"GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD . . ."

Homily for April 30^th: John 3: 16-21.

          “God so loved the world …” we just heard. Probably we say: “But of course. Isn’t that obvious?” To many people it is not obvious. Christians who in past centuries used to be called Puritans consider the world an evil place, from which Jesus’ disciples must flee. This view is still alive and well today in certain quarters. It has a kernel of truth. The world organized apart from God, and against God is evil. Jesus refers to that world when he says, later in John’s gospel: “In the world you will have tribulation. But be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (16:33) . In today’s gospel, however, Jesus is speaking of the world in a good sense: not the world of human marring, but the good world of God’s making. That world must be lovable, for God does not making anything that is not good.

          “God so loved the world,” Jesus goes on, “that he gave his only begotten Son.” He was the most that God had to give or could give. And God’s Son came into our world, and continues with us through the power of his Holy Spirit, not as some kind of great policeman or scold to frighten us into measuring up to his unrealistically high standards. No. Jesus came, and remains with us, “so that the world might be saved through him.” How?

          As we read on in today's gospel we discover the answer. We are saved “by believing in him,” Jesus Christ. To believe in someone is to trust that person -- more, to entrust ourselves to him or her. Whoever does that, our gospel tells us, lives not in darkness, but in light – the light that shines from the face of Jesus Christ. How dark our world would be had he never come to us!

          We pray in this Mass, therefore, that we may entrust ourselves ever more completely to Jesus, himself the light of the world; and that we ourselves may be lenses or prisms of his light in a dark and often fearful world.

         

         

"THE WIND BLOWS WHERE IT WILL."

Homily for April 29^th, 2014: John 3:7-15.

          In yesterday’s gospel reading we heard Jesus telling Nicodemus that he must be “born again.” How was that possible, Nicodemus asked? How could someone enter again into this mother’s womb and be born anew? Jesus explained that he was talking, not about biological birth, but about birth “from above” – heavenly birth, through water and the spirit. We understand (though Nicodemus did not) that Jesus was talking about baptism. 

          In today’s gospel Jesus expands on theme of spirit. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word for spirit is pneuma. In English medical terms are almost all from Greek roots; so we find pneuma in the name for a sickness of the lungs: pneumonia. In antiquity pneuma designated both a wind and a person’s breath. That is why the gospels speak about Jesus giving up his spirit when he died. His breath went out of him.

          Using the same word, Jesus speaks also about the winds of the air. In antiquity people believed that the winds came from God. Winds were, they thought, God’s breath. The winds we hear and feel blow from different directions. We hear the sound the wind makes, Jesus tells Nicodemus, but we do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

Then comes a crucial sentence: “So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” We are born of the spirit in baptism and in confirmation. At Pentecost we hear about the Spirit of God coming dramatically, like a strong driving wind. That we are Christians in a land undreamed of by anyone in Jerusalem on that first Pentecost day is proof that the Spirit=s Astrong driving wind@ did not blow in vain. Those first touched by that wind were blown into places, and situations, they never dreamed of.  Even those who never left Jerusalem found their lives utterly changed.

This same wind of the Spirit is blowing in the Church today. Is it blowing in your life? Or are you afraid of that wind B of what it might do to you, and where it might blow you? Cast aide fear. The wind of God=s Spirit, like the winds of the sky, blows from different directions. But in the end this wind blows all who are driven by it to the same place. The wind of God Spirit blows us home B home to God.   

'YOU MUST BE BEGOTTEN OF WATER AND SPIRIT."

Homily for April 28th, 2014: John 3: 1-8.

          Most of those who responded to Jesus’ teaching by coming to believe in him were “little people,” as the world reckons such things. In today’s gospel we meet an exception. Nicodemus was member of the Sanhedrin, the elite 70-man Jewish ruling body that went back to Moses. He comes to Jesus at night. He doesn’t want his fellow Sanhedrin members, almost all of whom are either hostile to Jesus, or indifferent, to know about his visit. The night visit my also have a symbolic meaning. John’s gospel is rich in symbolism. Nicodemus is coming from the darkness of disbelief, or at least of weak belief, to the One who is the light of the world.

There was similar symbolism in the gospel for Tuesday in Holy Week, also by John. After Judas leaves the Upper Room where Jesus was celebrating his Last Supper with the twelve apostles, John tells us: “And it was night.” For Jesus, however, it was not night. “Now is the Son of Man glorified,” he cries out, “and God is glorified in him.”

Nicodemus has been impressed by Jesus’ miracles – which ones we are not told. Calling Jesus “Rabbi,” Nicodemus says: “We know you are a teacher come from God, for no man can perform signs and wonders such as you perform unless God is with him.” This stops far short of acknowledgement that Jesus is the Messiah. There were other holy rabbis who performed signs and wonders. 

This explains Jesus’ less than enthusiastic response. You cannot see God’s kingdom, he tells Nicodemus, unless you are “begotten from above,” in other words, “born of God as your Father.” A father “begets” the child whom a mother “bears.” Jesus’ meaning becomes clear only when he says: “No one can enter God’s kingdom without being begotten of water and the Spirit.”

That is what happened to each of us when we were baptized. Through the Holy Spirit, and the pouring of water, God our Father made us his children, brothers and sisters of his divine Son, Jesus, and heirs of the kingdom of heaven. That is our eternal destiny. And nothing can prevent its fulfillment except our own deliberate and final No. 

"HE REBUKED THEM FOR THEIR DISBELIEF . . ."

Homily for April 26^th, 2014: Mark 16: 9-15.

          Throughout Easter week we have been hearing gospel readings which tell of the risen Lord Jesus sending out those to whom he appeared to proclaim that he is risen. On Monday he encountered the women visiting his empty tomb and told them: “Do not be afraid! Go and carry the news to my brothers . . .” On Tuesday we heard him giving the same command to Mary Magdalene. On Wednesday he encountered two of his disciples on the road to Emmaus and made himself known to them “in the breaking of the bread” – the first celebration of Mass. On Thursday we heard the account of Jesus appearing to the apostles, with the previously missing Thomas, a week after Easter. “You are witnesses of all this,” he tells them: not just a statement, but also a command. Yesterday we heard about Jesus encountering seven of his apostles, tired from a night of fruitless fishing on the lake, and charged Peter to “feed my sheep.”

          Today’s gospel reading is a kind of summary of all this. Twice over we hear that even after hearing the testimony of people who had seen the risen Lord, “they refused to believe.” Sitting at table with the eleven remaining apostles Jesus “takes them to task for their disbelief and stubbornness,” Mark writes, “since they had put no faith in those who had seen him after he had been raised.”

          Note what immediately follows. To these men whose faith was not merely lacking, but missing entirely, Jesus says: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the good news to all creation.” That challenged not only those eleven at table with Jesus. It also challenges us. When we think our faith is too weak to enable us bear witnesses to the risen Lord, and to proclaim his good news, to an often hostile though hungry world, we should remember: the first witnesses were also weak in faith, even lacking in any faith. Yet Jesus did not hesitate to send them. He knew that in the very act of proclaiming the good news to others their own faith would be kindled, and deepened.

Another man who knew that was the namesake of the present Pope: St. Francis of Assisi. “Preach always,” Francis said. “When necessary, use words.”

"HAVE YOU CAUGHT ANYTHING?"

Homily for April 25^th, 2014: John 21:1-19

AHave you caught anything?@ Jesus calls out from the shore at dawn to his friends in their boat. What he really said was: AYou haven=t caught anything, have you?@ Jesus was poking fun at their lack of success in the one thing they were supposed to be good at: catching fish. Not once in the gospels is there any record of Peter and his friends catching a single fish without Jesus= help. Here that help is the command to try again. At once they feel the net heavy with fish. One of those in the boat tells Peter: AIt is the Lord.@ It is the unnamed Adisciple whom Jesus loved.@ Peter and the others hurry ashore and find a charcoal fire with fish on it, and bread. Knowing that they would be hungry after their long night=s labor, Jesus has made breakfast for them.

Did Peter recall another charcoal fire, at night, in the courtyard of the High Priest=s house at Jerusalem, where Peter stood warming himself? APeter was distressed,@ we heard in the gospel, because Jesus asked his question a third time. Of course he was distressed! The memory of that three-fold denial was painful. Peter=s thrice repeated assurance of love is his rehabilitation. In response to each pledge of love, Jesus assigns Peter responsibility: to feed Jesus= sheep.

Why did Jesus give this responsibility to Peter, of all people? Jesus gave the office of leader to the friend whose love was imperfect; whose impetuosity and weakness made the name Jesus gave him C Peter, the rock C as ironic as calling a 350-pound heavyweight ATiny.@

Is there someone here today who feels weak? You have made so many good resolutions. Some you have kept, others not. You have high ideals. Yet time and again you have compromised. You had so many dreams, hopes, plans. How many have you achieved? You wanted so much. You have settled for so little. If that is your story, you have a friend in heaven. His name is Simon Peter. 

If, like Peter, you have discovered that you are weak, that command is reassuring. Jesus doesn’t ask you to be strong, for he knows your weakness. He doesn’t ask you to be a pioneer or a leader. He knows that is too hard: that you would soon lose your way C or at least your nerve. He asks one thing alone. He asks you to follow him. 

Following Jesus Christ is not always easy. If you know your weakness, however, you have an advantage over those who still think they are strong. Then you will trust, as you try to follow your Master and Lord, not in any strength of your own, but only and always in the strength of Jesus Christ. His strength is always reliable; and it is always available. We have only to ask and Jesus is there.  

"THOMAS WAS NOT WITH THEM."

Second Sunday of Easter, Year A. Acts 2:42-47; John 20: 29-31.

AIM: To help the hearers better appreciate the communal dimension of faith.

          “Thomas, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.” Where was he? We don’t know. One Easter, a few years ago, a man who had struggled with alcoholism suggested to me that Thomas may have been so devastated by Jesus’ crucifixion that he went on a week-long drinking binge. That’s not impossible.

          While Thomas may have been looking for Jesus on his own, Jesus himself was appearing to the apostles “on the evening of that first day of the week”, as we have just heard in our gospel reading. The first day of the week was Sunday. For Jesus, as for all his friends, the climax of the week was not Sunday, but the day before, the Sabbath. The third of the Ten Commandments ordered God’s people to keep the Sabbath holy, by resting from unnecessary work. In his book Jesus of Nazareth Pope Benedict writes: “It is clear that only an event of extraordinary impact could have led to the abandonment of the Sabbath and its replacement by the first day of the week. Only an event that marked souls indelibly could bring about such a profound realignment in the religious culture of the week.” (p. 259)  That was why the earliest Christians designated Sunday as “the Lord’s day.” It was the day, his friends recognized, on which the risen Lord came to be with his people, gathered to hear the word of God, and to receive the bread of life.

          On the evening of that first Lord’s day, the day of Jesus’ resurrection, Thomas was absent. He did not see Jesus until he joined the other apostles a week later. Then he uttered what many scripture scholars believe may have been the last words spoken by any of Jesus’ disciples in the original version of John’s gospel: “My Lord and my God!” The words come at the end of chapter 20. Scripture scholars believe that chapter 21, which follows, is an appendix, added to the original version later, possibly by another writer.         

Thomas’s experience has an important lesson for us. We encounter Jesus not one-on-one, but when we gather with our brothers and sisters in the great family of God which we call the Catholic Church. Purely personal encounters with the Lord — such as that enjoyed by Mary Magdalene on the morning of the resurrection, or by the apostle Paul outside Damascus — are exceptions, not the norm. And when they do occur, such one-on-one encounters are never just for the individual, to give that person a great spiritual experience. Down through history Jesus comes to specially chosen souls so that they can go to others as his witnesses, empowered by him to say: “I have seen the Lord.”

          Who are the Thomases in our world today, seeking the Lord on their own?  There are many – people who are sincerely seeking the Lord, but who prefer to do so apart from the worshiping and believing community. Religion, they say, is personal and private. In that they are right — but only half right. The religion of Jesus Christ is personal. But it is not private. People who neglect the communal dimension of our faith are constructing a private religion of their own, and a private church. They need to learn the lesson Thomas learned: that the Lord comes first and foremost when we are gathered together with our fellow believers. 

          Our Christian faith is not a private me-and-God affair. Jesus taught us this in the one prayer he gave us. It begins not “My Father,” but “Our Father.” We pray as members of a community. We need each other. We believe not as isolated individuals, but as members of the family into which we were reborn in baptism: the Catholic Church. That is how the apostle Thomas came to faith in the risen Lord: when he rejoined his fellow apostles.

          Nor is faith something we can summon up on our own. It is a gift. And the Lord uses his Church to give us this gift. It is in the Church, moreover, that our faith is nourished. Here is how the Catechism explains it: “Faith is a personal act – the free response of the human person to the initiative of God who reveals himself. But faith is not an isolated act. No one can believe alone, just as no one can live alone. You have not given yourself faith as you have not given yourself life. The believer has received faith from others and should hand it on to others.”

          And the Catechism continues: “Our love for Jesus and for our neighbor impels us to speak to others about our faith. Each believer is thus a link in the great chain of believers. I cannot believe without being carried by the faith of others, and by my faith I help support others in their faith.” [No. 166]

          Let me close with a personal statement of faith. If I am a believing Christian today, and happy to be a priest – indeed more than happy, overjoyed – it is because I grew up from earliest childhood in a world, and an atmosphere, in which private prayer and public worship were as normal and natural a part of everyday life as eating and sleeping. Faith in Jesus Christ was given to me long before I could understand the words which express our faith: the creed and the other formularies of faith which the Church gives us.

          What a blessing that was! But the Lord gave me more. At age twelve he put into my heart the desire to be a priest. There was no gestation period, no thinking it over, no “discernment.” One day it was not there. The next day it appeared, as a full blown and settled decision which I never afterward questioned. I told my classmates about it. So from age twelve I have been called Father. As I passed through my teens, I thought, each time I served Mass: “One day I’ll stand there. I’ll say those words. I’ll wear those vestments.”

          It took me thirteen years to reach the goal. I made the required retreat before ordination, and went to confession. After I had poured out the sorry tale of my sins, the priest, a holy monk, said to me, before giving me absolution: “You’re taking a tremendous gamble, offering yourself to God as a priest. And the Lord is taking an even bigger gamble, accepting you.” That was more than sixty years ago. But I’ve never forgotten it. As I look back over those years, I realize that I have failed the Lord times without number. But the Lord has never failed me: not one single day, not one single hour or minute.

          And so I ask you now to do what I have done. Look into your own heart, and look back over your life. Then see if you cannot say the same: "I have failed the Lord time and again. But the Lord has never failed me: not one single day, not one single hour or minute."

"YOU ARE WITNESSES OF THESE THINGS."

Homily for April 24^th, 2014: Luke 24:35-48.

“You are witnesses of these things,” Jesus tells his at first frightened and then incredulous friends. Those words were not merely a statement. They were a sending, a command. The risen Lord continues to make this command today – to us.

How do we bear witness to Jesus Christ? There are as many ways as there are witnesses. A few years back our local newspaper had an article about one such witness: Sister Irene Marie of the Little Sisters of the Poor, who take a special vow of “hospitality to the aged poor.” As “collector” for her community, she hits the street daily to collect supplies for their 100-bed home for the elderly. One of her regular stops is the wholesale food market, Produce Row. A man who sees her there often says: “I guess a polite way to describe Produce Row is ‘tough.’ But Sister Irene just goes right in there and tells those guys what she needs. They’re like little puppies around her.”

What’s her secret? She is careful not to push too hard, the article says. “You can’t expect people to give what they can’t afford,” Sister Irene told the reporter who wrote the article. “If we pushed like that, then God wouldn’t bless our work.”

          She wasn’t always in this line of work. “I was a seamstress in our Cleveland house,” she told the reporter. “One day Mother Superior told me I was going to be the collector.” Wasn’t she worried about taking on something for which she had no experience?  “Not really,” Sister Irene replied. “I’d never sewn before either.” That’s amusing, of course. But the deep and simple faith reflected in that Sister’s words is also uplifting. She is a shining witness to the power, and love, of the risen Lord Jesus.  

Friends, you don’t have to be a religious Sister to be a witness to Jesus Christ. You don’t have to be a priest either. There are people here in this church right now who, like that Sister, are bearing witness to the risen Lord by the inner quality of their lives: women and men of deep faith, steadfast hope even when all looks dark, and active, generous love for God and others.

          Here in the Eucharist we encounter the One who sends us out to be his witnesses in daily life. Here, in word and sacrament, we receive once again all his power, all his goodness, all his purity, all his love. And when we have Him, we have everything.  

THE TWO TABLES

Homily for April 23^rd, 2014.  Luke 24:13-35.   

          This best known of all the resurrection stories is also one of the most loved.  The story appeals because it shows Jesus coming to his friends in the two ways he has always come: through word and sacrament. After Jesus’ disappearance, his two friends recall that their hearts had been “burning within us while he spoke to us ... and opened the Scriptures to us.” More than once the gospels record that “he spoke with authority,” and not like other religious teachers. (Matt. 7:29 and parallels.)

Jesus is still speaking with authority today; and our hearts too can burn within us, as we ponder his word. For that to happen, however, we must spend time alone with the Lord, in silence. The 16^th century Spanish Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, says: “The Father spoke one Word, which is his Son, and this word he speaks always in eternal silence; and in silence it must be heard by the soul.”

          Though the two friends of Jesus in today’s gospel feel their hearts burning within them as they listen to the Lord’s words, they recognize him only “in the breaking of the bread” – the first celebration of Mass.

          Jesus’ swift disappearance at Emmaus shows also that he did not come to these friends of his so that they could luxuriate in a great spiritual experience. He came to empower them to carry the good news of his resurrection to others. Every encounter with God in Scripture is for the sake of others.

          Let me conclude with some verses written as a meditation on the Emmaus story. They are by a monk of the Benedictine abbey in St. Louis, Fr. Ralph Wright. 

 Sing of one who walks beside us / And this day is living still,

          One who now is closer to us / Than the thought our hearts distill,

          One who once upon a hilltop / Raised against the power of sin,

          Died in love as his own creatures / Crucified their God and King.

          Strangers we have walked beside him / The long journey of the day,

          And have told him of the darkness / That has swept our hope away.

          He has offered words of comfort, / Words of energy and light,

          And our hearts have blazed within us / As he saved us from the night.

Stay with us, dear Lord, and raise us / Once again the night is near.

Dine with us and share your wisdom. / Free our hearts from every fear.

In the calm of each new evening, / In the freshness of each dawn,

If you hold us fast in friendship / We will never be alone.