ASK, SEEK, KNOCK.

Homily for March 13^th: Matthew 7:7-12.

          I received an e-mail recently about a man who complained that God had not answered his months-long prayer that he would win the lottery. God answered the complaint by telling him: ‘Give me some help, will you? Buy a ticket.’ Jesus tells us something similar when he says: “Ask and you will receive.” The very act of asking is an expression of faith. But why ask when God knows our needs already? Doing so reminds us of our dependence on God. When things are going well for us and the sun is shining, it is easy to forget that we still need the Lord. Asking also strengthens our desire, much as regular exercise strengthens the heart, muscles, and lungs. St. Gregory the Great, who was pope from 590 to 604, wrote: “All holy desires grow by delay. And if they do not grow, they were never holy desires.”

Jesus also says, “Seek and you will find.” The Trappist monk who helped me over the threshold of the Catholic Church over a half-century ago wrote: “To fall in love with God is the greatest of all romances; to seek him the greatest human adventure; to find him the highest human achievement.”

Jesus tells us finally: “Knock and the door will be opened to you.” If we know that a house, or a room, is empty, we don’t bother to knock. So knocking too is an expression of faith – that there is someone there to open the door.

To strengthen our faith, Jesus asks two rhetorical questions: “Would you give your son a stone if he asked for bread, or a snake if he asked for fish?” Our wonderful Pope Francis asks simple, challenging questions like that. If his hearers don’t answer the question, he will repeat it until they do. You are certainly not saints, Jesus says; yet you know how to give gifts to your children. Do you suppose, then, that your heavenly Father will be less generous than you are? That is a “how much more” question, and Jesus uses it often. “How much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him.”

Today’s gospel reading closes with the Golden Rule: “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you.” That is not unique to Christianity. We find it, in some form, in all the great religions of the world. Treat others, the rule says, as you would like them to treat you.  

THE SIGN OF JONAH

Homily for March 12th: Jonah 3:1-10; Luke 11:29-32.

          “The word of God came to Jonah a second time,” our first reading began. The first time God had spoken to Jonah, he told him to go the Gentile city Nineveh to preach repentance to its citizens. Jonah not only refused. He took a ship going in the opposite direction from Nineveh. When the ship got into a terrible storm, the crew thought God had sent the storm to punish Jonah for his disobedience. So they threw poor Jonah overboard. He was saved in the belly of what the Bible calls “a great fish” – who after three days vomited Jonah up on land. It was at this point that the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time – and with the same command. Jonah had refused God’s command the first time, because he didn’t want Gentile outsiders to experience the love and mercy of Israel’s God. That was for Jews only, Jonah thought.

Now Jonah, though still resentful, goes to Nineveh, preaches repentance, and the people immediately obey! Whereupon Jonah is angry. ‘That’s just what I told you would happen,’ he complains to God. ‘That’s why I didn’t want to come here. Now I’d rather die.’ Jonah is the quintessential sorehead.

In the gospel Jesus reminds his fellow Jews of this old story, and tells those who have been demanding a “sign” before they will believe in him – some miracle so dramatic they it will compel belief – that the only sign they will get is the sign of Jonah. At his preaching the Gentile Ninevites, who didn’t have the Ten Commandments and all the other blessings that God had showered on Jonah’s people down through the ages, believed at once, without demanding a sign, repented, and received God’s merciful love.

Lent challenges us, as Jesus challenged his own people. Is our belief in him strong enough to make us willing to change in areas where he wants us to change? I’ll be on retreat all next week. In preparation I have been praying that during the retreat the Lord will show me the areas in my life which need to change, so that I may be more pleasing to Him, and more useful to the people whom the Church ordained me to serve.

Perhaps you’d like to make a similar prayer.  

THE OUR FATHER

Homily for March 11^th, Tues. of Week 1 in Lent: Matt. 6:7-15.

          I’ve told you that Lent is a kind of spiritual spring training. It focuses on three essential practices: prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving. Today’s gospel gives us Jesus’ teaching about prayer. “Do not babble like the pagans,” Jesus says. The pagan gods of Jesus’ day were manipulative. They were in competition with one another. To get on their good side, the worshipper had to say the right words, and repeat them as often as possible. Forget all that, Jesus says. The God to whom you must pray is your loving heavenly Father. He “knows what you need before you ask him.”  

          Jesus then lays out the pattern for our prayer. By praying our Father, and not my Father, we acknowledge that we approach God as a member of his people. We don’t have a private me-and-God religion. Three petitions follow, having to with God himself. “Hallowed be thy name” is the first. It means “may your name be kept holy.” God’s name is kept holy when we speak it with faith, not as a magical word to get his attention, or to con him into giving us what we want.

          “Thy kingdom come” is a petition for the coming of God’s rule over us and the whole world. We are unhappy, and frustrated, because the world, and too often our own personal lives as well, do not reflect God’s rule. “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” extends this petition. In heaven God’s will is done immediately, and gladly.

          Four petitions follow which have to do with our brothers and sisters in the family of God: for bread, forgiveness, deliverance from temptation, and victory over evil.

          Here is a Lenten suggestion. Take at least five or ten minutes to pray the Our Father slowly, phrase by phrase, even word by word. Start with the opening word: “Our.” Reflect on the implications of that word. Pray that you may be mindful not only of your own needs, but also of the needs of your brothers and sisters. That could be your whole prayer for five or ten minutes. Move on in your next prayer time to the word “Father,” and on the day following pray over the words “Hallowed be thy name.” Practiced faithfully, and with patience, this way of praying the one prayer Jesus has given us will bring you close to Him who tells us in John’s gospel: “All this I tell you that my joy may be yours, and your joy may be complete” (15:11).

SHEEP -- AND GOATS

March 10th, Mon. 1: Matthew 25:31-46.

          Often overlooked in this familiar parable is the surprise of both groups at the judgment pronounced upon them. Those whom the king commends are not aware of having done anything special. Those he condemns are indignant. As far as they know, they have observed all the rules. And now they find themselves rejected for things they never knew were in the rule book.

          What a lesson there is there for us Catholics. The parable is a warning. It tells us that everything we do in life, as well as the things we leave undone, have eternal consequences. The choices we make each day and hour are determining, even now, our final destiny. Judgment is not a matter of adding up the pluses and minuses in some heavenly account book. Judgment is simply God’s confirmation of the choices, or judgment, we have already made by the way we chose to live our lives. That is the warning.

          The parable’s encouragement is the assurance that we need not fear judgment if we are trying to help people in need whom we encounter along life’s way. It is not that our good deeds gain us a row of gold stars in some heavenly account book which help balance out the black marks. Jesus is saying something quite different. He is telling us that the person who is genuinely trying to serve others’ needs will not fail to attain moral goodness in other areas as well. And such failures as remain (and we all have them) will be forgiven by God.  

          Do you come here discouraged? Your life is a tangle of loose ends, failed resolutions, and broken promises? You pray poorly, you lose your temper, you’re impatient, you are unable to overcome some bad habit or, as they say, to “get it all together.” Take heart! If that, or any of that, is your story, then the parable of the sheep and the goats is Jesus’ encouragement for you. It is his way of telling you that your failures are not ultimately important, if you are looking for opportunities of helping others, and using those opportunities when you find them. Anything good you try to do for others, no matter how insignificant, is of infinite worth. It is done for Jesus Christ. One day you will discover, to your astonishment, that you have been serving Him all along, without ever realizing it. You will hear the voice of your shepherd-king saying to you tenderly, and very personally: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”

          That, friends, is the gospel. That is the good news.

"WHY DO YOU EAT WITH SINNERS?"

Homily for March 8^th, 2014: Luke 5:27-32.

          “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus’ critics ask indignantly. They put the question to Jesus’ disciples. Jesus himself answers himself. ‘People who are healthy do not need a doctor,’ he says in effect. 'The sick do. I have come not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.’

          To understand why the religious authorities are so indignant, we have to know that sharing a meal with someone was considered, in Jesus’ day, treating him as a brother. How could one give such treatment to tax collectors? They were the hated ripoff artists of the day, working for the Roman government of occupation to squeeze as much money as possible out of their fellow Jews, while retaining part of their receipts for themselves.

Is all that long ago and far away? Not at all. There is a similar controversy going on in the Church right now. It has to do with marriage. According to age-old Catholic teaching, marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman terminable only by the death of one spouse. The Church has the prophetic duty to proclaim this unchanging truth.

          The Church has, however, a pastoral duty as well: to reach out in love and concern to people whose marriages fail; in particular to those who, after civil divorce, wish to marry again while continuing to practice their Catholic faith. Many are able to do so after receiving from a Church court, called a tribunal, a ruling that there was some defect in the previous marriage which prevented it from becoming full marriage in the Catholic sense. But what about the large number of divorced Catholics in good faith who are unable to obtain such a ruling – either because the evidence they present is insufficient; or because they live in a country where Church tribunals do not even exist? Can we find some way, without compromising our teaching about the indissolubility of marriage to readmit them to the sacraments? Or must they live the rest of their lives in an extra-sacramental wasteland? Pope Francis himself has put this question on the Church’s agenda. Cardinals from around the world recently discussed it in Rome. The discussion will continue at a synod of the world’s bishops in Rome next October.

          Already we are hearing cries of alarm about an alleged “threat to the faith.” That is nonsense. Pope Francis is challenging us to find way, without undermining Church teaching, to extend the love and compassion we see in Jesus to people excluded up to now, by a rigid application of Church law. Today’s gospel shows that Jesus loves such people. How can we do the same?

MAN'S FALL

First Sunday in Lent, Year A: Gen. 2:7-9. 3:1-7; Rom. 5:12-19; Mt. 4:1-11.

AIM: To explain sin’s roots and consequences, and the meaning of redemption in personal life.

          “Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the Lord God had made.” Not only cunning, we discover in what follows, but able to talk as well! It is not difficult to imagine someone hearing this reading for the first time saying: “What kind of nonsense is this, anyway? Here we are at the beginning of the third millennium, and we’re supposed to take this seriously? Give me a break!”

          What about it? How should we take this reading? Literally? Of course not. But seriously? Yes indeed. It is only the story’s incidentals, such as the talking snake, and “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” which are childlike.  Underneath these fanciful details the story is not only shrewd but also very true: it corresponds, as we shall see, to what we daily experience.

          It is a story about testing. The man and woman in the first reading fail the test. The gospel shows us Jesus being put to his test. He passes the test. The details of his testing, like the details of the story in our first reading, seem fanciful to us, even bizarre. If we had more time, I could show you that they too are very up-to-date, very like what we experience. For that I must ask you to wait until the first Sunday in Lent another year. Enough today to concentrate on Adam and Eve.

          “But they’re not called Adam and Eve,” I can hear someone saying. That’s true. Our translation avoids those names for good reason. In the original language, Hebrew, Adam and Eve are the ordinary words for “man” and “woman.” This is not the story of two individuals. It is the story of Everyman and Everywoman — ourselves included.

          Note, first, how their testing begins: with a lie: “Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?” the serpent asks suggestively. In reality, God had said nothing of the kind. The tempter’s lying question is typical of the one whom Jesus calls “a liar and the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).

          The serpent continues his lying insinuations even after the woman corrects him, by saying there was only one tree of which God had said: “You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.” 

          “You certainly will not die,” the tempter responds. We’ve all heard the condescending, sarcastic tone in which those words were spoken: “Die? Aw, whadaya talkin’ about?  Don’t be ridiculous. You won’t die. He just says that.” 

          The woman listens just long enough to be impressed. That is her first mistake. She doesn’t realize it, but she’s dealing with a confidence artist. When you encounter someone like that, break off the encounter at once. Staying to discuss the matter can only get you into trouble.

          Having made one mistake, the woman now makes a second: she looks at the forbidden tree and its fruit. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom.” Our wills are stronger than our imaginations — if (but only if) we use our wills to control our imaginations. Permit your imagination to wander uncontrolled, and your imagination will take charge, rendering your will powerless. That is what happens to the woman in this story: “So she took some of the fruit and ate it.” 

          Realizing that she has done wrong, that she has disobeyed the Lord God who has given her and the man the beautiful garden where they live, her first concern is to get someone to share her guilt with her: “And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” At this point it is worth pausing to wonder whether, if the Bible had been written by women instead of men, the story might not have been a little different.  Possibly we would find the roles reversed.

          Be that as it may, what they have done (harmless as it may seem to us) has consequences: “Then the eyes of them both were opened, and they realized that they were naked.” Now we understand the tree’s name: “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” You can’t find such a tree in any botany book. The tree, and its name, are symbolic. Now that the man and woman have tasted the tree’s forbidden fruit, they know good and evil in a way they had not known them before. They have tasted evil.

          The story’s sad conclusion, which was not included in our reading, is closest of all to our experience. Confronted by God, they are ashamed and helpless. They can construct only the most pitiful of defenses. All they can do is pass the buck. Each of them blames it on the other. They both blame the serpent. 

          How true to life that is! Those of us old enough to recall World War II remember something similar at its close. The day after Adolf Hitler’s squalid suicide in his Berlin bunker, there wasn’t a single Nazi to be found in all of Germany.  Coming closer to home and nearer in time, I could cite the collapse of the Enron corporation in October 2001. Nobody, it seems was responsible. The company’s president sent out his wife to tell a nationwide TV audience that her husband (known until then as one of the country’s great hot-shot executives) had been kept in the dark by his associates. Other officers of the company said they had  warned of danger ahead — but no one would listen.

          But why look at other peoples’ sins? Which one of us has never tried to avoid responsibility by blaming others?

          This is no simple legend of a credulous and primitive people. It shows deep psychological insight into our human condition. We can distinguish right from wrong. All that is best in us draws us to choose good and refuse evil. Yet time and again we do the opposite.  The story, in short, is the biblical writer’s attempt to explain what we daily experience. 

          In our second reading, however, Paul tells us that the story has another chapter. “Just as through the disobedience of the one man, the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.”  The one obedient man is Jesus Christ. The man and woman in the first reading are put to the test, and fail. Put to his test in the gospel, Jesus rejects evil, and emerges triumphant.

          At birth we inherit the fallen human nature of which we read in Genesis. At baptism, which is our birth into the great family of God which we call the Catholic Church, we receive a share in the unfallen nature of the perfect man, Christ Jesus. Is it any wonder that we so often experience conflict within? Fallen human nature drags us down. The Christ-life within us, received at baptism, pulls us up. Is there anyone here who does not long to see the Christ-life victorious over the dark forces within which threaten to drag us down from what we know to be the highest and best?  

          Jesus Christ knows, from his own experience, how bitter that inner conflict can become. He knows that without a power greater than our own we cannot pass the test. That is why he offers us here his Body and Blood: not a good conduct reward for services rendered, but medicine for sick sinners: strengthening, nourishing food for those who come, dusty, weary, and wounded from life’s pilgrimage; seeking strength to journey on another day, another week; pitching our tent each night a day’s march nearer home.            

FASTING: WHAT, WHY, AND HOW?

Homily for March 7^th, 2014: Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matt. 9:14-15.

          Lent is an opportunity for what is called in sports spring training. It encourages us to take up three practices which are as essential for spiritual health as regular physical exercise and a healthy diet are for an athlete: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Both of today’s reading focus on the second practice: fasting.

Voluntarily giving up things we may legitimately enjoy, as an expression of our love for God, strengthens our wills and spiritual muscles. This helps us to resist the lures and lies of Satan, when he tempts us to make choices that we know to be sinful. Fasting may be of many kinds: refraining from food or drink, reducing the time we spend in front of the TV, computer, or movie screen, or engaging in hobbies and other legitimate leisure activities.  

Our first reading is a searing indictment of a wrong kind of fasting. The prophet Isaiah represents people who fast asking God: “Why do you not see it [and] take no note of it?” Speaking for God, which is the primary task of prophets, Isaiah gives the answer. ‘You fast, but while you do so, you continue to act unjustly: fighting, quarrelling, abusing those who work for you.’ If you want God to heed your prayers, work for justice, and for changing structures of society that cause injustice. Practice acts of charity for the poor, free those oppressed by unjust laws.

There is a tragic division in the American Catholic family today: between the so-called social justice Catholics and those who concentrate, sometimes exclusively, on the so-called life issues: abortion, gay-marriage, and the family. These life issues are important. But so is social justice. There should be no opposition between them. Isaiah’s words show that both are essential. The Lord calls us, Isaiah says, to release those bound unjustly; to set free the oppressed; to share our bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and homeless, to clothe the naked when we see them. There are people in our parish who are doing all those things. When we join them, Isaiah promises, our light will break forth like the dawn, our wounds will be quickly healed. “Then you shall call,” Isaiah says, “and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!” That, friends, is the gospel. That is the Good News!

              

CHOOSE LIFE!

Homily for March 6^th, 2014: Deut. 30:15-29; Luke 9:22-25.

          God’s chosen people, the Jews, were slaves in Egypt for more than four centuries, over double the life of slavery in our country. Oppressed people seldom develop high standards of social life. The high statistics of black on black crime in our country illustrate this. They also show that we are still paying the price of slavery. The price of oppression continues to be demanded even after the oppression has ended. The stories coming out of North Korea are similar – or worse. Oppressed people follow the law of the jungle, preying on one another in ways that horrify us.

          So the ragtag group of people who crossed the Red Sea with Moses had grown accustomed for centuries to inflicting on one another the cruelty they experienced from the people who had enslaved them.

          This is the background for God’s gift to Moses of the Ten Commandments. They were not then, nor are the Commandments now, fences to hem people in. The Commandments were and are ten signposts pointing the way to human flourishing and freedom. 

          That is exactly what Moses tells the people in our first reading. “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. … If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God … [He] will bless you … If, however you turn away your hearts … and serve other gods … you will certainly perish. …Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.”

          Is that just long ago and far away? Don’t you believe it! The worship of false gods is as widespread today as it was in Bible times. Today’s idols are pleasure, power, possessions, and honor. None of those things is bad. They become idols, only when we make pursuit of any one of them central in our lives. Once we do that, we inevitably experience frustration – because we can never get enough.

What is the remedy? Jesus gives it to us in the gospel. “If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.” Doing that means putting the Lord at the center of our lives: before our own desires and ambitions, even before those whom we love most. A long life has taught me that people who do that, and only such people, experience the peace and joy that only the Lord can give.