THEY TOOK OFFENSE AT HIM

Homily for February 5^th, 2020: Mark 6:1-6.

When Jesus returns to Nazareth, he speaks in the synagogue with an eloquence and power which astonish his hearers. “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary?” they ask. Those last three words suggest a hostile insult. In Jewish usage a man is normally identified with his father’s name: in Jesus’ case, “son of Joseph.” The brothers and sisters of Jesus mentioned here, and elsewhere in the gospels, are not necessarily full siblings. “They took offense at him,” Mark tells us.

People are still taking offense at Jesus today. They take offence, for instance, when they hear Jesus speaking about marriage as exclusively the union of one man and one woman, terminable only by death. When they hear our Pope Francis saying that we must also remember to be kind and compassionate to people who have difficulty living up to Jesus’ standards, they rejoice that at least this pope, unlike his mean and heartless predecessors, finally “gets it” and is starting to change Church teaching accordingly.

That is pure wishful thinking and utter nonsense. Pope Francis has changed nothing. “I am a son of the Church,” he said recently. He teaches exactly what his predecessors have taught. A professor at Notre Dame University recently wrote an article, which the New York Times was only too happy to print (no surprise there!), suggesting that Pope Francis might soon tell us that there were cases when abortion was perfectly OK. What nonsense! 

Jesus responds to those who take offense at him with words that have become proverbial: “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place.”

Mark concludes his report of Jesus’ home visit by writing: “So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there … He was amazed at their lack of faith.” It is faith which opens the door to the action of God in our lives. What prayer could we better offer in this Mass than that of the man seeking healing from Jesus, who prayed: “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”

 

HOMILY FOR FEB. 9th

“YOU ARE SALT ... LIGHT”

 Isaiah 58:7-10; Matthew 5:13-16

AIM: To explain the images of salt and light in the gospel

 

Jesus never talked over people’s heads. He spoke in simple, everyday language that even children could understand. What could be simpler than the two images Jesus uses in our gospel reading: salt and light?

“You are the salt of the earth,” Jesus says. The words are simple enough.  But what do they really mean?

A guest at a wedding was asked to propose a toast to the bridal couple.  Before he did so he presented them with a beautifully crafted mahogany box. 

“Open it,” he told them.

When they did so, they saw it contained salt.

“I have given that to you,” he said, “because you’re going to need it. Salt adds flavor to food. You cannot keep house without it. If you run out of toothpaste, you can use it, mixed with soda, to brush your teeth. Salt mixed with hot water helps heal a sore throat if you gargle with it. Before refrigeration was invented, salt was used to preserve food. It is still used as a preservative in many parts of the world: to cure fish and ham. You can use salt to melt ice on your front steps in winter. And salt can also be used to smother a fire.”

 “And now,” he said, “here is my toast. “May you bring into your marriage all of salt’s properties — its ability to cleanse, to heal, to preserve. May it melt the frost and ice that will sometimes build up between you, and put out the fires of anger when you try each other’s patience. Finally, as you embark on life in double harness, try to take things with a grain of this salt. If there is salt in your marriage, it will be healthy, lasting, and strong.”

In the ancient world in which Jesus lived soldiers received an allotment of salt as part of their pay. Because the Latin word for salt is sal it was called their salarium, from which we get our word salary. Even today, when someone doesn’t measure up or do his duty, we say he’s “not worth his salt.” 

Jesus says to us: “You are the salt of the earth.” We are to be that ingredient in the world which, like salt, may be small in quantity, but which makes all the difference in quality. By itself, of course, salt tastes quite different from the food to which it is added. Jesus uses this image to tell us that we too must be different from the world around us. We must live by different standards. Jesus gives us a    description of those standards in those sayings of his that are called the Beatitudes. They are Jesus’ recipe for happiness. His way to happiness is very different from that of the world around us. Where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” for instance, the world says “Blessed are the rich.”

Jesus also tells us: “You are light — the light of the world.” The first creation tale in Genesis says that creation began when God said: “Let there be light.” And the writer adds immediately: “And God saw that the light was good.” (Gen. 1:3f).

When, in the fullness of time, God’s Son came into the world, he said: “I am the light of the world.” (Jn 8:12) Pondering those words, and the story of creation in Genesis, Christians came to discern Christ’s role in creation. Hence we say in the Creed: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, ... through whom all things were made.”

It is not difficult to understand that Jesus is the world’s light. How dark the world would be if he had never lived! To hear Jesus say, however, “You are the light of the world” takes our breath away — or at least it would, if the words were not so familiar to us.  

Notice: Jesus does not tell us to become the world’s light, any more than he tells us to become salt. As followers and friends of Jesus Christ, given a share of his life in baptism, we already are salt and light for the world. “Be what you are!” Jesus is saying. 

Does that mean isolating ourselves as much as possible from modern society and culture? In every age there have been Christians who thought they must do that. They are good people. But they are mistaken. To isolate ourselves from others is like putting the lamp which lighted the small one-room house of Jesus’ day under a basket. The people who heard Jesus knew that wasn’t what you did with a lamp. You put it on a lampstand where, as Jesus says in today’s gospel, “it gives light to all in the house. Just so,” Jesus continues, “your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify ...” Glorify whom? You?  No — that they may glorify God! Why? Because without God we couldn’t do any good deeds. He is the one who inspires us to do good deeds. And it is God, and God alone, who gives us the power to do good — to be what we are: salt to cleanse, heal, and preserve; and light to shine in the darkness of our world.

What kind of good deeds is Jesus talking about? The words of the prophet Isaiah in our first reading tell us:

Share your bread with the hungry, shelter the oppressed and the homeless; clothe the naked when you see them, and do not turn your back on your own. ... remove from your midst oppression, false accusation and malicious speech ... bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted.

Isaiah addressed those words to people who were scrupulous about the rules of religion, but too often blind to the claims of humanity. The good deeds which Isaiah is talking about point away from themselves and from us, to Him who first inspires and then enables us to perform these deeds.

Today’s short gospel reading challenges us. If our world is often dark; if modern society and culture often leave us with a bad taste in our mouths; this is because we, the followers and friends of Jesus Christ, too often fail to be what we became in baptism: the world’s salt, the world’s light. The eighteenth-century British statesman, Edmund Burke, said: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph in the world is for good people to do nothing.”

Here at these two tables of word and sacrament the Lord first takes us up into his light and then sends us forth to pass on that light to others in a dark world, through a life of joyful service and generous love.

"ABSOLOM, MY SON, MY SON."

Homily for February 4^th, 2020: 2 Samuel 18:9-10, 14b ,25-25a, 30-19::3

          We heard last week of David’s great fall from grace: his adultery with Bathsheba, wife of the Gentile Uriah, who was away fighting for the King David; and David’s order for the arranged death of Uriah when Uriah refused David’s plan to have him sleep with his wife, so that everyone would think that he had fathered Bathsheba’s child, rather than David.

God sends the prophet Nathan to tell the king the heart-rending story of the rich man who stole the pet lamb of his poor neighbor rather than sacrifice a single animal from his vast flock to prepare a welcome meal for a visitor. Struck to the heart by this tale of injustice, David said, “The man who did this deserves to die.” Whereupon Nathan turns on him and says: “You are the man.”

Finally recognizing his double sin, David repents at once. Nathan assures the king of God’s forgiveness but tells him that though the guilt of his sin is taken away, the consequences remain. “The sword will never depart from your house,” Nathan says.  

The consequences of David’s great double sin, adultery and murder, are chaos and violence in his family. The child born to Bathsheba dies, though David fasts and prays for the little one’s survival. David’s subjects start to turn against him. We heard yesterday about one of them openly cursing the king and pelting him with stones. When one of David’s servants wants to kill the man, David forbids it: perhaps God has told him to curse me, David says. By accepting abuse, David is doing penance for this sin.

Today we have heard about a far worse consequence. One of David’s own sons, Absalom, raises a public rebellion against him. It fails. But when the news of Absalom’s death is brought to David, he utters the heart-broken lament what we have heard: “O Absalom, my son, my son. If only I had died for you!”

Our sins always have consequences, even after sincere repentance and forgiveness of their guilt. A college student who parties all semester and, with the knife at her throat at exam time, repents of her sin, is forgiven at once. But the consequences of her laziness remain: a failing grade in her exams, ignorance of the required subject matter, and bad study habits. These consequences must be repaired over time, which is why the theologians call them sin’s “temporal punishment.”

 

"GO HOME TO YOUR FAMILY"

Homily for February 3^rd, 2020: Mark 5: 1-20.

          The story we have just heard in the gospel reading is one of the strangest in the New Testament. Jesus heals a man of insanity. He has been living like an animal in a cave. According to the ideas of that day, he is possessed by evil spirits. Jesus drives out the spirits, who enter a herd of wild pigs feeding nearby. The animals rush headlong over a cliff into the lake, and are drowned.

          We must leave these bizarre details to the Scripture scholars. Important for us is what happens to the man after his healing. He begs Jesus to take him with him. No wonder. And how crushed he must have been when Jesus refuses and tells him instead: “Go home to your family and announce to them all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.” 

          “To my family?" we can imagine the man thinking. They were the people who had driven him out of his mind in the first place. At home everyone would point him out, whisper about him, laugh at him. What would happen to his new-found sanity and peace of mind then?

          With a cold, dead weight on his heart the man watches Jesus and his friends get into the boat. They row out a little way from shore and set the sails. Gradually the boat gets smaller and smaller, until it is only a speck on the horizon. And the man thinks: “Out there is the man who has changed my life: the kindest, the most wonderful man I have ever met.” It must have been a long time before the man finds the courage to turn round and climb the cliff gain, obeying Jesus’ command: “Go home . . . ”

          In a few minutes the Lord will give you that same command. Perhaps you’d prefer to stay. How good it is to be with Jesus. It is quiet and peaceful in church at this early morning hour. How difficult it is to return to the rough and tumble of daily life, to the demands that await you as soon as you do return. But return you must. We live not on the mountain tops of great spiritual experiences. Most of life’s journey is spent in the valleys; and for each of us there are times when those valleys are dark. When you must walk in darkness, remember the beautiful words of the most loved of all the 150 psalms, Psalm 23: “Even though I walk in the dark, I fear no evil; for you are at my side, with your rod and your staff that give me courage.”

HOMILY FOR FEB 2nd

A FEAST WITH THREE NAMES

 Luke 2:22-40.

AIM: To help the hearers better understand the meaning of this feast.

 

          Today’s feast has three names: the Purification of Mary, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, and Candlemas. To understand the first two, we must start with Jewish law about childbirth in Jesus’ day. This said that following the birth of a boy the mother was excluded from public worship for seven days. She was considered ritually impure. On the eighth day the boy was circumcised. This provision of the law is still observed by Jews today. Thereafter the mother remained at home for a further thirty-three days for her blood to be purified. That is why the first title for today’s feast is the Purification of Mary.

If this seems strange to us in 21^st century America, it is not strange at all in other parts of the world. Even today Chinese mothers stay at home for a month after giving birth. In Jesus’ day the Jewish mother observed forty days of rest and seclusion giving birth, and then presented a purification sacrifice: a lamb for a burnt offering, and a young pigeon or turtle dove for a sin offering. Poor mothers needed to offer only two turtle doves or two young pigeons. As we heard in the gospel, that is what Mary and Joseph offered. They were poor.

Since Mary enjoyed the unique privilege of being conceived without sin, she needed no purification. The child she bore would purify the world through his sacrificial death and resurrection. But as a devout Jew, Mary observed the law of her people nonetheless. Jewish law also said that a firstborn son belonged to the Lord. This was because, in the final plague inflicted by God on the Egyptians, he had killed all their firstborn children and animals. But he spared the firstborn among his own people, the Jews. Firstborn Jewish children belonged, therefore, to the Lord. The parents could “redeem” them (take them back) by paying five shekels to any Jewish priest they chose.

Instead of paying this redemption, Mary and Joseph take their infant son to the Jerusalem Temple, to present him to the Lord. This explains the second title for today’s feast: the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple. From that day Jesus belonged completely to God. By age twelve he knew this. He knew too that God, and not Joseph, was his Father. For when his parents found him in the Temple after a frantic three-day search, he asked them: “Did you not know that I had to be in my Father’s house?”  

When Mary and Joseph entered the Temple with their infant son, 40 days after his birth, they found that the Lord had two surprises for them. How often he surprises us. The first surprise was the appearance of the old man Simeon. He was “righteous and devout,” the gospel writer, Luke, tells us, “awaiting the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him.” God had promised Simeon that he would not die until he had seen “the Christ,” which means the Lord’s anointed servant, promised for so long by Israel’s prophets. When Simeon saw the child, he knew in his heart at that this was the one: the Lord’s anointed servant, the Messiah.

Taking the child in his arms, Simeon speaks the short hymn of praise to God that we heard in the gospel. It is called the Nunc dimittis, from its first two Latin words. From early times it has been chanted during the night prayer of the Church in both East and West. Praising God for fulfilling his promise, Simeon says he is now ready to go home to the Lord. The hymn also praises the child as Israel’s glory, and for the Gentiles a light – which helps explain why we bless candles on this feast and why it has a third name: Candlemas.

Simeon goes on to say that this child will be “a sign of contradiction.” Some will accept him, others will not. This contradiction continues today in those who regard the whole notion of God as a limitation of human freedom, and his law a fence to hem us in. In reality, God’s laws, first given to the leader of God’s people, Moses, in the Ten Commandments, are sign posts pointing the way to human happiness and flourishing.

Finally, Simeon warns Mary that the rejection of her Son by many will be a sword piercing her own heart. This prophecy would be fulfilled, according to the traditional dating, thirty-three years later on Calvary, where Mary stood beside her crucified Son, as he spoke his final words: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

The second surprise for Mary and Joseph is the appearance of the 84-year-old widow, Anna. Completely at home in the Temple, she has spent decades in fasting, adoration, and prayer – like contemplative nuns today. She now gives thanks for the child, Luke says, and speaks of him “to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Having fulfilled all the provisions of God’s law, Mary and Joseph return with their child to their home in Nazareth, where (Luke tells us) “the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” It was there, in hiddenness and silence, in faithfulness to daily work and prayer, that Jesus became the man who could say to rough workingmen, “Come, follow me,” and have them obey him on the spot; and to utter words that he is still saying to us today: “I have come that [you] might have life, and have it to the full” (John 10:10).

[The homily draws upon the presentation by Pope Benedict XVI in Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives pp.80-88.]

"COME AFTER ME . . ."

HOMILY FOR 3RD SUNDAY IN YEAR A.

AIM: To challenge the hearers to respond to the Lord’s call today.

 

          A cardinal was visiting a community of Carmelite nuns in Italy.  After celebrating Mass for them, he asked the Mother Superior if he could see how they lived.  Carmelite nuns are enclosed. They don’t leave the cloister. And visitors talk to them through a grille. The cardinal’s request violated their rule. But when a cardinal asks, you don’t say No. So, the Prioress asked one of the nuns to show him round.

          They visited the refectory, where the nuns sit on wooden benches without backs to eat their simple meals off bare wooden tables. The cardinal saw one of the cells where they sleep: a small room furnished with a narrow bed, a table to serve as a desk, and a hard-wooden chair; a single light bulb overhead and a gooseneck lamp on the table. Instead of a basin with running water there was a large washbowl on a stand, and on the floor next to it a large crockery jug. The nun explained that water was brought from the bathroom down the hall.

          At the end of the short tour the nun led the cardinal up a narrow stairway to the flat terraced roof above, furnished with hard benches and a railing all round.  “On feast days like Easter and Pentecost,” she explained, “we can come up here, if the weather is fine, for our recreation period.”  The view was beautiful. Across a valley they could see a magnificent villa surrounded by formal gardens and several fountains. It was summer. A gardener was cutting one of the hedges. Children were frolicking in the swimming pool. A couple were playing tennis on one of the two courts. 

          The cardinal turned to the nun who was showing him round. 

          “How long have you been here in Carmel, Sister?” he asked her.

          “I entered twenty years ago next Easter,” she responded.

          “Sister,” he said, “if the young man of that house had asked you twenty-one years ago to come and live there with him there as his wife, do you think you would be here today?”

          “Your Eminence,” she replied. “That was my house.”

          Why? Why would a young woman give up all that luxury and all that beauty? I think if we could have asked her, or hundreds like her round the world, she would have said something like this:

          “I wanted to be with Jesus.”

          Our gospel reading today tells of a similar sacrifice by two pairs of brothers: Simon and his brother Andrew, James and his brother John. They were fishermen.  Yet at Jesus’ call, our gospel told us, they immediately leave their nets and boat and follow him. Their nets and boat were their livelihood, their security. They were burning their bridges behind them. Why?  If we could have asked them, I think they might have said something like this: “You would have to have known this man Jesus. There was something about him that made it impossible to say No.”

          Somewhere in this church right now there is a young woman whom God is calling to be a religious Sister. Somewhere there is a young man who God wants to be a priest. Let me speak very personally to you.

          Jesus is offering you something he offers to only a few, something precious beyond words. He is offering you a life that will sometimes be hard, but which will be filled with meaning and filled above all with joy. How do I know that? Because eighty-eight years ago Jesus made that offer to me.  He called me when I was just twelve years old by placing in my heart and mind the desire to be a priest. Since then I have never wanted anything else.

         Thirteen years later I fulfilled that desire. That was almost sixty-six years ago. And I’ve never regretted it, not one single day. 

          And, I say to you, whoever you may be, whatever your age, whatever your circumstances: When Jesus calls you, go for it! And one day you too will be able to say what I say to you right now: What a wonderful life! I have experienced already here on earth a little bit of heaven.

          Is God’s call just for religious professionals, priests and nuns? Don’t you believe it! While you were still in your mother’s womb, God already had a plan for your life. He calls each one of us, as he called those four rough fishermen in today’s gospel. He calls us to walk with him, to be so full of his love that others will see the joy on our faces and want what we have. Christianity, it has been said, cannot be taught. It must be caught.

          “I could never do that,” you’re thinking? You’re wrong! Here is a list of some of the great people in the Bible. Every one of them had a reason for thinking God could not use them. So, the next time you feel like God can’t use you, remember: 

Noah was a drunk. Abraham was too old. Isaac was a daydreamer.  Jacob was a liar. Leah was ugly. Joseph was abused by his brothers.  Moses had a stuttering problem. Gideon was afraid. Sampson had long hair and was a womanizer. Rahab was a prostitute. Jeremiah and Timothy thought they were too young. David had an affair and was a murderer. Elijah was suicidal. Isaiah thought himself unworthy.  Jonah ran away from God’s call. Naomi was a widow. Job went bankrupt. Martha was a perpetual worrier. The Samaritan woman who spoke with Jesus at the well was five times divorced. Zacchaeus was too small. Peter denied Christ. The disciples fell asleep while praying.  At Jesus’ arrest, they all forsook him and fled. Paul was too religious.  Timothy had an ulcer. And Lazarus was dead! 

          So, what’s your excuse? Whatever it may be, God can still use you to your full potential. Besides, you aren’t the message. You’re only the messenger.

          When you were born, you were crying, and everyone around you was smiling. Start today (if you haven’t started already) living your life so that when you die, you’re the only one smiling, and everyone around you is crying.

HOMILY FOR 2ND SUNDAY IN YEAR A

JESUS’ SACRIFICE, THEN AND NOW

2^nd Sunday in year A.  John 1:29-34.

AIM: To explain the doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice.

 

“Behold, the Lamb of God!”  John’s words from the opening of the gospel reading we have just heard are so familiar to us that we don’t stop to ask what they  mean.  We hear the words immediately before Communion at every Mass, when the priest, holds up the Lord’s body and blood and says: “This is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”  What do those words really mean?    

To understand them we must plunge into the distant history of Jesus’ people and read about their greatest feast: the Passover.  Here is the account from the book of Exodus, chapter 12:

Moses told the people, “Go and get a lamb for your families and slaughter it for the Passover.  Then take some of the hyssop, dip it in the blood [of the lamb] and smear some of the blood ... on the door-posts and lintel. ... The Lord will go through Egypt and strike it, but when he sees the blood on the lintel and doorposts, he will pass over that door and will not let the destroyer enter your houses to strike you. You shall keep this as a rule of all time.  When your children ask you, ‘What is the meaning of this rite?’ you shall say: ‘It is the Lord’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when he struck the Egyptians, but spared our houses.  (Ex. 12: 21-27)

The blood of the Passover lamb smeared on the doorposts kept the people safe.  Later the lamb was thought of as sacrificed to God: a gift through which God and his human worshipers were reconciled.   Such gifts, offered in sacrifice to God, were supposed to restore the fellowship which had been broken by human sin.

The prophets of Jesus’ people criticized these sacrificial offerings.  They were based, the prophets pointed out, on the fiction that the things offered to God represented those who offered them.  What God really wants, the prophets said, is not things (since everything belongs to him already).  God wants men and women themselves.  But how could people really offer themselves to God in sacrifice?  And to the extent that people did offer themselves in a spiritual sense, they were offering God gifts stained by sin.  Hence the whole sacrificial system failed to achieve what it was meant to achieve.  This a central theme of the Letter to the Hebrews:

Every priest [and the writer is talking about Jewish priests] stands performing his daily service and offering time after time the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. (Heb. 10:11)  

Hebrews also affirms, however, that a perfect, unblemished sacrifice has been offered.  The fellowship between sinful humanity and God has been restored.  (Cf. Heb. 10:12).  Jesus is the priest who offers, and Jesus is himself the sacrifice    offered.  His life of perfect obedience to his heavenly Father, consummated on Calvary, “takes away the sin of the world,” as John says at the beginning of today’s gospel.  As the blood of the Passover lamb protected Jesus’ ancestors, so his blood protects us, his spiritual descendants.  Because of our sins we are unworthy to stand before God, to pray to him, to claim his blessing.  But as sisters and brothers of Jesus Christ we can do all these things. 

Jesus’ sacrifice, which mends the fellowship between us and God, broken by our sins, is not just long ago and far away.  Though the Last Supper and Calvary are unrepeatable, they become, here and now, a living reality each time we obey Jesus command at the Last Supper, to “do this in memory of me” with the bread and wine.   To this day part of the Jewish Passover ritual is the child’s question: “What is the meaning of this rite?”  To which the person presiding replies: “It is the Lord’s Passover.”  The unique past event is not repeated.  But through its ritual celebration it becomes a living reality for the worshipers today.

 This is what we Catholics believe about the Mass.  At the Last Supper, celebrated in the context of a Jewish Passover meal, Jesus took bread and said: “This is my body.”  He meant: ‘This is me.  When you do this I am truly with you.  I give myself to you.’  Saying over the cup, “This is my blood,” Jesus was telling us: ‘I am the one whose poured out blood keeps you safe, and brings you into a new relationship with God.’  The bread and cup of this meal, previously a celebration of the Passover, are now a pledge of Jesus’ personal presence with us, his friends.  That is the meaning of the offertory prayer we shall hear in a few moments: “When we proclaim the death of the Lord, you continue the work of his redemption.”

The Catechism says: “The Eucharist is the memorial of Christ’s Passover, the making present and the sacramental offering of his unique sacrifice ... [1362] The memorial is not merely the recollection of past events but the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men.  In the liturgical celebration of these events, they become in a certain way present and real. ... [1363]  The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit.” [1366]

The Mass is not the repetition the Last Supper and Calvary.  It is, in a unique and specially intense way, their sacramental commemoration.  It makes present, spiritually but truly, what it commemorates.  When we “do this” with the bread and wine, as Jesus commanded, we are there!  We are with the friends of Jesus in the upper room; with Mary and the Beloved Disciple at the cross.  Here in the sacrifice of the Mass we encounter him who is the true Lamb of God: the one who destroys sin; who protects us through his poured-out blood from sin’s just penalty; the one through whom we can approach God, not in fear and trembling because of our sins, but in confidence and love; calling him, as Jesus taught us to do: “Father.”

So much meaning, so much wonder, so much drama!  How often do we recognize it, and truly worship?

JAN. 12th: BAPTISM OF THE LORD

JESUS’ VOCATION — AND OURS.

Baptism of the Lord.  Is. 42;1-4, 6-7; Mt. 3:13-17

AIM: To show the happiness of a God-centered life.

 

In his posthumously published book, Treasure in Clay, the late and soon Blessed Archbishop Fulton Sheen writes: “No true vocation starts with ‘what I want’, or ‘what I would like to do,’ it starts with God.” I quote those words because the gospel reading we have just heard shows us Jesus entering publicly on his vocation. As he does so Jesus’ first concern is to show that he is a man under obedience. When John objects: “I need to be baptized by you, and yet you are coming to me?” Jesus responds: “Allow it now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” 

“To fulfill all righteousness” meant, for Jesus, doing the will of his heavenly Father. That was all that ever mattered for Jesus. Later, he would say that doing his Father’s will was what kept him going. When his disciples told him he must eat something, Jesus said: “I have food to eat of which you do not know ... Doing the will of him who sent me and bringing his work to completion is my food” (Jn. 4: 31-34). Our religion is so centered on Jesus Christ that we may fail to realize how little he did to draw attention to himself. The theme of Jesus’ preaching was not himself, but God’s kingdom. He came, he said, not to do his will, but the will of another: to serve God by serving others.

As a devout Jew, Jesus knew by heart many passages from the scriptures of his people — what we call the Old Testament. The words Jesus heard as he emerged from the Jordan following his baptism, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” would have reminded him of the words of our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah: “Here is my servant ... my chosen one with whom I am pleased.” Remembering what followed in that Isaiah passage, Jesus knew that he was not called to be the powerful, royal Messiah people were expecting. He would not be a political leader: “not crying out, not shouting,” as Isaiah says in that first reading. He was called instead to a ministry of gentleness: “A bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench,” to quote Isaiah’s words again.

Why is it important for us to know this? Because each one of us was given a similar task when we were baptized. Like Jesus, we are called “to fulfil all righteousness” by serving God and others. Responding to that call is the highest and best thing we can do with the one life that God has given us. Do we really believe that?

Many people do not. The ambition of many people is to “do their own thing,” as the popular modern phrase puts it. Actually, few of us succeed very well in doing our own thing. Rich or poor, female or male, black or white, young, middle-aged or old, all of us are limited by circumstances not of our own making.  The poor wish they were rich; the rich think they still don’t have enough, and spend much of their time guarding what they do have from loss. No wonder that so many people feel they’re on a treadmill; or say: “Its war out there.” 

Part of the gospel, the good news which Jesus Christ proclaims, is that it doesn’t have to be like that. There is another way to live: a better way, and certainly a happier one. It is the way Jesus lived. Jesus was never concerned with doing his own thing. He wanted one thing only: to do God’s thing. How many of Jesus’ sisters and brothers have discovered this key to a happy and fulfilled life we cannot know.  Most of them are anonymous.  Sometimes, however, God lets us identify some of them. Mother Teresa was such a person. So was Pope St. John XXIII — as those of us old enough to remember him know well. 

Pope St. John Paul II was another person who found happiness in “fulfilling all righteousness” — in doing not his own thing but God’s thing. Weighed down in his closing years by infirmities, a physical wreck yet still mentally alert, Pope John Paul was a sign to all the world that life is still worth living, even when one is old and infirm. On the eve of his eightieth birthday, the Pope wrote a letter “To my elderly brothers and sisters.” Here is some of what he said: “Despite the limitations brought on by age, I continue to enjoy life. For this I thank the Lord. It is wonderful to be able to give oneself to the very end for the sake of the Kingdom of God!”

The concluding paragraphs of this beautiful letter have a message for all of us: whatever our age or circumstances. Let me conclude by reading them to you.

After the words just quoted about his joy in giving himself to the very end for the sake of the Kingdom of God, the Pope continues:

At the same time, I find great peace in thinking of the time when the Lord will call me: from life to life! And so I often find myself saying, with no trace of melancholy, a prayer recited by priests after the celebration of the Eucharist: “At the hour of my death call me and bid me come to you.”  This is the prayer of Christian hope, which in no way detracts from the joy of the present, while entrusting the future to God’s gracious and loving care. “Bid me come to you!”: this is the deepest yearning of the human heart, even in those who are not conscious of it.   

Grant, O Lord of life, that we may be ever vividly aware of this and that we may savor every season of our lives as a gift filled with promise for the future. Grant that we may lovingly accept your will, and place ourselves each day in your merciful hands.

And when the moment of our definitive “passage” comes, grant that we may face it with serenity, without regret for what we shall leave behind.  For in meeting you, after having sought you for so long, we shall find once more every authentic good which we have known here on earth, in the company of all who have done before us marked with the sign of faith and hope. 

Mary, Mother of pilgrim humanity, pray for us “now and at the hour of our death.” Keep us ever close to Jesus, your beloved Son and our brother, the Lord of life and glory.  Amen!