HOMILY FOR FEB 16th

FULFILLING GOD’S LAW

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Sirach 15:15-20; Matthew 5:17-37.

AIM: To show that obedience to God’s law is a response to His love for us, not its

prerequisite.

“Do your own thing” is the slogan today of people who consider themselves “liberated.” Behind this slogan is the idea that the only thing that stands between me and happiness is lack of freedom. If laws limit my freedom – whether they are God’s laws or human laws – they must be bad. “How much happier life would be if there weren’t so many Do’s and Don’ts.” We may not actually say that. But probably most of us have thought it at one time or another.

Jesus would have been shocked at that idea. His religion taught him that God’s laws preserve and enhance human happiness. The Ten Commandments were God’s highest gift to the people he chose to be his own. They showed God’s special love for his people. They were directions for life, from the One who created all life. Obedience to God’s commandments was his people’s way of showing their love for the Lord God, while sharing his love with one another. The words of our responsorial psalm today express this view: “Happy are they who follow the law of the Lord!” (Ps 119:1)

There was never anything so good, however, that it could not be abused. Law is abused when people pay more attention to its letter than to its spirit; when they think up hairsplitting interpretations to show how little the law means, instead of how much. People who approach God’s law in that manner think of their relationship with God as based not on love (which the law, rightly understood, expresses) but on legalism.

From there it is only a short step to thinking that fulfilling our “minimum obligation” gives us a claim on God which he is bound to honor. That was the religion of some people in Jesus’ day. Sadly it is the religion of some Catholics today.

Jesus is addressing such people in today’s Gospel. He shows that legalistic human interpretations miss the true meaning of God’s commandments. God, Jesus says, looks not just at our exterior acts. He looks at our inner attitudes, desires, and thoughts. “You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery,” Jesus says. “But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” If that is what the commandment means, then who can claim perfect obedience? Do you see what Jesus is doing? He is plugging the loopholes in the law crafted by legalistic interpreters. In so doing, Jesus shows us that we can never establish a claim on God which he is bound to honor. God has a claim on us, and it is an absolute claim.

“Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees,” Jesus says, “you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” The scribes and Pharisees were Jesus’ critics, the people who scorned him for “receiving sinners and eating them.” Like some Catholics today, they knew (or thought they knew) the exact limits of their obligation, whether with regard to public worship, fasting, avoidance of work on the Sabbath, or almsgiving.

With his demand for a holiness surpassing that of the outwardly most “religious” people in his day, Jesus was undermining the whole basis of their religious practice. Was that good news? Hardly. For such people it was horribly bad news. If God’s law really meant what Jesus said it did, then who could hope for a reward from God? No wonder they crucified him!

The “greater righteousness” that Jesus asks of us is based not on what we do for God, but on what God has done for us. God accepts us not because we are good enough to deserve a reward for keeping his law. God accepts us because he is so good that he wants to share his love with us, as a free gift. That is the good news: that God loves sinners – people who often fail to keep God’s law, people who know that they have no claim on God. People, in short, like us.

Does this mean that we can forget about God’s law? Of course not. “I have not come to abolish the law,” Jesus says, “but to fulfill it.” God’s law remains as important for us Catholics today as it was for Jesus. What Jesus changed was not the law, but our motive for keeping it. We keep God’s law not to earn a reward: blessing in this life, heaven in the next. We keep God’s law to show our gratitude for the love he lavishes upon us before we have earned it, and though we can never merit it, on any strict accounting.

Here in the Eucharist, a word that means “thanksgiving”, we the people of God receive the greatest gifts he can give us this side of heaven. At the table of the word God gives us the gift of his truth. At the table of the sacrament, he gives us the body and blood of his Son.

Enriched with these gifts, which are always more than we deserve, God sends us out into the workaday world, there to show our gratitude for his gifts by a life of generous obedience to his holy law. Our effort to thank God for the gifts he gives us here at Mass requires the best that is in us. We shall find it easier to give our best if we keep in mind the words of our responsorial psalm: “Happy are they who follow the law of the Lord.”

"THE LORD DWELLS IN THE DARK CLOUD."

Homily for February 10^th, 2020; 1 Kings 8:22-23, 27-30.

          “Listen to the petitions of your servant and of your people Israel which they offer in this place,” Solomon prays at the dedication of the Temple. To pray that God will hear the petitions offered in the Temple is what we would expect. But then comes something we do not expect: “Listen from your heavenly dwelling -- and grant pardon.”

          Solomon’s prayer reminds us that whenever we approach God, the first thing we need to ask for is pardon for our sins. None of us is worthy to enter into the presence of the all-holy God. That is why the first thing we do in every Mass is to ask forgiveness for our sins, and implore God’s mercy.

          Pope Francis has made prayer for God’s mercy central in his preaching. Repeatedly, and in different ways, the Pope tells us: God never grows tired of forgiving us; it is we who grow tired of asking for forgiveness.

          It appears that this theme is rooted in the Pope’s personal history. At age thirty-six Jorge Bergoglio was put in charge of all the Jesuits in Argentina. The country was under a cruel military government. They arrested hundreds of people they did not like, perhaps thousands, and without trial flew them in planes over the South Atlantic and dropped them into the sea. Many Jesuits embraced something called liberation theology, putting political action and protest before traditional priestly duties: administering the sacraments and preaching the gospel.  

Guiding his Jesuit brothers along the right path in this chaotic and perilous situation would have been difficult even for a much older man with greater experience than Fr. Bergoglio. Some Jesuits were clearly over the line. To protect them he forbade his brothers to provoke the authorities by living in the slums and engaging in political protest. Inevitably this provoked charges that he was “soft on injustice.” Over time Bergoglio came to feel that he may have been too rigid, and that his treatment of his Jesuit brothers who confronted the military regime in Argentina, and embraced the cause of the poor, had perhaps been too harsh. This continues to weigh on him today, as Pope Francis. It helps us to understand his constant emphasis on our need for forgiveness.

Regardless of our personal history, we all need to pray for God’s mercy and forgiveness. And Pope Francis is right to remind us that this prayer is one that God will always answer.

ST. JOSEPHINE BAKHITA

Homily for February 8^th, 2020: St. Josephine Bakhita.

          St Josephine Bakhita, the saint whom the Church commemorates today, was born in about 1869 – she herself did not know the precise date -- to a wealthy family in Darfur, the capitol of Sudan in southern Africa. At age nine she was kidnapped and sold and re-sold in the slave market in Darfur. Beaten and flogged by her masters so often that she had 144 scars on her body, she came finally into the possession of the Italian consul in the Sudan. A kind man, he took Josephine with him when he returned to Italy in 1885. Here is some of what Pope Benedict XVI wrote about her in his 2009 encyclical “Saved by Hope.”

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

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

Revered by all who knew her because of her gentleness, calming voice, and ever-present smile, she was declared a saint by St. Pope John Paul in 2000. Asked once, "What would you do, if you were to meet your captors?" she responded: "If I were to meet those who kidnapped me, and even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands. For, if these things had not happened, I would not have been a Christian and a religious today.” Because the Church has declared her a saint, we can pray: St. Josephine Bakhita, Pray for us.   

DEATH OF JOHN THE BAPTIST

Homily for February 7^th, 2020; Mark 6:14-29.

          Herod had thrown John the Baptist into prison, today’s gospel tells us, “on account of Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip.” Herod divorced his first wife, in order to marry the wife of his still living brother Philip, a woman named Herodias. No wonder that John the Baptist denounced Herod. He had divorced his wife in order to marry his still married sister-in-law. This earned John the Baptist the hatred of two people, both equally unscrupulous: Herod and Herodias.

          Herodias sees her chance for revenge at a drunken party hosted by her second husband, Herod. Aroused by the dance of Herodias’ daughter – unnamed here, but celebrated in literature and in a well-known opera as Salome – Herod promises the girl, under oath, that he will give her anything she asks for, up to half of his kingdom. Not knowing how to respond, the girl consults her mother, who tells her to ask for the head of John the Baptist, whom Herod had imprisoned to keep him out of the public eye.  

          Aghast at the girl’s request, but unwilling to violate his oath, made before so many witnesses, Herod orders John’s immediate execution, without judge, jury, or trial. It is hard to conceive of something more cruel and unjust than the squalid story our gospel reports.

          Is that all just long ago and far away? Don’t you believe it! The media report similar outrages all the time: Muslims threatened with death, or actually killed, for converting to Christianity; a Christian missionary sentenced to death for preaching Christ in an Islamic country, and saved only by a worldwide outcry; the teenage girl in Afghanistan who last year survived an assassination attempt by terrorists who oppose education for women. Fortunately, she was nursed back to health in England, and lived to tell her story recently before a meeting of the United Nations in New York.

          How could we better respond to the atrocity reported in today’s gospel than to pray in this Mass for the countless victims of injustice and terror in the world today?

 

'''TAKE NOTHING WITH YOU."

           May 5^th, 2020: Mk 6:1-1.        

                   When Jesus sent out his disciples, he told them “to take nothing with them but a walking stick.” The lack of concern for material things shows the urgency of the disciples’ missionary task, and the need for dependence on God to supply whatever may be necessary. Could we do that?    

                    As an encouragement, I want to do what the Bible does repeatedly: tell you about someone who fulfilled Jesus’ demand to a remarkable degree. She was born in 1910 in what is now Albania and given the name Agnes in baptism. As a girl she heard about missionaries in India and dreamed of joining them. A Jesuit told her that the Loretto nuns, based in Dublin, worked in India. At age 18 Agnes, not knowing a word of English, journeyed to Ireland to become a Sister of Loretto. She would never see her home, or her mother, again. 

                     After only 6 weeks in Dublin, Agnes arrived in Calcutta. When she took vows as a Sister, she took the name of the late 19^th century French Carmelite, Teresa. For some 15 years she taught in the Loretto Sisters’ schools for Indian girls, becoming headmistress of a school for 300 pupils.

                     In 1946 Sister Teresa was traveling by train to her annual retreat when she received what should termed “a call within a call”: To give up all and follow Jesus into the slums -- to serve him in the poorest of the poor. “I knew it was his will and that I had to follow him. It was an order. I knew where I belonged, but I did not know how to get there.” Teresa exchanged her religious habit for the rough cotton sari of the poor, and went to live in a single room in the slums. Her only resources were 5 rupees, about a dollar. One by one former pupils joined her. They rose at 4:30, spent 2 hours in meditation and Mass, and then after a hurried breakfast set out for the slums, bearing baskets of food and medicines. Training her sisters was a primary concern. They were not to be social workers, but contemplatives, able to see in the gravely ill and wretchedly poor “Christ in his distressing disguise.”

                       At Mother Teresa’s death in September 1997 almost 4000 women had joined her Missionaries of Charity, some here in St. Louis. I invoke her prayers every day. I invite you to the same, asking you to respond as I say: “St. Teresa of Calcutta – Pray for us.”

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.”