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, 26 August 2018

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Joshua 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b; Psalm 34:2-3, 16-17, 18-19, 20-21; Ephesians 4:32- 5:1-2, 21-32; John 6:60-69

This homily was given at Our Lady of Sorrows Parish, Vancouver, BC, Canada. 

Baseball great Yogi Berra once famously said, “If you see a fork in the road, take it.” Of course, he also once quipped, “I never said half the things I said,” so sometimes what Yogi Berra actually said is up for debate.

Our readings today present us with “fork in the road” situations; we are required to make choices: In Joshua, whether to “serve the LORD” or the gods of foreign nations and faiths; in Ephesians, whether to act in our relationships among one another with the love with which Christ loves us; in John’s Gospel, whether or not to continue to follow Jesus when his teachings and those of the Church he has founded become “difficult.” When have we been faced with situations in our lives when we have had to make choices, practically, morally, or otherwise? Does this not happen to us constantly?

Are we not all here because we have chosen to be here? Our reasons for being here at this Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows vary: Maybe we are here out of a simple joy and love for the Mass. Maybe we are here with friends or family. Maybe we are here because the time of this Mass allows us to sleep in just a bit longer before we drag ourselves to Mass (that is not necessarily a bad thing), or because “Mom, Dad, or somebody made me get up for Mass,” or some other sense of obligation, or maybe some other more or less noble motive. The point is that we have all made a choice to be here. And, from the choice to be here to worship as a Catholic community of faith to simpler everyday choices like what to eat or wear, we are constantly making choices.

But relatively few of our choices are of the magnitude of the “fork in the road” moments faced by the people of Israel in Joshua’s time, the early Christians addressed by the letter to the Ephesians, or Jesus’ disciples in John’s Gospel grappling with what Jesus meant by making eating his flesh and drinking his blood essential for their eternal life. Each of these groups of people featured in our readings today also faces great pressure in making the choices they need to make. Would it be fair for us to wonder whether these people may have been tempted to evade making choices at all, or tempted strongly to make the wrong choice?

We hear first today from the end of the Book of Joshua. By this point in the Book of Joshua, the people of Israel who had been led by Moses and his successor, Joshua, back to their land have conquered this land for themselves from the Canaanites with relative ease. They might have thought, and probably many of them did think reasonably that it would be just as easy to maintain the land they had conquered as it had been to take possession of it. Sure, there are nations more powerful than Israel surrounding Israel and who worship other gods than the LORD. It would be tempting for Israel, in this situation, to bow to these surrounding nations and their gods to avoid being invaded and overtaken by these more powerful nations. Still, Joshua, in his last address to the people of Israel before his death, gives Israel a choice: “If you are unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve.”

When Israel could have chosen the easy way of alliances with pagan nations and worship of their gods, they choose freely under Joshua’s leadership to be different from these other nations. The people of Israel choose freely to take a risk of angering these other nations by trusting solely in the one LORD they know to be the true God, and not to trust in alliances with worldly power to save them.

A similar choice to the one put before the Israelites under Joshua is put before Jesus’ disciples in John’s Gospel. We have arrived at a decisive point in our relationship with Jesus as his disciples. Jesus has repeatedly claimed that he is God, the one LORD the people of Israel have worshipped since the time of Moses and the gift of manna in the desert. Jesus claims to be the true food from heaven to which the manna only pointed. Jesus claims that the only way to eternal life is to eat his flesh and drink his blood. By this point, the people hearing Jesus are outraged. Most of them turn away from Jesus and return to the way they were living before encountering Jesus. His own disciples ask a very legitimate question, one perhaps many of us have asked about particular aspects or teachings of our faith: “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it”? How can this man claim to be God, and how can he claim that the only way to eternal life is to eat his flesh and drink his blood?

Jesus’ disciples are at a fork-in-the-road moment, and they have only one choice: To take the fork. And our salvation depends on making the right choice.

“Do you also wish to go away”? Jesus asks his twelve closest disciples, his Apostles, as many if not most of his followers to that point turn “back and no longer [go] about with him.” Jesus knows that, even among these twelve, one will betray him outright, maybe not at this decisive point that is difficult for Jesus’ disciples to commit to following him, but at another fork-in-the-road moment not long thereafter. Might we imagine that even Simon Peter, the leader and usual spokesperson for the Twelve, may not have been so sure if he and the other Apostles in fact wanted to “go away” from Jesus at this point. Peter answers Jesus with a cautious, introspective kind of question at first: “Lord, to whom can we go”? Did Peter pause before continuing to answer Jesus, as if to say, “I need a second to think about this”?

We cannot know fully what was on the mind of Peter and the other disciples, only that this could not have been an easy question for him to answer on their behalf. I imagine Peter, looking up at the thinned-out crowd after many had turned away from Jesus, complaining and disputing among themselves. And yet Peter makes a decisive choice; the right choice. He answers Jesus, “You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter answers “yes” to continuing to follow Jesus, not because he is the perfect disciple, but because he freely chooses to allow Jesus to strengthen him and the others who continue to follow Jesus. Peter freely chooses to continue to walk with Jesus, at least until the next fork in the road.

My sisters and brothers, this is all Jesus; all God asks of us (or at least all Yogi Berra asks of us): “If you see a fork in the road, take it.” There will be points in our lives, if there have not been already, when we must choose and there is no intermediate option between “yes” and “no”; between serving the LORD and serving other gods, ourselves, or worldly goods and pleasures as gods; between continuing to follow Jesus, who has the “the words of eternal life,” as difficult as his way and words can be to follow, and not.

There will be points in our lives, as the letter to the Ephesians reminds us with the imagery of a faithful marriage, when to love another person, let alone God, will be a difficult choice. Our readings call us beyond the attraction-infatuation stage we might experience at first in a relationship with somebody, and even with God. Love becomes a choice. Being Church, a community of faith in worship and actions of kindness and mercy, eventually becomes not mere infatuation but a choice. It becomes a difficult choice in love when any members of the Church, especially in leadership, idolize and abuse power and prestige. They walk among the crowds who turn from Jesus; who make the easy but wrong choice; who refuse to walk with Jesus beyond the fork in the road.

Will we, then, continue with Jesus beyond the fork in the road, at least until the next decisive moment? Will we choose to be Church? Will we choose to serve the LORD faithfully? Will we choose to love as Christ loves us and “gave himself up for” us? Will we choose to let the words of Simon Peter be ours: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.”

Homily for Sunday, 19 August 2018

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada. 

When we gather for a meal, what are some of the things that happen before, during, and after the meal?

First, depending on how elaborate the feast is and how many people will gather together, we may invite people to the meal. And then, whether we are attending a grand feast with hundreds of people or with a small group of friends or family, or one friend, or our wife or husband, girlfriend or boyfriend, or whomever, we need to prepare or have somebody prepare the food and drink. Closer to the time of the meal, we set the tables. We gather at table. We pray in thanksgiving for the food and one another. As we eat and drink, we may tell stories, laugh, sing… We enjoy ourselves. Depending on the occasion, the number of people present, the culture, and so on, the meal may be simple or it may be a several-course feast that lasts all evening, or all day, or longer.

As somebody who enjoys good food and good company, and especially enjoys food and drink from all parts of the world and the cultures and people that inspire and prepare this food, I can think of many meals I have enjoyed over several hours. I think of the devout, generous families I have known and stayed with in places like Spain and France while working or studying there. For these families, meals after Sunday Mass would involve large groups of friends connected through their neighbourhoods or parishes, and would go on for what seemed like forever. I think of the impoverished people of my order’s parishes in Colombia whose doors were constantly open; who constantly offered what little food and drink they had; whose children, from house after house, seemed to stream out into the streets to greet their beloved Basilianos—Basilians. How humbling this giving of abundance out of poverty is when we see it! I think, most recently during my multi-city journey across North America this summer, of when I would enjoy meals with several families during the same day, or have a few hours to be with one family or good friend. Many times, my brother Basilians have put on great feasts. I think of many feasts after weddings, funerals, baptisms…

My sisters and brothers in Christ, we have all been invited to a great feast. When I say this, are many of us perhaps thinking of the Eucharist? If so, I cannot fault us for this. When we think of a great feast, it would be a good sign if we, as Catholic Christians, were to think immediately of the Eucharist. When we hear Jesus promise us his very self for our salvation in today’s Gospel reading from John, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,” it is natural and right for us to connect Jesus’ promise with our experience of the Eucharist. And yet, while our Eucharist is Jesus really, truly, and fully present among and within us here in this celebration and in bread and wine that we consume, our Eucharist is a sign—we call it a sacrament—of an even greater feast we have yet to experience, the everlasting feast of heaven.

This everlasting feast of heaven requires us to prepare for it. So how, then, do we prepare for heaven? We might prepare for heaven, for a feast for whose glory we can only hope this side of heaven, the same way we prepare for any great feast we have seen and known in this earthly life. The way we prepare for and then partake in meals, everything from small-scale meals with family or one or a few friends to great feasts, goes back before Jesus’ time. We hear of it in the Book of Proverbs. The main character of our reading from Proverbs today is a personified Wisdom. First, Wisdom puts “her house,” a large banquet hall with “seven pillars,” in order. When we are receiving company at home, how many of us, like Lady Wisdom, clean our home? After cleaning, Wisdom prepares the food. She invites guests to the feast, not the rich or the elites first, but from “the highest places in the town,” she invites the poor; those of less-renowned intellect or understanding: “You that are simple, turn in here.” The feast that Wisdom prepares will nourish and strengthen those who enjoy it. They will grow, “live, and walk in the way of insight.”

The letter to the Ephesians picks up the banquet scene where the book of Proverbs leaves off. The feast is underway. The people invited have gathered and are eating, drinking, enjoying themselves, and are amusing one another with stories, humour, and song. Do we not often do the same when we gather for a meal? Sing “Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves… giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Ephesians asks of the people invited to this feast. And yet this permission from Ephesians to enjoy ourselves at the feast in God’s name, no less, comes with a call to moderation: “Do not be foolish,” the letter to the Ephesians says.

Perhaps many if not all of us have been to a feast or a party when somebody behaves foolishly; somebody or many people eat, drink, or behave excessively, or speak in a way that is not careful or ruins others’ reputations. “That is debauchery,” the letter to the Ephesians says, when we become filled and fill others with gossip; so filled with worldly food and spirits that we cannot “be filled with the Spirit” of God. As Christians, invited to this feast of the Eucharist, we are called to better than this. We are called to this feast, having already made room to some extent within ourselves and in our world for God; for God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

This making room for God is the wisdom and “insight” to which our readings from Proverbs and Ephesians call us. After all, God has invited us to the feast, so it would be foolish for us to act in ways that ignore the graciousness of our host, just as this would be foolish to do at any meal to which we were invited. And yet it is all too easy, even for usually well-mannered people like us, to fall into excess; to fall into the foolishness that Ephesians warns against. Is our foolishness and even sin not often a product of excess and a kind of impatience? Instead of accepting that heaven, for which we are invited to hope as Christians, remains something not yet fully realized—that the greatest feast is yet to come—sin is when we try too hard, to excess, to impose our incomplete experience of heaven on one another, ourselves, and our world as if it were complete. We abuse the gifts God has given us to enjoy wisely and in moderation; gifts that point us to heaven without revealing everything of the grandeur of heaven all at once: Food and drink, the gift of speaking, our sexuality… And when we try too hard to impose “heaven” on earth instead of hoping, praying for, and cooperating with God through works of kindness, mercy, and justice toward heaven’s full realization, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as in heaven,” we end up not creating heaven but hell on earth, for ourselves and for one another.

We hear of this kind of excess, the imposition of a false “heaven,” in our Gospel reading today from John. It is telling that, as Jesus repeatedly identifies himself as “the living bread that came down from heaven,” the people’s response progresses from complaining to grumbling to a full-on dispute in today’s Gospel. If our reading from Proverbs today speaks of the advance preparations for a great feast, and Ephesians speaks of enjoying the feast in moderation, in John’s Gospel Jesus reveals to us what heaven will be in its fullness and how we might taste already the heaven that awaits us: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in them.”

Do we, then, have the patience to make room within and among us for Jesus, the only “true food” and “true drink” that enables us to “live forever,” and not to grumble, dispute, or gossip among ourselves? Do we have the wisdom to enjoy without mistaking God’s gifts to us in this life, which point us to heaven, as heaven already in its fullness? To the extent we exercise this patience and wisdom, we taste the food of the everlasting feast of heaven to which God has invited us and of which this Eucharist is a sign of our hope.