"THEY WANTED TO MAKE HIM KING."

Homily for April 16^th, 2021: John 6:1-15.

Following the miraculous feeding of the great crowd in the wilderness, “Jesus realized that they would come and carry him off to make him king, so he fled back to the mountain alone.” The people were so impressed with the great “sign” which Jesus had performed, that they want to capture the power the had seen in Jesus, so that it would be theirs always.

You cannot capture Jesus Christ. You cannot apprehend him or hold him fast. He will always elude your grasp. “Do not cling to me,” the risen Lord said to Mary Magdalene in the garden of the resurrection. She wanted to resume the relationship of emotional intimacy with Jesus which she had enjoyed during his public ministry. The time for that was past.  “Do not cling to me,” Jesus told her. “Rather, go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God!’” (John 20:17)

Jesus says the same to us today: “Do not cling to me.” At the end of every Mass the Lord sends us to others: his brothers and sisters -- and ours too. As we journey life’s way, with all its twistings and turnings, Jesus is always with us. He remains close to us, even when we stray far from him. But he does not belong to us. We belong to him. He will be with us always -- but he will always be ahead of us.

When you come to walk the last stretch of life’s journey, which each of us must walk alone, you will find that you are not alone. Jesus will be walking with you. And he will be waiting for you at the end of the road. “I am going to prepare a place for you,” Jesus says later in John’s gospel, “that where I am you also may be” (14:3). That is Jesus’ personal promise to you -- and to me. And when Jesus Christ promises something, he always keeps his promise.

Here, then, is a question to ponder. When you meet the Lord at the end of life’s road, will you be encountering a stern judge, before whom you shrink in fear? Or will you be meeting a familiar, dearly loved friend? The Lord in his goodness allows us to choose what the encounter will be like. It is the most important choice we shall ever have. 

 

"GO DOES NOT RATION HIS SPIRIT."

Homily for April 15^th, 2021: John 3:31-36.

          “He does not ration his gift of the Spirit,” we heard in the gospel. What does that mean? It means that God’s gifts are without limit. When God gives, he gives totally and completely.

          Jesus showed that in his own life. When he turned water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana, the quantity of water changed into wine would have kept the party going for a week. In every one of the six accounts of Jesus’ feeding a vast crowd in the wilderness, he gave them not just a snack. Always there was food left over, even after all had eaten to the full. When God gives, he gives not only abundantly, but superabundantly.

          Whether I offer Mass for one person, or for a hundred, does not affect the blessings that each receives. God’s blessings are infinite. We come again and again to Communion not because what we receive is limited, but because our capacity to receive is limited.

          Jesus goes on to say: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life.” We heard yesterday that believing in someone means trusting that person, and more: entrusting our lives to him or her. Friends and disciples of Jesus Christ are people who entrust their lives to him who is our best friend, our lover – but also our Savior, our Redeemer, our God in human flesh.   

          And note: Jesus does not say that we shall have eternal life. No. He speaks in the present tense. “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” – here and now. The fellowship we have with the Lord Jesus continues on beyond death into eternity. That is God’s plan and design for your life, and for mine. And the only thing that can frustrate the fulfillment of that plan is our own final and deliberate No.

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

"GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD."

Homily for April 14^th, 2021: John 3: 16-21.

          “God so loved he world …” we just heard. Perhaps someone is thinking: “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 make 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.

         

         

HOME TO GOD

Homily for April 13^th , 2021: John 3:7-15.

          In the passage immediately before today’s gospel reading, which we heard yesterday, Jesus has told 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 the theme of spirit. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word for spirit is pneuma. Our 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 “strong 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? 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 -- home to God.   

 

 

 

"YOU MUST BE BEGOTTEN OF WATER AND THE HOLY SPIRIT."

Homily for April 12^th, 2021: 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. 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 10^th, 2021: 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 post-Easter 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 charging 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 weak, 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.”

PETER'S CALL

April 9^th, 2021: Easter Friday. John 21:1-14.

“Have you caught anything?” Jesus calls out from the shore at dawn to his friends in their boat. What he really said was: “You 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. They do so – and at once they feel the net heavy with fish. One of those in the boat tells Peter: “It is the Lord.” It is the unnamed “disciple 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? We all know what Peter did that night. Three times he denied even knowing the Lord and Master he so deeply loved. How mortified Peter must have been to recall his weakness.

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, take heart! 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 -- 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.  

"YOU ARE WITNESSES."

Homily for April 8^th, 2021: Luke 24:35-48.

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