"ALL ATE AND WERE SATISFIED"

Homily for February 15^th, 2020: Mark 8:1-10

          This story of Jesus feeding the vast crowd in the wilderness is told six times over, with variations in detail, in the four gospels. What accounts for its popularity? I can think of four reasons. First, it shows Jesus’ ability to solve what, to us, is insoluble. Second, it is an example of what is sometimes called “The Law of the gift.” Third, it helps us understand the central Christian mystery: the Eucharist. And finally, it reminds us of what happens in every Mass.

Feeding four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a few fish was clearly impossible. Not, however, for Jesus. The story tells us that when we place our resources, however inadequate they may be, into the hands of Jesus Christ, we discover that they are inadequate no longer. Jesus is the Son and representative of the God of the impossible.

Second, the story helps us understand what is sometimes called “The Law of the Gift.” This tells us that when we give something to the Lord, it is not lost. It comes back to us. But it comes back transformed, and enlarged. That is because God does not need our gifts. He is, as the theologians say, sufficient unto himself.

Third, what we offer to God in the Eucharist -- a little bread and a small quantity of wine, gifts every bit as insignificant as the seven loaves of bread and a few fish offered to Jesus in this story -- comes back to us transformed into the Body and Blood of God’s Son: all his love, all his goodness, all his strength, all his purity and compassion, all his willingness to forgive.

Finally, the story reminds us of what Jesus does in every Mass. “Taking the seven loaves,” the story says, “he gave thanks, broke them, and gave them to his disciples to distribute.” That is exactly what happens in every Mass, with but one exception. Though the host and celebrant are the same, Jesus, we cannot see him with our eyes, only with the eyes of faith. We see instead his human representative, the priest.

“They ate until they had their fill,” Mark tells us. When Jesus gives, he gives not only abundantly, but super-abundantly. We come repeatedly not because the gift is limited, for it is not; but rather because our capacity to receive is limited.

"BE OPENED!"

Homily for February 14^th, 2020: Mark 7:31-37.

 “Be 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: 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: “Be 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: “Do your own thing.” Most of the conflicts, divisions, and wars in our world -- between individuals, families, classes, groups, and nations -- 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: “Be 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, “he stretched out his hands as he endured his Passion, so as to break the bonds of death and manifest the resurrection.” (Weekday Preface VI) 

HOMILY FOR FEB. 16th

FULFILLING GOD’S LAW

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Sirach 15:15-20; Matthew 5:17-37.

AIM: To show that obedience to God’s law is a response to His love for us, not its

prerequisite.

 

“Do your own thing” is the slogan today of people who consider themselves “liberated.” Behind this slogan is the idea that the only thing that stands between me and happiness is lack of freedom. If laws limit my freedom – whether they are God’s laws or human laws – they must be bad. “How much happier life would be if there weren’t so many Do’s and Don’ts.” We may not actually say that. But probably most of us have thought it at one time or another.

Jesus would have been shocked at that idea. His religion taught him that God’s laws preserve and enhance human happiness. The Ten Commandments were God’s highest gift to the people he chose to be his own. They showed God’s special love for his people. They were directions for life, from the One who created all life. Obedience to God’s commandments was his people’s way of showing their love for the Lord God, while sharing his love with one another. The words of our responsorial psalm today express this view: “Happy are they who follow the law of the Lord!” (Ps 119:1)

There was never anything so good, however, that it could not be abused. Law is abused when people pay more attention to its letter than to its spirit; when they think up hairsplitting interpretations to show how little the law means, instead of how much. People who approach God’s law in that manner think of their relationship with God as based not on love (which the law, rightly understood, expresses) but on legalism.

From there it is only a short step to thinking that fulfilling our “minimum obligation” gives us a claim on God which he is bound to honor. That was the religion of some people in Jesus’ day. Sadly, it is the religion of some Catholics today.

Jesus is addressing such people in today’s Gospel. He shows that legalistic human interpretations miss the true meaning of God’s commandments. God, Jesus says, looks not just at our exterior acts. He looks at our inner attitudes, desires, and thoughts. “You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery,” Jesus says. “But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” If that is what the commandment means, then who can claim perfect obedience? Do you see what Jesus is doing? He is plugging the loopholes in the law crafted by legalistic interpreters. In so doing, Jesus shows us that we can never establish a claim on God which he is bound to honor. God has a claim on us, and it is an absolute claim.

“Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees,” Jesus says, “you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The scribes and Pharisees were Jesus’ critics, the people who scorned him for “receiving sinners and eating them.” Like some Catholics today, they knew (or thought they knew) the exact limits of their obligation, whether with regard to public worship, fasting, avoidance of work on the Sabbath, or almsgiving.

With his demand for a holiness surpassing that of the outwardly most “religious” people in his day, Jesus was undermining the whole basis of their religious practice. Was that good news? Hardly. For such people it was horribly bad news. If God’s law really meant what Jesus said it did, then who could hope for a reward from God? No wonder they crucified him!

The “greater righteousness” that Jesus asks of us is based not on what we do for God, but on what God has done for us. God accepts us not because we are good enough to deserve a reward for keeping his law. God accepts us because he is so good that he wants to share his love with us, as a free gift. That is the good news: that God loves sinners – people who often fail to keep God’s law, people who know that they have no claim on God. People, in short, like us.

Does this mean that we can forget about God’s law? Of course not. “I have not come to abolish the law,” Jesus says, “but to fulfill it.” God’s law remains as important for us Catholics today as it was for Jesus. What Jesus changed was not the law, but our motive for keeping it. We keep God’s law not to earn a reward: blessing in this life, heaven in the next. We keep God’s law to show our gratitude for the love he lavishes upon us before we have earned it, and though we can never merit it, on any strict accounting.

Here in the Eucharist, a word that means “thanksgiving”, we the people of God receive the greatest gifts he can give us this side of heaven. At the table of the word God gives us the gift of his truth. At the table of the sacrament, he gives us the body and blood of his Son.

Enriched with these gifts, which are always more than we deserve, God sends us out into the workaday world, there to show our gratitude for his gifts by a life of generous obedience to his holy law. Our effort to thank God for the gifts he gives us here at Mass requires the best that is in us. We shall find it easier to give our best if we keep in mind the words of our responsorial psalm: “Happy are they who follow the law of the Lord.”

THE DEMON HAS GONE

Homily for February 13^th, 2020: Mark 7:24-30.

          I told you yesterday that there are many things in the Bible that we do not understand. Yesterday we heard Jesus overthrowing the distinction in Jewish law between clean and unclean foods. Why then was there the great controversy, perhaps less than a decade later and reported in the Acts of the Apostles and three of Paul’s letters, over whether Gentile converts to Christianity must keep the Jewish food laws? We simply don’t know.      

          Today’s gospel poses another 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 showed that she was out to win. Her daughter means everything to her. She refuses to take no for an answer.

Jesus’ words about the sons of the household 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 terminology. 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 saying this, you may go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.” Illness of all kinds was thought in Jesus’ day to be caused by demons.

          The beautiful conclusion of this moving story follows at once. “When the woman went 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 make us like her.

 

 

                             

EVIL COMES FROM WITHIN

Homily for February 13^th, 2020: Mark 7:24-30.

          I told you yesterday that there are many things in the Bible that we do not understand. Yesterday we heard Jesus overthrowing the distinction in Jewish law between clean and unclean foods. Why then was there the great controversy, perhaps less than a decade later and reported in the Acts of the Apostles and three of Paul’s letters, over whether Gentile converts to Christianity must keep the Jewish food laws? We simply don’t know.      

          Today’s gospel poses another 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 showed that she was out to win. Her daughter means everything to her. She refuses to take no for an answer.

Jesus’ words about the sons of the household 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 terminology. 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 saying this, you may go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.” Illness of all kinds was thought in Jesus’ day to be caused by demons.

          The beautiful conclusion of this moving story follows at once. “When the woman went 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 make us like her.

 

 

                             

THE DEMON HAS GONE

Homily for February 13^th, 2020: Mark 7:24-30.

          I told you yesterday that there are many things in the Bible that we do not understand. Yesterday we heard Jesus overthrowing the distinction in Jewish law between clean and unclean foods. Why then was there the great controversy, perhaps less than a decade later and reported in the Acts of the Apostles and three of Paul’s letters, over whether Gentile converts to Christianity must keep the Jewish food laws? We simply don’t know.      

          Today’s gospel poses another 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 showed that she was out to win. Her daughter means everything to her. She refuses to take no for an answer.

Jesus’ words about the sons of the household 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 terminology. 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 saying this, you may go. The demon has gone out of your daughter.” Illness of all kinds was thought in Jesus’ day to be caused by demons.

          The beautiful conclusion of this moving story follows at once. “When the woman went 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 make us like her.

 

 

                             

PRAYER FOR GOD'S MERCY

Homily for February 11^th, 2020; 1 Kings 8:22-23, 27-30.

          “Listen to the petitions of your servant and of your people Israel which they offer in this place,” Solomon prays at the dedication of the Temple. To pray that God will hear the petitions offered in the Temple is what we would expect. But then comes something we do not expect: “Listen from your heavenly dwelling -- and grant pardon.”

          Solomon’s prayer reminds us that whenever we approach God, the first thing we need to ask for is pardon for our sins. None of us is worthy to enter into the presence of the all-holy God. That is why the first thing we do in every Mass is to ask forgiveness for our sins, and implore God’s mercy.

          Pope Francis has made prayer for God’s mercy central in his preaching. Repeatedly, and in different ways, the Pope tells us: God never grows tired of forgiving us; it is we who grow tired of asking for forgiveness.

          It appears that this theme is rooted in the Pope’s personal history. At age thirty-six Jorge Bergoglio was put in charge of all the Jesuits in Argentina. The country was under a cruel military government. They arrested hundreds of people they did not like, perhaps thousands, and without trial flew them in planes over the South Atlantic and dropped them into the sea. Many Jesuits embraced something called liberation theology, putting political action and protest before traditional priestly duties: administering the sacraments and preaching the gospel.  

Guiding his Jesuit brothers along the right path in this chaotic and perilous situation would have been difficult even for a much older man with greater experience than Fr. Bergoglio. Some Jesuits were clearly over the line. To protect them he forbade his brothers to provoke the authorities by living in the slums and engaging in political protest. Inevitably this provoked charges that he was “soft on injustice.” Over time Bergoglio came to feel that he may have been too rigid, and that his treatment of his Jesuit brothers who confronted the military regime in Argentina, and embraced the cause of the poor, had perhaps been too harsh. This continues to weigh on him today, as Pope Francis. It helps us to understand his constant emphasis on our need for forgiveness.

Regardless of our personal history, we all need to pray for God’s mercy and forgiveness. And Pope Francis is right to remind us that this prayer is one that God will always answer.

HOMILY FOR FEB 16th

FULFILLING GOD’S LAW

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Sirach 15:15-20; Matthew 5:17-37.

AIM: To show that obedience to God’s law is a response to His love for us, not its

prerequisite.

“Do your own thing” is the slogan today of people who consider themselves “liberated.” Behind this slogan is the idea that the only thing that stands between me and happiness is lack of freedom. If laws limit my freedom – whether they are God’s laws or human laws – they must be bad. “How much happier life would be if there weren’t so many Do’s and Don’ts.” We may not actually say that. But probably most of us have thought it at one time or another.

Jesus would have been shocked at that idea. His religion taught him that God’s laws preserve and enhance human happiness. The Ten Commandments were God’s highest gift to the people he chose to be his own. They showed God’s special love for his people. They were directions for life, from the One who created all life. Obedience to God’s commandments was his people’s way of showing their love for the Lord God, while sharing his love with one another. The words of our responsorial psalm today express this view: “Happy are they who follow the law of the Lord!” (Ps 119:1)

There was never anything so good, however, that it could not be abused. Law is abused when people pay more attention to its letter than to its spirit; when they think up hairsplitting interpretations to show how little the law means, instead of how much. People who approach God’s law in that manner think of their relationship with God as based not on love (which the law, rightly understood, expresses) but on legalism.

From there it is only a short step to thinking that fulfilling our “minimum obligation” gives us a claim on God which he is bound to honor. That was the religion of some people in Jesus’ day. Sadly it is the religion of some Catholics today.

Jesus is addressing such people in today’s Gospel. He shows that legalistic human interpretations miss the true meaning of God’s commandments. God, Jesus says, looks not just at our exterior acts. He looks at our inner attitudes, desires, and thoughts. “You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery,” Jesus says. “But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” If that is what the commandment means, then who can claim perfect obedience? Do you see what Jesus is doing? He is plugging the loopholes in the law crafted by legalistic interpreters. In so doing, Jesus shows us that we can never establish a claim on God which he is bound to honor. God has a claim on us, and it is an absolute claim.

“Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees,” Jesus says, “you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The scribes and Pharisees were Jesus’ critics, the people who scorned him for “receiving sinners and eating them.” Like some Catholics today, they knew (or thought they knew) the exact limits of their obligation, whether with regard to public worship, fasting, avoidance of work on the Sabbath, or almsgiving.

With his demand for a holiness surpassing that of the outwardly most “religious” people in his day, Jesus was undermining the whole basis of their religious practice. Was that good news? Hardly. For such people it was horribly bad news. If God’s law really meant what Jesus said it did, then who could hope for a reward from God? No wonder they crucified him!

The “greater righteousness” that Jesus asks of us is based not on what we do for God, but on what God has done for us. God accepts us not because we are good enough to deserve a reward for keeping his law. God accepts us because he is so good that he wants to share his love with us, as a free gift. That is the good news: that God loves sinners – people who often fail to keep God’s law, people who know that they have no claim on God. People, in short, like us.

Does this mean that we can forget about God’s law? Of course not. “I have not come to abolish the law,” Jesus says, “but to fulfill it.” God’s law remains as important for us Catholics today as it was for Jesus. What Jesus changed was not the law, but our motive for keeping it. We keep God’s law not to earn a reward: blessing in this life, heaven in the next. We keep God’s law to show our gratitude for the love he lavishes upon us before we have earned it, and though we can never merit it, on any strict accounting.

Here in the Eucharist, a word that means “thanksgiving”, we the people of God receive the greatest gifts he can give us this side of heaven. At the table of the word God gives us the gift of his truth. At the table of the sacrament, he gives us the body and blood of his Son.

Enriched with these gifts, which are always more than we deserve, God sends us out into the workaday world, there to show our gratitude for his gifts by a life of generous obedience to his holy law. Our effort to thank God for the gifts he gives us here at Mass requires the best that is in us. We shall find it easier to give our best if we keep in mind the words of our responsorial psalm: “Happy are they who follow the law of the Lord.”

"THE LORD DWELLS IN THE DARK CLOUD."

Homily for February 10^th, 2020; 1 Kings 8:22-23, 27-30.

          “Listen to the petitions of your servant and of your people Israel which they offer in this place,” Solomon prays at the dedication of the Temple. To pray that God will hear the petitions offered in the Temple is what we would expect. But then comes something we do not expect: “Listen from your heavenly dwelling -- and grant pardon.”

          Solomon’s prayer reminds us that whenever we approach God, the first thing we need to ask for is pardon for our sins. None of us is worthy to enter into the presence of the all-holy God. That is why the first thing we do in every Mass is to ask forgiveness for our sins, and implore God’s mercy.

          Pope Francis has made prayer for God’s mercy central in his preaching. Repeatedly, and in different ways, the Pope tells us: God never grows tired of forgiving us; it is we who grow tired of asking for forgiveness.

          It appears that this theme is rooted in the Pope’s personal history. At age thirty-six Jorge Bergoglio was put in charge of all the Jesuits in Argentina. The country was under a cruel military government. They arrested hundreds of people they did not like, perhaps thousands, and without trial flew them in planes over the South Atlantic and dropped them into the sea. Many Jesuits embraced something called liberation theology, putting political action and protest before traditional priestly duties: administering the sacraments and preaching the gospel.  

Guiding his Jesuit brothers along the right path in this chaotic and perilous situation would have been difficult even for a much older man with greater experience than Fr. Bergoglio. Some Jesuits were clearly over the line. To protect them he forbade his brothers to provoke the authorities by living in the slums and engaging in political protest. Inevitably this provoked charges that he was “soft on injustice.” Over time Bergoglio came to feel that he may have been too rigid, and that his treatment of his Jesuit brothers who confronted the military regime in Argentina, and embraced the cause of the poor, had perhaps been too harsh. This continues to weigh on him today, as Pope Francis. It helps us to understand his constant emphasis on our need for forgiveness.

Regardless of our personal history, we all need to pray for God’s mercy and forgiveness. And Pope Francis is right to remind us that this prayer is one that God will always answer.