Homily for Friday, 2 April 2021– Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:15-53:12; Psalm 31:6, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 25; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

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

Let me, if we will, propose two key terms, freedom and solidarity, through which we might remember the events we do today, of the Passion and death of our Lord Jesus.

In his recent reflection for Good Friday in America Magazine, published by the Jesuits in the U.S., Fr. Terrance Klein, a priest of Dodge City, Kansas, asks what exactly God might have willed in allowing Jesus to go to his death, on a cross no less. Did, or could God, in fact, will his Son Jesus’ death in this horrific and humiliating way? This question may be both a common puzzle for us as Christian faithful and a major obstacle, Fr. Klein says, to non-believers: Who would want to believe in a God who would will, or at least allow, his Son to undergo a death like this?

Yet John’s Gospel today invites us to behold not so much God as a Father who would will or permit his Son to be given up to death, but the Son, Jesus, as freely in command of his self-sacrifice on the cross to its final moment, when “it is finished.” Our faith proclaims this freedom of Jesus; the freedom, Jesus says of himself at one point in John’s Gospel, to lay down his life and “to take it up again.”

And, if we go all the way back to the first moments of creation, we see that, of all the creatures God created, God willed from the very beginning to give us the same freedom God has. This is quite remarkable! This was and is also quite risky on God’s part: God gave us the freedom that nobody else but God has, to accept and to love whom God has made us to be or to reject and to hate this; to accept and love God; to accept and love one another as God loves us, or to reject and refuse to love God and one another.

When we have chosen to misuse the freedom God gave us to accept and love or to reject and refuse to love—this to some extent willing rejection and refusal to love, we might call sin—God has not rejected us in turn, although God was free to do so. No, God has responded to our sin by continually calling to us and being with us in history, through the Law and the prophets and, finally, by becoming like us in all but sin in the person of Jesus Christ. And we remember today how Jesus, Son of God, completed his free act of solidarity with us sinners: By redeeming us from all our sin, our rejection, our violence and hatred; by submitting to all this at the hands of sinners, on a cross, and transforming this into our ultimate good; the only possible means of our salvation.

“It is finished” now, this free act of God of solidarity with us, the only way we can be freed from sin and saved. We are witnesses, this and every Good Friday, to God’s re-creation of us, as remarkable as God’s first act of creating us with God’s own freedom. We are witnesses to this renewed freedom God has given us to love, to accept, to enter into solidarity with one another, especially anybody in any way disadvantaged, rejected, or abandoned in our world, as God freely entered into solidarity with us; as God freely took on our human experiences of joy and sorrow; good and evil; life, death, and resurrection, we pray, to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 19 April 2015– Third Sunday of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9; 1 John 2:1-5a; Luke 24:35-48

This homily was given at Anglin House, the residence for elderly and infirm Basilians in Toronto, ON, Canada.

“You are witnesses of these things,” we hear today from Luke’s Gospel. Later, Peter echoes these words to the people he addresses in Acts, taking the identity of witness upon himself and the other disciples of Jesus: “To this we are witnesses.” To what are we witnesses? What is the central message that we have been invited to proclaim “to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem”; beginning from when the risen Christ stood among his first disciples in the upper room at Emmaus?

“Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day,” Jesus reminds his disciples, “and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name.” Repentance and forgiveness of sins: To this we are witnesses. Repentance and forgiveness of sins: This is at the core of the message of the risen Christ; the message that our Lord invites us to continue to proclaim and, more importantly, to live out day to day.

How are we to be witnesses to repentance and forgiveness of sins? We cannot go back to stand among the first witnesses to the risen Christ in the upper room, who first heard Jesus’ greeting, “Peace be with you.” We cannot stand with those first disciples who “in their joy” at seeing the risen Christ were “disbelieving and still wondering.” We cannot witness directly to Peter’s address to “the people” of Israel. These events are finished; in the past.

I like to imagine Peter’s speech in our first reading, from Acts, as the opening arguments at a courtroom trial. Only these opening arguments are not from the prosecution or the defense, but from the defendant. In Acts, Peter lays out the charge against the people: Rejection; denial of “the Holy and Righteous One”; asking “to have a murderer given to” them in the place of Jesus, the Christ; killing Jesus, “the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead.” “To this we are witnesses,” Peter says. But Peter speaks not as one who has any right to accuse the people of anything but as the guilty party. Peter stands for us. Peter and we are all guilty of this crime of having denied Christ; having handed Christ over to death for our sins.

And then something remarkable happens at this trial: We are clearly guilty beyond reasonable doubt, but we are not condemned. Instead, we are pardoned. We are forgiven. This was God’s will for us all along, “that his Messiah should suffer.” By Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, we are forgiven and, even more remarkably, given the chance to be witnesses to our own forgiveness by our own lives. We, the defendants at this trial, represented by Peter, become this trial’s star witnesses. So how do we go about being witnesses?

We cannot go back in time to re-live these events of our Scriptures: Peter’s address to the people of Israel in Acts; Jesus’ appearance in the upper room to his disciples in Emmaus. Yet in his reflection for today’s readings in America Magazine, John Martens points out that we witness in two ways to the resurrected Christ and what Christ’s resurrection means for us as Christians. First, we witness to “the authenticity and trustworthiness of the” first “witnesses”; to Jesus’ first disciples and Apostles who first encountered our risen Lord physically present among them. We trust the truth revealed to us in Scripture and by the tradition of the Church, handed on to us from the first Apostles; from these first direct witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Second, even more importantly, we bear witness to the risen Christ by “the authenticity and trustworthiness of our lives.” How can we live our lives in a way that is most authentic and trustworthy? I ask this: How many of us have ever been forgiven of some wrongdoing? How many of us have been forgiven, especially when we did not expect to be forgiven by the person we had wronged, at least not as immediately or as generously as this person forgave us? I can think of a few instances in my own life in which I have been forgiven. I have even gone, filled with guilt on a few occasions, to people I have wronged, only to hear, “I forgive you; do not worry. No longer dwell on what you did wrong. Let it go.” How freeing! Has anyone ever approached us, having wronged us, thinking she or he would surely be scolded or condemned (maybe when we have heard confessions, those of us who are priests), and we have instead responded with great tenderness and forgiveness? This generous forgiveness is an image of God’s forgiveness for us, shown most fully by Christ’s death and resurrection for us. “To this we are witnesses.”

And being witnesses means extending the same forgiveness to others that we have received. Who is in most need of our forgiveness? I ask all of us, the next time we have a chance to pray silently for a few minutes, to think of one person who is most in need of our forgiveness. Maybe this person is a member of our family; a friend; an acquaintance; maybe even a member of our religious community; a Basilian confrère… This is the person to whom God is inviting you; inviting me today to reach out in forgiveness; to witness to the forgiveness we have all been granted because Christ died and is risen for us! This is how God invites all of us to ever greater “authenticity and trustworthiness” of our lives as Christians.

This is how God invites all of us today to witness to the “repentance and forgiveness of sins” that is central to Peter’s message to the people of Israel after Jesus had risen from the dead. This is how God invites all of us today to witness to the “repentance and forgiveness of sins” that is the central message of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples in the upper room at Emmaus.

This is the message that we as Church, beginning with the first disciples; “beginning from Jerusalem,” have been entrusted with proclaiming “in [Jesus’] name to all nations.” Proclaim by all means and, even more importantly, live by “repentance and forgiveness of sins.” Reach out with the same forgiveness we have been given by God through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Reach out with the same forgiveness we have, at one time or another, received from another person. Reach out with forgiveness. “To this,” to God’s gift of forgiveness that impels us both to forgive and to repent from sin, “we are witnesses.”

Homily for Saturday, 21 February 2015‒ Saturday after Ash Wednesday

Readings of the day: Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 86:1-2, 3-4, 5-6; Luke 5:27-32

Who does God call to follow in God’s ways, and how are we to do as God invites us?

Jesus answers the “who” question through his calling of Levi in today’s Gospel reading from Luke. Jesus says at the end of the meal scene: “I have not come to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.” And Isaiah answers the “how” question in our first reading. How are we, all redeemed sinners who have been called by God, to respond to this call?

Isaiah gives us some practical ways in which we can respond to God’s invitation to us. “Remove from your midst oppression, false accusation, and malicious speech,” Isaiah says. “If [we] bestow [our] bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted,” then we will be living our calling from God; our divine vocation as baptized Christians.

This is not a vocation we somehow deserve. After all, let us return to Jesus’ call to Levi, a tax collector. We are Levi; we are all sinners, but we are all called to something; called to radical holiness by God. Like Levi, God calls us, “Follow me.” I recall especially Pope Francis’ words in the interview with America magazine a few months after his election as pope. The interviewer, the Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, asked his first question: “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” Our pope responded, “I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” And later in the same interview, Pope Francis repeated, “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.” What a great Lenten message for us! Our pope; I; all of us are Levi. We are all redeemed and invited sinners. Do we “accept” God’s invitation in a true “spirit of penance”? How do we accept God’s invitation?

“Remove from your midst oppression,” Isaiah says. Still today, many are oppressed, even right here in our own country; our own communities. God, through Isaiah’s prophetic words, invites us to stand up for the dignity of human life from conception to natural death; to stand especially in favor of our society’s most vulnerable members. God invites us to raise the poor out of poverty; to stand for the rights of workers to a living wage; to stand against ideological divisions.

“Remove… false accusation and malicious speech.” This includes gossip and passive-aggression. Pope Francis continues to denounce gossip and the damage it causes to human relationships.

“Bestow your bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted.” Charity is nothing if it “costs nothing and does not hurt”; if it does not take us beyond ourselves; beyond our comfort zones, Pope Francis again said just days ago on Ash Wednesday. St. Basil also reminds us of how radical Christian charity is: “The [excess] bread you keep belongs to the hungry; the cloak you store in your closet belongs to the naked… The [extra] shoes” you store “belong to those who are barefooted; the money you keep hidden belongs to the needy.”

We are sinners, and yet we are redeemed. We are Christians called to radical charity; holiness. We are Levi. Jesus calls to us, “Follow me.”