Homily for Sunday, 1 August 2021– Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15, 31a; Psalm 78:3-4, 23-24, 13-14, 25, 54; Ephesians 4:20-24; John 6:24-35

Many of us may know of the Canadian children’s author Robert Munsch. He is known for his many heartwarming if zany, and vividly illustrated stories for children, but that also appeal to adults.

Today’s readings, especially from Exodus and John’s Gospel, center on food—Exodus’ manna in the desert; Jesus’ Bread of Life Discourse that follows the multiplication of the loaves and fish in John’s Gospel. In both Exodus and John, the people who are fed are unsatisfied and complain about the food.

The Robert Munsch story that comes to my mind is called Something Good. In Something Good, a father takes his young children grocery shopping. His daughter, Tyya, complains that, whenever her dad takes her grocery shopping, he never buys her any good food, like ice cream, cookies, chocolate bars, or ginger ale. Instead, Tyya’s father only ever buys food like bread, eggs, milk, cheese, and (ugh!) spinach—“nothing any good”!

Has this ever been our experience, especially those of us who are or have been parents of young children, when we take the kids grocery shopping? And, kids, I hope you do not quite behave like Tyya in Something Good when you are with your parents at the grocery store, and that you eat the bread, eggs, milk, cheese, and even spinach your parents buy to feed you! Anyway, in Something Good, when Tyya’s father is not watching, she gets her own shopping cart and fills it with all the “good” junk food she wants, much to her dad’s dismay. While Tyya’s father is returning all the one hundred boxes of ice cream and other goodies with which Tyya has filled her cart, Tyya is in fact very well-behaved: Just as her father tells her, she does not move or make any sound while he returns all the junk food to the shelves. Tyya is so well-behaved and still that she is mistaken for a doll, placed on a shelf with a price tag on her nose, $29.95, and even nearly bought for this bargain price by a few would-be shoppers. Finally, while Tyya’s father, Tyya, and her brother and sister are all arguing with the cashier—“This is my own kid. I don’t have to pay for my own kid”!— Tyya says to her dad, “Don’t you think I’m worth twenty nine dollars and ninety-five cents”? Tyya’s father pays the cashier, gives Tyya “a big kiss… and a big hug,” at which point Tyya says, “Daddy, you finally bought something good after all.”

Now, unfortunately, neither the people of Israel in Exodus or in John’s Gospel were as well-behaved or as endearing as Tyya in Robert Munsch’s book. In fact, many passages in our Bible and a few places in Israel (Meribah and Massah, for example) are named for the habit the people under Moses and Aaron had of complaining constantly, testing not only Moses and Aaron but God. We could say that the people of Israel in the Bible are consistently among the world’s biggest complainers.

In the Book of Exodus today, they are like little children trailing behind their father in the grocery store, while he buys bread, eggs, milk, cheese, and (ugh!) spinach… —“nothing any good”! No, worse yet, while they are in the depths of hunger, walking through a hot, dry desert, God gives them manna to satisfy their hunger. But how do the people of Israel receive this frost-like substance God gives them to eat? They look at it sideways and wrinkle their noses at it as if it were (ugh!) spinach or something; “nothing any good,” anyway. They ask (we can imagine, grumbling), “What is it”?

I find it amusing that, in Hebrew and related languages from the ancient Middle East, “manna” or “man” is a question word (an interrogative pronoun), so the Israelites’ question about what the flaky, frosty substance was that coated the ground in the desert becomes the name of this substance: “Man(na) (What is it)”? Manna!

But, by the time of Jesus and our Gospels, several generations later in Israel, the people of Israel do not seem to have progressed much beyond their old habit of complaining constantly. Jesus has just multiplied the few loaves and fish by thousands, so that everybody had more than enough to eat, and still the people clamour and complain; still they ask Jesus for a sign so that they may believe in him. How exasperating! The crowds in Jesus’ time, like the Israelites led by Moses and Aaron, are like little Tyya in the grocery store in Robert Munsch’s story: They keep asking for “something good,” not realizing that the something good, earthly sustenance, which points to something even better, eternal life, has already been offered to them. Maybe if Jesus had multiplied the ice cream, cookies, chocolate bars, or ginger ale, instead of loaves of bread and fish, the crowds would have gotten the point. On second thought, somehow I doubt this.

The point I suggest Jesus makes through the multiplication of the loaves and his Bread of Life Discourse that follows in John’s Gospel and that we will hear over the next few Sundays, is that the sign itself does not matter so much as how we receive it and what we do with it. The same is true of any of Jesus’ signs in the Gospels, or any of the signs of God’s presence among God’s people (like the manna in the desert) in the Old Testament: How we receive and what we do with these signs matters.

What do I mean by this? Jesus does not ask the crowds to arrive at a pithy, maybe philosophical name or formulation of Church teaching that would describe the essential meaning of the sign: Real Presence or transubstantiation, for example, however true and right (if mystifying) those terms are. Jesus does not ask us, first and foremost, to connect his multiplication of the loaves and fish and Bread of Life Discourse to our Eucharist (although certainly that connection can be and has been made, rightly so). No, Jesus asks only one thing of us in today’s Gospel from John: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

To believe in Jesus, the one whom God has sent, means to trust completely that Jesus has our best interest at heart. Jesus desires one thing for us: Eternal life. And to trust completely in Jesus and his one desire of eternal life for us is to allow our hearts; our minds, whenever we experience a sign in nature, in this earthly life, of God’s presence and goodness, to connect that sign to God’s ultimate desire for us to have that same experience on an infinite level. That is eternal life. But I think, maybe, to ask of us to trust Jesus completely, without reservation, in this way, is to ask something very difficult of ourselves. This level of trust in anybody is difficult, simply because nobody on Earth; nobody we know; no leader within the Church; certainly not I can possibly command the completeness of trust that Jesus can and does ask of us. There are some people who come close to the kind of authority and command of our trust that Jesus is able to ask of us. Those people are the saints who walk among us. And, thank God, there has never been an age when we have been without a saint who has walked this earth with us and then interceded for us from heaven with God.

Who, then, might our role models be in receiving Jesus’ signs as a call to trust completely in God and God’s call to eternal life? Do we remember the boy in last Sunday’s Gospel, the one who gave the few loaves and fish to Jesus, who then multiplied those loaves and fish to feed the thousands? That little boy in John’s Gospel is our example of complete trust in God and in Jesus, whom God has sent. The boy does not complain that he only has a few loaves and fish to offer. He simply, humbly gives what he has to Jesus. And Jesus multiplies what he gives him into a sign of what heaven will be: A banquet beyond our wildest imagination, where everybody is fed, with abundant leftovers.

If we still have difficulty trusting in God and in Jesus, whom God has sent, in a world that gives us not a few sad countersigns to heaven; signs that instead point to the scandal of human sin, I invite us to familiarize ourselves with the example of at least one of the many saints who have trusted in God in the way Jesus asks us; have recognized signs of the greatness of heaven in nature—God’s creation—sometimes amid great adversity. I think of the cry of St. Augustine of Hippo to God: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” From the last century or so, we have the simple prayer of St. Faustina Kowalska: “Jesus, I trust in you.” Or there is the profound prayer of total trust in God of Blessed Charles de Foucauld, founder of the Little Brothers of Jesus, hermit, evangelist to the Touareg people, martyr of the desert of Tamanrasset, Algeria: “Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.”

In these prayers of saints, there is no complaint. There is no turning up our noses at the nourishment God offers us or asking, “What is it”? There is no seeking something good, or better than what God has already offered us. There is only complete trust that God will take what we offer back to God of his goodness, and multiply it so that the saving food God gives us will last forever.

Homily for Sunday, 11 July 2021– Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

We might find it curious that, in the Bible, nobody God calls to be a prophet wants to be a prophet. Why is this? There are several reasons why the Biblical prophets do not tend to want to be prophets. Some of them are all too aware of their own inadequacy, moral or otherwise, for the task. I think of Isaiah, who pleads with God, to no avail, to choose a better prophet than him, “a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips,” or Elijah, who hides from God in a cave to avoid being sent out as a prophet: “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”

Other prophets in the Bible have other reasons for being reluctant to accept God’s call to prophesy. Prophets during the time of Israel’s kings in the Old Testament tended not to have good reputations, or they were not widely accepted by the people who were meant to receive their messages. Many kings of the time hired “professional” prophets, who usually told the kings what they wanted to hear. Some prophets of Israel’s royal court were not simply flatterers to the king in this way, but these court prophets who challenged the king (much less got away with it with their lives or reputations intact) were few.

Enter Amos, whose call to be a prophet we hear about today. Amos is no professional prophet of any royal court. He is a humble “herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees.” In fact, Amos is not even from the Kingdom of Israel, but from Judah. Now, this becomes a bit confusing: After the death of King Solomon, son of King David, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah, centered around Jerusalem, in the south. Judah often claimed to have held onto belief in only the one God, whereas Israel and its kings believed in or worshipped many gods. This led to Israel and Judah resenting each other, so we can understand a bit better why “Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” orders Amos to return to Judah and “never again prophesy at Bethel.”

The setting of Bethel for Amos’ call as a prophet is appropriate; it is also a bit ironic. Bethel literally means “house of El” or “house of God” (El is a Hebrew name for God). It was near the border between Israel and Judah. Bethel is where the Book of Genesis says Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth took place. Yet because Bethel is situated where it is—not as far away as Jerusalem, for people who lived in the northern Kingdom of Israel—Jeroboam, the first king of Israel as a kingdom separate from Judah, built golden calves, one at Bethel, so that the people of Israel did not have to travel all the way to the temple of Jerusalem to worship. Does this story of a golden calf sound familiar? The presence of a golden calf in Bethel led the people of Israel to worship it, an idol, instead of the one God of Israel, just as the golden calf in Exodus had led the people of Israel into idolatry back then. Bethel, the “house of God,” had become a house of idol worship; a house of a false god.

God sends Amos to Bethel to preach against this worship of false gods, and all the unfaithfulness and injustices that went along with it. And, we can imagine, Amos and his message were not well-received by the king of Israel, the officials of his court, or most of the people of Israel. It would be as if a foreign leader or influential person were to travel to another country today and criticize the leaders and people of that country on their own soil. This is usually not received well, even if the criticism is justified.

“Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” essentially tells Amos to go home to Judah and spare Israel and its king the criticism Amos directs against them. This would be well and good if Amos were one of those professional royal court prophets kings of that time were used to. But Amos’ prophetic mission is not his own; it is from God. Amos never wanted to be a prophet, but God had called him from tending his flock and sycamore trees to prophesy in Israel.

In Mark’s Gospel today, we meet more people—Jesus’ twelve apostles—who never wanted to be prophets and probably could not have dreamed of the mission with which Jesus would entrust them. Yet Jesus does just that: He entrusts his apostles with a prophetic mission; a difficult mission at that. They are to travel light, so to speak, with only a staff. (This would be a good skill for me to practice, as a priest of a religious order who has traveled and served in many places.) Jesus’ apostles are to be totally reliant on God and the hospitality of the people they meet. Should the people in any place “refuse to hear” the Twelve, they are to leave, shaking the dust off their feet “as a testimony against them.”

Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve highlight the difficulty of their journey and the message they are to preach. It is a message of repentance, after all. And maybe Jesus’ instruction to his apostles to shake the dust from their feet should some people not receive their message well especially calls to mind the difficulty of the apostles’ journey and message. Nowadays, like many good Biblical sayings, though, “shake the dust from your feet” has become a convenient, catchy phrase: Do not let a disagreement, or somebody’s ill reception of a message we want to communicate, bother us; simply move on. But, whenever I hear this Gospel, with this instruction of Jesus to his apostles, I try to understand it as a challenge to listen more attentively, especially as a priest and especially to people who disagree or are not receptive, for whatever reason, to my idea or message. I think a key prophetic skill for today might be to develop this reflex to listen; not to misunderstand “shake the dust from your feet” as an excuse not to listen to those with whom we differ (or even find disagreeable).

Another key characteristic of a prophet, if we look at Jesus’ Apostles, or Amos in the Old Testament, is that a true prophet recognizes that prophecy is a gift and a commissioning from God. Amos was not a professional prophet of a royal court, somebody who wanted to be a prophet. In fact, God called him to prophesy on foreign soil to a king and people who were not receptive to his message. The same was true of Jesus’ Apostles, in many ways. To what extent is the same true of us?

This may sound far-fetched to many people (maybe less so within this group), but God calls each of us, in virtue of our baptism, to be prophetic. In baptism, each and every one of us is anointed, as Christ himself was, “Priest, Prophet, and King.” This does not necessarily mean that we will accomplish great feats of faith, or be great and powerful communicators or educators of our faith, although some of us will be or are already.

Ultimately, a prophet by definition is one who speaks for God. Our speaking (or acting, or listening) in the place of God, impelled by the call of God, may lead us to communicate a message that is unpopular, in a place or time where we will be dismissed as strange or even ridiculed. This was Amos’ reality, as he preached faithfulness to one God to the unreceptive ears of Israel’s king and his court. Our prophetic baptismal calling may be more like that of Jesus’ first apostles, whom Jesus sent forth to preach repentance (similarly to how Amos was sent forth but, in the apostles’ case, they worked more as a team or in small groups than the more solitary prophets of the Old Testament, like Amos, did), but also to console and to heal the sick. More often, we will live out our prophetic mission in unassuming ways, making God known and heard through small everyday acts of kindness and mercy.

There are perhaps countless ways to live our prophetic calling from God, but each of us holds in common a baptismal calling to act, speak, listen—to do all we do—in a way that makes God most present in our world. And, as the letter to the Ephesians reminds us, we did not choose this prophetic calling from God, but God has chosen us for a purpose. God has chosen us “in Christ,” not only in baptism but “before the foundation of the world.” This is remarkable language from Ephesians!

In whatever particular way we live our prophetic calling from God, we can be assured, Ephesians says, that we have been blessed “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” We are called, yet also equipped with every blessing, to be God’s prophets in our time: To be God’s ears that listen, God’s mouth that speaks, God’s hands that work; that heal; that console, God’s feet that carry us to each encounter with God’s people, while we trust fully in God’s strength and blessings to see our prophetic journey through.

Homily for Tuesday, 6 July 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: Genesis 32:23-33; Psalm 17:1b, 2-3, 6-7ab, 8b, 15; Matthew 9:32-38

Tuesday of the 14th week in Ordinary Time

Whenever I hear today’s Gospel reading, I am saddened somewhat by Matthew’s description of the crowds following Jesus about from village to village while he healed their “every disease and every sickness” as “like sheep without a shepherd.”

The question I ask myself when I hear this—the crowds were “like sheep without a shepherd”—is how Jesus responds to this situation of the crowds. One word stands out for me in this respect: Jesus responds to the situation of the crowds—lost, scattered, “harassed and helpless,” with their diseases and sicknesses in need of healing, their being like “like sheep without a shepherd”—with compassion. Jesus, Matthew says, “had compassion for them.”

True compassion is difficult. At least as Jesus, or Matthew, understand it, compassion is a full-person, body-and-soul experience. The word Matthew uses to describe Jesus compassion toward the crowds is rather graphic: Here, Jesus is (figuratively, we might hope) moved to his inmost depths for the people following him.

The other day, I was reading one of my favourite Catholic blogs, called “Where Peter Is.” This blog reported on a letter Pope Francis handwrote to Jesuit Fr. James Martin both to congratulate Fr. Martin’s nephew on his confirmation and to thank Fr. Martin for his ministry (which is controversial among many people) with LGBTQ+ Catholics. Pope Francis writes in his letter to Fr. Martin, “The Father’s ‘style’ has three features: Closeness, compassion, and tenderness.”

The “Where Peter Is” article points out that emphasis on compassion, connected to pastoral closeness and tenderness, is nothing new for Pope Francis. Compassion is a major focus of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which the “Where Peter Is” article calls “the programmatic text of [Francis’] pontificate.”

Evangelii Gaudium often connects compassion to attentive listening to the faithful in their concrete life situations. Listening with compassion, Pope Francis says in Evangelii Gaudium, helps us to hear “the outcry of the poor” and suffering. When sin is present, compassionate listening can help us “to correct others and to help them to grow on the basis of a recognition of the objective evil of their actions… but without making judgments about their responsibility and culpability.” Pope Francis goes so far as to say that “only thorough such respectful and compassionate listening can we enter on the paths of true growth and awaken a yearning for the Christian ideal: The desire to respond fully to God’s love and to bring to fruition what he has sown in our lives.”

I wonder if this may make compassion, together with attentive listening, closeness and tenderness, to seem easier than these are. I have experienced, as I am sure is true of anybody who is engaged in any pastoral ministry, that compassion, listening, closeness, and tenderness take constant practice. Compassion, the ability to be moved to our depths, so to speak, by another’s need, is a self-emptying experience. But I think its faithful and constant practice will help us to respond to all kinds of situations in which the faithful find themselves “like sheep without a shepherd,” whether it is in ministry to the poor, to the LGBTQ+ community (as in Fr. Martin’s ministry) or, for instance, the long process of compassion, penance, and reconciliation in light of our Church’s participation in the Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

May our ministry, our encounter with the People of God in their joys and also their needs and perhaps suffering, be a ministry of growth in compassion, in listening, closeness and tenderness in a way in which we empty ourselves; in ways in which we emulate Jesus who had compassion for the crowds who followed him.