"iT IS EXPEDIENT THAT ONE MAN DIE."

Homily for March 27^th, 2021: John 11:45-57.

          “It is better to have one man die [for the people], than to have the whole nation destroyed.” These words of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas in today’s gospel reading are cynical. They were spoken at a meeting of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, called together to discuss what should be done about the crowds who were becoming followers of Jesus following his raising of Lazarus from the dead. “What are we going to do?” members of the Sanhedrin ask. “This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away our sanctuary and our nation.”  

          Palestine was already controlled by the Roman government of occupation. But the authorities had an agreement with the Sanhedrin, allowing them to control internal affairs, as long as they kept order and saw to it that things remained quiet. Jesus’ miracles, culminating in the raising of Lazarus from his tomb, threatened to destroy this stability. If things got out of hand, the Romans would crack down hard; and the Sanhedrin’s limited authority would be swept away. Caiaphas was proposing a simple solution. Let’s show the Romans we can still control things. We’ll just get rid of Jesus, he says, and things will quiet down.

          Jesus was removed, as we know: by crucifixion. But although it was the hated Romans who executed him, working with the small ruling clique around the Sanhedrin, God remained in charge. As the great nineteenth century convert, St. John Henry Newman, wrote in a memorable phrase, “God knows what he is about.” Jesus’ death and resurrection brought salvation not only to his own people, but to all peoples. As the gospel writer says: “Jesus died … not only for [his own] nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God.”

          Through baptism we are members of that people; dispersed throughout the world, but united in worship of the One who, by rising from death, has opened for us the gate to life everlasting, with Him.

"THE FATHER IS IN ME."

Homily for March 26^th, 2021: John 10:31-42.

          “The Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus,’ The gospel today starts where yesterday’s gospel ended: with Jesus’ critics throwing stones at him. As we saw yesterday, that was the punishment commanded in the book Leviticus for blasphemy (24:16). 

          Whenever critics accuse him of blasphemy for making himself equal to God, Jesus responds by saying, I have not made myself anything. It is God our Father who has made me who I am. Jesus says in today’s gospel: “the Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

          This John’s gospel according to John starts with that claim: “In the beginning was the Word; the Word was in God’s presence, and the Word was God. He was present to God in the beginning” (John 1:1). Words are used to communicate. Since we cannot see God, he sends us his Son, God clothed in human flesh, to show us what God is like. 

          When we listen to Jesus, we hear God speaking to us. When we look at Jesus, we see what God is like. What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in a provincial village where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people.

Jesus was of the earth, earthy. In his youth he worked with his hands in the carpenter’s shop. His teaching was full of references to simple things: the birds of the air, the wind and the raging waves, the lilies of the field, the vine, the lost sheep, the woman searching for her one lost coin, leavening dough with yeast, the thief breaking in at night. 

          In preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is like. He who is God’s word, God’s personal communication to us, is saying that God loves humble people. In his earthiness Jesus shows us God’s love for this world and everything in it.

Often we think of God and religion as concerned only with some higher, spiritual realm. That is wrong! God loves the earth and the things of earth. He must love them, because he made them. And God does not make anything that is not lovable. God made each of us, using our parents as his agents. And he loves us with a love that will never let us go.

"BE NOT AFRAID."

Homily for March 25^th, 2021: The Annunciation. Luke 1:26-38.

          “Do not be afraid,” the angel Gabriel says to Mary. Girls married very early in those days. Mary may have been only 14 or 15. To be visited by an angel was no ordinary experience. Mary did not know what was happening to her. Of course she was afraid – “greatly troubled,” Luke says. To reassure her, the angel calls Mary “full of grace.” Grace is God’s love, poured into our hearts through the power of God’s Holy Spirit. How wonderful for this young teenager to hear that she was filled with God’s love – the greatest and most powerful love there is.

          Only after speaking this reassurance does the angel tell Mary that even before her planned marriage to Joseph, she is going to be pregnant. No wonder that she asks, “How can this be?” In response Mary hears the stunning news that the father of her child will not be Joseph. Her son will be conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit. Hence, the angel says, “the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God.”

Did Mary understand that? How could she? Only later, decades later, did all this start to make sense to her. At the time she understood only this: that in a little village, where gossip was rife, and everyone knew everybody’s own business, many would consider her an unmarried mother. Without hesitation, however, Mary responds in trusting faith: “I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”

More than thirty years later, the Son whom Mary bore would say, not once but often, what the angel had said to his mother, at the time he was conceived: “Be not afraid.” Jesus spoke those words to his disciples in a boat, when they saw him coming toward them on the water in the midst of a storm (Mt 14:27). He spoke the same words to Peter, James, and John on the mountain at his Transfiguration (Mt 17:7 and parallels). He repeated them to Jairus, the synagogue official who, after asking healing for his little daughter, was told that the girl had already died (Mark 6:50).

The Lord is saying those same words to us, right now: “Be not afraid.” Trust me. I am with you. I shall be with you – always. On this day when we celebrate Mary’s acceptance of the Lord’s call, we ask her to pray for us, that like her, we too may say our yes to God, in good times, but also in bad.

"THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE."

 Homily for March 24^th, 2021. John 8:31-42.

             “Everyone one who commits sin is a slave of sin,” Jesus says. What does that mean, “a slave of sin?” To answer that question, we must start with temptation. Where does it come from? From Satan, also called “the Tempter.” Jesus calls him “a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

          Satan lied to Jesus in the second of the three temptations during Jesus’ 40-day fast in the wilderness. “Then the devil … showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. He said to him, ‘I will give you all this power and the glory of these kingdoms: the power has been given to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Prostrate yourself in homage before me, and it shall all be yours” (Luke 4:5ff). That was a lie. Jesus recognized the lie at once, and rejected the temptation with a scriptural quote: “You shall do homage to the Lord your God; him alone shall you adore” (Deut. 6:13).

          We all experience temptation, all the time. ‘Go ahead. Do it. Why not? It will make you feel good. You’ll be happy. Everybody does it.’ Every one of those statements is a lie. So, we say, ‘Well, just this once.’ And then we find that it’s not just this once. Having yielded to Satan’s lies, we yield again – and again, until we find that we’ve acquired a habit, which soon has us in its grip. Over time we discover that we are slaves of sin, as Jesus says in today’s gospel. Breaking the habit is very difficult.

          But not impossible. “If you remain in my word,” Jesus says, “you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” What is this truth that will set us free? It is knowing that when the Lord God set his mark on us at baptism, he made us his sons and daughters, sisters and brothers of his Son, Jesus. As long as we stay close to him, we are happy -- and we are also free. And when we wander off, as all of us do at times, he is ready to forgive us and to restore us to his friendship. He does that in the sacrament of penance, or confession.

A video made in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome a few years ago shows Pope Francis kneeling to confess his own sins, before going to another confessional to hear the sins of others. I have an appointment with my own confessor next week. If you have not celebrated this sacrament recently, I hope you will do so before Easter. It’s not something unpleasant like going to the dentist. It is a personal encounter with One whose love will never let you go. He wants to set you free. His name is Jesus Christ.    

"IF YOU DO NOT BELIEVE THAT I AM."

Homily for March 23^rd, 2021: John 8:21-30.

          “Many came to believe in him,” we just heard. Others, however, did not. As he nears his arrest, trial, and crucifixion, Jesus speaks with increasing urgency. “If you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” That sentence makes sense only if we know the story of God calling Moses, already an old man, to return to Egypt and deliver his people from slavery to the Egyptians. Moses asks what he is to say to his people when they ask who has sent him. And God responds: ‘Tell them that I AM has sent you.’ So what Jesus is saying, in the gospel we just heard, is that only those who believe he is the divine Son of God will have their sins forgiven.

          Three recent gospel readings have been giving us reasons to believe in Jesus as God’s divine son. In the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration, a couple of weeks ago, we saw the divine light of his divinity momentarily breaking through the veil of his humanity. In the story about Jesus cleansing the Temple and saying: “Destroy this Temple and I will raise it up,” he was not speaking, as many of his hearers assumed, about the Temple building. He was speaking about the Temple of his body, and hence about the resurrection. Finally, Jesus’ words, “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him may not die, but may have eternal life,” were a prophecy and promise of the resurrection.

          “Because he spoke this way,” today’s gospel tells us, “many came to believe in him.” In his book Jesus of Nazareth Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI writes that those who welcomed Jesus as he entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey on the first Palm Sunday “were not the same crowd that later demanded his crucifixion” (p.8). That crowd consisted, Pope Benedict writes, of “the Temple aristocracy,” a small ruling clique who felt their power threatened by Jesus’ teaching and claims – and not even all of them, as we see in the case of Nicodemus, a member of the ruling caste, but secretly Jesus’ disciple (cf. op.cit. 185f).

“Just as the Lord entered the Holy City that day on a donkey,” Pope Benedict writes, “so the Church [sees] him coming again and again in the humble form of bread and wine.” Greeting him, we are encountering the One who made us; the One who upholds us at every moment of our lives; who is always close to us, even when we stray far from him; who loves us more than we can ever imagine; who is waiting for us at the end of life’s road, to welcome us into the place he has gone ahead to prepare for us; where we shall experience not just joy but ecstasy – for we shall see God face to face.

 

AN ADULTEROUS GIRL

Homily for March 22^nd, 2021: John 8:1-11.

            The people who come to Jesus in today’s gospel, dragging with them a young girl caught in adultery, are whipped up and excited. They are out to put Jesus on the spot; and they think they have found the perfect means. The Jewish law in such a case was clear. A woman guilty of adultery must be stoned. They demand that Jesus take a stand.

          His first response is silence. Jesus remains calm and relaxed throughout, in full command of the situation. Stooping down, he begins to write on the ground. Perhaps Jesus is embarrassed. Or maybe he is filled with indignant shame that religious leaders could act so heartlessly.

          And heartless the woman’s accusers were. The Scripture scholars say that she was probably a young teenager, seduced perhaps by an older man into her first sexual contact. Whatever her age, her accusers have no interest in her at all. Her accusers were really interested in one thing only: setting a trap for Jesus, “so that they could have some charge to bring against him,” as John tells us.

          When they insist that Jesus give some answer, he speaks the well-known words: “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Jesus’ challenge strikes home. When all the accusers have departed, leaving Jesus alone with the terrified girl, the condition he has set for her condemnation is fulfilled. Jesus is without sin. If anyone was entitled to condemn her, he was. He refuses to do so. Instead he offers her God’s mercy and the chance to begin again: “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”

          Jesus is not saying that sexual sins are unimportant. Against sin Jesus was uncompromising. With sinners he was compassionate. And with none was he more compassionate than with people guilty of the so-called sins of the flesh. The only people with whom Jesus is severe in the gospels are those guilty of spiritual sins: hard-heartedness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, pride.  

          Those were the sins of the girl’s accusers. To her Jesus extends God’s mercy. This alone could give her hope, challenging her to turn from a destructive life of sin to a constructive life for God and for others – which is the only way to fulfillment, happiness, and peace. Jesus offers us the same challenge today.