JESUS USES HYPERBOLE

Homily for August 11^th, 2018: Matthew 17:14-20.

          Today’s gospel reading gives us an example of Jesus using hyperbole. How so, you ask? Webster’s dictionary says that hyperbole is “a statement exaggerated fancifully, as for effect.” The American humorist Mark Twain was using hyperbole when he said: “The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for 3 million dollars; and it is the mistake of my life that I did not do so.” In Mark Twain’s youth 3 million dollars was like 300 million today. The statement is absurd – but also very funny, which is of course the effect Mark Twain was aiming at.

          Helping people understand the power of faith is the effect Jesus was aiming at when he spoke the words in today’s gospel: “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘move from here to there,’ and it will move.” That is as absurd as Mark twin claiming he could have bought Louis for 3 million dollars. No one would expect a mountain to move on command.

          What Jesus is actually saying is that with faith we can accomplish the impossible. What is faith, anyway? Many Catholics would probably say: faith is the list of truths that we profess every Sunday in the creed. That is not wrong. But faith in that sense is properly called the faith.

          The primary meaning of faith is trust. Even in the Creed, we say “I believe in God.” To believe in someone is to trust that person. When we say we believe in God, we’re saying that we trust him enough to entrust our lives to him. Faith in that sense is not something that comes to us naturally. It is a gift. And the one who gives it to us is God.

          Each time we come here we are praying that through his two tables of word and sacrament God will deepen and strengthen our trust in him. We are like the man in Mark’s gospel who comes to Jesus asking healing for his boy, who suffers terrible convulsions. Jesus asks the man if he truly believes that Jesus has power to heal. “I do believe,” the father replies. “Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). With this gospel reading Jesus is inviting us to make that man’s prayer our own.  

"GOD LOVES A CHEERFUL GIVER."

Homily for August 10^th, 2018. 2 Corinthians 9:6-10.

          “God loves a cheerful giver,” Paul writes in today’s first reading. Paul wrote his letters in Greek. And the Greek word which Paul uses for cheerful is hilarios. That’s where we get our English word “hilarious.” If we wanted to translate Paul’s words literally, therefore, we would say: “God loves a hilarious giver.” Why? Because that is how God gives: not sparingly, not grudgingly, “without sadness or compulsion” (as Paul writes), but with overflowing joy.

“There is more happiness in giving than in giving than in receiving,” Jesus says (Acts 20:35). Those words, incidentally, are the only saying of Jesus that is preserved outside the gospels. Paul speaks them to representatives of the Christian community at Ephesus, telling them to remember a saying that they were already familiar with from the oral teaching of Paul and other apostles. The New Testament did not yet exist: it hadn’t been written. But already the Church was teaching the faith, and telling people what Jesus had said and done. That is the answer to people who say they have a religion of “the Bible only.” The Church’s faith is older than the Bible – older, at least, than the New Testament.

People who have never experienced the joy of giving that Jesus speaks about are poor, no matter how large their bank accounts, investments, or other possessions. As a help to finding this joy, consider this. God does not need anything. He is, the theologians say, “sufficient unto himself.” Hence anything we give to God – or to people in need, or to good causes – comes back to us. But it comes back to us changed, and enlarged. The bread and wine we offer in the Mass come back to us transformed into the Body and Blood of God’s divine Son. The same is true with all our gifts. That is why Paul writes: “Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully”

There are people here who have already experienced that. They experience the joy of living with open hearts, and open hands. If you’re not yet one of them, the Lord is inviting you to join our happy company – today!                

A MODERN MARTYR

Homily for August 9^th, 2018: A Modern Martyr.

On an August evening in 1921 a brilliant 30-year-old Jewish woman in Germany who had long since abandoned religious belief was staying overnight with some Catholic friends. They apologized for leaving her alone: they had a previous evening engagement. Among their books their guest found the autobiography of the Spanish Carmelite, St. Teresa of Avilla. She read it through overnight and declared the next morning: “That is the truth.” She was baptized on New Year’s Day 1922. The woman’s name was Edith Stein, the saint whom we commemorate today.

          In October 1933, Edith Stein, by then well known in German university circles as a brilliant philosopher, but now excluded from academic employment by the Nazi racial laws, entered the Carmelite convent in Cologne. She took the name Teresa Benedicta a Cruce: “Teresa blessed by the cross.”  On the night of November 9/10, 1938, the Nazis instigated the notorious “Kristallnacht”, smashing Jewish shop-windows all over Germany, and torching synagogues. At the news Edith Stein, who, like St. Paul, never abandoned her identification with her own people, felt herself “paralyzed with pain.” Shortly thereafter, to avoid imperiling her fellow Sisters, she moved to a Carmelite convent in Holland. 

          At the end of July 1942 the Nazis, having invaded Holland, retaliated for the public protest of the Dutch bishops against the persecution of Jews by rounding up all Dutch Jews who had received Catholic baptism, Sister Teresa Benedicta among them, and shipped them like cattle to Auschwitz. Upon arrival they went straight to the gas chamber. The date: August 9, 1942.

          After the war Edith Stein’s Sisters put up a memorial tablet in the Cologne Carmel with the inscription: “She died as a martyr for her people and her faith.” Pope John Paul II confirmed these words on October 11, 1998, when he enrolled Edith Stein in the church’s official list of saints, with the title “martyr.” With thanksgiving therefore, we pray in this Mass:

St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross – Pray for us.

"I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE."

August 12^th, 2018: 19^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B. 

1 Kings 19:4-8; John 6:41-51.

AIM:  To deepen the hearers’ appreciation of the two eucharistic tables.

 

          An African priest studying in Paris was asked by the French priest with whom he lives and unable, because of illness, to celebrate his regular 4 p.m. Mass for nuns in a nearby convent, to substitute for him. When the African priest rang the convent doorbell at 3.55, the Sister who answered was surprised to see an unfamiliar face. Since he was not wearing a clerical collar, which in Paris as in most European cities is worn by relatively few priests these days, she thought the stranger was a street person asking for help. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “We’re just about to have Mass. We can’t help you now. Come back later.” Fifteen minutes later, the nuns called the rectory to ask where their priest was. Imagine their embarrassment when they learned that they had just turned him away.

          Why did these good Sisters go without Mass that day? It was not because they were bad people. It was simply because the priest who came did not look like the person they were expecting. That happened to Jesus repeatedly. His fellow Jews were expecting that God’s long awaited anointed servant, the Messiah, would come dramatically, descending from the clouds of heaven. Jesus was different. He was not dramatic. And he was ordinary. When Jesus said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” they thought he must be crazy. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?” they asked. “Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”  

          Jesus’ people knew about “bread from heaven.” That was the manna with which God had fed their ancestors during their desert wanderings. But the prophets also spoke of bread as the spiritual nourishment which God gives to those who approach him in faith and try to do his will. Isaiah, for instance, portrays God telling his people: “Come, you who have no food ... Come to me and listen to my words; hear me, and you shall have life”(55:1-3). Another prophet, Amos, warns the people that if they persist in disobedience, God “will send a famine on the land, not hunger for bread ... but for hearing the word of the Lord” (8:11). And Sirach says that if a person keeps God’s law, wisdom “will nourish him with the bread of understanding”(15:3).

          So when Jesus said, “I am the bread come down from heaven,” he was using the language of the prophets, but giving it a deeper meaning. He was saying, in effect: ‘I am the life-giving bread of which Isaiah speaks. I am the one who satisfies the hunger for God’s word mentioned by Amos. I am Sirach’s bread of understanding and wisdom.’ Jesus’ people failed to understand him. Like the substitute priest ringing the convent bell in Paris, Jesus was too different, too unexpected.

          Do we really understand what Jesus tells us in today’s gospel? When Jesus says, “I am the bread come down from heaven,” and “I am the bread of life,” we read those words as a reference to the Eucharist. That is correct. Too often, however, we forget that there are two tables at the Eucharist: the table of the Lord’s body, but also the table of the word. The first part of the Mass, the liturgy of the word, is not merely a preparation for the “essential part”: consecration and communion. It is equally important, and equally essential. The Second Vatican Council said in 1965: “The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures as she venerates the body of the Lord, insofar as she never ceases, particularly in the sacred liturgy, to partake of the bread of life and to offer it to the faithful from the

table of the word of God and the body of Christ” (Verbum Dei, 21). 

          The council was saying that we are nourished not only by the Lord’s body and blood in communion; we are nourished no less by hearing God’s word. In the same passage the Council says: “In the sacred books the Father who is in heaven comes lovingly to meet his children, and talks with them. And such is the force and power of the word of God that it can serve the Church as her support and vigor, and the children of the Church as strength for their faith, food for the soul, and a pure and lasting source of spiritual life.”

          Our first reading told how the prophet Elijah journeyed “forty days and forty nights” in the strength of the food God gave him through an angel. In the gospel Jesus speaks of how God strengthened the whole people during their wanderings in the desert through manna, bread from heaven. Though this bread gave them strength for their journey, it did not make them immortal.

          Jesus does not hesitate to claim, however, that the food he gives does impart immortality. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven,” he says. “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Jesus means that for those who eat the “living bread” which he gives, physical death will not be the end, but only a way station on the journey to eternal life.

          Jesus gives himself to us as this “living bread” here in the Eucharist. He does so in two closely linked ways: through his holy word, read and proclaimed in our midst; and through his sacramental body and blood, given under the outward forms of bread and wine. Unless we receive the food the Lord offers us at both tables, we risk being spiritually undernourished.

          When we do partake of both tables, however — listening devoutly to God’s word, and receiving the Lord’s body and blood with due preparation and reverence — we begin to realize that the words of today’s responsorial psalm are true:

“Taste and see how good the Lord is; blessed the man who takes refuge in him.”

 

"THE DEMON GONE."

Homily for August 8^th, 2018: Matthew 15:21-28.

          Today’s gospel poses a question which we cannot answer. Why did Jesus initially refuse the request of a Gentile woman that he heal her daughter? It cannot be because Jesus lacked compassion. The gospels show that he was a man of total compassion. Did Jesus want to test the depth of this mother’s love for her sick child? If so, she passed the test with flying colors. Throwing herself at Jesus’ feet, she shows that she is out to win. Her daughter means everything to her. She refuses to take no for an answer.

Jesus’ words about the children being fed first seem to be a reference to his mission of feeding his own people first. When Jesus says it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs, he is using traditional Jewish language. Jews in his day often referred to Gentiles as dogs. Jesus softens the word, however. The word he uses means not dogs but  puppies. Even this does not discourage the woman. Without missing a beat she comes right back with the remark: “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps.” To understand what she is saying, we must know the eating habits of the day. Food was eaten with the fingers, which were wiped afterwards with pieces of flat bread that were then cast aside to be eaten by the household dogs.

          Or was Jesus testing the woman’s faith? If so, she passed that test too. For Jesus responds: “For such a reply, be off now! The demon has already left your daughter.” In Jesus’ day illness of all kinds was thought to be caused by demons.

          The beautiful conclusion of this moving story follows at once. “When the woman got home, she found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.”

          This desperate and nameless woman is a model of love and faith. We pray in this Mass for the Lord to give us her perseverance, and her faith.

 

 

                             

"DO NOT BE AFRAID."

Homily for August 7^th, 2018: Matthew 14:22-36.

          What began as a routine evening crossing of the lake soon turns into a nightmare for Jesus’ friends in their small boat. The storm which breaks on the disciples so unexpectedly this evening comes from just the direction in which they are heading.This explains why they are still far from their destination in “the fourth watch of the night.” Small wonder that they cry out in fear as they see a human figure approaching across the wind-whipped waves. It is Jesus. “Take courage,” he calls out. “It is I; do not be afraid.”

          One man in the boat is more impulsive than his companions. He no sooner recognizes Jesus than he wants to be with him. He will react in the same way upon recognizing the risen Lord on the shore after a fruitless night of fishing in the lake. (Cf. Jn. 21:7) It is Peter. “Lord,” Peter calls out, “if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” “Come,” Jesus replies.

          Peter’s willingness to do the unthinkable enables him to experience the impossible. He climbs out of the boat and starts to walk to Jesus across the storm tossed waves. “But when he saw how strong the wind was,” Matthew tells us, “he became frightened. And, beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’”

          Jesus had a special role for Peter. He was to be the leader of Jesus’ friends and thus of the Lord’s Church. This terrifying experience was part of Peter’s preparation. Years later he would remember: as long as he had kept his eyes on the Lord, he was safe. When he looked down, and saw the danger, he began to sink.

          The story assures us that when the storm rages and the night is blackest; when we cannot see the way ahead; when we are bone weary with life’s struggle and our hearts fail us for fear, Jesus is close. He only seems to be absent. In reality he is never far from us. He knows at every moment the difficulties against which we contend. Across the storm waters of this world he comes to us and chides us, as he chided Peter: “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

          Happy if we today, in this hour, can respond to the Lord’s saving presence and power as his friends did in that boat. Happy if we too can bow before him in awe-struck worship and say, with those first friends of Jesus:

          “Truly, you are the Son of God!”

THE TRANSFIGURATION

Homily for August 6^th, 2018, The Transfiguration: 2 Pet. 1:16-19; Mark 9:2-10.

          The mysterious event which we celebrate today, called the Transfiguration, gives a glimpse, however brief, into eternity. For a moment, before the descent of the cloud, the three friends of Jesus see their friend and Master transformed beyond anything they could have imagined. It was as if his humanity had no limits.

“We were eyewitnesses of his majesty,” Peter writes in our second reading.” The Transfiguration is a manifestation of Christ’s divinity, for a moment breaking through the veil of his humanity. But it is more. It also shows us our potential to become divine.  

          If the goal of the spiritual life is to grow in likeness to God, then the more we progress, the more we participate in God’s own life. When our journey reaches its end, and we have been stripped of all the obstacles to holiness, God’s life will become our life, and we shall be one with God. Then our earthly pilgrimage beneath an often overcast sky will yield to the uninterrupted vision of God’s glory. We too shall shine with an unearthly light — the light that shines from the face of Jesus Christ: our Master, our Savior, our Redeemer — but also our passionate lover, and our best friend. We shall have reached our true homeland, the heavenly city which (as we read in Revelation) needs neither sun nor moon, “for the glory of God gives it light, and the lamp is the Lamb” (Rev. 21.23).

          As we journey onward to our heavenly homeland the words of an Evangelical hymn unknown to Catholics, can help us:

          Cast your eyes upon Jesus, / Look full in his wonderful face,

          And the things of earth will grow strangely dim /

                    in the light of his glory and grace.

          Now, however, is the time above all for hearing. We listen for the Father’s voice and heed his command, as he speaks to us the words first uttered to those three friends of Jesus on the mountain two thousand years ago:

          “This is my beloved Son, on whom my favor rests. Listen to him.”