Homily for Friday, 12 June 2015– Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Friday of the 10th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Hosea 11:1, 3-4, 8c-9;  Responsorial Canticle: Isaiah 12:2-3, 4, 5-6; Ephesians 3:8-12, 14-19; John 19:31-37

What does it mean for us to love God? Fr. Larry Gillick, a Jesuit priest at Creighton University, has what I find to be a helpful answer to this question. Fr. Gillick says that “to love God is to let God love us.”

This leads me to more questions, which we might take to our examination of conscience; our prayer and meditation, maybe daily. My questions are these: When have we let God love us? And when have we not let God love us and so have been in need of God’s love and mercy more than ever?

Our answer to when we have let God love us is easier than we might think. Look around at all of us who are here in God’s presence; in Christ’s presence in this Eucharistic celebration. Our presence, here to meet God’s presence, is the foremost way in which we as Christians show that we are allowing God to love us. And so we show by gathering for this Eucharist that we love God. We also show that we are willing to let God love us; that we love God by our celebration of any of the Church’s sacraments. We show this by our works of kindness and justice; of service toward one another, especially those most in need: The poor; the sick; those who have lost a loved one; those whose loved ones experience need or hardship. We show our willingness to let God love us, and so we show we love God, when we allow ourselves to be served by another’s kindness and generosity when we are in need.

God’s love for us is certain. We can be confident in and never despair of God’s love for us, no matter our need; no matter how well or how often we pray; no matter our sin. Our readings today on this feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the feast itself, ask the fundamental question: How much are we willing to let God love us?

The Book of the Prophet Hosea, from which our first reading is drawn, is set during an especially troublesome time in ancient Israel’s history. The kings of Israel, in the line of King David, as well as the people had become corrupt, turning to false gods and committing all forms of social injustice toward the weakest and most vulnerable. The end of the monarchy and exile into foreign nations threaten if Israel continues to be unfaithful to God and unjust to its own people. But God is willing, out of love, to forgive; not to remain angry if Israel returns to faithfulness to God. Hosea’s question to the Israelites is this: Are you willing to let God love you?

This same question is at the center of our second reading, from Ephesians. God has been present; has loved us into being from the moment of creation. God sustains creation; us out of love. God has given us himself in the person of Jesus Christ: The utmost act of love possible. And our Gospel reading speaks of the events immediately after Jesus’ death on the cross. Jesus pours forth love, shown as blood and water, from his heart, pierced by the soldiers’ lance while Jesus hangs on the cross.

Our devotion; our feast today of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus draws us to answer this same question and, do we not believe, answers this question with a resounding “Yes”: Do we love God, and do we show our love for God by letting God love us?

Homily for Thursday, 11 December 2014– Ferial

Thursday of the 2nd Week in Advent

Readings of the day: Isaiah 41:13-20; Psalm 145:1, 9, 10-11, 12-13ab; Matthew 11:11-15

Has anybody here ever experienced feeling completely powerless or helpless? Of course, we have all been powerless or helpless at one point in our lives, when we were all babies or small children. But babies do not have full consciousness that they are helpless; totally dependent on their mothers, fathers, and other caregivers for survival. When adults or older children are helpless or powerless, do we not feel helpless or powerless?

This was the problem of the people of Israel to whom the prophet Isaiah speaks in our first reading: They felt their powerlessness; their helplessness in the midst of the Babylonian Exile. They had been deported to a foreign nation. Their own nation and its centerpiece, the Temple of Jerusalem, lay in ruins. The people of Israel had developed a “little guy complex,” in the words of today’s reflection on our readings from the Creighton University Daily Reflections website[1] (a website I recommend to all of us who want another great way to follow the daily Mass readings).

The exiled people of Israel had come to feel that they were helpless against the Babylonians; that they were a mere “worm” or “maggot.” Isaiah does not use these words in a derogatory way, but to challenge the people of Israel on their own feeling of inferiority.

God has a history of choosing the “little guy” to do great things: Abraham as our father in faith; Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt; the prophets to speak for God when Israel is at its most helpless. Isaiah’s message to Israel and to us is that God will once again choose the “little guy,” who will rise to greatness because of God.

Our God will deliver Israel from exile; just wait, Isaiah says to the people. God will turn the “wasteland”; the ruins; the desert into “a marshland”; into “springs of water” that recall the Temple of Jerusalem; the kingdom of Israel as it once was and will be again, under God. Our God will choose Israel; has already chosen the “little guy” as the instrument of its own rebuilding. This is counter-intuitive for a people that has slipped into a “little guy complex.” And so Isaiah reminds them with some energy: God will choose and build up the “little guy,” Israel, so “that all may see and know, observe and understand, that the hand of the LORD has done this; the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

These are profound words from Isaiah! The message of our reading from Matthew’s Gospel is similar. Once again, God has chosen the “little guy,” John the Baptist, to announce that the reign of God is here in the person of Jesus Christ. And yet Jesus says this of John: “Among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist.”

Once again, God has chosen the “little guy,” a reminder to us in the times we feel powerless and helpless. And this “little guy,” John the Baptist, was the herald of another person who began as a “little guy” in a manger in Bethlehem: Powerless; helpless, and yet our King; our Savior; our Lord, Jesus the Christ.

---

[1]  George Butterfield, “Daily Reflection, December 11, 2014.” http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/Collaborative Ministry/121114.html. Accessed 11 December 2014.