Homily for Thursday, 28 March 2024– Holy Thursday, Evening Mass of the Lord's Supper

Readings of the day: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; Psalm 116:1-13, 15-16bc, 17-18; 1 Corinthians 11:24-26; John 13:1-15

There is a legend surrounding Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of “The Last Supper.” Da Vinci took many years to find people to be subjects for the painting of Jesus and each of his apostles. First he found a young, handsome man in his late teens to paint as Jesus.

Seven years later, Leonardo da Vinci had finally found enough subjects, out of hundreds of possible people, to have painted Jesus Christ and eleven of his apostles. The only apostle who remained to find a subject and paint was Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus. After another long search, da Vinci was told that his ideal subject for Judas Iscariot was a wretched prisoner in a dark dungeon of Rome. So, da Vinci went down into the dungeon and met the prisoner. Da Vinci had made a deal with the authorities that the prisoner could be released from prison and into da Vinci’s care if he agreed to be the figure of Judas Iscariot in the “Last Supper” painting.

When da Vinci finished painting Judas in the likeness of the haggard prisoner, he showed the prisoner his Judas in the “Last Supper.” The prisoner, taken aback, said back to da Vinci, “You don’t recognize me, do you? I’m the man you painted seven years ago as Jesus Christ. O God, I have fallen so low”!

Sisters and brothers in Christ, who has invited us to tonight’s Eucharistic memorial of his Last Supper: Even if our sinful state weakens our ability to recognize another person, or maybe even ourselves—to recognize the likeness and dignity of God with which God created us—God will never fail to recognize us. God will always and forever recognize God’s own image and likeness, God’s beauty as in the young man Leonardo da Vinci first painted as Jesus Christ in the “Last Supper,” in each of us.

God will always welcome us, tonight in a special way and every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, to his table in memory of Jesus’ Last Supper. Our God in Jesus Christ once welcomed twelve very imperfect men to eat his final meal with him before he died. One of those Twelve, the head of the apostles Simon Peter, would go on to deny even knowing Jesus, three times, as Jesus was being led to his crucifixion. Another, Judas Iscariot, would betray Jesus to the authorities to have him killed. All the others except “the disciple whom [Jesus] loved”—who stood by Jesus’ cross with the three Marys: Jesus’ mother, “the wife of Clopas,” and Mary Magdalene—would flee the scene of the cross.

All except one of Jesus’ Twelve apostles would fail to recognize Jesus as he was arrested, condemned, crucified to death. But God, in Christ, would recognize them for who they truly were. God recognizes us for who we truly and fundamentally are, sisters and brothers, even when we do not recognize the God-given dignity in one another or sometimes in ourselves or in all creation; even if, like the prisoner Leonardo da Vinci painted as Judas Iscariot, we “have fallen so low” into the wretchedness of sin.

Sin, and the blindness toward the image and likeness of God in each of us that sin causes, is not our original state of being. Our original state of being is one of beauty, blessing, dignity as God intended: “God blessed them and gave them dominion” over creation, the Book of Genesis says of the first people God created, Adam and Eve. This “blessed” state of being is the state God will always recognize in us, even if or when we obscure it, corrupt it by sin. This blessed state is the figure our Lord invites to share his Last Supper, this Eucharistic memorial of his Last Supper, with him.

But what about our sin? Jesus’ Last Supper; Jesus’ Passion, death, and resurrection that follow his Last Supper show us two main ways in which God responds to our sin, our “fall” from the state of divine grace and blessing in which God first created us. First, the events of Jesus’ Last Supper, Passion, death, and resurrection that we will commemorate over these next three days show us that God’s response to our sin will urge us to confront our sinfulness, our woundedness, our betrayals, our denials, our fleeing the scene of the cross. Jesus’ first disciples who confronted their sinfulness would be the first to be restored to God’s grace through these Paschal events: Peter, who would weep immediately at his denial of Jesus and later be able to confess, three times, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you”; Mary Magdalene, who would be the first to tell the beloved disciple and Peter of the empty tomb on Easter morning; the other disciples upon whom the risen Christ would breathe the peace of the Holy Spirit and ask that they forgive as they had been forgiven; Thomas, who would overcome his doubt to make an astounding profession of faith, “My Lord and my God”!

Second, these events of Jesus’ Last Supper, his Passion, death, and resurrection are a continuation (and a fulfillment) of how God has always acted in history toward us, especially in response to our sin, our lack of recognition of our original state of divine blessing. Whenever we have sinned, God has not waited to begin the process of restoring us to his grace and friendship.

From the moment Adam and Eve first sinned by eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, God did not wait to promise that the woman’s offspring would crush the serpent, the Satan, the prince of deceit and evil. God would put an end to all evil, all corruption from our original state of divine blessing.

We have heard tonight from Exodus part of the long epic of how God guided the people of Israel through forty years of wandering through the desert wilderness, from slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt to the land God promised them. These people of Israel were so often not exactly worthy to be delivered from slavery, from wandering through the wilderness, as God did for them many times. The people of Israel would sin. They would complain about everything. They would test God. They would worship false gods, not the God constantly working to save them. Yet today we hear the high point of the Exodus story, Israel’s deliverance story: When God struck down the firstborn of Egypt but (literally) passed over the people of Israel, allowing them to live and continue their escape from slavery.

And tonight we have heard the fulfillment of the first Passover through the second, which began with Jesus Christ gathering his disciples for a Last Supper before he died. Jesus gives us in this renewed Passover a new commandment, “an example,” a mandate for us that gives this celebration its old name of Maundy Thursday, mandate Thursday: “That you should also do as I have done for you.”

What has Jesus done for us that is so radical, such a fulfillment of the first Passover, and why has he done this for us? He has started by washing feet, which we will remember in a few moments by replicating in this celebration. John’s Last Supper account starts with Jesus taking the place of a slave before his disciples. This act is startling to his disciples, to Peter, who refuses at first to allow Jesus to lower himself to that level.

But this is only the beginning. Jesus will go so far as to take upon himself all our sin, everything that obscures our view, our recognition of the beauty, the grace, the blessing with which God first created us, and have it nailed to a cross with him on Calvary. Tomorrow we will hear the prophet Isaiah’s foretelling of how, on Good Friday, Jesus accepted being made as one “despised and rejected… as one from whom others hide their faces” and who hold “him of no account.”

Jesus would do none of this for us, for our salvation, because we are worthy. On the contrary! But Jesus once gathered his disciples together for a Last Supper. The next day, “he was crucified, died, and was buried… And on the third day he rose again.” Jesus did all this because, no matter whether we recognize our blessedness, our beauty, the image and likeness of God that we all bear, how much God loves each and all of us (so that he, God in Jesus Christ, would die for us!), God will always recognize all this in us. To Jesus, we will always be like the figure Leonardo da Vinci painted as Jesus. We will always be, as maybe one of my favourite Psalm in the Bible (Psalm 8) begins by describing us, “little less than gods.”

And, through this celebration of Holy Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus only asks of us two things: First, remember what he has done for us on this night. And, second, do as he does: “Do this in remembrance of me”… “You should also do as I have done to you.” We remember and we do for one another as Jesus has done for us when we remember our blessedness, God’s love for us. We remember and fulfill Jesus’ Last Supper commandment to us when we recognize ourselves and one another as Jesus recognizes us perfectly. We remember and fulfill Jesus’ Last Supper commandment when we act on what we recognize, most fundamentally, in ourselves and one another: A people blessed from the first moments of our creation; a people created in and bearing God’s image and likeness (as in a da Vinci painting, but much more beautiful!); a people called to take, eat, and drink of this Last Supper of friendship, of salvation, of God’s self-emptying, of the blessing of our Lord.

Homily for Sunday, 31 December 2023– Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Year B

Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-6, 21:1-3; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; Hebrews 11:8, 11-12, 17-19; Luke 2:22-40

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Yet our readings today invite us to a broader understanding of three related realities: Family, holiness, and blessing. The word of God invites us to see the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as the culmination in human history of family, holiness, and blessing.

For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, the faithful of the three great Abrahamic religions, that history begins with Abraham. It is difficult, I think, for us not to feel badly for Abraham at the beginning of the reading we hear this evening from the Book of Genesis. God promises Abraham a son with Sarah, an ancestor to many nations, several times within a few chapters of Genesis. By the time Genesis introduces us to Abram, he is seventy-five years old. He is one hundred years old when Sarah gives birth to Isaac. So Abraham has had to wait a long time for God’s promise of descendants to become reality. Abram begins to feel like God has abandoned him and Sarai. His slave “Eliezer of Damascus” is, so far, his only heir. At this point, Abram has no family, no descendants of his own blood. “Maybe,” Abram could have thought, “I or Sarai have done something wrong. Maybe we have been less than steadfast in holiness.” God certainly seems, so far, to be denying Abram and Sarai the blessing of a child, of descendants.

So, what does God do with Abram? God does not ask Abram to look upon Sarai with love and imagine her expecting a child with him. And Genesis is clear that Abram has been nothing but faithful and patient with God. Abram’s faith and trust in God’s promise of descendants is “reckoned… to him as righteousness.” God does not ask of Abram any greater sign of his faith toward God. So, why does God continue to delay (or deny) Abram the only blessing he really longs for, a child, a family, descendants to populate all nations?

God asks only one thing of Abraham in the reading from Genesis we have just heard: Go outside; “look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them… So shall your descendants be.”

So, what does this encounter between God and Abram—God’s renewed promise (again) to Abraham of a great number of descendants—say to us about family, holiness, blessing? Sisters and brothers, family, holiness, and blessing are not things to be counted in the biblical imagination. In the Bible—the epics of Abraham and Sarah, of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the people and generations in between them—family is not limited to blood relationships. Holiness and blessing, too, are from God. So these are uncountable, infinite gifts to us of God’s grace.

God asks of us that we live according to the holiness and blessing that has been ours since the first moments of our creation. God saw that we were—humanity was—“very good”; God had created us in God’s image and likeness, blessed us, and given to us the care of everything God had created.

For Abraham and Sarah, to live according to this original state of holiness and blessing meant to trust in God’s promise of descendants, a family of nations in faith. It meant to go outside and look up with awe into the limitlessness, uncountable as the stars are uncountable, of God’s blessing to them and all people, all creation for all time. For this, Sarah’s and Abraham’s trust in God, Genesis says today twice, God blesses Sarah, places her and Abraham at the head of God’s historical family in faith.

For the people who hear the Letter to the Hebrews—for us today, hearing this proclamation anew—to live in good faith according to our original state of holiness and blessing is to recognize in God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob the prefigurement of God’s restoration of us to that original state of holiness and blessing in and through Jesus Christ. In Jesus Christ we have the human manifestation of “God [who] is able even to raise someone from the dead.” God has raised Jesus from the dead, giving us a share in the blessing of eternal life.

For the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in Luke’s Gospel today, to live according to our original state of holiness and blessing is not so much to look up in awe at the limitlessness of the stars as Abram did, but to look and travel toward the temple of Jerusalem. In the time of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, the temple was the centre of the Jewish faith, the dwelling place of God on earth, centred on the Holy of Holies.

Mary and Joseph set out, obedient to God’s call and their faith, to present Jesus in the temple. There is some ambiguity here: The Holy of Holies of the temple is the Holy Family’s destination, the dwelling place of God on earth. Yet Mary and Joseph hold God in human flesh, the infant Jesus, in their arms as they set out on their pilgrimage to the temple. Once the Holy Family arrives at the temple, the Holy of Holies, the baby Jesus, meets the Holy of Holies. But then the focus of this encounter of the Holies becomes the arms of the “righteous and devout” Simeon.

At that point, Simeon has nothing more on earth to live for. God’s Holy Spirit had “revealed to him… that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord.” God’s promise, God’s blessing to the holy Simeon has been fulfilled. So Simeon is able to praise God, Luke’s Gospel says, with one of the most beautiful prayers in all of Scripture. For those of us who pray the Breviary or Liturgy of the Hours, at Night Prayer (Compline) the Church still prays Simeon’s prayer: “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”

This moment of prayer is a moment of encounter: Blessing, holiness, family all meet in this moment. Now, Simeon may depart this life for eternal life in heaven. He who has looked upon the presence of God, who has held God in the Christ Child in his arms, is an heir to God’s promise to Abraham, who looked up at the limitlessness of God’s promise, God’s holiness, God’s blessing of family: “Look toward heaven and count the stars… So shall your descendants be.”

There is only one thing on earth left for Simeon to do as he returns the baby Jesus to Mary and Joseph: Simeon blesses the Holy Family as he sends them on their way back to Nazareth, their hometown. It is a strange sort of blessing, I imagine unnerving if we had been Mary or Joseph in that situation. “This child,” Simeon says, “is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

What is Simeon talking about? And how are his words to Mary there a blessing? Simeon’s words are a blessing, but with a dose of reality. God has given us every blessing possible under heaven. God has created us with holiness, in God’s own image and likeness. And God has given us the gift of a Saviour, who has restored us to the dignity of being called members of God’s holy family, the People of God.

Yet our mission is to accept these gifts from God. Our mission is to hand on these gifts to still other people, so that all people for all time become heirs to God’s blessing, God’s holiness; all become members of God’s family of peoples and nations. The Christ Child, the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph stand as “a sign that will be [and to this day continue to be] opposed” by many who want to exclude from God’s blessing, God’s people on the grounds that these are somehow not “worthy” of God’s grace, God’s blessing, being called God’s people: The poor, refugees and migrants, people whose relationships are irregular by Church law, and so on. This is the cruel reality present in our world. Yet the encounter between Simeon and Anna and the Holy Family in the temple, prefigured by the encounter of Abraham and Sarah with God, shows us that God’s grace, God’s blessing, God’s holiness, God’s call to us to be universal family of God’s chosen people, will not be so easily limited.

The leaders of Jesus’ own people, of his own time, would try to limit God’s grace, God’s blessing by crucifying the Lord of all grace and all blessing: “A sword will pierce your own soul too.” But life, grace, blessing overcame even that violent attempt to limit it, to limit God. So God continues to call us forth, now from this place of encounter with God to be heralds of God’s blessing, God’s holiness with which we have been created and that is our original state of being, in God’s image and likeness. In the name of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, God invites us to bless the world, to exclude nobody from God’s blessing, so that we become ever more perfectly and universally the holy family of the People of God.

Homily for Thursday, 27 July 2017– Ferial

Thursday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Exodus 19:1-2, 9-11, 16-20b; Responsorial Canticle: Daniel 3:52, 53, 54, 55, 56; Matthew 13:10-17

Did any of us hear in our readings today the contrast between how God makes God’s self known in Exodus versus in Matthew’s Gospel?

How God makes God’s self known to us; reveals himself to us: We call this divine revelation. In Exodus today we hear the immediate lead-in to the Ten Commandments, which we will hear tomorrow. God is most concerned that the people being led by Moses in the desert will hear him when he speaks with Moses; when he gives Moses the Ten Commandments. God says to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after.” The people need to be able to trust Moses and so to trust God. This is the primary way in which God reveals himself in the part of Exodus we hear today.

In Matthew’s Gospel, do we not get the sense of a more distant and even irritable God through Jesus’ explanation of why he speaks “to the people in parables”? Jesus offers us a strange and even somewhat troubling explanation for why he teaches in parables: “[So] that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.” Does Jesus speak in this way because he really does not want the people hearing him to “perceive… listen,” and understand what he is saying? This seems to me to be unlikely. Perhaps Jesus speaks this way because the people have had a chance to “perceive… listen” and understand him, to believe that he is the Messiah, and they have missed their chance.

But how long do we have before we have missed our chance to “perceive… listen… understand” believe what has been divinely revealed to us, that Jesus is the Messiah, and to back up our belief in Jesus as the Messiah by the way we live? As one bishop I know is fond of saying tongue-in-cheek, we have “between now and five minutes after death” to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and to act by what we believe. In other words, this process that we might call conversion takes a lifetime. But how long do we have?

Nobody fully knows the answer to this question. The Ten Commandments, the introduction to which we hear today in Exodus, were one event of God’s self-revelation to the people of Israel during a forty-year journey through the desert to their homeland. The journey of conversion, of grappling with divine revelation, would take the people of Israel more than one generation. Yet they did enter their homeland, although Moses did not.

We cannot know how much time we have left to believe in what God has revealed to us; what is essential to our faith; in Jesus Christ as the Messiah, and to live by it. Perhaps, then, Jesus is inviting us; pleading with us not to wait. Conversion is not a process we might begin in the future, but a process to live out in the present. And only if conversion for us is a present more than a future reality will we also experience the promise of Jesus to his disciples in today’s Gospel in the present: “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”

Homily for Wednesday, 26 July 2017– Feast of Sts. Joachim and Anne

Wednesday of the 16th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Sirach 44:1, 8, 10-15; Psalm 132:11, 13-14, 17-18; Matthew 13:16-17

“Let us now sing the praises of our ancestors in their generations.” I am drawn to this opening verse of our first reading this morning, from the book of Sirach, first because it is the verse printed on the cover of the necrology of my religious order, the Basilians, that is, the listing of all my brother Basilians who have gone before us to God since the order was founded back in 1822.

But our Church also gives us this reading to mark the feast day today of Sts. Joachim and Anne, Jesus’ grandparents, the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our secular society celebrates a Grandparents’ Day on September 10 (I had to look this up). But might we consider today the Church’s Grandparents’ Day, a day to “sing the praises of our ancestors in their generations”; to “sing the praises” especially of Sts. Joachim and Anne? They are two important saints particularly for Canada. St. Joachim is the namesake of the first Catholic parish here in Edmonton. And St. Anne is a patron saint of the province of Quebec.

Above all, though, Sts. Joachim and Anne are grandparents; the grandparents of our Lord. And could we not hear in Jesus’ words today in Matthew’s Gospel a blessing especially to grandparents; to “our ancestors in their generations” as Sirach says?

Jesus says “to his disciples, ‘Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.’” Jesus blesses his disciples, who have seen and heard something “many righteous people” have not had the chance to see and hear. Jesus’ disciples, we among them, have seen and heard; experienced some sign of the kingdom of heaven. Of course, Jesus’ disciples were seeing and hearing him live in front of them.

Sts. Joachim and Anne are not mentioned among these disciples of Jesus; indeed they are not named anywhere in the Bible. We know of them by name only from writings in Church tradition more recent than the Biblical Gospels. Yet might Sts. Joachim and Anne have been among the crowds, receiving this blessing from their grandson? Might they, rather, have been among the “many righteous people” who never got to see and hear what the disciples of Jesus later got to see and hear this side of heaven?

This is hard to say. But, if Sts. Joachim and Anne were not standing there on the day Jesus blessed his disciples, might we imagine them as having been able to hold Jesus when he was very young, or hearing Jesus’ first words, or experiencing his other milestones? I have known first-hand the joy of my own parents and grandparents in experiencing these “firsts” of their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Could we not imagine the same experiences as those of Sts. Joachim and Anne?

And if we are able to imagine prayerfully these experiences Sts. Joachim and Anne might have had with Jesus, might we be more easily able to celebrate today as a “Grandparents’ Day” in the Church? To all of us who are grandparents or great-grandparents; to our grandparents gone before us or who never knew their grandchildren: Today especially our Church prays for you and entrusts you to the intercession of Sts. Joachim and Anne, as we “sing the praises of our ancestors in their generations.”