"THEY WERE AFRAID TO ASK HIM."

Homily for Sept. 26^th, 2020: Luke 9:43b-45.

          “They were all amazed at [Jesus’] every deed,” today’s brief gospel reading begins. Immediately before this verse Luke has described Jesus’ healing of an epileptic boy, the only son of his father (9:38). The man has already asked Jesus’ disciples for healing, without success. The youth has an epileptic fit even as he is being brought to Jesus. The Lord heals the boy with a word and gives him back to his father. “And all who saw it marveled at the greatness of God,” Luke tells us (vs. 43a).  The opening words of our gospel today follow immediately: “All were amazed at [Jesus’] every deed.”  

          Jesus breaks into the people’s amazement to tell them something he wants them to remember. “Pay attention to what I am telling you” are the words we heard. What Luke writes literally is: “lay up in your ears these words. The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men.” This is so jarring that the people do not understand it. “They were afraid to ask him about this saying,” Luke tells us.

          This fear can be understood if we reflect that the miracle of healing which the people have just witnessed, indeed all Jesus’ miracles, kindled in them a desire for something we all want: a success story. Being betrayed into the hands of men certainly didn’t sound like success. No wonder the people were afraid to enquire too deeply about Jesus’ meaning.

          The day would come, however, when people would understand. After Jesus’ death and burial his women disciples, more faithful than the men, visit his tomb as soon as the Sabbath rest is over, intending to do what had been impossible Friday evening, because the Sabbath had already begun: anoint the Lord’s body. The women find not Jesus’ body but “two men in dazzling garments” (clearly angels) who ask them: “Why do you search for the Living One among the dead? He is not here; he has been raised up.” And then, Luke tells us, the angels tell the women: “Remember what he said to you while he was sill in Galilee – that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” “With this reminder,” Luke writes, “[Jesus’] words came back to them” (Lk 24:4-8).

          We pray, then, in this Mass: “Open our ears, Lord Jesus, to listen to your words. And   when we do not understand, give us patience to await the day when we shall understand, when we shall see you face to face. Amen”

AN APPOINTED TIME FOR EVERYTHING

Homily for September 25th, 2020: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11.

          The short Old Testament book Ecclesiastes, from which our first reading is taken, has the repeated refrain, “All is vanity.” No wonder that many call it the most cynical book in the Bible. The refrain brings us not good news, but the bad news that life is indeed empty, “vanity,” unless we center our lives on the Lord God. In the midst of this bad news, however, we come upon a passage that is like finding an oasis in a desert: the assurance which we heard in today’s first reading, that “There is an appointed time for every thing under the heavens.”

          In words of great beauty the author, called Qoheleth, a word of uncertain meaning, often translated “the Preacher,” says that there is “A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant; a time to tear down, and a time to build. A time to weep, and a time to laugh . . . A time to be silent, and a time to speak.”  

The full and rounded person makes time for each of these pairs of opposites. There are times when it is important to speak. At other times silence is more appropriate. When I entered seminary 71 years ago, we newcomers were given a little book called “Principles.” One of them went like this: “The conversation of the brethren should help and cheer us, but God’s voice speaks most often in silence. Keep some part of every day free from all noise and the voices of men, for human distraction and craving for it hinder divine peace.” I’ve tried to do that in all the years since I first read those words.

About one sentence in this short reading, Bible scholars have been disputing for over 2000 years. God “has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into [people’s] hearts.” What is this “timeless”? I believe it is the sense, inborn in us but rejected by the book’s author, that there is a world beyond this one, and a life beyond death. It is for this that we are born and made: to serve God, our loving heavenly Father, faithfully here on earth; but beyond that to be happy with him forever in heaven.

 

HEROD'S CURIOSITY

September 24^th, 2020: Luke 9:7-9

        “Herod was curious to see Jesus,” Luke tells us. This Herod, called the Tetrarch or Herod Antipas, was ruler of Galilee and one of the many sons of Herod the Great, who ruled Palestine at the time of Jesus’ birth. He was the one who, when told by the Wise Men from the East that they were going to Bethlehem to venerate the infant king of the world, ordered the killing of all children there, two years old and younger, in the hope that one of them might be the infant king these Kings from the East, as they were called, had told Herod about.

         At a drunken party in his palace, this Herod Antipas was so carried away by the erotic dance of a young woman named Salome that he promised her any reward, up to half of his kingdom. Salome’s mother told her daughter to ask for the head of John the Baptist, languishing in Herod’s prison for criticizing his adulterous marriage to the mother. And the head was promptly brought to Salome on a platter.

Herod’s curiosity to see Jesus would be satisfied after the Lord’s arrest by Pontius Pilate, who sent him to Herod, because Jesus came from “up north,” in Galilee, which belonged to this Herod’s territory. Hoping to see Jesus work a miracle, Herod questioned him at length, but Jesus spoke not a word. Whereupon Herod sent Jesus back to Pilate.

Luke reports all this to contrast the indifferent indifference with which so many of Jesus’ contemporaries looked on him -- “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son, they asked scornfully – with the faith of the minority who “saw and believed.”

The story in today’s brief gospel reading challenges us with the question: how do we look on Jesus? Is he just someone we call on when we’re in a jam and want help getting out of it? Or is he the Lord of all my life and a deeply loved friend?

 

 

"TAKE NOTHING FOR THE JOURNEY."

Homily for Sept. 23^rd, 2020: Luke 9:1-6.

          “Take nothing for the journey,” Jesus tells the Twelve as he sends them out “to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal the sick.” He wants those whom he commissions as his messengers to travel light. They are to depend not on material resources, but on the Lord alone.

          Jesus’ words are especially relevant today. All over the world, the forces hostile to the Church are rising. In our own country the government is trying to impose on Catholic organizations, such as Catholic hospitals and universities, requirements which we cannot, in conscience, accept. We are being asked, for instance, to pay for sterilization and abortion. In Ireland, unlike the United States a historically Catholic country, there is even an attempt to pass a law which would compel priests, in certain instances, to violate the seal of the confessional. TV entertainers air gross jokes about Catholic priests which they would not dare make about Muslim imams or Jewish rabbis. And the media show little interest in reporting studies which show that Christians are the Number One target of religious persecution in the world today.

          We rightly lament this tide of anti-Christian and anti-Catholic sentiment. But it has a good side as well. Whenever in its two thousand year history, the Church has been favored by the powers that be, whether financially or in other ways, it has grown spiritually flabby and weak. The Church is always at her best in times of persecution. When persecution is raging it is difficult, mostly impossible, to see this. Things become clear only when we look back. So let’s look back.

In recent centuries the most violent attack on the Church came in the French Revolution, which started in 1789 and lasted more than a decade. Thousands of priests were murdered under the guillotine. Most of the French bishops fled the country. Those who remained had to accept restrictions on their ministry which they justified on the plea that there was to other way to continue offering the sacraments to God’s people. 

As the Church moved into the nineteenth century, however, there was an explosion of religious vocations in France, and the foundation of an unprecedented number of new religious orders, for both men and women.

          When we grow discouraged at the hostile forces confronting us, we need to remember: God can bring good out of evil – and he does, time after time!

JESUS' TRUE FAMILY

Homily for Sept. 22^nd, 2020: Luke 8:19-21.

          Jesus’ mother and his brother come to visit him, our gospel tells us. His brothers? The word which Luke uses means “relatives” or “kinsmen.” From antiquity Catholics have believed that Mary had no other children but Jesus. Having given herself completely to God by responding to the angel’s message that she was to be mother of God’s son with the words, “Be it done to me according to your word,” it was inconceivable that Mary could give herself to another. This is why she is called “Mary ever virgin.” 

          Jesus’ mother and his other relatives are unable to get to him, we heard, “because of the crowd.” Those four words give us a glimpse of what life was like for the Lord on most days of his public ministry. He was constantly hemmed in by people: shoving, pushing, shouting, trying to get his attention. This explains why Jesus retreated, whenever he could, to what the gospels call “a deserted place” – somewhere where he could be alone with his heavenly Father. 

          When Jesus is told that his mother and other relatives are trying to get to him through the crowd, he responds with words that sound like a put-down: “My mother and brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” In reality the words are not dismissive. Can there be any doubt that Mary truly listened to God’s word and  who truly listens to his teaching and acts on it – in other words, to us.

          God’s word comes to us in many ways: through Holy Scripture, read out here in church, or pondered over as we read the Bible for ourselves. God’s word comes to us also through the teaching of his Church, and through the still, small, but powerful voice of conscience.

          How better, then, could we respond to Jesus’ words in today’s gospel than with the simple prayer of the boy Samuel, when he heard his name being called as he was sleeping in the Temple: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3:10).

THE CALL OF MATTHEW

Homily for Sept. 21^st, 2020: Matt. 9: 9-13.

          “As Jesus passed by, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post.” Matthew was a tax collector. He was not the kind of tax collector we know today, a civil servant. In the Palestine of Jesus’ day, the Roman government of occupation entrusted the collection of taxes to tax farmers, as they are sometimes called, who bid for the right to collect taxes. In doing so, these tax collectors enriched themselves by extorting more than the government required. They were hated, therefore, for two reasons: for preying on people financially; and for serving the despised Roman rulers of the land. 

          Jesus speaks just two words to Matthew: “Follow me.” Without hesitation, Matthew gets up and follows Jesus. Other disciples of Jesus have already done the same, when, at Jesus’ command, they abandoned the tools of their trade as fishermen, their boats and nets, to follow Jesus. What motivated this immediate obedience? I think that if we could have questioned any of them, Matthew included, they would have replied: “There was something about this man, Jesus, which made it impossible to say no.” 

          As a parting gesture Matthew invites his friends to dinner at his house, with Jesus as the honored guest. As we would expect, many of those friends were Matthew’s fellow tax collectors. Others were simply “sinners,” as the gospel reading calls them: Jews, like Matthew, who did not bother to keep all of God’s law.

Observing these disreputable guests, the Pharisees, proud of their exact observance of God’s law, ask Jesus’ other disciples how their Master can associate with such ruffians. Jesus supplies the answer himself: “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. … I did not come to call the righteous [by which Jesus means ‘people like you Pharisees’]. ‘I came to call sinners.’

What is the message for us? If we want Jesus’ loving care, we need first to recognize and confess our need. And the first thing we need from Jesus is forgiveness.