Homily for Sunday, 30 January 2022– Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; Psalm 71:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 15-17; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

One of my brother Basilian priests has said that, when we hear readings as we do today in which we hear a short verse or two, and then the reading skips over a section before continuing on, it is sometimes a good idea to pay attention to the part that is skipped over.

So what gets skipped over in our readings today? From the Book of Jeremiah we hear God’s call of Jeremiah to serve as God’s prophet. Luke’s Gospel also features a prophetic call story, that of Jesus, beginning his public ministry in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth.

The Book of Jeremiah begins with God’s call to the prophet, lines from our Scriptures than which few are more beautiful: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” For me, God’s opening revelation to Jeremiah, the beginning of God’s call to Jeremiah to be his prophet, is always a beautiful reminder that, whatever I had planned for my life; however we have discerned how God is calling us to live and serve God in our lives, God had a plan, for me and for each one of us, before we were even conceived!

But what if we do not want to do or be exactly who God is calling us to be? What if the vocation to which God is calling us is, say, one that will put our life in danger? Such is the case with Jeremiah. As soon as Jeremiah hears the call of God to be a prophet to God’s people, he senses the real danger to his life, and immediately tries to refuse God’s call.

And this is the part of God’s call to Jeremiah that our reading skips over today. Jeremiah protests: “I do not know how to speak. I am too young.” God, do you not know that every prophet before me has been a laughingstock in Israel; that some have even been killed? Yet Jeremiah’s protests are to no avail. God has his heart set on Jeremiah as God’s prophet, and even promises to protect Jeremiah against the worst the people would do to him. “They will fight against you,” God reassures Jeremiah, “but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you… to deliver you.”

I will admit that the part our Gospel reading from Luke skips over today is not really skipped over. We heard last Sunday what today’s Gospel reading does not repeat: The mission statement of Jesus’ public ministry, in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth. Jesus is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Our Gospel reading picks up again today where Jesus rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says to everybody gathered in the synagogue, with all eyes in the assembly “fixed on him”: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I find it consoling to be reminded that Jesus’ public ministry started well that day in his hometown. In that synagogue of Nazareth, Luke says, “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Even the assembly’s identification of Jesus as “Joseph’s son” is spun positively in Luke’s Gospel, whereas in the other Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and John), when the people who hear Jesus ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”, they mean it in an insulting way. And, I do not know how all of us feel but, when Jesus’ audience belittles him by asking, “Is this not Joseph’s son”; the son of the carpenter, I begin to feel just a little indignant, wanting to defend not only Jesus but Joseph, the humble, righteous man whom God chose to mentor Jesus like a father in this world.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ public ministry begins well, even in the eyes of the people of his hometown. This is in marked contrast to Jeremiah, or in fact most if not all the prophets: Their ministry is poorly-received by the people from the start. It is no wonder that Jeremiah, from the beginning of the biblical book in his name, wanted to get out of being a prophet to Judah as God had called him from before he was even conceived in the womb.

But the good will of the people toward Jesus would not last. We know this from what we hear in Luke’s Gospel today. And we know this from the fact that, even though Jesus escapes the murderous rage of the mob who wants to “hurl [Jesus] off the cliff” at the end of today’s Gospel reading, his destiny—the focal point of our Gospels—is to be tortured and crucified; to die for us in this exceedingly cruel way.

It is unclear from Luke’s account what the people in the assembly that day in Nazareth wanted to hear from Jesus. But maybe they wanted to hear a message that would support elements of tribalism and sectarianism in their social and religious attitudes. Maybe they were unaware, until those tribalistic and sectarian attitudes were kindled into open fury at Jesus’ message in their synagogue, of the extent to which those attitudes had affected them and become engrained in them.

We, sisters and brothers, are not exempt, either, from the kind of insular tribalism and sectarianism—a “silo mentality”—that nearly led to Jesus being killed on the very first day of his public ministry, in his own hometown. It was the movement and the mentality among Jesus’ own people that cried out, “We are God’s chosen people,” over and against the people of other nations and faiths: The Phoenician people, represented in Jesus’ commentary in today’s Gospel by the widow of Zarephath, to whom Elijah was sent in a time of famine in 1 Kings; the Syrians, represented by the Syrian king’s general, Naaman, who is afflicted with leprosy but healed by Elijah’s prophetic successor, Elisha. “We are God’s chosen people,” the people in the synagogue of Nazareth protested. “God’s promise of salvation; God’s covenant; God’s presence would never be with other people as it is for us”! Why should we be concerned for the other; for people not of our nation? It was Israel first, after all. And so their rage was kindled against Jesus.

But how often do we hear or observe the same silo mentality at work today? How often do we hear cries of “our country first”; our tribe first; our religious creed first; our social “in” group first; and ultimately me first? Why should I be concerned about the other person, especially the poor or otherwise excluded person? Why should I be concerned (some say today) about protecting public health, out of love of neighbour, in the face of the public health crisis our world continues to face, and that disproportionately affects the already-disadvantaged? Jesus’ counter-message to this entitled and selfish insularity is as challenging and as controversial today as when he preached it in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth. It is challenging and controversial to many of our sister and brother Christians of our time.

Jesus’ message is challenging and controversial still, first because it did not begin with Jesus and, second, because his message is not some superficial all-inclusiveness, but an inclusiveness that is preferential toward the people whom this world’s elites exclude in the name of nation first; the well-to-do of society first; the advantaged first; me first. Jesus’ vision of the reign of God on earth—think of this when we pray, as part of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”—is one that is preferentially inclusive of the poor, the disadvantaged, the outsider, the poor first. Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God is one preferentially inclusive of those whom the entitled and advantaged exclude: Not one Israelite, but the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian!

This vision of God’s reign on earth was the vision of God’s prophets: Isaiah, whose scroll Jesus reads and interprets in the synagogue of Nazareth; Jeremiah, whom we hear first from the word of God this morning. Isaiah’s message was preferentially inclusive: All the nations would know and be invited to witness the glory of God that had saved Israel time and again. Jeremiah’s message was preferentially inclusive: Israel’s slavishness to the temple of Jerusalem would mean nothing if its people did not open their hearts to practice justice preferentially toward the least well-off: The poor, the foreigner, the widow, the orphan.

So, indeed, may we pay attention to the parts our readings at Mass skip over. But, also, may we pay attention to those parts God is urging us not to skip over: The parts of the word of God that trouble us; that are controversial to us; that challenge us or our societies in fairly well-off countries like our own to open our hearts to the least-advantaged among us first.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” This is God’s vision of justice; God’s vision of the reign of God on earth for which we pray. It is a vision that calls us beyond ourselves; beyond our social circles; often beyond our comfort, to be “good news to the poor.” It is a vision we are invited not to skip over; a vision to ensure that God’s word of our Scriptures continues to be “fulfilled in [our] hearing.”

Homily for Sunday, 2 January 2022– The Epiphany of the Lord

Readings of the day: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 12-13; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

This is maybe no more than simple coincidence, but it seems to me that, over the last few years, at around this time of year, space exploration has been in the news. Three years ago, on January 1, 2019, the New Horizons space probe made a fly-by of a small, snowman-shaped object in the Kuiper Belt, outside the orbit of Neptune. This object was eventually named Arrokoth after the word for “cloud” in the Powhatan language once spoken by the Indigenous people of the area around Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, where Arrokoth was discovered. Arrokoth became the farthest object from Earth ever visited by a spacecraft.

And then, just a few days ago, on Christmas Day 2021, we may have heard news of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana. The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to observe deeper into space and farther into the infrared light spectrum (invisible to the human eye) than the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which discovered Arrokoth.

I think we can say that there is a natural human fascination with what is beyond our Earth: The heavens; the stars; the universe’s age and continuous expansion; or even whether there is intelligent life beyond Earth. And our fascination with this beyond pre-dates even the first, most rudimentary scientific instruments to aid our space observation, never mind Hubble or the James Webb telescopes. Our fascination with the beyond dates back to ancient times.

Our Gospel account of the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus and the main figures in this event is familiar to us. Matthew’s Gospel presents us with magi or “wise men from the East” who were drawn to Bethlehem by a star to pay homage to the newborn Messiah, Jesus. We know little about these “wise men from the East,” from Matthew or any other source, besides the gifts they brought to honour Jesus, and that they returned from honouring Jesus “to their own country by another road” to avoid the ill-intentioned Herod. The meaning of the gifts of the magi has been the focus of theological reflection: Gold is most often the gift for somebody royal, so the magi reveal the newborn Jesus as somehow a king. Frankincense is associated with prayer—incense, with its pleasing smell, rises to heaven; to God—so the magi reveal this child as somehow God. And myrrh is a burial spice, so the magi reveal Jesus as one who, although he is God and a king, has submitted himself to every aspect of our humanity, including our experiences of suffering and death.

I use the word “reveal”—by their gifts the magi reveal the newborn Jesus to our world as a king, as God, and as the one who will die to save us—because this is what our celebration today is about: Epiphany is a Greek word that means “making known” or “revelation.”

This Epiphany; this revelation of our God born into our world as fully human is to all peoples and nations. This Epiphany we celebrate is truly universal. But it begins with these “wise men from the East.” Who were these “wise men from the East”? Were they, as some have speculated, Zoroastrian astrologers from Persia who drew spiritual meaning from the movements of the stars? Were there three wise men—something about which Matthew’s Gospel is not clear; Matthew only says that they brought three gifts? All of this is hard to say.

We know about these “wise men from the East,” though, that something—a star—drew their attention toward the west. We know that the Epiphany of our Lord to all peoples; all nations; to the universe God created began with a very simple, yet profound act: These “wise men from the East” looked up. They looked up at the heavens with some kind of awe. And their awe, whether at the beauty of the heavens or the unusual appearance of that star to the west, led them to set off from their homeland. Their awe led them to set off toward a land that may well have been unknown to them.

The awe of these “wise men from the East”; their simple act of looking up, led them to discern that some event had taken place that had changed the world. Somehow, in the course of their journey, they discerned that a child had been born, one who was being called “king of the Jews.” Who had told them this, somewhere between their homeland and Jerusalem? And why were the magi interested in a Jewish baby, since they were probably not Jews? How did they know what gifts to bring the newborn Jesus, or the meaning of these gifts? Again, all this is hard to say.

But, most vital to the encounter the magi would have with the Christ child; most vital to the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth to the whole created universe as fully God and fully human (fully inscribed in God’s creation; his divinity clothed in created matter), is the starting point of this Epiphany encounter: The magi looked up with awe.

When was the last time we looked up; when we looked beyond ourselves with simple, profound awe? Maybe I have an advantage (at least I think I do, and I thank God for this) over many people, with some background in biology and a lively interest in the sciences; in any case my interest in science and what this means for us as people of faith leads me to look up and outward with awe almost constantly. God has created for us truly a beautiful world; a beautiful universe. And I am in awe, constantly, that our God (at least the God in whom I believe and I think our Catholic Church believes, most fundamentally) would create for us a world at the same time intelligible to our human senses and minds, but that would push us to want to discover more of what we still do not know.

In our time, we have sophisticated scientific instruments, like infrared telescopes, to help in our discovery of what we still do not know about our universe. We have the gift of hindsight: Of past events; past scientific observations affirmed as fact (or nearly) by repeatedly producing the same results. We have the gift of hindsight that the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ in Bethlehem is now over two thousand years past. Even Matthew’s Gospel today interprets the events of the Lord’s Epiphany based on hindsight. Matthew interprets these events based on Israel’s prophets who lived before him: “For so it has been written by the Prophet [in this case Micah]: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

We can be fairly sure that Israel’s prophets themselves relied on hindsight; on previous experience of Israel’s relationship with God. Micah’s prophecy that Matthew’s Gospel interprets in light of the Epiphany of our Lord (again, I think we can be sure) did not originally foresee God entering our world as a human baby in Bethlehem a few centuries after the prophet’s lifetime. Micah, like all Israel’s prophets, was interpreting events of his present in light of Israel’s past relationship with God. Even Isaiah, in the reading we hear today, interprets his and Israel’s present in light of God’s past relationship with God’s people. Israel of Biblical times was almost persistently in turmoil; in exile; under occupation. The prophets strove to remind Israel that they had (perhaps miraculously) survived as God’s people; as a nation to that point in history, and that whatever affliction they were facing would pass, if they trusted in God. This is why Isaiah is able to remind his people in past tense, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you”!

Once again, St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, had and used his gift of hindsight. “The mystery” of God made human, St. Paul says, “was made known to me by revelation.” St. Paul is able to interpret, from this past revelation—a past Epiphany—that God was in the process of revealing something new; something still more universal: “The Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body” of Christ, through God becoming human in the person of Jesus.

St. Paul, like Isaiah, Micah, and all Israel’s prophets; like Matthew and all the Gospels, invite us to make use of our gift of hindsight. It, too, is from God: The gift of discerning the hand of God in past events and applying this discernment to our present. But this hindsight; this discernment must lead us to something more. If it does not, our hindsight can be misused. Hindsight alone can close us in on ourselves. Hindsight alone can lead us to dwell on our experiences of evil; our experiences of suffering; our experiences that can lead us to doubt God’s hand in the creation and sustenance of our universe; our world and all things; all life in it. With hindsight alone, we could never set out, as the “wise men from the East” did, to encounter God’s Epiphanies that change our world; that are saving and will save our world.

What must act along with hindsight? In a word, awe: This must act along with the gift of hindsight. With awe, then, may we look up and out beyond ourselves. May we bring not perhaps the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to greet our newborn God, King, and Saviour; but may we simply and profoundly bring our gifts of awe and thanksgiving to God for God’s creation and sustenance of creation; of us. As the magi did, we lay before our God revealed to our universe as one like us our gifts of awe and thanksgiving. And we return from this encounter with our God in human flesh—this universal Epiphany we celebrate today—with overwhelming joy.

Homily for Saturday, 1 January 2022– The Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God

Readings of the day: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

Does anybody here besides me find how we, the Church, present and venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary to be, in a word, ambiguous? We celebrate the Blessed Virgin Mary, today especially, as Mother of God.

We believe, going back to the Council of Ephesus of 431, that Mary is the Mother of the Christ, or Christ-bearer, but that she is more than this. To call Mary the Christ-bearer was fine, Ephesus said. But if she were only Christ-bearer, this could lead to confusion among the faithful (and even bishops and other authority figures in the Church) that somehow the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, can be divine and human, but never at the same time. To avoid any confusion, the bishops of the Council of Ephesus emphasized the divine nature of the Christ (without, let us be clear, ever forgetting his human nature, distinct but never separate from his divine nature). Ephesus first called Mary not only Christ-bearer but God-bearer or Mother of God.

We believe Mary to have been preserved by God from sin, from the very moment of her conception in the womb of St. Anne. We believe that, at the end of Mary’s earthly life, God took her, body and soul together, into heaven; that neither Mary’s soul nor her body ever knew decay. We believe that Mary was ever-virgin, before and after the birth of Jesus.

We venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary as the model or ideal image of the Church. And we are right to believe and venerate all these aspects of Mary. Yet, in a way, does our celebration; our veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all these events and aspects unique to Mary not make Mary so different from us, or so much greater than any of us, so that imitating her in our lives becomes unrealistic?

None of us were conceived immaculately, without sin from the very moment of our conception. None of us have given birth and raised a child who is actually God. None of us, at least before the return of Jesus Christ in glory at the end of time, will be assumed, body and soul, into heaven.

This is the ambiguity about our celebration and veneration of Mary of which I speak. So, if we cannot imitate the Blessed Virgin Mary (at least not immediately) in many of the ways in which we celebrate her—immaculately conceived; the Mother of God, the bearer of God in the flesh into our world; assumed body and soul into heaven—how can we imitate Mary? How can we follow Mary’s example, so that we become, as well as possible, the Church of which Mary is the ideal image or model?

Our readings today give us clues as to how we can imitate Mary, Mother of God and Mother and model of the Church, and how we can imitate Jesus, even though, of course, none of us is God. Today St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians reminds us of who we are in relationship to Jesus by reminding us of Jesus’ (and so our) relationship with Mary. “When the fullness of time had come,” St. Paul says to the Galatians, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.”

Unless any of us were born into this world by some other miraculous way, I am sure that all of us, like Jesus, were “born of a woman.” All of us, like Jesus, or Mary, or any person who has ever lived, have been born of a human mother. This common (we can say, biological) feature to all of us is so important to our Church, insofar as our relationship with Mary and with Jesus, that Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, begins its final chapter, on “The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the Mystery of Christ and the Church,” with the words we hear today from the Letter to the Galatians.

Jesus was “born of a woman.” So was each of us. This is our starting point, sisters and brothers, when we consider our relationship with Jesus through Mary, Mother of God; when we consider our identity as Church, in relationship with Mary, Mother of the Church. “Wishing in his supreme goodness and wisdom to effect the redemption of the world, ‘when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman… that we might receive the adoption of sons and daughters,” this final chapter of Lumen Gentium begins.

We, who have each been born of a woman, have been redeemed precisely by God’s choice to enter this world as one like us, born of a woman; born of the most blessed among women, Mary, Mother of God. So when we honour the dignity of women (beginning with, but not only, our mothers)—in our homes, in our public places, in our workplaces, in our Church—in all our actions and our words, we honour the way in which God has chosen to save us: By being born into this world by a woman, Mary, Mother of God. When we speak and act so that women, our sisters in God’s creation, are spared any form of violence especially on account of gender; when we speak and act in ways that value and revere women as true subjects of God’s beautiful creation, and not mere objects for economic or other selfish, loveless gain, we honour the way in which God has chosen to save us.

In his homily two years ago today, on this Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, Pope Francis reminded us of the essential role of Mary for our salvation, and connected this with the honour and respect due women today, honour and respect too often denied our sisters in the image of Mary of Nazareth. Pope Francis says, strikingly, “From [Mary], a woman, salvation came forth and thus there is no salvation without a woman… Humanity’s salvation came forth from the body of a woman: We can understand our degree of humanity by how we treat a woman’s body. How often are women’s bodies sacrificed on the profane altars of advertising, of profiteering, of pornography, exploited like a canvas to be used? Yet women’s bodies must be freed from consumerism; they must be respected and honoured.”

The more we respect and honour women in our lives and in our world, the more we draw close to Mary, Mother of God through whom our salvation entered our world. The more we respect and honour women, the better we are, as individuals and as a Church.

How else might we honour, respect, and revere women? How else, by honouring, respecting, revering women, might we glorify God by being more like Mary, our mother; Mother of God; Mother and model of the Church? We might honour women, and so honour Mary and, ultimately, give glory to God, by actively striving for peace. Women in our world are disproportionately poor; disproportionately among the people subject to unpaid, unrecognized, if not slave labour; disproportionately affected by war and violence; overrepresented (along with children) among those who flee their homes and countries because of violence.

Yet today the Book of Numbers gives us an ancient blessing. It is God’s blessing through Moses. It is God’s blessing to “the children of Israel”; to us as God’s children, born of and saved through a woman: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”

Today we, the Church, also mark the World Day of Peace. And, when we think of progress toward greater peace in our world, we might think first of working to end war and violence on this greater scale. But we hear in Numbers this prayer for peace. Have we ever prayed this for our mothers; for our fathers; for the members of our families and households, for peace in our homes and among our loved ones? Have we ever prayed this prayer for somebody we have difficulty loving as God loves us, especially if this person is a member of our family or somebody close to us: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace”?

This prayer, my sisters and brothers, is one way in which we might honour God; our God who chose Mary to be Mother of God; Mother of our salvation; Mother of the Prince of Peace, our Lord Jesus Christ. Mary’s eyes were the first to gaze upon the infant Saviour of the world. Mary’s arms were the first to cradle the Son of God. Mary’s body gave birth and nourished the Christ child. Mary’s heart, as Luke’s Gospel reminds us beautifully today, was the first to treasure and ponder what all this would mean for the world: That God had chosen her, the Virgin daughter of Nazareth, daughter of God, to bring our salvation into this world; to raise him alongside faithful St. Joseph; to be with him as he served, healed, preached, suffered, died, rose and ascended to heaven; to be taken, body and soul, to God’s and her Son’s side in heaven when her earthly life was ended.

On this day, like Mary we, too, might let our hearts treasure and ponder. We might pray and act for the Lord’s peace in our world, in our country, in our families and households. In this we honour one another, each born of a woman; we honour, venerate, imitate, and celebrate Mary, Mother of God, Mother and model of our Church; our mother; the mother of the Salvation of the world.