Homily for Sunday, 9 September 2018

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10; James 2:1-5; Mark 7:31-37

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, Edmonton, AB, Canada. 

When is the last time any of us have attended a baptism? Have any of us ever noticed a strange part of the baptismal ritual, after the baptism itself, when the deacon or priest prays over the newly-baptized person while touching her or his ears and mouth? The deacon’s or priest’s prayer over the newly-baptized at this point in the ritual is this: “The Lord Jesus made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. May he soon touch your ears to receive his word, and your mouth to proclaim his faith, to the praise and glory of God the Father.”

This part of the Rite of Baptism is known by a strange word: “Ephphatha.” We hear this originally-Aramaic word, ephphatha, translated for us as “be opened,” with the accompanying gestures from Jesus toward the deaf and mute man—Jesus puts “his fingers into [the man’s] ears” and touches his tongue—today in Mark’s Gospel.

Is it not remarkable that this Gospel event of which we hear today, Jesus’ restoration of hearing and speech to the deaf and mute man, “Ephphatha,” “Be opened,” was integrated in a set ritual of Baptism very early in the Church’s history, as early as the 600s? This was just as the Church was expanding beyond the geographical limits of the former Roman Empire north and west into then-pagan territories of Europe. The ephphatha has always had a double focus: First, to “open” the newly-baptized to God’s grace against sin. This is why, until it was moved in the baptismal ritual to after the baptism itself after Vatican II fifty years ago, the ephphatha introduced the renunciation of sin and profession of faith at the very beginning of the Rite. Second, the ephphatha held (and more dominantly today holds, especially since Vatican II) the significance of a call to the newly-baptized to spread our Christian faith in word and action, what we might call evangelization.

How, then, might we accomplish this, if at the heart of Jesus’ command to the deaf and mute man, “Be opened,” and at the heart of our calling as baptized Christians is evangelization, spreading the good news of Jesus Christ? Our Gospel and baptismal call to “be opened,” ephphatha, presents us with challenges both in the Gospel account of Jesus’ healing of the deaf and mute man itself and in the world in which we live. In Mark’s Gospel, as soon as Jesus heals the deaf and mute man, commanding him to “be opened,” he orders the crowds “to tell no one” about the healing. Do these two commands not contradict each other? And in our world today, how do we evangelize; spread the good news of the truth and beauty of our faith in Jesus Christ, while honouring the human beauty and dignity of those people to whom we communicate our faith; the dignity of people of other faiths; people who differ or disagree with us; people who may be resistant to our Christian message, even when proclaimed lovingly and reasonably? Is evangelization not out of place in a world as pluralistic as ours is in terms of faiths, cultures, politics, and worldviews?

Let me suggest that our response to these questions and challenges presented by our Gospel and our world might begin best with our attentiveness to the order of Jesus’ actions in healing the man in our Gospel reading today. This order of actions, by which Jesus touches the man’s ears and then his tongue, is reflected in the order of the ephphatha in our Rite of Baptism: “May [God] soon touch your ears to receive his word, and your mouth to proclaim his faith”…

As in Jesus’ healing of the deaf and mute man in Mark’s Gospel, and from the moment of our baptism, Jesus opens our ears to hear before he opens our mouths to speak. If our evangelization, our proclamation of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Word of God, “to the praise and glory of God the Father,” is to be effective, it must be heard attentively before we are able to speak it with any authority. And if we are hearing God’s word attentively, it will become something heartfelt before we ever speak a word.

This is the message of the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading, of which Jesus’ healing of the deaf and mute man may have reminded the crowds following him in our Gospel reading today. For Isaiah and for Jesus, the word of God is a message to be taken to heart. Isaiah’s first address today is to “those who are of a fearful heart.” Only then does Isaiah proclaim that “the eyes of the blind shall be opened… the ears of the deaf unstopped,” that “the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.”

If we remain “of a fearful heart,” we risk becoming paralyzed; closed in on ourselves by our fears. We risk closing our hearts to the Word of God and its invitation to us to “be opened.” When I speak of fear in this way, I speak not of fear as a legitimate response to the unfamiliar and even terrifying, but when we allow fear to take over our other senses so that we are attentive to nothing but our fear, which ends up destroying us from within. It will not matter, then, what we sense with our eyes and ears; the actions and words we communicate will be joyless, faithless, and meaningless, self-centered instead of God-centered.

Do most or all of us not know people who are so overtaken by fear in this way; people who are afraid to move beyond limited situations in which they are comfortable? Pope Francis has often lamented the number of Christians who are like this: “Like Lent without Easter,” Francis describes them in his Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium; with “faces like pickled peppers,” he said in an audience within his first months as pope. But the symptoms of fear that has taken over the heart and closed it off to God’s presence, closed us off to effective and joyful evangelization, can be more subtle.

From the moment Jesus enters into the pagan territories between Tyre and Sidon and the ten cities “of the Decapolis,” Jesus leads by example as to what he will mean in commanding the deaf and mute man to “be opened.” Before he heals the man the crowds bring before him or even speaks a word in today’s Gospel, Jesus actively shows us the true meaning of evangelization; of proclaiming the presence and good news of the Word of God in person, but in a strange land, not among his own people. There, we witness the healing of the deaf and mute man: “Ephphatha,” “Be opened,” ears first, to hear the Word of God attentively, and only then the tongue, to proclaim this Word of God with joy.

But all this presupposes an encounter of hearts between Jesus and the man, before any opening of his other senses is able to take place. “Jesus took him aside in private,” Mark’s Gospel says. Jesus takes the deaf and mute man aside, away from the noise of the crowds, away from his fears, but also possibly away from his comfort in the support of friends among the crowds who had brought him to Jesus. “Ephphatha”—“Be opened”: This invitation is effective only if a heart-to-heart with God takes place first. Only then will our efforts at evangelization be effective. These heart-to-heart encounters take several forms: Private prayer, examination of conscience, public worship, the celebration of Eucharist other sacraments, particularly the so-called sacraments of healing, reconciliation and the anointing of the sick, spiritual direction, even more informal private conversation about matters of faith, and so forth.

We encounter God heart-to-heart in the love of one another. We encounter God heart-to-heart in any moment that moves us beyond ourselves. We may even encounter God heart-to-heart, in ways in which our hearts are opened to deeper truths about our own faith, through encounters with people of other faiths or Christians who struggle with teachings of our own faith. To open our hearts is often discomforting. But this is necessary for any evangelization we do to be any more than mere noise; the mere noise of the crowds that Jesus orders to silence (albeit unsuccessfully) in today’s Gospel.

Evangelization, proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ, requires us first to open our hearts to this good news. With our hearts open, we are then able to have our ears opened to hear God’s Word attentively, and only then to have our mouths opened to proclaim it, not for our own comfort or glory but, according to our baptismal calling, “to the praise and glory of God the Father.”

Homily for Sunday, 2 September 2018

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; Psalm 15:2-3, 3-4, 4-5; James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

This homily was given at St. James and Our Lady of the Valley Churches, Vernon and Coldstream, BC, Canada. 

What do we make of the tensions in today’s readings between internal intentions and external actions; between observance of religious laws and traditions and what Jesus teaches is most important to God?

To some extent, I anticipate that most if not all of us have a high regard for laws, rules, and traditions, whether they are from God or from people; religious or secular. And there is nothing wrong with having a high regard for laws, rules, and traditions. In Canada, as in most or all developed countries at least, we speak of the “rule of law”—the Constitution and its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, civil and criminal law, precedent set by the rulings of several levels of courts of law—as a principle to govern our society. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses instills among the people of Israel a “rule of law” system. Israel is to be ruled by God’s laws, which will not be difficult for the people to discern and observe. God’s laws, Moses says to the people of Israel, are not to be seen as an imposition or a nuisance, but as a gift.

Other nations around Israel at the time worshipped several gods, and many worshipped their human rulers as gods. Many gods and human rulers as gods meant complicated systems of laws for the people to follow. What, then, does God propose through Moses to Israel’s people? If there is one God, then there is one simplified system of laws to communicate to Israel the nearness to it of its God; the care of God for Israel. And so God asks rhetorically through Moses: “For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today”? The point is that no other nation would enjoy such closeness to its God. No other nation would enjoy the gift of a rule of law so intelligible and just as Israel would enjoy. This law would be a perfect echo of God’s voice, caring for and sustaining our well-being on earth, so there would be no need to add to or take away from it.

There is nothing wrong with laws, rules, and traditions, as long as we do not allow these laws, rules, and traditions in themselves to become our gods. This is the point Jesus makes in the Gospel of Mark from which we hear today; in his dispute with the Pharisees and scribes who come from Jerusalem to investigate how well Jesus and his disciples observe the laws about food, laws about the ritual purification of dishes and vessels for food and drink and their bodies.

Neither Jesus nor Mark, the Gospel writer, simply dismiss this set of laws the Jews had inherited from Moses’ time as unimportant. In fact, in this part of Mark’s Gospel we get a sense that, very soon after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the earliest Christian communities had to contend with both Jews, who knew and followed the law given them through Moses, and Greek and Roman pagans, who did not, joining them. This is most likely why Mark explains the long list of laws the Jews had about food preparation and washing the food, the vessels to prepare the food, and themselves. The first Christian leaders after Jesus decided immediately that, as Jesus had taught and lived among them, their communities would include everybody: Jews and pagans alike who had come to believe in Jesus. This would create some uneasy tensions among different groups of people, each with their laws, rules, and traditions.

These laws, rules, and traditions would remain important, though, and even constructive of Christian community as long as these laws, rules, and traditions did not become gods in themselves. These laws, rules, and traditions would be praiseworthy as long as they were observed as a gift that pointed the people to the one God, who cares for and sustains our life and well-being here on earth. Neither could religious or cultural laws, rules, and traditions become reduced to decrees we merely follow externally, while they fail to change our hearts and bring us closer to God.

This is at the heart of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees and scribes of his time, based on the words of the prophet Isaiah centuries before Jesus: “You hypocrites… ‘this people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’” I offer this with a caveat that most Pharisees and other religious leaders of Jesus’ time followed with their hearts the sometimes-rigorous outward observance of religious law that they expected of themselves and everybody else. Mark’s Gospel today features a small group of Pharisees and scribes “from Jerusalem.” These were the self-proclaimed official police of observance of the Law of Moses, who thought themselves to be important because they had come from Jerusalem, the city at the centre of the Jewish faith. For them, the laws, rules, and traditions of faith were no longer a gift from God to point us back to God and to eternal life. They were no longer a sign of God’s care for us and for creation, but had been reduced to a means to power and prestige by this minority of religious leaders of Jesus’ time.

And when laws, rules, and traditions become inflexible, static means to power and prestige, how often does this show itself as self-righteous judgmentalism, in our own time as often as in the time of Jesus? If we appoint ourselves judges based on external observance of laws, rules, and traditions, we risk failing to discern accurately, as well as possible, the condition of the hearts of the faithful before God, which may or may not be well-reflected in external observance.

Yet how often do we hear, if we have not said ourselves, things like, “People who have committed or supported such-and-such an action should not receive communion? Those people come to Canada to take our jobs and change our culture and customs! How dare that person openly question that teaching; she or he is a heretic! That couple is ‘living in sin’”!

“This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” I imagine Jesus thinking of the people for whom laws, rules, and traditions become means to their own power and prestige instead of means toward patiently bringing external observances closer into line with the more universal longing of our hearts for God.

What, then, are the remedies for this self-righteousness; what we might call “Phariseeism”; for reducing laws, rules, and traditions, religious and otherwise, to means to power and prestige? First, I think it is important, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, to recognize that evil (but also good) does not come from outside us; from external observances, no matter how faithful. Goodness or evil are conditions of the heart, of what is inside us. Second, as we hear in the Letter of James [the patron saint of this church], an important remedy to judging based on externals is to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive” ourselves.

We become “doers of the word” when we are deeply aware of the condition of our own hearts; the presence within each of us of good and evil. We become “doers of the word” when our external observances are a sincere reflection of the condition of our hearts; when we expect of others only what we ourselves are capable; when we consider everybody as loved by God and called to eternal life; when we consider nobody as excluded from the eternal life God offers us.

We become “doers of the word,” and our hearts are drawn to the heart of God, when the law becomes not a means to power if not to an abuse of power; when laws, rules, and traditions are not gods in themselves but a gift from God to point us to eternal life.