Homily for Sunday, 8 September 2019

Readings of the day: Wisdom 9:13-18b; Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Full disclosure: Yesterday was my brother Eric’s and (officially) new sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Sherwood Park, a great celebration of love, family, friendship and, dare I say, Christian discipleship. What exactly, then, does Jesus mean when he says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate their father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even their life itself cannot be my disciple”? How many of us here now, maybe with your family or friends, are here because you in fact really hate your father or mother, husband, wife, or children, brothers or sisters, or even your own life? And petty squabbles and, kids, sibling rivalries do not count. Jesus says we really need to hate each other to be his disciples, right?

Well, not quite. At least I hope that, having just celebrated my brother Eric’s and sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding, I am now not supposed to hate them and the rest of my family if I want to be Jesus’ disciple! I think we may understand what Jesus says in today’s Gospel a little better with a brief lesson in Greek, because Jesus’ original meaning when he asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple gets lost in translation to English. When Jesus asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple, the word we hear as “hate” is from the Greek misei. In English, words like “miser” or “miserly,” for somebody who is not very generous with his or her money, derive from this Greek word.

So, does this mean that Jesus’ ultimate disciple would be somebody like Ebenezer Scrooge? Well, again, not quite. Misei in Greek means, more precisely, “to treat as nothing”; “as of minimal to no importance.” This may still be troublesome for those of us who love our families and like to spend a lot of time with them, as I do. One great blessing I have when I have taught here at St. Joseph’s College is to live, for a few months of the year, in the same city as most of my immediate family and many of my closest friends. I would have difficulty being Jesus’ disciple if this meant treating my family as if they were not important. This is simply not my reality; my experience.

But to be Jesus’ disciple, I think Jesus is saying to us today, is a question of priorities. Even if (as I hope we all do) we love our mothers and fathers, our wives, our husbands, our children, and know the beauty and dignity of our own lives, Jesus is asking us to put God first. Jesus is inviting us to put our relationship with God above all the other great relationships we may have with people closest to us and however much we may love our own lives. Compared with our relationship with God, Jesus invites us to consider even the greatest of our relationships with other people and with ourselves (and certainly our own ego) as of minimal to no importance. This is especially because all our relationships with other people—our families and close friends—and our ability to recognize and love the dignity of our own lives all find their source in God.

If we understand Jesus’ saying that, to be his disciple, we must “hate… father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in this way, this may also help us to place what Jesus says to us in the context of our other readings today, from Wisdom, the Psalms, and Philemon.

The Book of Wisdom, not surprisingly, invites us to prioritize and seek after wisdom. Now, the Book of Wisdom is a strange book of the Bible. It, like several books that make up the so-called “wisdom literature” of the Old Testament—Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, some of the Psalms, and Wisdom—barely mention God and at times include statements that are theologically problematic if they are not interpreted carefully. We hear even today, for example, that “a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind.” Texts like this would be used by people on the fringes of the early Church called Gnostics (from another Greek word, gnosis, that means “knowledge”), who taught that the human body is like a prison dwelling from which the soul had to free itself to go to heaven. This teaching, and the Gnostics’ view that there is knowledge, gnosis, that is essential for our salvation that is outside the Bible or the teaching of the Church handed on from Jesus’ Apostles, were eventually condemned by the Church as heresy. But the Biblical wisdom literature is also peculiar in that it mentions God sparingly and, at face value, tends to prioritize human faculties like wisdom over anything divine.

At least today’s reading from Wisdom acknowledges a divine source (who remains unnamed, but still) of wisdom. The Book of Wisdom asks, “Who has learned your counsel, unless you have given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high”? So, if Wisdom prioritizes or glorifies wisdom above all, we could say that it does so because to prioritize or glorify wisdom is to point us to the source of all wisdom, the ultimate source of “all that is good,” whom we call God.

Like the Book of Wisdom and Luke’s Gospel, St. Paul’s letter to Philemon also calls us to discern priorities. Philemon is the shortest and one of the latest of St. Paul’s letters that are included in our Bible. St. Paul writes from prison to a wealthy Christian of the time, Philemon, who was possibly a bishop or other leader of the Church and who owned slaves, but whose slave Onesimus had run away from him. In the meantime, Onesimus had become a Christian (possibly baptized by Paul) and was being accompanied and taught by St. Paul in the Christian faith. If the Old Testament Book of Wisdom prioritizes the human faculty of wisdom, Philemon gives pride of place to virtues like forgiveness and reconciliation. Like wisdom, forgiveness and reconciliation point us to our utmost priority, God. Who here has forgiven or reconciled with another person, or been forgiven, not least in the sacrament of reconciliation, and so knows of what I speak?

Philemon, whom St. Paul addresses with this brief yet moving letter, was in no way obligated to receive Onesimus back as his slave, much less as “a beloved brother” in Christ as St. Paul asks of him. St. Paul knows this; he knows Philemon’s legal rights toward Onesimus, yet he asks Philemon to receive Onesimus back anyway, using affectionate terms for Onesimus like “my child” and describing his relationship with Onesimus like that of a father to a son.

St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, our Psalm today, and the Book of Wisdom all point us to our ultimate priority, who is God. But each reading we hear today points us to God in a different way. In the letter to Philemon, the way to God is through practice of the virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation, especially when we are not required to forgive somebody; to receive that person back as “a beloved brother” or sister. Forgiveness and reconciliation without conditions is how God acts toward us when we stray from God and hurt one another by our sin. Unlike Onesimus, though, we do not begin as slaves; we begin as beloved people, created in God’s own image and likeness.

Our Psalm, like the Book of Wisdom, prioritize wisdom among ways of seeking God first. To know the shortness of our earthly days is, in a way paradoxically, to know the “favour” and “steadfast love” of the LORD for us; to know God as the source of our life, both our finite life on earth and our eternal life with God in heaven for which this life is our preparation.

In this earthly life, family and close friends can help us to prepare for eternal life by acting as examples of God’s love toward us, and our acting as examples of God’s love toward them. It will be unlikely for us, but it does happen still in our world today that people, Christians, are asked to choose in a moment between love for family, friends, and this life, and God. It is for these moments especially that Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Whether in the rare event we will be called to give our life for the Lord, or whether we seek wisdom, or love of family and friends, or forgiveness and reconciliation—all of which are good things—may we allow our seeking after these things to point us toward God. All earthly realities are secondary: Wisdom, human love and relationships, even giving our lives for our faith. God is and must be first. God is the source of “all that is good”; all that God gives us in this life for our salvation.

Homily for Tuesday, 3 September 2019– Memorial of St. Gregory the Great

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6, 9-11; Psalm 27:1, 4, 13-14; Luke 4:31-37

Tuesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Luke’s Gospel says today that the people of Capernaum, where Jesus taught “on the Sabbath,” “were astounded at his teaching because he spoke with authority.” How did Jesus speak “with authority,” and what would it mean for us to speak and act “with authority” after Jesus’ example?

Our Gospel gives us some indication of ways in which Jesus “spoke with authority.” Today, we hear how Jesus healed a man with an unclean spirit in the same synagogue at Capernaum. Simply by placing this scene on the Sabbath in a synagogue, Luke is relating that Jesus had a sizeable audience for his teaching. A few years ago, during a pilgrimage I was on to the Holy Land, our group visited Capernaum. For the time, Capernaum would have been a sizeable community for a population centre other than Jerusalem in Roman Palestine, a town of about 1 500 people built around fishing on the Sea of Galilee. And its synagogue from Jesus’ time, now an archaeological site, is an imposing structure with its Greco-Roman columns. I easily imagine this space having been full that day for Jesus’ teaching and healing of the man with the unclean spirit. Jesus’ reputation as somebody who not only spoke well but backed up his teaching and preaching with actions like this miraculous healing would have spread quickly from a place like Capernaum.

But speaking well or powerfully is not necessarily enough for somebody to be regarded as authoritative, at least in a good way. Might we say that actions that show power, even in the presence of large crowds, are not in themselves enough to constitute authority?

Can many of us not think of a long list of world leaders and dictators who have spoken and acted with power, even people who were considered “authoritative” in their time? But there is a difference between authority and tyranny. Gregory the Great, the sixth-century pope whose feast we celebrate today, made this distinction between authority and tyranny, even within the Church. Gregory said, “No one does more harm in the Church than he who has title or rank of holiness and acts perversely.”

The rightful exercise of authority is never about me; it is about God. Authority empowers another and empowers our Church as a communion of faith with God’s grace. This is what Jesus did on that Sabbath in the synagogue in Capernaum and what Jesus continues to do through us today.

And it begins with our baptism: By baptism we all, not only ordained members of the Church, are given the power and the responsibility in Christ to speak and act with authority; to speak and act in a way that channels God’s grace to one another; to speak and act in a way that reconciles and forgives sin; to speak and act in a way that brings us to salvation together.

Homily for Monday, 2 September 2019

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Psalm 96:1, 3, 4-5, 11-12, 13; Luke 4:16-30

Monday of the 22nd week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Today, do we not hear Jesus make a bold statement in Luke’s Gospel? After reading from “the scroll of the prophet Isaiah” on the Sabbath in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus rolls up the scroll and sits down. Then, with “the eyes of all in the synagogue… fixed upon him,” Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

May I ask us, then, what would be the message that, if we heard it today, would be like that “scripture… fulfilled in [our] hearing”? Here, would we not want to be somewhat careful, so not to confuse a message we want to hear with a message we may need to hear?

There is certainly a distinction in today’s Gospel between the message the people want to hear and the message they need to hear from Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth. The people in the synagogue of Nazareth that day were happy with Jesus’ claim to be the one “anointed… to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” But what did Jesus’ claim to be the anointed one to accomplish all this mean? Jesus’ proclamation of “good news to the poor… release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind,” freedom for the oppressed; Jesus’ proclamation of “the Lord’s favour” was not to be primarily for the people in the Nazareth synagogue that day. In fact, Jesus’ proclamation was not to be primarily for the people of Israel, but for foreigners, just as the Lord’s favour had been for the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian in the times of Elijah and Elisha.

The people who heard Jesus in the synagogue of Nazareth that day changed suddenly from all speaking “well of Jesus” to trying to “hurl him off [a] cliff.” Jesus’ inclusive offer of “the Lord’s favour,” not primarily for the people in the synagogue that day or even for the people of Israel but for foreigners, misfits; those for whatever reason unworthy of “the Lord’s favour” as Jesus’ hearers understood them, was not what the people in the synagogue in Nazareth that day wanted to hear. But it was the message they needed to hear. Not they; not any of us have a monopoly on “the Lord’s favour.”

Who, then, are “the poor… the captives… the blind” and “the oppressed” among us today? Who are the widows of Zarephath and the Naamans among us today, disfavoured because of our individual if not social prejudices?  If Jesus were to preach on this scripture from Isaiah today, would he not perhaps proclaim “the Lord’s favour” primarily toward our society’s poorest and most outcast, perhaps the unborn; refugees and migrants trying to integrate into Canadian society and our communities; people with disabilities; the elderly and the seriously ill; people who despair to the point of contemplating ending their lives or having physicians end their lives for them; people who have committed crimes and are trying to rebuild their lives and re-integrate into society, and so on.

Who will “proclaim… the Lord’s favour” to these people? Who will bring hope to those “who have no hope,” in St. Paul’s words today to the Thessalonians? Who will proclaim the inviolable dignity of all human life, without exception, even and especially when this message is ill-received and even ridiculed by people who hear it or see it in action from us?

“Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in [our] hearing.”