Homily for Tuesday, 16 September 2014– Memorial of Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian

Tuesday of the 24th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 27-31a; Psalm 100:1b-2, 3, 4, 5; Luke 7:11-17

Who here has ever received visitors at your home: family; friends; someone trying to sell something; someone bringing a religious message door-to-door; someone you do not know? Who here has been a visitor to someone else’s home? I imagine that most of us have.

On the one hand, having visitors in our homes can be a wonderful experience. On the other hand, visitors can sometimes make us feel uncomfortable or irritate us, or sometimes we just do not know what to expect, whether as the host or as the visitor…

Now what if God came to visit our homes? First of all, I would want to make sure my house was spotless!

Jesus is a visitor in our Gospel reading today from Luke. He joins a funeral procession in a small city called Nain. The funeral is for the only son of a mother who is also “a widow.” We hear from Luke that Jesus raises the young man to life again: “Young man, I tell you, arise!” And then Jesus gives the man, raised from the dead, “to his mother.” This event foreshadows Jesus’ own death and resurrection: Jesus dies on the cross, is given to his mother, and rises after three days in the tomb.

I am sure the people of Nain in that funeral procession did not expect the young man to be raised to life. The miracle that this visitor, Jesus, performs, fills the people present with “fear.” They exclaim, “God has visited his people”!

What if we were to enter a home and, when we left, our host were to say, “God has visited his people”; “God has visited” this home in the person of any one of us? Have we ever said this of a visitor to our homes? Neither I nor, to my knowledge, anyone here, has ever succeeded in raising someone from the dead as Jesus did in Nain (If you have, I want to see you after Mass!). And yet the events of which we hear today surrounding the funeral procession in Nain remind me of the times I have visited homes for wake services before or for receptions after funerals. I often do not know what to say, if anything, to a family and friends grieving a loved one. I only know that I have been invited simply to be present to them. Families in these instances have shown to me the presence of God by their generosity and kindness in ways I could never repay. I can say in these instances after the people of Nain: “God has visited his people.”

We, too, are invited to be God’s presence to people in need: to feed the hungry, to give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to help the homeless find shelter, to visit the sick and comfort the dying, to free the unjustly imprisoned, to bury the dead, to teach, to profess, and  to live our faith in a way that convinces the doubtful and the lost, to bring sinners to God’s mercy, to be patient with one another’s shortcomings, to forgive one another, and to pray for the living and the dead… These are called corporal and spiritual works of mercy by our Church for a purpose: They are ways in which, through us, God visits his people.