HARDSHIPS, AND PEACE

Homily for May 12th, 2020: Acts of the Apostles 14:19-28; John 14:27-31a.

         Seven years ago a book was published with the interesting title: "The Boy who Met Jesus." It told the story of a 15-year-old penniless boy in the African country of Rwanda named Segatashya who had never been to school or a church, and had never seen a Bible. Resting under a shade tree one day in 1982, he was visited by Jesus, who asked Segatashya if he’d be willing to go on a mission to remind people how to live a life that leads to heaven.

        Segatashya accepted the assignment on one condition: that Jesus answer all his questions -- about faith, religion, the purpose of life, and the nature of heaven and hell. Jesus agreed to the boy’s terms, and Segatashya set off on what would become a most miraculous journey. Some of what the young man learned confirms things we have heard in our two readings.

     “What you need to know is this,” Segatashya told the book’s author. “Jesus knows us all to the very depths of our souls, all our dreams and worries, all hopes and fears, all our goodness and all our weakness. He can see our sins and faults and wants nothing more than for us to heal our hearts and cleanse our souls so that we can love him as immeasurably as he loves us. When he sends s suffering, he does it only to strengthen our spirits so we’ll be strong enough to fight off Satan, who wants to destroy us, so that one day we can bask on the glory of his presence forever.

      Paul says something similar in our first reading: “It is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.”  I discovered those words 75 years ago. They have helped me through I couldn’t tell you how many trials ever since.

      “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you,” we heard Jesus saying in the gospel.” Segatashya must have heard those words, for he told the book’s author: “When I was with him, I never wanted to leave. If he asked me to come and be with him now, I would leave this world without the slightest hesitation. To be near him is to live I love; no words need be spoken. In his presence, your soul is at peace and completely joyous. Know that his love is real, and that it is eternal and ours to have if we love him and do his work on earth. Ask him into your heart, and all graces are yours. He will refuse you nothing. If you were able to know only one truth in your life, you should know this truth: Jesus loves you.

      Sadly, the young man who spoke those words was killed in the Rwandan slaughter of 1984. Our Christian and Catholic faith gives us reason to hope that we may meet him one day in heaven.

"WHOEVER LOVES ME WILL KEEP MY WORD."

Homily for May 11^th, 2020: John 14: 21-26.

          “Whoever loves me will keep my word,” Jesus tells his friends. He is speaking to the apostles at the Last Supper, after washing their feet. He did this to show them that he was sending them to serve others, and not to be served. That is what Jesus means by keeping his word: being servants of others. Jesus was speaking not just to those twelve men in the Upper Room at Jerusalem. He is speaking also to us. If we keep his word, he is telling us, his heavenly Father will love us, and both Jesus himself and his Father will love us and come to us, and make their dwelling with us. What a wonderful promise that is! And of course whenever Jesus promises something, he always keeps his promise.

          None of us ever keeps God’s word completely, however. All of us fail at times. That was why Mother Teresa – now St. Teresa of Calcutta – used to say: “God does not ask us to be successful. He asks us to be faithful.” When we fail, we need to remember what our wonderful Pope Francis never tires of telling us: “God never grows tired of forgiving us. It is we who grow tired of asking for forgiveness.”  

         Speaking to a vast crowd of young people in Germany in September 2011, his predecessor, now Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI said: “Dear friends, Christ is not so much interested in how often in our lives we stumble and fall, as in how often with his help we pick ourselves up again. He does not demand glittering achievements, but he wants his light to shine in you. He does not call you because you are good and perfect, but because he is good and wants to make you his friends. Yes, you are the light of the world because Jesus is your light. You are Christians – not because you do special and extraordinary things, but because he, Christ, is your life. You are holy, we are holy, if we allow his grace to work in us.”

          Pope Benedict’s words were an example of something else that Jesus promises in today’s gospel reading, at the close. “The Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” On that evening with those young people in Germany nine years ago, the Pope of that day was doing just that.

"YOU WILL DO GREATER WORKS."

Homily for May 9^th, 2020: 14:7-14.

“Whoever believes in me will do the works that I do,” Jesus says, “and will do even greater works than these …” How is that possible? Well, consider. During his life on earth Jesus’ works were confined to just a few years, and to one very small part of the world. But these works did not end with Jesus’ return to his Father in heaven. They have continued, through his Church. Starting as a sect of Judaism, the Church spread throughout the whole world and has continued through twenty centuries of history. We the Church’s members are charged to continue Jesus’ works. He has now no hands to bless people than ours; no eyes to look upon people in love than ours; no tongue to speak words of love, encouragement, or reproof but ours; no arms to support people and lift their burdens than ours. The Church's works are greater than those of her Lord because they are more extended in time and space than they could ever be during the few years that Jesus walked the dusty roads of Palestine.

And the Church’s works are great -- amazing in fact -- because they have never ceased despite the failures and betrayals of Church leaders and members. The betrayals began when, at Jesus’ arrest, “they all forsook him and fled” (Mk 14:50); and when, only hours later, their leader, Peter, three times denied that he even knew the Lord. Should we be surprised when we hear of similar betrayals today?

Let me close with a story. It’s only a story, but it tells us something important. When the Lord Jesus returned to heaven at the ascension the angels wanted to know everything he had done on earth. So, Jesus told them how he had gone about doing good, healing the sick, and teaching people about the freely given love of God.

“That’s wonderful, Lord,” the angels said. “But now that you're no longer in earth, won’t people soon forget about what you have done and said?”

“Oh no,” Jesus explained. “I founded a Church. I chose twelve men to be its first bishops. I spent three years teaching them: how to pray, how to heal people, how to free them from their burdens, how to teach others about God’s freely given love. They are going to carry on my work.”

“That’s all well and good, Lord,” the angels replied. “But we know how fickle and unreliable these human beings are. How do you know that they will keep on doing all those things you trained them to do?  How do you know that they will remain faithful?” At that the Lord fell silent. He looked down and seemed to be thinking. Then he looked up and, with that beautiful, radiant smile of his, said very simply: “I trust them.”

"I AM GOING TO PREPARE A PLACE FOR YOU."

Homily for May 8^th, 2020: John 14:1-6.

          “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places,” Jesus tells us, “I am going to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.” What a tremendous promise! Jesus’ words address our greatest enemy, and for most of us our greatest fear: death. Down through the centuries Christians have pondered and prayed over this promise. Here is what three of them have said.

St. Cyprian, 3^rd century Bishop of Carthage in North Africa:

“We reckon paradise to be our home. A great throng awaits us there of those dear to us, parents, brothers, sons. A packed and numerous throng longs for us, of those already free from anxiety for their own salvation, who are still concerned for our salvation. What joy they share with us when we come into their sight and embrace them! What pleasure there is there in the heavenly kingdom, with no fear of death, and what supreme happiness with the enjoyment of eternal life.” [Office of Readings for Friday of the 34^th week of the year)]

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in North Africa from 395 to 430.

“How happy will be our shout of Alleluia there, how carefree, how secure from any adversary, where there is no enemy, where no friend perishes. There praise is offered to God, and here too; but here it is by people who are anxious, there by people who are free from care; here by people who must die, there by those who will live forever. Here praise is offered in hope, there by people who enjoy the reality; here by those who are pilgrims on the way, there by those who have reached their own country.” [Office of Readings for Saturday of the 34^th week of the year)]

Pope Benedict XVI, now retired:

“Christianity does not proclaim merely a certain salvation of the soul in some imprecise place beyond, in which everything in this world that was precious and loved by us is erased, but it promises eternal life, ‘the life of the world to come’: nothing of what is precious and loved will be ruined, but will find its fulfillment in God. All the hairs of our head are numbered, Jesus said one day (cf. Matthew 10:30). The final world will also be the fulfillment of this earth, as St. Paul states: ‘Creation itself will be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God’" (Romans 8:21). [Aug. 15, 2010]

          How do we reach the joys of which these three great Christians speak? Jesus tells us in the final sentence of today’s gospel: “No one comes to the Father except through me.”

 

A DISPUTE ABOUT WHO SHOULD BE GREATEST

Homily for May 7^th, 2020: John 13:16-20.

          Jesus’ words in today’s gospel reading immediately follow his washing of the apostles’ feet. Feet shod only in sandals got dirty on the dusty roads of Palestine. It was customary, therefore, for a host to provide water for arriving guests to wash their own feet. Jesus went beyond this gesture of hospitality. By washing his friends’ feet himself, he gives them an example of humble service which they must be prepared to imitate.

          How little the Twelve heeded and followed this example, we learn from Luke’s gospel, which says that at the Last Supper “a dispute arose among them about who should be regarded as greatest” (22:24). After the foot-washing, therefore, Jesus goes on to speak about what he has just done.

          “No slave is greater than his master,” Jesus says, “nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.” Down through the centuries many of Jesus’ followers have recognized this, and acted accordingly. Jesus directs his words to them when he says: “If you understand this, blessed [which means “happy”] are you if you do it.” Sadly, there are also some who act as masters themselves, rather than as servants, conceiving of priesthood as a career, not as service. Knowing that there was one such follower at table with him there at the Last Supper, who in his heart had already rejected his servant role, Jesus quotes a verse from Psalm 41: “The one who ate my food has raised his heel against me.”

          Then, to encourage those truly resolved in their hearts to be and to remain his servants, Jesus says: “Amen, amen,” [which means “solemnly”] I say to you, whoever receives the one I send receives me.” Which one of us would not be thrilled to receive Jesus in person? A recent e-mail from a Philippine deacon in Rome, soon to be ordained priest, had the words “A great grace” in the subject line. It told about his being able to greet Pope Francis personally at the end of an audience for seminarians.  

Jesus was telling his apostles that those to whom he was sending them would be no less thrilled than my Philippine friend. Jesus concludes by saying: “Whoever accepts anyone I send accepts me, and in accepting me, accepts him who sent me.”

"WHOEVER SEES ME . . . "

Homily for May 6^th, 2020: John 12:44-50.

          “Whoever sees me sees the One who sent me,” Jesus tells us in today’s gospel reading. What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in an obscure provincial village on the edge of Nowhere, where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people.

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

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

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

How do we know that? Jesus told us himself when he said: “Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). And Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans: “It is precisely in this that God proves his love for us: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (5:8).

          That, friends, is the gospel. That is the Good News.

 

5th EASTER SUNDAY:"GREATER WORKS THAN THESE."

“GREATER WORKS THAN THESE....”

Fifth Sunday of Easter Year A. John 14:1-12.

AIM: To deepen the hearers’ faith.

 

      A four-year-old boy was in the kitchen with his mother. “I need a can of mushroom soup, Johnny,” she said to him. “Could you go down into the cellar and get it for me?”

      “It’s dark down there, Mom,” he replied. “I’m scared to go down.”

      His mother tried several times, without success, to persuade him that he had nothing to be scared of. When all else failed, she played her trump card. “It’s all right, Johnny. Jesus will be down there with you.”

      At that Johnny opened the cellar door and called out: “Jesus, if you’re down there, would you bring me up a can of mushroom soup?”

      Four-year-old Johnny’s fear was not unlike the fear of Jesus’ friends in our gospel reading. Jesus has just washed his disciples’ feet. Then he said he would be leaving them. The news plunged them into grief and fear. At the beginning of our gospel reading Jesus responds to this fear by saying: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” 

      The “trouble” they were experiencing went deep. The gospel writer uses the same word to describe Jesus’ emotions at the tomb of his dear friend Lazarus as he joins in the grief of Lazarus’ sisters and other friends. The word is used once again to describe Jesus’ emotions when he realizes that one of his inner circle, Judas Iscariot, is going to betray him. The “trouble” Jesus felt on those occasions, and which his disciples feel now, was gut-wrenching, and stomach-turning. It is the feeling we experience at the news that someone we dearly love has unexpectedly died. Nothing, we realize, will ever be the same again.

class=WordSection2>

      Notice how Jesus counters this fear. “You have faith in God,” he tells his disciples. “Have faith also in me.” Faith in God Jesus could take for granted. These friends of his were believing Jews. He challenges them to extend this same faith to him. You must trust, he was telling them, that the same God whom we worship in synagogue and temple is truly present and active in me. 

      That is a tremendous claim, when you think about it. The disciples whom Jesus was addressing didn’t yet know him as we know him — as the divine Son of God. To them he was a man like themselves. Realization that he was more came only after the resurrection.

      Jesus’ challenge to his friends to trust him as they trusted God involves the central teaching of our Christian faith: the incarnation. Incarnation means “embodiment.” Children are the embodiment, or incarnation, of their parents’ love, which brings them into being. This building is the incarnation of an idea in the mind of the architect who designed it, and of the sacrifices of those whose gifts made its construction possible. And Jesus is the incarnation of God. That explains how Jesus can say in today’s gospel reading: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” The introduction to the Eucharistic Prayer for Christmas says the same: “In him [Jesus] we see our God made visible, and so are caught up in the love of the God we cannot see.”       

      The incarnation begins with Jesus. But it has important implications for us as well. By taking on our human nature Jesus has broken through the boundary between our world and the world of God. The same God who took human form in Jesus is also embodied, though of course in a different degree, in each person who, in baptism, becomes a member of Christ’s body, the Church. Hence, we can even say that each one of us is, in a certain measure, the embodiment of God. He dwells in us through the presence and power of his Holy Spirit.

      This truth, that each of us is the temple or dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, helps us understand Jesus’ words at the conclusion of our gospel reading: “Truly I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I go to the Father.”

      What are the works that Jesus did?  First on just about any list would be his miracles: the healings he performed, the stilling of the storm on the lake, the raising of the widow’s son at Naim and of Jesus’ friend Lazarus. Jesus also fed the hungry: the vast crowd in the wilderness, his twelve apostles at the Last Supper. After his resurrection Jesus prepared a lakeside breakfast for Peter, James, and John, tired and hungry from a night of fruitless fishing with the net coming back empty time after time until a man on shore, still unrecognized, calls out, “Cast the net on the right side” — and they feel the net heavy with fish, and “the disciple whom Jesus loved” calls out excitedly: “It is the Lord.” Jesus’ works also include his beautiful stories — the parables — and all his teaching about the love of God, his heavenly Father: the love that will never let us go.   

      How can Jesus say that we, his followers, will do even greater works than those? Well, consider. During his life on earth Jesus’ works were confined to just a few years, and to one very small part of the world. But these works did not end with Jesus’ death, resurrection, and return to his Father in heaven. He wanted them to continue, and they have continued, through his Church. Starting as a sect of Judaism, the Church which Jesus founded spread throughout the whole world and has continued through twenty centuries of history. 

      We, the Church’s members, are charged to continue Jesus’ works. He has now no hands to bless people than ours; no eyes to look upon people in love than ours; no tongue to speak words of love, encouragement, or warning but ours; no arms to support people and their burdens than ours. The Church’s works are greater than those of her Lord because they are more extended in time and space than they could ever be during the few years that Jesus walked the dusty roads of Palestine. And the Church’s works are great — amazing in fact — because they have never ceased despite all the failures betrayals began when, at Jesus’ arrest, “they all forsook him and fled” (Mk 14:50); and when, only hours later, their leader, Peter, three times denied that he even knew the Lord. Should we be surprised when we hear of similar betrayals today?

I began with a story.  Let me close with another. When the Lord Jesus returned to heaven at the ascension the angels wanted to know everything he had done on earth.  So, Jesus told them how he had gone about doing good, healing the sick, and teaching people about the freely given love of God.

“That’s wonderful, Lord,” the angels said.  “But now that you’re no longer in earth, won’t people soon forget about what you have done and said?”

“Oh no,” Jesus explained. “I founded a Church. I chose twelve men to be its first bishops. I spent three years teaching them: how to pray, how to heal people, how to free them from their burdens, how to teach others about God’s freely given love. They are going to carry on my work.”

“That’s all well and good, Lord,” the angels replied.  “But we know how fickle and unreliable these human beings are. How do you know that they will keep on doing all those things you trained them to do? How do you know that they will remain faithful?”

At that the Lord fell silent. He looked down and seemed to be thinking. Then he looked up and, with that beautiful, radiant smile of his, said very simply:

“I trust them.”

 

 

"THE FATHER AND I ARE ONE."

     Homily for May 5^th, 2020: John 10:22-30.

A careful reading of the gospels shows us that Jesus was very guarded about revealing his true identity. Pressed in today’s gospel to say whether he is God’s long awaited Messiah (“the Christ” in English) he replies: “I told you and you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me.” What works is Jesus referring to?

          First on any list would be his miracles: the healings he performed, the stilling of the storm on the lake, the raising of the widow’s son at Naim and of Jesus’ friend Lazarus. Jesus also fed the hungry: the vast crowd in the wilderness, his twelve apostles at the Last Supper. After his resurrection Jesus prepared a lakeside breakfast for Peter, James, and John, tired and hungry from a night of fruitless fishing with the net coming back empty time after time until a man on shore, still unrecognized, calls out, “Cast the net on the right side” — and they feel the net heavy with fish, and “the disciple whom Jesus loved” calls out excitedly: “It is the Lord.” Jesus’ works also include his beautiful stories — the parables — and all his teaching about the love of God, his heavenly Father: the love that will never let us go. 

        These works say nothing to you, Jesus tells his questioners, because “you do not believe, because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice; I know them and they follow me.” What does it take to be among Jesus’ sheep? The first requirement is openness: willingness to learn, not just once, but all our lives long. People who think they know it all already, that they have nothing more to learn after their formal education is finished, cannot be among Jesus’ sheep. “My sheep hear my voice,” Jesus says. That requires listening, all our lives long. Our education is never finished as long as life lasts.

         To those who come to him not as skeptics, saying ‘show me,’ but in a spirit of openness, Jesus gives the greatest of all gifts: eternal life. “No one can take them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one can take them out of the Father’s hand. The Father and I are one.”

         That too is the gospel. That is the Good News.