MAN'S FALL

Homily for February 16^th, 2019: Genesis 3:9-24.

          Have you ever felt so ashamed of yourself that you wanted to run away and hide? Today’s first reading is about a man who felt that way. After disobeying God’s command, Adam hides, hoping to avoid a confrontation with the loving Creator and Father against whom he has rebelled. 

          When God pursues him and asks, “Where are you?” the man replies: “I was afraid ... so I hid myself.” He thought he would find happiness by ‘doing his own thing.’ Instead he finds only disappointment, frustration, and shame. Is there anyone here who has never had a similar experience? This simple story is no primitive folk tale. It is the story of Everyman with a capital “E” – true to our common experience of life. If the story has a moral, it is this. We find happiness, joy, and peace only when we stop trying to run away and hide from God, and begin entrusting ourselves to him in faith. 

          “In faith” is crucial. It means trusting God. That does not come easily to us. Our natural instinct is to trust ourselves. Most of the time we enjoy playing the leading role in what Fr. Robert Barron, widely recognized as the Bishop Fulton Sheen of our day, calls our “egodrama” – an apt term for the idea that life is really all about me, and I’m in charge, thank you.

          It takes most of us years, with many falls into disgrace and failure, to learn that life is not all about me. We begin really to live, and to enjoy happiness, fulfillment, and peace, only when we start to enter into what Fr. Barron calls the “theodrama” – God’s drama. He plays the leading role, he is in charge.  

          People who do that to a heroic decree are called saints. They surrender their lives to the One who made them, using their parents as his instruments: the Lord God. St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), wrote what has become a classic prayer which expresses this surrender. I learned it at age 12. I have prayed it daily ever since. It goes like this:

“Take, O Lord, and receive my entire life: my liberty, my understanding, my memory, my will. All that I am and have you have given me. I give back to you all, to be disposed of according to your good pleasure. Give me only the comfort of your presence, and the joy of your love. With these I shall be more than rich, and shall desire nothing more.”

 

"BE OPENED."

Homily for February 15^th, 2019: Mark 7:31-37.

 ABe opened!@ Jesus says to the deaf man who is brought to him for healing. Deafness has closed him off from others. Jesus wants to set him free. Jesus is the man of total openness: openness to God; and openness to those whom society in Jesus= day accepted only in subordinate roles or not at all B women, children, and social outcasts like prostitutes and the hated tax collectors. Our fourth Eucharistic prayer tells us that Jesus proclaimed “the good news of salvation to the poor, to prisoners freedom, and to the sorrowful of heart, joy.”

Jesus is saying to us right now, in this church, what he said to the deaf man: ABe opened!@ How closed in we are much of the time: closed to God, closed to others. We shut ourselves up in prisons of our own making, whose walls are self-fulfillment, and whose guiding principle is the hackneyed and deceitful slogan: ADo your own thing.@ Most of the conflicts, divisions, and wars in our world B between individuals, families, classes, groups, and nations B are the result of people not being open. In the cacophony of conflicting arguments and claims we hear only what we want to hear, and no more; just enough to confirm our prejudices; and then we stop listening altogether. 

Even between Christians there are barriers erected by our failure to be open to each other. To remedy this tragic situation, which contradicts Jesus= prayer the night before he died, that all might be one (Jn. 17, passim), the Second Vatican Council recommended the method of dialogue. Dialogue requires that we be open to what those who are separated from us are saying; that we listen before we speak.

Can dialogue overcome all barriers? Sadly it cannot. Some conflicts are so grave that no human power seems great enough to break down the walls that separate us from one another. Nor can we penetrate by our own efforts alone the wall which our sins erect between us and the all-holy God. The gospel proclaims the good news that there is One who can break down those walls. His name is Jesus Christ.

Jesus, the man of total openness, has the right, if ever a man had it, to command: ABe opened!@ He won that right for all time on Calvary when, as we shall hear in a moment in the preface to our Eucharistic prayer, Ahe stretched out his hands as he endured his Passion, so as to break the bonds of death and manifest the resurrection.” (Weekday Preface VI) 

"IT IS NOT GOOD FOR THE MAN TO BE ALONE."

Homily for February 14, 2019: Genesis 1:20-2:4a.

          Since Monday of this week we have been hearing readings from the first creation tale in Genesis. The Bible comes to us from a prehistoric age. Yet the two somewhat different creation tales in Genesis 1 and 2 contain important truth about the origin of our world.  

A striking feature of the first tale, in Genesis 1, is the repetition after each stage of creation of the phrase, almost like a refrain: “God saw how good it was.” This tells us that everything that comes from the hand of God is good. The evil in the world comes not from God, but through human sin.

          The first thing that God looks at in the Bible and says, “It is not good,” is loneliness: “It is not good for the man to be alone,” we heard in our first reading today, from chapter 2 of Genesis. In chapter one man and woman are created together, as we heard in Tuesday’s first reading: “God created man in his own image … male and female he created them.” Chapter two tells a different story. “The Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living thing.” The creation of woman follows: formed, we read in chapter two, out of one of the man’s ribs. That detail is pre-scientific. But it expresses an important truth. Man and woman were not made for rivalry: domination on the one hand, manipulation on the other. They were made for partnership – to complete one another. That is why the second creation tale from Genesis 2 is often used at weddings.

Yet not everyone is called to marriage. There are people who do not find a spouse. And spouses die, leaving the surviving partner alone. And then there are those whom God calls to religious sisterhood, or to priesthood. Are all these people condemned to a life of loneliness, called by God himself “not good”? That is what many people assume. They are wrong.

The cure for loneliness is not marriage – for married people too are sometimes lonely. Loneliness comes about because even in the perfect marriage or the ideal friendship (and how many people have found either?) the deepest desires of our hearts remain unfulfilled. There is only One who can fulfill those desires, the One who is love: God himself. We come here day by day to receive his love; and so that we may share that love with others. No one has said it better than St. Augustine, writing out of his own experience: “You have made us for yourself, O God; and our hearts are restless, until we find rest in you.”

"BLEST ARE YOU POOR."

 

Februay17th, 2019:  Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C.  Jer. 17:5-8, Lk 6: 17, 20-26.

AIM: To encourage the hearers to persevere in their choice for Jesus, despite the cost.

 

How many people here would like to be poor?  To be hungry?  To be weeping and hated by everybody?  If I asked for a show of hands to those questions, how may would go up?  Suppose, however, that I asked some different questions: How many of you would like to be rich, well fed, laughing, and well spoken of by all?  Aren=t those things we all want? 

How, then, can Jesus pronounce a blessing on those who are poor, hungry, weeping and hated? Are those things good? Of course not! Every one of them is bad: poverty, hunger, weeping, hatred, exclusion. Which one of us would want any of those things for our children? How, then, can God want any of them for us, who are his children? There is only one possible answer. God does not want any of those things for us. Yet Jesus calls those who suffer these things Ablessed@ C a word which in the original Greek of Luke=s gospel means Ahappy@  To understand why, we must look again at what Jesus says at the end of these beatitudes: Aon account of the Son of man.@  Things evil in themselves C poverty, hunger, weeping, hatred, exclusion C become good when they are the price we must pay for choosing to stand with Jesus Christ, and remaining faithful to that choice. 

This becomes clearer when we look at the context. When Luke wrote his gospel, almost all Jesus= followers were Jews. Deciding to follow Jesus meant being disowned by family members and exclusion from the synagogue. For many that meant poverty, hunger, and bitter grief. The passage we just heard immediately follows the call of the twelve apostles. From a large group of followers, some committed, others just along for the ride, Jesus publicly summons twelve to be his closest associates. How do you suppose they felt? Given the situation I have just described, they could hardly have been overjoyed. They faced alienation from their friends, loss of their livelihoods, hatred, and much grief. Some of them, I think, must have had tears in their eyes as they responded to Jesus= call. To these frightened, tearful men, uncertain about what they are getting into, Jesus speaks the words we heard in the gospel:         

Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours.  

Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and exclude and insult you,

     and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.

Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!

Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.

How would those twelve have felt upon hearing these words? Some of them, surely, would have smiled through their tears, knowing that despite the high price they would pay, they had made the right choice.

Jesus goes on to utter a series of Awoes@ on those who are rich, satisfied, and praised by all. Who was Jesus addressing? He was speaking to people like the rich young man who felt unable  to respond to Jesus= call because he had great possessions (cf. Lk 18: 23). That rich young man stands for all those cling so tightly to the good things of this life that their possessions and wealth become a god for them B a false god, of course, what the bible calls an idol. Such people have made the wrong choice. Choosing to put worldly prosperity before God, Jesus says, invariably leads not to lasting happiness, but to disappointment, frustration, and bitter regret.

Where do we stand? With the frightened Twelve whom Jesus calls blessed?  Or with the young man who went away sorrowful because he was rich? Let=s not be too sure that Jesus= woes aren=t for us just because we=re not rich. Jesus is not talking about the size of our bank accounts. He is talking about the cost of discipleship. That cost can be high, no doubt about it. Here are some examples: 

C       For someone tired of a spouse who is no longer the young, glamorous person he or she was on the wedding day long ago, being faithful to Jesus Christ can mean saying No to what looks like greater happiness with a younger, more attractive partner. 

C       For a woman pregnant with a child she does not want, faithfulness to Jesus Christ can mean rejecting the quick fix of abortion because all human life, in the womb or at life=s end, is sacred. And for the child=s father, and anyone else who claims to love the mother, faithfulness to Jesus Christ means supporting her courageous choice for life in the face of the world=s scorn.

C       For the parents of a pregnant teenager faithfulness to Jesus Christ can mean supporting and loving their daughter, telling her that those who assure her it is all right to kill her child are wrong C and helping her to hold her head high in the face of the scorn of those who see no problem with abortion.

C       For all of us faithfulness to Jesus Christ means upholding the right to life, from conception to natural death, in the face of the attacks in the media and the disdain of so-called enlightened public opinion taunting us for being old-fashioned, rigid, members of the despised and dangerous AReligious Right,@ and not Awith it.@

C       For those called to serve God and his people as religious Sisters, brothers, or priests, faithfulness to Jesus Christ means accepting celibacy not as a burden but as liberation from family responsibilities, so that we may be more completely available to God and others: emptiness, yes B but emptiness for God!

Those are high costs. How could they be otherwise when the One who asks these costs of us paid the highest cost of all: life itself. Jesus= words in today=s gospel seem hard. In reality they are good news. They are his encouragement to people who wonder what they have let themselves in for, who wonder if the cost of following Jesus Christ may not be too high. Listen again to this encouragement, this good news.  Jesus is speaking to you!

Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of God is yours.  

Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied.

Blessed are you who are now weeping, for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and exclude and insult you,

     and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.

Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!

Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.

EVIL COMES FROM WITHIN.

Homily for February 13^th, 2019: Mark 7:14-23.

          “Everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile,” Jesus says, since it enters not into the heart but the stomach.” The heart in Jewish thought was considered the seat of feelings and learning. The gospel writer Mark adds his own summary of what Jesus has just said: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”

Jesus’ disciples were all Jews. For them there was a whole list of foods which not be eaten because they were unclean, starting with pork. By declaring all foods clean Jesus was making a radical break with Jewish tradition. But this raises a problem. If Jesus so clearly abolished the distinction between clean and unclean foods, why was there the great debate, reported in the Acts of the Apostles and three of Paul’s letters, about whether Gentile Christians were bound by the Jewish food laws? The answer to that question is simply: we do not know. There are many things in the Bible that we cannot understand. 

What we can understand is the list of vices that Jesus gives us: evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. Evil thoughts may be of many kinds: hatred, anger, lust, resentment. The list goes on and on. All of us have such thoughts from time to time. As long as we are trying to turn away from such dark thoughts to better ones, our evil thoughts remain only temptations. And a thousand temptations do not make a single sin. Indeed Jesus himself was tempted after his 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. Yet we know that Jesus never sinned.

Theft is forbidden by the Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world where there was no theft? We wouldn’t need to lock our homes or cars. If we left something behind, we’d know it would be there when we came back. Could there be a better example of the Commandments being signposts to human happiness, not fences to hem us in? Envy is the one vice that brings its own punishment with it. When we give way to envy, we’re unhappy. Blasphemy is not respecting the holy name of God. Arrogance puts people off: no one like an arrogant person. And folly means misusing or wasting the gifts God showers upon us.

Jesus, who gives us this list of vices, has also given us the best defense against them: the closing words of the one prayer he has given us, “Deliver us from evil.”

 

 

EARNING GOD'S REWARD?

February 12^th, 2019: Mark 7:1-13

“You hypocrites,” Jesus says in the gospel. He spoke those words not to open and notorious sinners, but to Pharisees: people who prided themselves on their exact fulfillment of God’s law. He condemns them with words taken from the prophet Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.”

Jesus follows these words with an example of what he is talking about. You Pharisees, he says, are careful to obey purely human rules (washing of cups, cleansing of your hands after you return from a shopping expedition). Yet you explain away the fifth of God’s Ten Commandments: “Honor your father and mother” by saying, “If someone says to father or mother, ‘Any support you might have had from me is qorban' (meaning, dedicated to God), you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother. You nullify the word of God in favor of your tradition that you have handed on.”

Who are today’s Pharisees? They are people who think they can earn rewards from God. In reality, God’s love and our salvation are not things we can earn. They are God’s free gift. God bestows his gifts on us not because we are good enough, but because He is so good that he wants to share his love with us. God’s law is not the list of rules and regulations that we must first obey before God will love us and bless us. God’s law is, rather, the description of our grateful response to the love and blessing which God has already bestowed on us out of sheer generosity.  

          Does this mean that there is no “just reward” for those who do try to obey God’s law? Of course not. God’s reward for faithful service is certain. Jesus tells us this in many gospel passages. He warns us, however, that those who try to calculate their reward in advance will be disappointed. The people who are most richly rewarded – who are literally bowled over by God’s generosity – are those who never stop to reckon up their reward because they are so keenly aware of how far short they still fall of God’s standard. 

          If we want to experience God’s generosity (and is there anyone here who does not?), we must learn to stand before God with empty hands. Then we shall experience the joy of Mary, who in her greatest hour, when she learned – astonished, fearful, and confused – that she was to be the mother of God’s Son, responded with words which the Church repeats in its public prayer every evening:

          “The hungry he has given every good thing,

                    while the rich he has sent empty away” (Lk 1:53).

 

"AS MANY WHO TOUCHED IT WERE HEALED."

Homily for February 11^th, 2019: Mark 6:53-56.

          For a couple of hours, during the voyage across the lake, Jesus has privacy. No one will bother him. Then, as soon as they reach the farther shore, the old routine resumes. “As they were leaving the boat, people immediately recognized him,” Mark tells us. “They scurried about the surrounding country and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was” – another normal day for Jesus.

I still remember seeing on television back in 1964, pictures of Pope Paul VI in Jerusalem. As he tried to walk through the narrow streets of old Jerusalem, lined by shops and crowds of people on both sides, the Pope was constantly jostled by the crowds. And I remember thinking: ‘That’s what Jesus’ life was like; constantly hemmed in by people wanting to speak to him, to touch him.’ That is why we read often in the gospels about Jesus withdrawing to what the gospel writers call “deserted places.” He needed to escape the constant pressure, to be alone with his heavenly Father, from whom all Jesus’ power came, and all his love.  

In today’s gospel Mark tells us that wherever Jesus came “they laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch only the tassel of his cloak; and as many as touched it were healed.”

Jesus is still healing people. He cures us of physical ailments, but of spiritual ones as well: bad habits, pride, lack of love, jealousy, envy, hard-heartedness, impurity, resentment and hate. One of Jesus’ titles is the Good Physician.

There is a little prayer, only five words, which I learned decades ago and which I repeat often as I go through the day. “Good Physician, make me whole.” Take that prayer and use it as you go through this day. Repeat the words over and over. They will take you straight to the heart of the One who loves you beyond your imagining; whose love will never let you go.

“Good Physician, Make me whole.”