Homily for Tuesday, 19 January 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: Hebrews 6:10-20; Psalm 111:1-2, 4-5, 9, 10c; Mark 2:23-28

Tuesday of the 2nd week in Ordinary Time

One of the many points of wisdom that my novice master has handed on to me since my novitiate year was to ask myself what my most absolute convictions are, especially on more contentious issues, and on which issues or personal or faith convictions I would allow a bit (or a lot) more leeway. And when I determine what my most absolute convictions are, I still need to exercise due charity toward other people who may not share the same absolute convictions that I do, culpably or not: Be prepared to listen; to ask questions aimed at a better mutual understanding of truth and not questions “baited” with my own agenda, and so on.

Could we not say that, in the Church as in the secular world, all truths, teachings, or convictions are not created equal, so to speak? In the Church, the truths we hold to be the most directly divinely revealed, those more absolute truths and convictions, we call dogmas or definitive doctrines. Only a small proportion of our Church’s teachings and convictions belong to this category of what is essential for our faith.

So, in today’s Gospel, what did the Pharisees consider to be the essential tenets or convictions of their faith? On the surface, the heart of their complaint against Jesus and his disciples seems to be their breach of the Sabbath law. After all, Jesus’ final retort to the Pharisees today is that “the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.” But if the Sabbath law were at the heart of the controversy in today’s Gospel, then why were the Pharisees conveniently on scene to complain about Jesus’ disciples making a path “through the grain fields [and plucking] heads of grain”? By some interpretations of Jewish Law at the time, the Pharisees would have been doing work, therefore violating the Sabbath themselves, by having walked far enough from home to notice Jesus’ disciples making a path through the grain fields.

The Gospel passage we hear today is nestled within a series of similar controversy events in Mark involving Jesus or his disciples versus the Pharisees, so something a bit more complex and probably sinister is happening in today’s Gospel than the Pharisees simply complaining that Jesus’ disciples were violating the Sabbath.

Once again, Mark shows the Pharisees going out of their way to bait Jesus into excusing his or his disciples’ violations of Jewish Law that to them were an inexcusable breach of their essential convictions. Maybe we could say that they were an inexcusable breach if somebody other than the Pharisees were doing the breaching! Anyway, their essential convictions do not correspond with Jesus’ most essential conviction that meeting basic human need—feeding the hungry, for example—is more important than laws governing the Sabbath.

Here again, we have what Vatican II would call “a hierarchy of truths”: What are our most absolute, essential convictions? To which rules, religious or civil, are we willing to make exceptions, for ourselves or other people, and why? How willing are we to exercise charity toward people (even when they are in error and our truth is worth defending) who do not share our most absolute convictions? Maybe the Pharisees; maybe everybody could benefit from a figure like my novice master to invite us to keep these questions in mind.

Homily for Sunday, 18 August 2019

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10; Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

About one hundred years after Jesus’ earthly life, in the ancient city of Sinope, now part of Turkey, there lived a man named Marcion, whose teachings became important in shaping early Christianity. Why would I start with the story of Marcion, from so many centuries ago? Well, Marcion perceived some key differences between what became the Old and New Testaments of our Bible. In the Old Testament, Marcion saw that God was often angry and quick to punish people for wrongdoing. Marcion, though, saw the God of the New Testament, shown through the life of Jesus, to use my word here and not Marcion’s word, to be nicer than the Old Testament God.

In the course of ministry, I have heard people claim only once or twice that the God of the Old Testament is angry and punishing while the God of the New Testament is kinder and more forgiving. So maybe Marcionism is not really popular these days. After all, if we read enough of our Bible (something Marcion did not have the benefit of doing in his time, because the books to be included in the Bible as we know it were not set yet in Marcion’s time), we see instances when, in the Old Testament, God is quite kind and forgiving and, in the New Testament, when God—even Jesus—becomes angry and promises punishment of wrongdoers.

One of those instances when Jesus becomes angry is in the Gospel reading we have just heard. Jesus himself asks and then answers the question: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division”! This does not sound like a very nice Jesus; like the Jesus maybe many of us would associate with peace, forgiveness, love, does it? What does Jesus mean when he says that he has come to bring not “peace to the earth… but rather division”?

Let me suggest that we are right if we get the impression that Jesus is not very nice in today’s Gospel reading. In our Gospels, Jesus is often not very nice… Now, why would I say that? I insist: Jesus is not nice. In the Gospels, including in our Gospel reading today, Jesus is redemptive. Jesus is often tender and forgiving, even of some fairly serious evil and sin. Jesus is loving. Jesus always, even when he is angry or on a prophetic mission, looks out for our utmost well-being. Jesus shows us the way to salvation; he is our way to salvation. So Jesus is kind, in the sense of the kind of love he shows, that goes so far as to lay down his life so that we may have eternal life. But Jesus is not nice.

How do we use the word “nice”? Do we not usually mean somebody who is kind, loving, forgiving, a lot like Jesus usually is in the Gospels? This is nice, but this definition of “nice” is actually quite recent. Not too long ago—about two hundred years ago, which is a short time when we speak of how language changes—“nice” primarily meant “ignorant” or “stupid,” from its Latin origin, meaning “not knowing.” Only since then has “nice” fairly rapidly taken on the more usual sense of something or somebody pleasant, agreeable, or kind.

Then again, we still use “nice” in its older deprecating or insulting sense today. Have any of us ever shown lack of interest, or heard somebody show lack of interest in what another person was saying in a mocking tone, “That’s nice.” I suppose that what we mean by “nice” today is all about our tone and body language in using this word. When we are pleased by something or somebody, we say, “Aww, that’s really nice, thank you,” or simply, “Niiiice”! But we can mean nice in a dismissive way, as in, “I am not interested in this foolishness. Go away”… “That’s nice.”

So I suppose we could consider Jesus to be “nice” in this newer sense of somebody pleasing or kind, but is even this not a stretch when we hear Jesus in Luke’s Gospel today? Not “peace to the earth… but rather division” does not exactly sound nice in the sense of kindness or pleasantness. Rather, Jesus sounds a lot like the prophets of the Old Testament before him: People who spoke truth to power; people who spoke for God; who confronted God’s people and their leaders with truths they often did not want to hear; people who risked their own lives in doing so, and who were not exactly “nice” about it much of the time. Among those prophets was Jeremiah, who was so persistent in not being especially “nice” as an advisor to King Zedekiah that Zedekiah’s officials had Jeremiah thrown into a cistern and left him to die.

In a similar way, Jesus, “a prophet and more than a prophet,” was persistent in claiming to be God’s own Son; in warning his hearers that their eternal life depended on repentance from their sin; in speaking truth to powerful elites that they did not necessarily want to hear. Jesus was often enough not “nice” about insisting on seeking the utmost good, the salvation, of all people, such that those elites had Jesus crucified and left him to die. Does this not sound familiar?

The prophet Jeremiah was not, in one sense, nice. Jesus was not nice. There is a reason why both Jeremiah and Jesus were killed at the hands of the elites of their day. When Jesus proclaims that he had come not “to bring peace to the earth… but rather division,” he is not saying that he had intended to go out of his way to create divisions among his hearers; his disciples. This would not only not have been nice, but this would have been unkind, and against Jesus’ own rule governing his every action and word. Instead, Jesus always seeks our best interest; our salvation. Yet Jesus knew that, in seeking our best interest, our salvation, his words and actions would expose our division; our sin; everything that already exists to inhibit our way to salvation. Only in exposing our already-existent divisions, sin, unkindness, injustice, and everything that inhibits our salvation that God so dearly desires for us will those divisions, sin, unkindness, and injustices ever be healed and forgiven. And, as many if not all of us know by our own experience, divisions, unkindness, and sin are not distant realities from us. They exist within our own relationships. They exist and destroy the intimacy and trust even within our households and families, as Jesus reminds us today.

Jesus’ reminder of this state of our world into which he came, which has not changed much from Jesus’ time to ours, is hardly nice. It reveals a hard truth many people in Jesus’ time were unwilling to accept, and that many people in our time, I dare say, are no more willing to accept than they were in Jesus’ or Jeremiah’s time. True prophets, who accurately bring to light the state of the world; the state of our human relationships; the state of our relationship with God always speak and act for others’ best interest. Prophecy cannot be ego-driven. But this does not mean prophecy must be nice. Prophecy, if it is true, may go so far as to put at risk the prophet’s reputation, if not his or her very life, if it is true prophecy.

What, then, does this mean for us today? From the moment of our baptism we are called “priest, prophet, and king” in our Rite of Baptism itself. Our baptism calls us to take part in the prophetic mission (as well as priestly and royal missions, in the self-sacrificial sense) of Jesus. Our baptism calls us to seek and work toward one another’s salvation, not only our own. Nowhere, though, in our Rite of Baptism are we called to be “nice.”

This does not mean that we are to seek out opportunities to divide, to destroy relationships, to make enemies, or to scandalize one another unnecessarily. This would itself be sinful. Prophecy is never “all about me.” Instead, true prophecy is all about participating in God’s salvation of the world through prophets through the ages, like Jeremiah, and ultimately through Jesus Christ. Our baptismal prophetic mission is a participation in God’s salvation of the world. It will entail discernment of the sometimes fine line between revealing hard truths about the sin of the world, especially to people in positions of power, and contributing to the sin ourselves; between acting and speaking from our own ego and acting toward the best interests of one another; between being merely “nice” and being kind and just (the virtue we call Christian charity) even when we are angry (even justly so) at another person or at the sin of the world.

Without God, it may be possible to be at least superficially “nice,” but only by putting God first is it possible for us to be the prophets our baptism calls us to be, for one another’s salvation and the salvation of the world.

Homily for Wednesday, 26 June 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8-9; Matthew 7:15-20

Wednesday of the 12th week in Ordinary Time

Whenever I or my family would travel in the Rocky Mountain National Parks of my home province of Alberta, Jasper or Banff, I would get a chuckle out of one of the t-shirts in the gift shops in these parks. The t-shirt I enjoyed features a bear standing next to a sign, like the many real signs seen throughout these parks, that reads, “Do not feed the bears.” The bear on the t-shirt wears a hat with moose antlers, and carries a sign that says, “I am not a bear. Trust me.”

In Matthew’s Gospel, today we hear Jesus warn us to “beware of false prophets, who come to [us] in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.” Do we not wish maybe that these “false prophets” would be easy to discern as if they wore “sheep’s clothing” but held up a sign that read, “I am not a wolf, trust me”? Unfortunately, when speaking of our faith, to differentiate “false prophets,” those who deceive and distract us from the true and right priorities of our faith, from those who speak and teach the truth, is occasionally not so easy.

To add to our challenge to discern real sheep from wolves “in sheep’s clothing,” or good trees bearing good fruit from rotten trees bearing rotten fruit, do Jesus’ pithy proverbs we hear today not sometimes work in different, even opposite ways? On the one hand, even among self-professed Christians there are people who do seek to seek to deceive and distract us from God and the true priorities and ethics of our faith. At the risk of judging them too harshly myself, I become especially irritated at people with authority who promote what I hear as a charade of the Christian faith that more closely resembles idolatry of wealth and prosperity, nationalism, militarism, or forms of xenophobia (a rejection of anybody who does not look, think, or behave “like us”), than anything Christ or his Apostles taught.

On the other hand, I encounter brother and sister Christians (and I have been guilty of this myself) who are at times too quick to seek errors in other Christians’ message or how their message is articulated and lived. Words like “heretic” have become the most recent curse words from ostensibly-Christian media outlets, especially but not only on the internet, against fellow believers who hold differing views or struggle more openly to understand or live by some of the Church’s teachings. Quick insults like this and the animosity that can exist today even among Christians create and aggravate divisions and breed still further animosity. Too-ready a search for wolves “in sheep’s clothing” risks misjudging as wolves our sisters and brothers who are in fact sheep, if black sheep, within our Church and even our social groups and families.

Please let me suggest these possible remedies to these problems, for me as much as for each of us: The next time somebody says something or acts in a way with which you disagree or that you think is wrong, make an intentional effort to discern (if not write down) something good or true in the other person’s message or action, even if the balance of this person’s message or action is still wrong or erroneous. This intentional seeking of the good in one another will help us to differentiate sheep from wolves, good trees and their fruit from bad, while maintaining the charity for one another, especially as Christians, which our Lord teaches us is the highest good of all.

Homily for Thursday, 10 August 2017‒ Feast of St. Lawrence

Thursday of the 18th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 9:6-10; Psalm 112:1-2, 5-6, 7-8, 9; John 12:24-26

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Lawrence, a deacon and martyr of the Roman Empire’s persecution of Christians under the emperor Valerian. Yet when we celebrate feasts of martyrs in our Church, people who have literally given their lives for Christ and have been killed out of hatred for our faith, I often ask how we might relate to these martyrs. Are our chances of being killed for our faith not slim to nil?

Of course, more Christians have been killed for our faith in the past century than in all the previous centuries of Christianity combined. But here in Canada, while we may encounter misunderstanding, incredulity, and even ridicule if we are truly living our faith, our lives are more or less safe. And so how might we relate to martyrs like St. Lawrence? What are common aspects of our lives with those of martyrs like St. Lawrence?

The readings we hear today might give us clues to answering these questions. Our Gospel reading from John is a classic call to martyrdom; Jesus’ glorification of anybody who would give up their lives for his sake, as he himself was about to when he spoke those words: “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains… a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

St. Lawrence died indeed, and a gruesome death at that. Let me suggest, though, that his death alone was not what made him a martyr. Before his death, St. Lawrence had practiced for many years a kind of living martyrdom. The most important ministry of deacons of the time in Rome was to ensure that the necessities of life of the poor were met. This St. Lawrence did with distinction. Legend has it that, when St. Lawrence was arrested and brought before the Roman prefect, he was ordered to bring with him the treasures of the Church to be confiscated. Lawrence presented to the prefect a large group of poor people of Rome, saying: “Here are the treasures of the Church”!

We say in our Psalm response today, “Happy the merciful who give to those in need.” And in our first reading, from 2 Corinthians, we hear that “God loves a cheerful giver.” St. Lawrence was certainly “the merciful” and “cheerful giver” to anybody in need. He gave his life to this ministry, long before he was killed for his and our faith. It is foremost in these works of mercy and in his regard for the poor as “the treasures of the Church” that St. Lawrence is an example to us. St. Lawrence’s free acceptance of a martyr’s death only flowed from the martyr’s example of the rest of his life.

God calls us, as he called St. Lawrence, “happy” insofar as we “give to those in need. God calls us still to give cheerfully; to ensure that the least well off among us are not in need of necessities of life and human dignity. God calls us to value the least among us as “treasures”; to challenge social structures that marginalize and dehumanize many while enriching a few. This is living martyrdom; a true counter-culture we are called to live as St. Lawrence did, dying to ourselves in the process, as humble grains of wheat fall “into the earth” to die and, only so, to “bear much fruit.”