"ALL ATE AND WERE SATISFIED."

Homily for February 13^th, 2021: 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 12^th, 2021: 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) 

"THE DEMON HAS GONE."

Homily for February 11^th, 2021: 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 shows that she is 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 10^th, 2021: Mark 7:14-23.

          “Everything that goes into a person from outside cannot defile,” Jesus says, since it enters not into the heart but the stomach.” The heart in Jewish thought was considered the seat of feelings and learning. The gospel writer Mark adds his own summary of what Jesus has just said: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”

Jesus’ disciples were almost all Jews. For them there was a whole list of foods which not be eaten because they were unclean, starting with pork. By declaring all foods clean Jesus was making a radical break with this Jewish tradition. But this raises a problem. If Jesus so clearly abolished the distinction between clean and unclean foods, why was there the great debate, reported in the Acts of the Apostles and three of Paul’s letters, about whether Gentile Christians were bound by the Jewish food laws? The answer to that question is simply: we do not know. There are many things in the Bible that we cannot understand. 

What we can understand is the list of vices that Jesus gives us: evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. Evil thoughts may be of many kinds: hatred, anger, lust, resentment. The list goes on and on. All of us have such thoughts from time to time. As long as we are trying to turn away from such dark thoughts to better ones, evil thoughts remain only temptations. And a thousand temptations do not make a single sin. Indeed, Jesus himself was tempted after his 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. Yet we know that Jesus never sinned.

Theft is forbidden by the Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal.” Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world where there was no theft? We wouldn’t need to lock our homes or cars. If we left something behind, we’d know it would be there when we came back. Could there be a better example of the Commandments being signposts to human happiness, not fences to hem us in? Envy is the one vice that brings its own punishment with it. Whenever we give way to envy, we’re unhappy. Blasphemy is not respecting the holy name of God. Arrogance puts people off: no one like an arrogant person. And folly means misusing or wasting the gifts God showers upon us.

Jesus, who gives us this list of vices, has also given us the best defense against them: the closing words of the one prayer he has left us, “Deliver us from evil.”

 

 

EARNING GOD'S REWARD?

February 9^th, 2021: Mark 7:1-13

“You hypocrites,” Jesus says in the gospel. He spoke those words not to open and notorious sinners, but to Pharisees: people who prided themselves on their exact fulfillment of God’s law. He condemns them with words taken from the prophet Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.”

Jesus follows these words with an example of what he is talking about. You Pharisees, he says, are careful to obey purely human rules (washing of cups, cleansing of your hands after you return from a shopping expedition). Yet you explain away the fifth of God’s Ten Commandments: “Honor your father and mother” by saying, “If someone says to father or mother, ‘Any support you might have had from me is korban' (meaning, dedicated to God), you allow him to do nothing more for his father or mother. You nullify the word of God in favor of your tradition that you have handed on.”

Who are today’s Pharisees? They are people who think they can earn rewards from God. In reality, God’s love and our salvation are not things we can earn. They are God’s free gift. God bestows his gifts on us not because we are good enough, but because He is so good that he wants to share his love with us. God’s law is not the list of rules and regulations that we must first obey before God will love us and bless us. God’s law is, rather, the description of our grateful response to the love and blessing which God has already bestowed on us out of sheer generosity.  

          Does this mean that there is no “just reward” for those who do try to obey God’s law? Of course not. God’s reward for faithful service is certain. Jesus tells us this in many gospel passages. He warns us, however, that those who try to calculate their reward in advance will be disappointed. The people who are most richly rewarded – who are literally bowled over by God’s generosity – are those who never stop to reckon up their reward because they are so keenly aware of how far short they still fall of God’s standard. 

          If we want to experience God’s generosity (and is there anyone here who does not?), we must learn to stand before God with empty hands. Then we shall experience the joy of Mary, who in her greatest hour, when she learned – astonished, fearful, and confused – that she was to be the mother of God’s Son, responded with words which the Church repeats in its public prayer every evening:

          “The hungry he has given every good thing,

                   while the rich he has sent empty away” (Lk 1:53).

 

ST. JOSEPHINE BAKHITA

Homily for February 8^th, 2021: St. Josephine Bakhita.

          St Josephine Bakhita, the saint whom the Church commemorates today, was born in about 1869 – she herself did not know the precise date -- to a wealthy family in Darfur, the capitol of Sudan in southern Africa. At age nine she was kidnapped 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. A kind man, he took Josephine with him when he returned to Italy in 1885. Here is some of what Pope Benedict XVI wrote about her in his 2009 encyclical “Saved by Hope.”

“Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is another Master, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her -- that he actually loved her. She was loved by none other than the supreme Master, before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself been flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father's right hand’. Now she had ‘hope’-- no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: ‘I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me -- I am awaited by this Love. And so, my life is good.’

          In January 1890 Josephine was baptized, and on the same day given confirmation and First Communion by the Patriarch of Venice, later Pope St. Pius X. In 1893 she entered an order of religious Sisters, with whom she lived until her death in 1947. When she was old and bent, a bishop visiting her convent asked her what she did. “I do the same as you,” she replied. Astonished, the bishop asked her, “What’s that?” “Your Excellency,” she replied, “we both want and do the same thing: God’s will.”

Revered by all who knew her because of her gentleness, calming voice, and ever-present smile, she was declared a saint by Pope St. John Paul 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.”