HOMILY FOR EASTER

OUR NO, GOD’S YES

Easter.  Acts 10:34a, 37-43; John 20:1-9.

AIM: To instill hope by proclaiming the resurrection; and to encourage the hearers to be messengers of this hope. 

          When we say No, God says Yes. That is the message of Easter. On Good Friday human beings said No. On Easter God overruled this No with his triumphant Yes. That is the earliest Christian understanding of Easter. It explains why a favorite text for preachers in the first generation after the resurrection was the verse from today’s responsorial psalm, which speaks of God choosing what human beings have rejected: “The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner-stone.” When we say No, God says Yes.

          When we look at all the evil and suffering in the world and say there is no hope, God says there is hope. God himself is our hope. He is stronger than all the forces of evil. 

          When we look at all the suffering and injustice in the world and say that there is no meaning in life; that there is no point in sacrifice, in trying to live for the best and highest we know, because self-sacrifice is always defeated, and idealism has no future: God says Yes! There is a future for us. God himself in our future. 

          On Good Friday the friends of Jesus thought evil had triumphed. They were wrong. “They put him to death,” Peter says in our first reading today, “by hanging him on a tree.” But — and it is the most important “but” in history: “This man God raised on the third day.” Not Satan and evil but Jesus Christ emerged victorious from that cosmic conflict. The sign of that victory is the empty tomb of Easter morning. It is a sign only, not a proof. A proof compels belief. A sign points beyond itself to something more and invites belief, without compelling it. Of the two disciples in today’s gospel reading who saw the empty tomb, one only understood the sign and believed. The other came to belief only later, when he had seen not only the empty tomb, but the risen Lord.

          When we contemplate the finality of death, and are tempted to think that there is nothing beyond death, no goals beyond such happiness as we may be able to achieve in this world, and in this life; God says Yes! There is life beyond death.  This life is a preparation for that life.

          This message of our No and God’s Yes is central in the letters of St. Paul, who encountered the risen Lord not at Easter, but on the Damascus road, as Paul was on the way to say his own No to Jesus Christ, by hunting down and persecuting Jesus’ followers. “The language in which we address you,” Paul wrote later, “is not an ambiguous blend of Yes and No. The Son of God, Christ Jesus, proclaimed among you by us ... was never a blend of Yes and No. With him it was, and is, Yes. He is the Yes pronounced upon God’s promises, every one of them.” (2 Cor.1, 18ff: New English Bible)

          If God’s triumphant Yes, first uttered on Easter morning, is to be heard in our world, it will be heard only through us. “This man God raised on the third day,” Peter says in our first reading, “and granted that he be made visible, not to all the people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.”

          This Eucharist is the continuation not only of the Last Supper, but of those meals Peter was talking about which Jesus shared with his friends after his resurrection. Here, as we obey Jesus’ command to “do this in my memory”, the risen Lord renews his Yes. And here he commissions us, as he commissioned Peter and his companions, to be witnesses of that joyful and triumphant Yes to a weary and discouraged world. We bear our witness not so much by words — for words are cheap, and people today are inundated by words. Rather we bear our witness to the risen Lord by the inner quality of our lives: by living as people who know that because of Easter this world is not without hope, life does have meaning, death is not the end.

          At this eucharistic meal with our risen Lord he empowers us to live as people who know that this world, with all its horrors and suffering and darkness and evil, is still God’s world. Here the risen Lord renews the commission we received in baptism and confirmation: “To shine like stars in a dark world and to proffer the word of life, in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation” (Phil 2:15f). That is our high calling as God’s daughters and sons, our thrilling destiny as sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ. Can there be a life, and a calling, more glorious than that?

          To the extent that we fulfill this calling we, like Peter, are witnesses to the risen Lord and to his power. We are proclaiming, through lives which speak more eloquently than words, that Jesus Christ, risen triumphant from death today, is truly “the stone which the builders rejected, [who] has now become the cornerstone.” We are proclaiming that Jesus Christ “is not a blend of Yes and No, but that with him it was and is, Yes. He is the Yes pronounced upon God’s promises, every one of them.”

"I GO TO PREPARE A PLACE FOR YOU."

April 8th, 2020 John 14:1-6: "I go to prepare a place for you."

 

         Jesus has just washed his disciples' feet. Then he tells them he will be leaving them. This plunges them into grief and fear. Jesus responds by saying: Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me."  
        That is a tremendous claim. The disciples whom Jesus was addressing did not know him as we know him -- as the divine Son of God. To them he was a man like themselves. Realization that he was more came only after the resurrection. "I am going," Jesus assures his friends, "to prepare a place for you. I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be." Down through the centuries Christians have pondered and prayed over this promise. Here is what three of them have said:
St. Cyprian, 3^rd century Bishop of Carthage in North Africa:

“We reckon paradise to be our home. A great throng awaits us there of those dear to us, parents, brothers, sons. A packed and numerous throng longs for us, of those already free from anxiety for their own salvation, who are still concerned for our salvation. What joy they share with us when we come into their sight and embrace them! What pleasure there is there in the heavenly kingdom, with no fear of death, and what supreme happiness with the enjoyment of eternal life.” [Office of Readings for Friday of the 34^th week of the year]

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa from 395 to 430.

“How happy will be our shout of Alleluia there, how carefree, how secure from any adversary, where there is no enemy, where no friend perishes. There praise is offered to God, and here too; but here it is by people who are anxious, there by people who are free from care; here by people who must die, there by those who will live forever. Here praise is offered in hope, there by people who enjoy the reality; here by those who are pilgrims on the way, there by those who have reached their own country.” [Office of Readings for Saturday of the 34^th week of the year]

Pope Benedict XVI, now retired:

“Christianity does not proclaim merely a certain salvation of the soul in some imprecise place beyond, in which everything in this world that was precious and loved by us is erased, but it promises eternal life, ‘the life of the world to come’: nothing of what is precious and loved will be ruined, but will find its fulfillment in God. All the hairs of our head are numbered, Jesus said one day (cf. Matthew 10:30). The final world will also be the fulfillment of this earth, as St. Paul states: ‘Creation itself will be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God’" (Romans 8:21). [Public Audience, Aug. 15, 2010]

          How do we reach the joys of which these three great Christians speak? Jesus tells us in the final sentence of today’s gospel: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

 

GOOD FRIDAY: NO CROSS, NO CROWN

NO CROSS, NO CROWN

Homily for April 10^th, 2020: Good Friday

AIM: To proclaim the centrality of the cross.

 

There are three religious symbols that are recognized the world over: the crescent of Islam, the six-pointed star of David for Judaism, and for Christianity the cross. The cross is at the center of every Christian church the world over, Catholic or Protestant. 

The cross hangs round the necks of millions of people in our world who give no particular evidence of deep religious faith or practice. Teachers of young children report that if they offer the youngsters a selection of holy cards and invite them to choose one, they will almost always select the picture of Jesus on the cross.

How can we explain this continued fascination with a horrifying instrument of torture and death? The cross has a magnetism that can never fade because it is a picture of how much God loves us. “No one has greater love than this,” Jesus tells us, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn.15:13).

Those present on Calvary viewed the cross as an instrument of defeat. In reality, the cross is a symbol not of defeat but of victory. What looked to the bystanders like a display of weakness is in reality a source of power. A scene of utter degradation and shame is actually a place of glory. 

We can perceive the cross as a place of victory, power, and glory, however, only if we see behind it the open portals of the empty tomb. Too often we separate the two. The cross alone -- Good Friday without Easter -- gives us a religion of grimness and gloom. The empty tomb without the cross, on the other hand, is nothing but superficial optimism and empty sentiment. The late Bishop Fulton Sheen said it well: “The law of Christ is clear. Life is a struggle; unless there is a cross in our lives, there will never be an empty tomb; unless there is a Good Friday, there will never be an Easter Sunday.”

Jesus could not have the one without the other. Neither can we. Take the cross out of Christianity, and you have ripped the heart out of it. Today more than ever a religion is credible only if it is costly. People today say, with the apostle Thomas on the evening of the first Easter day: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails ... I will not believe” (Jn. 20:25).

Perhaps there is someone in this church this evening who is thinking: ‘What does a priest know about suffering?’ And just possibly, you are right -- though I can assure you that a priest’s life has, along with great joys, its share of suffering as well: loneliness, misunderstanding, unjust criticism, frustration, disappointment, and for some priests bitter injustice.

But for the sake of argument, I am willing to grant the objection. Say, if you like, that I know little of suffering; that I have a soft and easy life: pampered, coddled, cosseted, put on a pedestal by a certain kind of Catholic; that I am a man with soft hands, clean fingernails, and no aches or pains from heavy lifting. Say, if you will, that I am a stranger to suffering.  

But you cannot say that of my Lord. Whatever pain you suffer, Jesus suffered more. Whatever injustice you bear, Jesus bore it first. Whatever loneliness you experience, Jesus was lonelier. As our second reading tells us: “We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).

Suffering comes to us all, in one form or another, sooner or later. Why it is so, our Christian faith does not tell us. The existence of suffering in a good world, created and upheld by a loving God, is a dark mystery. Because of the cross, however, because Jesus tasted human suffering in all its bitterness and pain, any suffering we experience becomes the key that one day will help unlock for us the gate of heaven.  Let me quote Bishop Sheen again:’

“All of you who have lain crucified on beds of pain, remember than an hour will come when you will be taken down from your cross, and the Savior shall look upon your hands and feet and sides to find there the imprint of his wounds which will be your passport to eternal joy.”

To learn the deepest meaning of our Christian faith we must take our stand beneath the cross and contemplate in silent awe and reverent love the One who hangs there. All the great lessons of life are learned at the foot of the cross.

HOLY THURSDAY: "DO THIS IS MY MEMORY"

Holy Thursday, 2020:  1 Cor. 11:23-26.

AIM: To help the hearers see the centrality of the Eucharist and the significance of the foot-washing.

          “Do this, in my memory,” Jesus tells us. Was ever a command so obeyed? Down through the centuries, and continuing today, the friends of Jesus Christ have obeyed his command to do this in his memory.

          In Rome today our Holy Father has done this. Somewhere in a prison in China a priest or a bishop of the so-called underground Church has done this today, with a morsel of bread and a little wine smuggled in to him by friends. Bishops all over the world have done this, at the only Mass other than this one which the Church permits on Holy Thursday: the Chrism Mass at which the bishop consecrates the oils to be used in the year following for baptisms, confirmation, the sacrament of holy orders, and the anointing of the sick. In our Cathedral this morning our archbishop did this, with only a few of his priests, alas, because of the present health emergency. 

          In Lent 2000 a Vietnamese bishop, Francis Xavier Van Thuan, preaching the annual Lenten retreat to Pope John Paul II and the Roman curia, told them of how he had obeyed Jesus’ command to do this, in a Communist prison in Vietnam. Here is his story, in his own words.

          “When I was arrested, I had to leave immediately with empty hands. The next day I was permitted to write to my people in order to ask for the most necessary things: clothes, toothpaste ... I wrote, ‘Please send me a little wine as medicine for my stomach ache.’ The faithful understood right away.

          “They sent me a small bottle of wine for Mass with a label that read, ‘Medicine for stomach aches.’ They also sent some hosts, which they hid in a flashlight for protection against the humidity. The police asked me, ‘You have stomach aches?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Here’s some medicine for you.’

          “I will never be able to express my great joy! Every day, with three drops of wine and a drop of water in the palm of my hand, I would celebrate Mass. This was my altar, and this was my cathedral! It was true medicine for soul and body ... Each time I celebrated the Mass, I had the opportunity to extend my hands and nail myself to the cross with Jesus, to drink with him the bitter chalice. ... Those were the most beautiful Masses of my life!” [Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, Testimony of Hope (Pauline Books, Boston, 2000) p. 131] He died of cancer in Rome in 2002. Five years later Pope Benedict XVI started his cause of beatification, which could lead one day to his being declared saint.

          Young men of twenty-five, fresh from their priestly ordination, surrounded by family and friends, nervous but joyful, do this for the first time. Somewhere today more than one priest, and perhaps a bishop or two, has done this for the last time: encountering the Lord under the outward forms of bread and wine for the final time before he encounters him face to face in heaven.

          We do this when Christians marry. We do this for birthdays, for anniversaries of marriage and ordination. We do this at life’s end, to pray for our departed loved ones, coming closer to them through our obedience to Jesus’ command than we can in any other way here on earth.

          No matter what the outward circumstances, whether accompanied by splendid ceremonial, gorgeous music, in a stately cathedral — or under makeshift conditions, in a primitive hut, a prison cell, or on the hood of a military jeep under the open sky — our obedience to Jesus’ command, “Do this in my memory,” is in every essential respect the same. When we do this with the bread and wine Jesus is with us as truly as he was with his twelve apostles in the Upper Room on this evening, with but one exception: we cannot see him with our bodily eyes, only with the eyes of faith.

          If our fulfillment of Jesus’ command were merely an act of obedience, it would still be impressive. But there is more to it than obedience. We do this with the bread and wine so that Jesus may empower us to do in daily life what he did before he gave us this command: washed his disciples’ feet. That was a symbol of what all of us are called to do as followers and friends of Jesus Christ: to serve the needs of others whom we encounter on life’s way. 

          If we are faithful to that calling, one day we shall hear the Lord saying to us, personally, and with great love: “Come, you have my Father’s blessing! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me. I was ill and you comforted me, in prison and you came to me. ... As often as you did it for one of my least brothers [or sisters], you did it for me” (Mt. 25:35f, 40).

"WHY THIS WASTE?"

Homily for April 6^th, 2020; John 12:1-11.

          “Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?” Judas asks. Three hundred days’ wages represent the annual income of an ordinary working man in Jesus’ day, in today’s terms perhaps thirty-thousand dollars – valuable perfumed oil indeed!
          The complaint of Judas continues to be made today. It takes genuine faith to appreciate the expenditure of money for things that cannot be justified in utilitarian, worldly terms: the building of a beautiful church, for instance, the beautification of an existing church, the purchase or upgrading of a pipe organ, rather than settling for a cheaper electronic instrument. There are always people who will ask, when such things are proposed or undertaken: “Why this waste?” The answer to that question is simply: “God deserves the best.”   

          People complain about waste when a young person decides to forego marriage and parenthood in order to be a priest or a religious sister. The media reported recently about a highly accomplished young woman in Washington DC in her late 20s who has decided to abandon a successful career to enter a rapidly growing congregation of Dominican Sisters. There are people who’ll tell you that she’s throwing her life away. They ask, with Judas: why this waste? Without faith that question cannot be answered. With faith no answer is necessary.

          We have several communities of so-called contemplative Sisters in our diocese, women who stay always in the convent and have no work outside: Carmelites, Passionists, Poor Clares, the so-called Pink Sisters, and others as well. They have given their lives to the Lord God. They pray for us. Without them the Church would be poorer.

          Nothing we do for the Lord God is wasted. And nothing we do for the Lord is sufficient to express our gratitude for the blessings he showers upon us, always more than we deserve, on any strict accounting. Do you sometimes have doubts about whether the sacrifices you make for God and for others are worth making? Then pray the closing verse of today’s Responsorial Psalm: “I believe I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.”