Homily for Friday, 17 September 2021– Memorial of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess, and St. Robert Bellarmine, Bishop, Doctors of the Church

Readings of the day: 1 Timothy 6:2c-12; Psalm 49:6-7, 8-10, 17-18, 19-20; Luke 8:1-3

Friday of the Twenty-fourth week in Ordinary Time

Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is a noticeably brief transitional passage between lengthier and more detailed episodes in Jesus’ Galilean ministry. It is preceded by the meal scene at the home of Simon the Pharisee, the woman who washes and anoints Jesus’ feet, and Jesus’ parable of the two debtors, which we heard in yesterday’s Gospel reading. Today’s passage is followed in Luke by the parable of the sower.

For its brevity, though, today’s Gospel reading says a lot to us about the diversity yet unity of the earliest Church, the first disciples of Jesus, across longstanding social and religious distinctions. Of course, Luke says, “the twelve were with Jesus”; the twelve Apostles are reminiscent of the twelve Old Testament tribes united as one nation of Israel. But then Luke, alone among the four Gospels, includes today’s detail about various women who followed Jesus: “Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many [unnamed] others.”

What is a common trait among these diverse women and earliest disciples of Jesus? Luke says that they “provided for Jesus and the twelve out of their resources.” This is to say that, out of their diversity of resources—not only monetary but the particular gifts each brought to the community of disciples of Jesus—they worked to ensure the unity of these disciples in Christ. I think we can presume that the twelve; the women; all these earliest disciples of Jesus were diverse, if we only consider their personal backgrounds and material wealth, let alone other points of diversity. With her connections to the royal court of Herod, Joanna may have had some wealth. Mary Magdalene is often portrayed as wealthy. The Gospel says little about Susanna besides her name, and less still about several unnamed disciples of Jesus at the time.

We may know that, in terms of the Church’s liturgy, for weekday Masses in Ordinary Time the central theme of the first reading does not purposely fit together with that of the Gospel. Yet (please allow me to break this mostly unwritten rule of preaching here) I cannot help but see a point in common between the women in Luke’s Gospel who provide for Jesus and the twelve “out of their resources” and the caution to Timothy in our first reading today that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

Money and other forms of material wealth are not in themselves evil, as long as they are used most justly, to ensure that nobody lacks at least the necessities of life. It is the individualistic “love of money”; the love of and selfish focus to excess on one’s individual rights when this negates the basic rights of others and the common good, that is evil. The author of 1 Timothy essentially urges Timothy and his Christian community (and us) to live their discipleship and dispense their gifts and wealth in the way the women in our Gospel do: With ultimate care for our unity in Christ, in imitation of him.

It is also appropriate today (I am not sure this happens on any other day of the year) that we celebrate the memory of two saintly Doctors of the Church, Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine, on the same day. To be a Doctor of the Church is to be a saint recognized, as only thirty-six people in the Church’s history have, for outstanding teaching of our faith. But Hildegard, Benedictine abbess and mystic of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the 1100s, and Robert, Jesuit entrusted with doctrinal interpretation and implementation of the Council of Trent in the 1500s and early 1600s, could not have been more different.

Perhaps our celebration of Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine is yet another invitation to us to provide out of our diverse sets of resources and gifts for the common good and salvation of all.

Homily for Thursday, 16 September 2021‒ Memorial of St. Cornelius, Pope, and St. Cyprian, Bishop, Martyrs

Readings of the day: 1 Timothy 4:12-16; Psalm 111:7-8, 9, 10; Luke 7:36-50

Thursday of the 24th week in Ordinary Time

Meals can be great occasions to unite people. But have some of us not experienced how meals can be occasions, sadly, for the creation or deepening of divisions among friends and acquaintances, households and families? The conflict over a contentious political or moral issue at a meal for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other holidays is even somewhat stereotyped.

Fr. Eugene LaVerdière, a priest and Biblical scholar of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, wrote a book in the mid-1990s entitled Dining in the Kingdom of God. This book comments on the many meal scenes of Luke’s Gospel. Fr. Laverdière considers the meal scene we hear in today’s Gospel to be the centrepiece of a lengthy section of Luke (chapters 6 to 8) that extends from Jesus’ naming of his twelve Apostles to his healings of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage. In this section of Luke, Jesus emphasizes unity that transcends many social and religious distinctions: Gender, social and religious status, ritual cleanliness, sinners versus the less sinful (since nobody, except for Jesus and Mary, is sinless), and so forth.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus finds himself at dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. A woman enters Simon’s house, bathes Jesus’ “feet with her tears and [dries] them with her hair,” and anoints his feet with oil. Immediately, Simon questions this woman’s presence in his house: If Jesus were a true prophet, he would know “that she is a sinner.” This draws from Jesus the parable of the two debtors, with the essential point that the greater debt or sin a person has to be forgiven, the more love with which that person will respond to having been forgiven.

The meal scene in Luke’s Gospel today is lengthy and detailed. We might focus, rightly, on the extravagance of the probably expensive oil with which the woman anoints Jesus; the drama of her washing Jesus’ feet with her profuse tears and drying them with her hair, as a sign of the main point of Jesus’ parable that follows: The woman’s sin is great, and so is her love poured out for Jesus upon forgiving her.

But Eugene LaVerdière says that this meal scene, placed within a longer section of Luke on Jesus’ call of his Apostles and early Galilean ministry, centres, in a word, on unity. Jesus chooses twelve Apostles to recall the twelve tribes of the one nation of Israel in the Old Testament. Meals in Jesus’ time, LaVerdière says, were ideally a sign of unity across tribal and social or religious status boundaries; the unity of the nation of Israel.

Other commentators on today’s Gospel meal scene invite us to pay attention not only to the fact that a woman interrupts Jesus’ meal with Simon in this way and that the woman is a serious sinner, or that she takes the place of a servant or slave by washing and anointing Jesus’ feet. This is despite her obvious wealth, since she could afford expensive ointment.

On top of all this, the woman would have had to enter the dining room along its edge to anoint Jesus’ feet as she does. This is because, at meals like this in Israel at Jesus’ time, the meal guests would usually recline, with their heads toward the table at the centre of the room and their feet toward the outer walls. This woman—because she is a woman and a serious sinner, but also literally, physically—enters and anoints Jesus’ feet from the periphery of the room. When Simon the Pharisee attempts to ostracize her further, to push her farther to the (more figurative) periphery on account of her sin, Jesus corrects him with a parable. And then he restores the woman to unity, social and religious: “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”

The well-being of the ancient nation of Israel depended on this kind of unity. The well-being of our social units, households, and families depends on the unity to which Jesus calls us today. And our salvation depends on this same unity.

Homily for Sunday, 12 September 2021– Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Isaiah 50:5-9a; Psalm 116:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35

One of the great advantages of living in a religious community of priests, as I do with my brother Basilians Frs. Jim, Dave, and Glenn here in Edmonton, is the depth and diversity of conversation we get into among us. I pray this is also true in our families and households. But recently, just as classes were starting here at St. Joseph’s College and the University of Alberta, Fr. Jim (a philosopher) and I (a theologian) were having our usual deep conversation over breakfast. Fr. Jim asked me an interesting and important question: As a Christian, an academic theologian and instructor at our College, what sets Christianity apart? Why am I a Christian and not of any other noble faith in our world, or of no faith? And what gives me the passion to teach, preach, and study our faith as I do?

I found that, even for somebody who has had as much time to think about these questions as I have, to answer Fr. Jim’s question was difficult. After a long pause, and a short walk over to the coffee pot to fill my mug with the coffee that, for me, is essential to be able to answer such questions early in the day, I blurted out the best answer my insufficiently-caffeinated brain could come up with: The Incarnation. That God, in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity who takes on our human nature, shares fully in all our experiences that make us human, including suffering and death, is to me what distinguishes Christianity from any other faith. The Incarnation, first and foremost, gives me the passion to preach, teach, and study our Christian, Catholic faith as I do.

As I reflect on my answer to Fr. Jim that morning, I do not want to put myself on the level of St. Peter in his answer to Jesus’ question in today’s Gospel: “Who do you say that I am”? But I think there are similarities between my answer and Peter’s answer to Jesus in our Gospel. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include substantially this same event of Peter’s identification of Jesus as the Son of God, “the Christ.” The Gospels differ in some details, though. Only Matthew has Jesus emphasize to Peter how right his answer is, but that he could not possibly have answered so correctly had this not been revealed to him by God “the Father in heaven.” In Luke and Mark, Peter seems to identify Jesus much more fortuitously—“flying by the seat of his pants,” or maybe his tunic, so to speak. Of course, God’s grace in revealing to Peter Jesus’ identity as the Christ is implied by its context in Luke and Mark, if it is not as explicit as in Matthew.

But however Peter is able to answer Jesus’ answer about his identity correctly, amid all kinds of competing options—“John the Baptist… Elijah, and still others, one of the prophets”—with God’s grace (undeniably), before or after his morning coffee, Peter, thanks be to God, gets his answer right. For Peter as for me, the Incarnation is central to who Jesus is. In Jesus, the Son of God, already fully possessing the same eternal divine nature as the Father and the Spirit, has become fully human, fully one of us, and shares in every feature that makes us human, except sin. He takes on human flesh and blood, is born of a human mother, grows up a human child cared for by human parents, breathes, eats, sleeps, prays, serves, heals, teaches… dies a horrific, torturous death, rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven…

Wait, did we just go off script? Even if Jesus is human, he is also God. God cannot suffer and die, right? A significant part of me wants to leap to Peter’s defense when Jesus scolds him so harshly: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do.”

Truly, though, I think part of me is so eager to defend poor Peter because I am so much like him. We are all so much like him. We would not be here, and we would not profess in our Creed all that we do about God who, in the Second Person of the Trinity, as Jesus, the Christ, became fully human if the Incarnation were not, as it was for Peter; as it is for me and for all of us, so essential to our faith. But, alas, like Peter, I tend; we all tend to think “not as God does, but as humans do.” This is not a criticism against us. If it were, I should be foremost in being criticized, because I have that much more responsibility, as a priest who studies and teaches theology, to understand and teach our faith accurately. We cannot help thinking “not as God does, but as humans do.” Our only experience is that of being human. We are not and cannot be God. We need God’s grace to reveal God’s self to us, Father, Son, and Spirit, so that we can think as God does and seek God in all things, all our thoughts, all our experiences, in our natural world and in heaven.

We are all so much like Peter. We are all here because we have all or will all, at some point, answer correctly; profess our faith correctly, as Peter did: “You are the Christ”…“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

Yet we are all so much like Peter. We all constantly need God’s grace to accept and enact the most difficult thing we say we believe: That Jesus, the Christ, suffered, died (or is even able to suffer and die), rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. We, like Peter, need God’s grace to put Satan behind us; Satan who would never allow us to make the profession of faith we do in a God who can and does take our human nature, including our suffering and death, only to transform it into resurrection and ascension to eternal life.

If the Incarnation is truly, as we profess that it is, essential to our Christian faith, then we must be very much like Peter. We must be very much like the “suffering servant” whose hymn we hear today through the prophet Isaiah. Today’s reading from Isaiah is the third of four “servant hymns” in Isaiah. It is the lament of somebody who is suffering horribly for relief from that suffering, but it is also a hymn of hope; of trust in God. This hymn anticipates God’s final vindication of the suffering servant, but also places that vindication in the present tense: “The LORD God helps me… I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near.”

In our Church’s tradition, Isaiah’s servant hymns have long been connected to the passion and death of Jesus Christ. We hear the four servant hymns in order from the Book of Isaiah during Holy Week, just before Easter, each year. But who are Isaiah’s servants, really? (Isaiah was written centuries before Jesus’ time, so I think it is fair to say that Isaiah could not have been referring directly to a future coming of Jesus. Prophets do not foretell the future; they point out God’s action on our behalf in the present). Are the servants of Isaiah the prophet himself, suffering the reproach of Israel’s people, who were not open to his prophecy? Are they other prophets who spoke for God in Israel’s history? Do they stand for the entire people of Israel? Are they meant to remind us of ourselves as a people of God?

I ask this last question especially because, if we ourselves have not suffered, I think most if not all of us know somebody or know of somebody who has. How many of us have known somebody who has suffered greatly, yet has maintained faith and trust in God, that their suffering or even death will not have the final word? And, if we are not the person suffering in this way, yet continuing to believe and hope, how often do we tend to be drawn to those people; to the strength of God working through them?

This, I think, is at the heart of St. James’ bold claim that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” If our faith is true; if the Incarnation is the centre of our faith as we say it is, then our faith will necessarily lend itself to solidarity with others, especially those who suffer in any way. This is so because our solidarity with those who suffer is in imitation of Jesus Christ who, in an unprecedented way in history—in a way no other world religion claims its founder did—entered into full solidarity with us by becoming human like us. In this way, Jesus is Isaiah’s servant, projected into our human history, but so are we.

In this way the Incarnation becomes enacted in our own lives. Jesus continues to take flesh and blood, die, rise, and ascend to heaven in us, insofar as we enter into solidarity with the suffering servants of our time; as we pray and act preferentially for their well-being. This allows us then to sing together the servant’s hymn of lament, but also of hope and trust in God, that eternal life and not suffering or death will have the final word.

Homily for Thursday, 9 September 2021– Ferial

 Readings of the day: Colossians 3:12-17; Psalm 150:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6; Luke 6:27-38

Thursday of the 23rd week in Ordinary Time

Optional Memorial of St. Peter Claver, Priest

What clothing do we keep in our Christian wardrobe, so to speak? I have to admit, and I wonder if I speak for many of us: I am a little more concerned these days about what I wear now that we have returned to our work and study places in public after many months of working from home and online due to the COVID pandemic.

Speaking of our worship, I have served as a priest in enough places among the poor to know to be very careful about how to approach the subject of appropriate clothing for Mass; for our worship spaces. I am sure we have heard the term “Sunday best” to describe proper, dignified Church attire. In places I have served, because of poverty or other reasons, people have arrived at churches in shabby clothing. These people are always a reminder to me not to do or say anything, especially as a minister of the Church, that would marginalize them further. Neither I nor any of us know what is in a person’s heart, based on their clothing no less.

Today, the letter to the Colossians also invites us to put on a kind of clothing that is more important than our physical clothing. Colossians reminds us of the appropriate clothing of the heart: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” And again: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love.”

Love is not measured in percentages of cotton, wool, polyester, nylon, or other materials we might wear. And, in Luke’s Gospel today, Jesus raises the command to love to a new and radical level: “I say to you that listen, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’”

Here, Jesus is not asking us (figuratively) to wear our best clothing, the clothing of love including for our enemies, only on Sundays, or when we are at Mass, or when we feel like it. No, we are to put on this best clothing all the time, even when this clothing might be less comfortable than the clothing of bitterness, rudeness, or impatience that we (yours truly included) may be tempted to put on occasionally when people behave in less-than-loving ways toward us.

I pray sincerely that none of us have or will have enemies; people who challenge us profoundly to love them as God loves them (and us). I pray that none of us will ever be an enemy to anybody else; that, as Colossians says, “the peace of Christ [will] rule in [our] hearts,” and especially at the heart of our presence, our ministry, our study, and our worship here at St. Joseph’s College. But we know as Christians that, to the extent we live our faith in the public square, even humbly and quietly, we may not have enemies, but we will have people who misunderstand us or outright reject at least what they perceive to be important tenets of our faith that they cannot accept.

Our encounters with these people, our encounters with the poor or otherwise marginalized will be opportunities to put on our best clothing, that of love: The invisible clothing that few may perceive immediately that we are wearing, but the clothing that makes us who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ in our world.