"I AM THE VOICE."

Homily for January 2^nd, 2021: John 1:19-28.

          The preaching of John the Baptist, accompanied by mass baptisms, created a sensation. Great numbers went out into the desert, where John lived, to hear him and to be baptized by him. (Cf. Matt. 3:5) The Jewish Scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, speak in several places of the Lord taking away sins by the pouring of water. It is understandable, therefore, that the religious authorities in Jerusalem send messengers to John to ask what was going on, and what was his authority.     

          John’s response to their questions is simple: “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” These words hark back to a passage in the prophet Isaiah: “A voice cries out: In the desert prepare the way of the Lord! Make straight in the wasteland a highway for our God! Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be laid low.” (Is. 40:3f) Isaiah’s words were directed to his people in exile in Babylon. The angels, Isaiah told his people, were preparing a way for them to return from captivity to their homeland in Palestine.

“Like a modern bulldozer, the angels were to level hills and fill in valleys, and thus prepare a superhighway. John the Baptist is to prepare a road, not for God’s people to return to the promised land [as in Isaiah’s day], but for God to come to his people. John’s baptizing and preaching in the desert was opening up people’s hearts, leveling their pride, filling their emptiness, and thus preparing them for God’s intervention.” (Cited from Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel according to John, p.50)

John, as we saw before Christmas, was a voice for the one who is the Word: God’s personal communication to us, to show us, who cannot see God, what God is like. John’s message is still preparing people’s hearts and minds to encounter God’s Son and Word. He does so in what were perhaps the greatest of the Baptist’s words: “He must increase. I must decrease.” (John 3:30) Take those words with you into the year that is just one day old today. Let them be your guide during the remaining 364 days of this year of 2021. They will keep you close to the One who alone can make this a happy year for you. “He must increase. I must decrease.”    

THE WORD BECAME FLESH

Homily for December 31^st, 2020: John 1:1-18.

          If you came to Mass on Christmas morning, you probably heard this gospel. You may have thought it strange. Where are the shepherds, the manger, Mary and Joseph? Where is their child? Instead of these familiar Christmas figures we have heard about abstractions: light and darkness, the Word becoming flesh.

Let’s start with another word: “incarnation.”  It means “taking on flesh, embodiment.” This building is the incarnation of an idea in the mind of the architect who designed it, and of the sacrifices that made its construction possible. Children are the incarnation of their parents’ love. And Jesus is the incarnation of God. 

We cannot see God. Jesus shows us what God is like. That is why this Christmas gospel calls Jesus God’s "word." A word is used to communicate. Jesus is God’s word because he is God’s communication to us: not a lifeless, abstract statement, but God’s living and breathing utterance and self-disclosure.    

When we listen to Jesus, we hear God speaking to us. When we look at Jesus, we see what God is like. What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in a provincial village where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people. They were the ones who welcomed him most warmly.  The rich and powerful and learned had difficulties with Jesus. Many were hostile to him – then, and still today.

In his youth Jesus 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 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. Those were images that everyone could understand. Jesus also told stories: so simple that they capture the interest of children; yet so profound that learned scholars are still studying them today.

In preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is like. He who is God’s utterance and word, God’s personal communication to us, is saying through all the circumstances of his life that God loves humble people. God is especially close to those who feel that they are not in control of their lives; that they are the victims of circumstances; that their lives are a tangle of loose ends and broken resolutions.

It is because God gave us his Son at Christmas that we give gifts to one another. The greatest gift we can give cannot be bought in any store. It is the gift God gave us at Christmas: the gift of himself. Look at Mary’s child: helpless, vulnerable, and weak, as all babies are. He is God’s way of saying: ‘This is how much the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, loves you; enough to be become tiny, insignificant, vulnerable. Jesus, the personal utterance and word of God, is God’s gift to each one of us. He wants us to share this gift with others.

JESUS' HIDDEN YEARS.

Homily for December 30^th, 2020: Luke 2:36-40.

          The prophetess Anna, whom we have just heard about in the gospel, was very old. “She never left the Temple, “Luke tells us, “but worshipped day and night with fasting and prayer.” There are such people in the Church today: contemplative nuns, who do not leave the convent for charitable or other good works, like most Catholic Sisters. They lead hidden lives, praying for others.

          Anna has evidently been praying, as devout Jews had done for centuries, for the coming of God’s promised anointed servant, the Messiah. When Mary and Joseph brought their baby into the Temple to present him to the Lord, as the Jewish law required, both the Jewish priest Simeon and Anna recognized at once that this infant was the long-awaited Messiah. How they most have rejoiced! Anna’s joy is evident in the fact that she cannot keep the news to herself. “She gave thanks to God,” Luke tells us, “and spoke about the child to all those who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.”

          Then comes what at first seems like an anti-climax. Mary and Joseph return to Nazareth with their child. Save for a glimpse of Jesus back in the Jerusalem Temple at age twelve, we know nothing about his boyhood, adolescence, or young manhood until, at age 30, he begins his public ministry with 40 days of fasting in the desert. These are called his so-called “hidden years.”

          Are they really so hidden, however? “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” people in Nazareth will ask later (Mt. 13:55). So, we can assume that as a boy, Jesus must have worked in the carpenter’s shop. Is it conceivable that any shoddy work came out of that shop? that customers were kept waiting beyond the promised date? Luke tells us that in that shop, Jesus “grew in size and strength, filled with wisdom.” He did that by accepting the burdens, duties, and frustrations of a very ordinary and outwardly uninteresting life.

He calls us to do the same.

"WHOEVER HATES HIS BROTHER IS IN DARKNESS."

Homily for December 29^th, 2020: 1 John 2:3-11.

          “I am the light of the world,” Jesus says in John’s gospel (8:12). How dark the world would be without him. In baptism we were commissioned to be lenses and prisms of that light, shining from the face of Jesus Christ. In today’s first reading the apostle John tells us how we fulfill that commission. “Whoever loves his bother remains in the light . . . Whoever hates his brother is in darkness; he walks in darkness and does not know where he is going because the darkness has blinded his eyes.”

          To understand these words, we need to know that the words “love” and “hate” here do not refer to feelings. They refer to our conduct. This becomes clear if we look at the words of Jesus himself in the parable of the sheep and the goats in chapter 25 of Matthew’s gospel. There Jesus says that when we come to stand before God in judgment, he won’t ask us how many prayers we’ve said, or how many Masses we have attended. He will ask instead how we have treated other people.

          To those on his right hand, designated as sheep in that story, the king (a stand-in for Jesus) will say: “Come, you have my Father’s blessing! … For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, in prison and you come to me.” Astonished at these words, those on the king’s right hand ask when they had done all those things. To which the king responds: “As often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me.” 

Then, to those on his left hand, designated as goats in the story, the king says: “Out of my sight, you condemned, into that everlasting fire prepared for the devil and has angels!” To explain this harsh judgment the king tells those on his left that they have done none of the things the other brother has done. Conduct and not feelings is the standard by which both are judged.

          We pray then in this Mass that when the Lord sends his angel to call us home to Him, he will find us walking in the light -- by doing good to those we encounter along life’s way.

THE SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS

Homily for December 28^th, 2020: Matthew 2:13-18.

          Which of us does not remember the brutal killing of 20 young schoolchildren, first and second graders, in Newtown/CT ten years ago? It happened the Friday before the third Sunday in Advent, which is called “Rejoice Sunday” because the readings are about joy and rejoicing. I was away from St. Louis, visiting friends in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington/DC, and staying in the rectory of a large parish. I had prepared a homily for Rejoice Sunday, on the theme of joy.  

          As soon as the terrible news came from Connecticut, I knew I could not preach about joy, when our hearts were breaking at the slaughter these innocent children. Away from home, and without access to the books I normally use for homily preparation, and the mass of material already on my computer, I was unable to produce the full text which I would have prepared had I been at home. I reflected long and hard about what I could say which would help people grieving over this tragedy. And I prayed that the Holy Spirit would give me the words I needed.   

At 11 o’clock on that Sunday morning I stood before a congregation of at least 300 people to speak about our grief and how God can bring good out of evil. My own voice was breaking as I did so. When I finished, I knew that God had answered my prayers for inspiration and guidance. The whole congregation rose and erupted in applause. And I remember saying to myself: “It’s not about you, Jay, it is about the Lord.”

          Today’s gospel tells us about a tragedy every bit as terrible as that one ten years ago. In a frantic attempt to kill the baby king whom the Wise Men from the East had told him about when they passed through Jerusalem two years before, the cruel Gentile tyrant Herod ordered the slaughter of all the boys in and near Bethlehem two years old and younger.

          We cannot observe the feast of the Holy Innocents in America today without thinking of the mass killing of unborn children, a quarter of all babies conceived, which goes on day after day and year after year, leaving their mothers, most of them acting under pressure from others, burdened for life with regrets, shame, and guilt – a burden no woman should have to bear. This modern slaughter of the innocents will end only when hearts and minds are changed and people become as ashamed of abortion as we now are about slavery. For that we pray fervently at Mass today.

"YOU WILL BE HATED BECAUSE OF MY NAME."

Homily for Dec. 26^th, 2020: Acts of the Apostles 6:8-10; 7:54-59; Mt. 10:17-22.

          A priest fifteen or perhaps more years ordained, told me recently that he was concerned about the overly rosy image of priesthood being offered to today’s seminarians. The recruitment material sent out by Vocation Directors is full of success stories. All the photos on the websites of today’s seminaries show young men laughing, smiling, and joking. None of this is false. Thousands of priests testify to the joy of serving God and his holy people as a priest. You’re looking at one of them right now. The late Chicago priest-sociologist and novelist Fr. Andrew Greely said: “Priests who like being priests are among the happiest men in the world.” And he cited sociological surveys to back up that statement.

          The result of all this happy talk, my priest-friend told me, was that young priests who have a bad day, a bad week, or who encounter rejection or failure, start thinking that perhaps they have chosen the wrong vocation and should abandon priesthood. Jesus never promised his disciples that they would have only joy, success, and happiness. Both of today’s readings are about the price of discipleship. “You will be hated by all because of my name,” Jesus says at the end of today’s gospel. Only after these words warning about the cost of discipleship does he proclaim the good news: “But whoever endures to the end will be saved.”

          Christmas is a feast of joy, of course. But the day after Christmas year reminds us each year that this joy has a price. In a dispute with his enemies, the deacon Stephen, the Church’s first martyr, cries out: “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” Infuriated by the supposed blasphemy in those words, his enemies take Stephen outside the city and stone him to death. Omitted from our first reading are Stephen’s dying words: “Lord, do not lay this sin to their charge.” Jesus too suffered outside the city. Among his Last Words was the prayer: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests about the increasing secularization of our society, the late Cardinal George of Chicago said, in what he later admitted was an “overly dramatic fashion”: “I expect to die in bed; my successor will die in prison; and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.” Mostly omitted by those who quote these words, is the good news which the cardinal spoke in conclusion: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history.”

"BLESSED BE THE LORD."

Homily for December 24^th, 2020: Luke 1:67-79.

          The Old Testament has a number of stories about women unable to conceive who become pregnant through God’s intervention. The one which most resembles the story of Elizabeth and Zechariah, the parents of John the Baptist, is the story of Sarah and Abraham. In both instances the parents are long past the age of childbearing. Three visitors come to Abraham and tell him that when they return next year, Sarah will have a son. From the tent nearby, where she is preparing a meal for the visitors (as required by the oriental law of hospitality for strangers), Sarah overhears the conversation and laughs at the absurdity of an old woman of her age giving birth. Whereupon God asks, “Why did Sarah laugh?” To which Sarah replies, “I didn’t laugh.” And the Lord responds, “Yes, you did.” (Genesis 18:1-15)

          In the case of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, an angel brings the message to the father, while he is performing his priestly duty of offering incense in the Temple. His aged wife, Elizabeth, will have a son. The angel also says that the boy will be called John. Zechariah is unable to believe the news. Because of this unbelief, he loses the power of speech – and, as we learn later, his hearing as well. Thus, he is unable to tell his wife about the angel’s announcement or the child’s name.

          This explains why, when they come to name Elizabeth’s baby, people are astonished to hear his mother say he will be called John; and her husband  -- still unable to speak, or even to hear what his wife has just said – writes on a tablet the words Elizabeth has just spoken.

          Immediately Zechariah’s speech and hearing are restored. We might expect a conversation between him and Elizabeth about how they had agreed on the same name. Instead Zechariah immediately breaks out in the hymn of praise that we have just heard, called ever since the Benedictus, because that is the first word of the hymn in Latin.

          What does all this tell us? It says that in our relationship with God praise and thanksgiving come first. We come to Mass first of all to worship. We come, that is, not to get but to give. And all experience shows that those who give most generously also receive most abundantly.

"HE WILL BE CALLED JOHN."

Homily for December 23^rd, 2020: Luke 1:57-66.

          At the circumcision of John the Baptist, eight days after his birth, “they were going to call him Zechariah after his father,” Luke writes. Scholars tells us that in New Testament times a child’s naming was the right of the father. The naming of Mary’s Son was an exception: he had no human father. That was why the angel Gabriel told Mary in advance, “You will give him the name Jesus.”

          John’s father Zechariah had lost his power of speech when he failed to believe the angel’s message to him that his wife, though long past childbearing age, would have a son, “whom you shall name John” (Lk 1:13). He had thus been unable to tell Elizabeth that the angel had already disclosed the name of the son she would bear. We now learn that Zechariah is not only mute but deaf. So, he cannot hear his wife saying: “He will be called John.”

          To get confirmation of the name, the bystanders must question the deaf father by writing him a note. Imagine the astonishment when he confirms the name already chosen by his wife by writing: “John is his name.”

          “Immediately his mouth was opened,” Luke tells us, “his tongue freed, and he spoke, blessing God.” Those final words are significant. With his speech restored, Zechariah speaks first of all to the Lord God, blessing and thanking him for the humanly impossible gift he and his wife have received. “Blessed be the Lord the God of Israel because he has visited and ransomed his people.” The Latin word for “blessed” is benedictus. So, the canticle or hymn which Zechariah speaks is known by Catholics as the Benedictus. The Church incorporates Zechariah’s words into her daily public prayer, in the Office of Lauds or Morning Prayer.

Happy are we, if we do the same: by praising and thanking God for the blessings he has already bestowed on us, even before we start asking for fresh blessings.