Friday, July 19, 2019

"A BRUISED REED HE WILL NOT BREAK."


Homily for Saturday July 20th, 2019. Matthew 12:14-21.

          Jesus “warned them not to make him known.” Why? Jesus did not want celebrity status, based on his ability to heal people and perform the other miracles we read about in the gospels. Mostly Jesus worked quietly. The gospel reading we have just heard describes Jesus’ manner of work in language taken from the Prophet Isaiah.

          “He will not contend or cry out,” Isaiah writes. “A bruised reed he will not break, a smoldering wick he will not quench.” In his 2007 Encyclical on hope, Spe salvi, Pope Benedict XVI told the story of a woman who was like Isaiah’s bruised reed and smoldering wick, Josephine Bakhita. Born in about 1869 to a wealthy family in the Sudan, she was kidnapped at age 9 and sold and re-sold in the slave market in Darfur. Beaten and flogged by her masters so often that she had 144 scars on her body, she came finally into the possession of the Italian consul in the Sudan. He took Josephine with him when he returned to Italy in 1885. There Josephine heard about a master who was unlike any other: not only just and kind, but one who actually loved her. He too had been flogged. He was waiting for her at the Father’s right hand.

          In January 1890 Josephine was baptized, and on the same day given confirmation and First Communion by the Patriarch of Venice, later the Pope, St. Pius X. In 1893 she entered the Italian Canossian Sisters, with whom she lived until her death in 1947. Revered by all who knew her because of her gentleness, calming voice, and ever present smile, she was declared a saint by St. John Paul II in 2000.

Asked once, "What would you do, if you were to meet your captors?" Josephine responded: "If I were to meet those who kidnapped me, and even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands. For, if these things had not happened, I would not have been a Christian and a religious Sister today.” Because the Church has declared her a saint, we can pray: “St. Josephine Bakhita, Pray for us.”  

Thursday, July 18, 2019

"IT IS MERCY I DESIRE, NOT SACRIFICE."


Homily for July 19th, 2019: Matthew 12:1-8.

          “Remember to keep holy the Sabbath day,” is the third of the Ten Commandments. We find the Commandments twice in the Old Testament: in the 20th chapter of Exodus, and in the 5th chapter of Deuteronomy. Both versions say that we keep the Sabbath holy by refraining from work. Exodus says that the Sabbath rest commemorates God resting on the seventh day after creating the world and everything in it in the previous six days. Deuteronomy doesn’t mention God resting; but it spells out in greater detail what Exodus says more briefly: that the Sabbath rest is for all, domestic animals as well as humans, masters and slaves alike: “for you were once slaves in Egypt.”

          By Jesus’ day the rabbis had developed a list of 39 kinds of work that were forbidden on the Sabbath. Harvesting crops and preparation of food were both on the list. So when the Pharisees, who were among Jesus’ most severe critics, see his disciples picking off heads of grain as they walk through a wheat field on the way to the synagogue on a Sabbath day and eating the grain to satisfy their hunger, they pounce quickly. “That’s forbidden!” the Pharisees say.

          Jesus defends his disciples by citing an incident in the Old Testament regarding the bread offered to God in the Temple each Sabbath. After a week it was eaten by the priests and replaced with fresh bread. Others were forbidden to eat it. Yet once, when the great King David was hungry, he and his companions ate the bread themselves.

          Jesus never abrogated any of God’s laws. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says that he came not to abolish the law, but to fulfill it (cf. Mt. 5:17). But he made charity the highest law of all. That is why he healed on the Sabbath, for instance. And that is why Pope Francis, celebrating the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in a prison on the first Holy Thursday after his election disregarded the liturgical law which says that only the feet of baptized men should be washed, in order to wash also the feet of some Muslim women. The highest law of all is charity. Or as Jesus said, quoting the prophet Hosea: “It is mercy I desire not sacrifice.”

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

"TAKE MY YOKE UPON YOU."


Homily for July 18th, 2019: Matthew 11:28-30.

          “Take my yoke upon you,” Jesus says. In Jesus’ day yokes were in daily use. Carved out of wood to fit over the shoulders, they had arms extending out about a foot or more on either side, with a ring on each end supporting a rope or chain from which the person using the yoke could hang a bucket or other container. This made it possible to transport with relative ease loads which could not be carried by hand.

          It was crucial that yoke fit the shoulders of the person using it. Otherwise the yoke would chafe and the person attempting to use it would soon throw it off. “My yoke is easy,” Jesus says, “and my burden light.” There is an unspoken IF there. The yoke and burden Jesus offers us are easy and light only if we accept them. If we chafe against the yoke and try to throw it off, then it is not easy; and the burden which it supports is heavy and definitely not light.

          To help us accept the yoke Jesus says: “Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.” Meekness and humility do not come to us easily or without prolonged effort and many failures. We must be lifelong learners. Our teacher is the best there is. He understands our difficulties. He is not interested in how often we stumble and fall. He is interested in one thing only: how often, with his help, we get up again, and continue the journey.

          Our teacher’s name is Jesus Christ.     

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

THE CALLOF MOSES


Homily for July 16th, 2019: Exodus 3:1-6, 9-12.

Again today, as in our first reading yesterday, we encounter Moses. He has become a Nobody in a foreign land, reduced to tending sheep for a living. The Bible puts his age at eighty. His meaningful life, it would seem, is over. But not for God. God calculates differently. On a day which starts like every other, God breaks into the old man’s life and calls him to do what he had miserably failed to do half a lifetime before.

“The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and [Moses] looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.” (Ex. 3:2) Moses is in the desert, the abode of wild animals. Fire means danger: better keep clear. Old in years but still young in spirit, Moses does something unexpected. “And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.’ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here am I.’” (Ex. 3:3f)

          “Do not come near,” God says to Moses, “put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. … And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Ex. 3:5f). Those words come back to me often, when I approach the altar to obey Jesus’ command at the Last Supper to “Do this in my memory.” Never in Holy Scripture is the encounter with God routine or ordinary. Always there is awe, even fear. So it was then. So should it be today.

“I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt,” God tells Moses, “and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians …” How surprised Moses must have been at these words. But also how gratified. The words which follow, however, shock him to the core of his being. “I will send you so that you may bring forth my people … out of Egypt.”

Me? Moses asks in astonishment. “Who am I that I should go and bring the sons of Israel out of Egypt?” To which God replies simply: “I will be with you.”

When God promises something, he always keeps his promise. We know the dramatic sequel: the delivery from certain death of an entire oppressed people, under the leadership of a man who – until God called him -- was washed up, finished, kaput as the Germans say. If God could still use a man like that, He can use each one of us if, like Moses, we remain open to the Lord’s call, seeking every day to do his will.

Sunday, July 14, 2019

A NEW KING AROSE IN EGYPT.


Homily for July 15th, 2019: Exodus 2:1-15a.

          “A new king arose in Egypt, who knew not Joseph,” we heard in yesterday’s first reading. Alarmed at the robust birth rate of the enslaved Hebrews in his kingdom, this new Pharaoh decrees that every male Hebrew child should be killed at birth. “Whom the gods would destroy,” an ancient saying says, “he first makes mad.” Pharaoh’s order was madness indeed. He was ordering the death of the very people he needed for his ambitious building projects.

          Pharaoh’s order was the reason why the mother of the Hebrew baby in our first reading today (whose name, we learn later, was Moses), put him in a water-proofed basket in the river, hoping that the little one would those escape the attention of Pharaoh’s enforcement police. It was a slender hope. Most likely the swiftly flowing water would soon carry away the basket and its content. As an extra precaution the mother tells her maid to keep watch from the nearby bushes.

          Against all odds, this high-risk strategy works. The little one is discovered by the daughter of Pharaoh himself. Thus it comes about that the baby is brought up at the court of none other than the ruler who had decreed his death. A remarkable coincidence? So we might say. For the Bible, however, coincidences are God’s way of concealing his identity. 

          Surrounded by every luxury, including we can assume, an education in the highest culture of that day, the adult Moses shows himself to possess a keen sense of justice. Seeing two Hebrews being abused one day by their Egyptian taskmaster, he intervenes by slaying the abuser. He does so carefully, only after assuring himself that there are no witnesses, other than the man whom he saves. Oppressed people often turn on each other: see the statistics of black-on-black crime today. When, on another day Moses sees two of his Hebrew countrymen fighting, he rebukes them. “Are you going to kill us like you killed that Egyptian yesterday?” they ask. Alarmed that his blow for justice is not secret, as he supposed, Moses must flee for his life. So it comes about that a man twice on the brink of death, once as an infant, then as an adult, becomes the man whom God has chosen to save his entire people, trapped between the impassible waters ahead, and Pharaoh’s army closing in on them from behind.

            Once again we witness God as the God of the impossible, whose characteristic work in every generation, our own included, is to bring life out of death.