SIN AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT.

Homily for October 17^th, 2020: Luke 12:8-12.

          “Anyone who speaks against the Son of Man [a title for Jesus] will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven.” These words of Jesus are difficult. We find them, in different versions, in all three of the so-called synoptic gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. From the beginning the words have caused heart-searching and anguish, especially for people inclined to scrupulosity. What can we say about them?

          Here is what the Catholic Catechism says: “There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and final loss.” [1864] Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit does not properly consist, then, in offending against the Holy Spirit in words; it consists rather in the refusal to accept the salvation which God offers to us through the Holy Spirit, working through the power of the Cross.

       Pope John Paul II explained it thus: “If Jesus says that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit cannot be forgiven either in this life or in the next, it is because this ‘non-forgiveness’ is linked, as to its cause, to ‘non-repentance’, in other words to the radical refusal to be converted. . . Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then, is the sin committed by the person who claims to have a ‘right’ to persist in evil -- in any sin at all -- and who thus rejects redemption. One closes oneself up in sin, thus making impossible one's conversion, and consequently the remission of sins, which one considers not essential or not important for one's life. This is a state of spiritual ruin, because blasphemy against the Holy Spirit does not allow one to escape from one's self-imposed imprisonment and open oneself to the divine sources of the purification of consciences and of the remission of sins.” [Dominum et vivificantem, 46.]

          And Pope Francis says again and again: “God never grows tired of forgiving us. It is we who go tired of asking for forgiveness.” Committing the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit means, therefore, refusing to ask for forgiveness, and perseverance in such refusal until the end.

"DO NOT BE AFRAID."

Homily for Oct. 16^th, 2020: Luke 12:1-7.

          “Do not be afraid,” Jesus tells us in the gospel reading we have just heard. He says it, in fact, twice over. We find the same reassuring command, to fear nothing, throughout the gospels. In today’s gospel reading the command not to fear follows the statement, “Everything you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight.” That is fearful indeed. Which one of us would like to have everything we have ever said, even in secret, publicly revealed to all? Don’t we all have things we’ve said that would make us ashamed if they were publicized?

          Jesus repeats the command not to fear after speaking about what we must all undergo at the end of earthly life: death. “Do not fear those who can kill the body and can do no more.” Fear instead, Jesus says, “him who has power to cast into hell after he has killed.” This time Jesus gives us the reason why we need not fear: because God loves us with a love that will never let us go: in God’s eyes, he says, “even the hairs of your head are numbered.”

There is not one of us who has no fears at all. To overcome them we need to deepen and strengthen our spiritual vision. Buried in the Old Testament and hence mostly overlooked, there is a story about this. We find it in just a few verses in the 2^nd Book of Kings, chapter 6.  It tells about the prophet Elisha finding himself surrounded one morning by enemy troops. They want to kidnap him, because Elisha has been giving intelligence information to the king of Israel. Seeing their desperate plight, Elisha’s servant panics. “Do not be afraid,” Elisha tells him, “for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.”   

          How could the servant believe that? He and Elisha were alone and encircled. Their situation was hopeless. So, Elisha does what prophets do best. He prays: “O Lord, open his eyes, that he may see.” The story continues: “And the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, so that he saw the mountainside filled with horses and fiery chariots around Elisha.” With the protection of these heavenly warriors, God’s angels, Elisha has an easy victory over his enemies that day.

When we find ourselves beset with fear, we need to pray, as Elisha prayed: “Lord, open my eyes that I may see” – see your love for me, your understanding of my weakness, the desire deep in my heart to be truly yours, despite my many humiliating falls. Let me see, Lord, your boundless mercy and willingness to forgive. Help me to see that those who are with me are always more than those who fight against me.

 

         

ST TERESA OF AVILA

Homily for Oct. 15th, 2020: St. Teresa of Avila

          We celebrate today one of the great women of the 16th century, Teresa of Avila in central Spain. Born in 1515 as her mother’s third child and first daughter, she was, in the words of a modern biographer, “a vain and vivacious girl, with a divine agenda.” When she was thirteen, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child. Devastated, Teresa prayed that henceforth Mary might be her mother. Despite this early piety, Teresa says herself that she was a frivolous teenager, “wearing fancy things, and silly baubles.” This was likely why her father sent Teresa to a convent school at age 16.

          She got on well in the convent. But after 19 months she fell ill and was sent to a deeply pious uncle in the country to recuperate. Conversations with him convinced Teresa that the world would soon end and that if she did not change, she would go to hell. To avoid this, she decided to “bully herself” into becoming a nun. Lacking her father’s permission for this, she stole away at age 20, with the help of an older brother, to the Carmelite convent in Avila. She would remain there for the next quarter-century. It was a relaxed life, with nuns from wealthy families enjoying comfortable suites, pets, and even servants. “Everything about God gave me tremendous pleasure,” Teresa writes, “but the things of the world captivated me. I spent almost twenty years on this stormy sea, falling and rising, then falling again.”

          When she was not quite 40, she had a conversion experience. Her prayer deepened and she began to think of what more she could do for the Lord. Reform of orders for men and women was in the air, and in 1562 Teresa, with only 4 companions, but with the support of her 17 years younger friend and Confessor, St. John of the Cross, founded a new convent with a far more austere life than the one she had left. Teresa would found almost 20 other such convents in the 20 years which remained to her. Exhausted by the travels all over Spain which these foundations required, Teresa died in 1581. She left classic writings on prayer which fill 3 volumes in English translation. They formed the basis for Pope Paul VI’s declaration in 1970 of Teresa of Avila as a Doctor or official teacher of the Church, the first woman to be so honored.

          The modern English Carmelite, Ruth Burrows, writes: “Teresa’s will was identified with our Lord’s. So everything she was, her many gifts and her weaknesses too, were brought into the orbit of her love and dedication. Union with Christ does not mean becoming someone different, renouncing our gifts, changing our temperament; but putting everything we have into our love for God and opening everything we have to his transforming influence. Teresa reached the full potential of personhood: what she was meant to be she became. This is holiness.”

          How wonderful, if something like that could be said of us, when the Lord sends his angel to call us home. To that end, then, we pray:

St. Teresa of Avila, pray for us

"I AM A SINNER"- Pope Francis

Homily for Oct. 14^th, 2020: Luke 11: 42-46

“Woe to you Pharisees!” Jesus says in today’s gospel. Who are these people about whom we hear so much in the gospels, most of it negative? Their name means “the separated ones.” They looked down on their fellow Jews who paid little attention to all the details of the Jewish law.  

          There is an example of this superior attitude in John’s gospel. The Pharisees and chief priests ask the Temple guards in Jerusalem why they have not arrested Jesus. “No one ever spoke like that before,” the guards reply. “Do not tell us you have been taken in!” the Pharisees respond. “You don’t see any of the Sanhedrin believing in him, do you? Or the Pharisees?” Then comes the condescending sentence:” Only this lot, that knows nothing about the law – and they are lost anyway!” (John 7:45-49).

Jesus never condemns the Pharisees’ meticulous efforts to keep God’s’ law. What he criticizes is their legalistic spirit. “You [Pharisees] pay tithes of mint and of rue and of every garden herb, but you pay no attention to judgment and to love for God. These you should have done,” Jesus says, affirming the payment of tithes on even the tiniest things, “without overlooking the others”: judgment and the love of God.

Pope Francis spoke similarly in the lengthy interview he gave shortly after his election, and published all over the world in late September, 2013. “The Church sometimes has locked itself up in small things,” he said. And he gave this example: “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. … The teaching of the Church is clear and I am a son of the Church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.” People immediately assumed that the Pope was changing Church teaching. Yet within days he told a group of gynecologists: “Every unborn child, condemned unjustly to being aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ, the face of the Lord.” You can’t get more specific than that.

What is the bottom line? The laws of God and the Church are important. Observing them is the key to happiness. Even more important, however, are help and mercy for those who fail in this – and that is all of us. Asked at the beginning of the interview, “Who is Jorge Bergolio” (the Pope’s original name), he responded: “I am a sinner. This is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.” In saying those words, the Pope spoke for all of us, without exception.

PUT OFF THE YOKE OF SLAVERY

October 13^th, 2020: Galatians 5:1-6.

          “Christ freed us for liberty” we heard in our first reading. “So do not take on yourselves the yoke of slavery.” What is Jesus talking about? He is correcting the idea common among his own people -- and sadly, common among many Catholics today – that God will not love us until we have shown that we have done something to deserve his love. People who think like that think of the Ten Commandments are a kind of moral test in which we must first get a passing grade before God will do anything for us. That is false!

          You have heard me tell about the young couple I knew who were expecting their first child. They had learned it was a girl. “We talk to the baby,” they told me, “when we lie in bed at night.” “What do you say to her?” I asked. “Oh, we tell her about everything we did that day. We also play beautiful music for her: Mozart, and Chopin piano music.”

          How wonderful! They were surrounding their little one with love and beauty even before she was born. God does the same for us. He doesn’t wait to see how we turn out – whether we have done something to deserve his love. If he did, he would wait a long time! He loves us as parents love their children: because we are his.

          Does that mean we can forget about God’s law: the Ten Commandments? Of course not. It means that we must understand the Commandments for what they are: a description of what we must do to thank God for the love he gives us before we have anything to merit his love.

          Measured by the Commandments, we all fall short: the saints included. Yet we find the saints confessing their sins even more than we do. Why? It is because they stand closer to the light of God’s love than ordinary sinners like us. This enables them to see their remaining faults more clearly than we can.

          Hence Paul’s conclusion in our first reading: “In Christ Jesus [what counts] is only faith, which expresses itself in love:” love for God, and love for others – whether they deserve our love, or not.

          The Ten Commandments, then, are a description of the grateful life. And if a life of ninety-two years has taught me anything it is this: grateful people are happy people – no exceptions!

         

 

 

"THIS GENERATION SEEKS A SIGN."

Homily for Oct. 12th, 2020: Luke 11:29-32.     

          “This generation seeks a sign,” Jesus says. He is referring to the repeated demand of his contemporaries for a miracle so dramatic that it will force them to believe. But belief cannot be forced any more than love can be forced. Jesus’ miracles confirm the faith of those who already believe. They do not compel belief on those who hearts and minds are closed to him and his message.

          Jesus then mentions two such confirming signs: Jonah, and the so-called queen of the south, Sheba. Jonah’s sign was not his survival in the belly of the great fish. The book Jonah is fiction, not history. We know that because it says that the city of Ninevah, to which Jonah was sent, was so large that it took three days to walk through it. There was no city that large in ancient times. Like much great fiction, notably Jesus’ parables and Shakespeare’s plays, Jonah is the vehicle for important truth about God, humanity, and life. The sign of Jonah which Jesus refers to is the immediate repentance of the people of Nineveh – Gentiles without the gift of God’s law – in response to Jonah’s preaching. Jesus contrasts the response of the Ninevites with the failure of so many of his own people to respond to his message.

          The sign of Queen Sheba is different, though in one respect the same. Like Jonah, she came from afar, motivated however not by a divine command, but by the report that King Solomon possessed wisdom greater than that of all other rulers or sages. “There is something greater than Solomon here,” Jesus says. He is referring to himself. He not merely possesses wisdom: Jesus is wisdom personified. Similarly, the statement that “there is something greater than Jonah here” means that Jesus’ message is more compelling than Jonah’s -- yet the people still do not respond. Jesus sums up by saying that the Ninevites and Queen Sheba showed a readiness to respond which his own people do not.

Are we responding? “I have come,” Jesus says in John’s gospel, “that they may have life, and have it to the full” (10:10). Are we embracing Jesus’ offer of life to the full? Or do we think of our faith as observing enough of the Church’s complicated rules and regulations to be able, on Judgment Day, to squeeze our way into heaven?

          Think about it!