Homily for Sunday, 7 November 2021– Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 17:10-16; Psalm 146:7, 8-9, 9-10; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

In the language of the Bible, there are few people depicted as poor and downtrodden as widows. From many different texts of the Old Testament, we have the oft-repeated triplet, “the widow, the orphan and the stranger (or resident alien),” which stands for the lowest of the low classes in the society of Israel of the time. We hear the widow-orphan-stranger motif in our Psalm today: “The LORD loves the righteous, and watches over the strangers. The LORD upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”

Girls and women through Biblical times had few rights independently of their fathers and then their husbands, and children had few rights independently of their parents. So a child whose parents had died, or a woman who had lost her husband, would be extremely poor and excluded from the power structures of those ancient societies.

Can we not think of many examples when Jesus preferentially calls upon children, women, and sometimes widows; when he makes these underprivileged people the centre of the event? We hear a clear example of Jesus doing this in today’s Gospel, the story of the so-called “widow’s mite.” In fact, both Mark’s Gospel and our reading from 1 Kings today centre on the heroic widow figure. (And if we are thinking that the term “heroic widow” is self-contradictory, an oxymoron even to our ears today, that is because it is. Our Bible offers us this jarring image of the widow, the lowest of the low classes, who becomes the heroine; the main driver or protagonist of the event).

When I think of the widow’s mite, I think of one of my favourite paintings, one by the French painter James Tissot, called “The Widow’s Mite” or “Le denier de la veuve.” Tissot is known for his set of 365 distinctive watercolour (or gouache) paintings, which he painted late in his life and many of which are scenes from the Bible. But much of his earlier work is of well-dressed, wealthy, attractive women in the rich neighbourhood of Paris where Tissot lived. And then, one day, James Tissot visited Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris to paint a portrait of a choir singer. There, he experienced a vision of Jesus tending to the very poorest people, and soon he returned to a devout practice of his Catholic faith.

It strikes me (whether this is intentional on Tissot’s part or coincidence, I am not sure) how similar the temple treasury area in Tissot’s “The Widow’s Mite” looks to the limestone façades of Saint-Sulpice and many other churches in Paris. I lived within a fifteen-minute walk of Saint-Sulpice for five years in Paris. And the scene of people milling about the temple treasury in “The Widow’s Mite” reminds me of a frequent scene around the entrances to Saint-Sulpice and other churches in Paris: Well-dressed elites, but the (still) many poor people the elites have been almost conditioned to ignore.

But there is one person noticeably not shown in Tissot’s painting, “The Widow’s Mite.” That person is Jesus. Tissot is also famous for at least two (that I can think of) of his later watercolours that are from Jesus’ perspective. One is Tissot’s “Crucifixion, Seen from the Cross,” which is from the crucified Jesus’ view, looking down upon the crowds—closest to him, his mother, the women who served Jesus during his ministry, and the beloved disciple—at the foot of the cross. And the second of these paintings is “The Widow’s Mite.”

Midway through today’s Gospel reading, Mark says, fairly innocuously, that “Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” Tissot’s unseen Jesus paints the watercolour for us: A crowd of men in fine robes, the scribes Jesus has just criticized for their boastfulness, even in prayer, as “they devour widows’ houses.” This crowd is wealthy, proud, and self-serving. And in their midst is a poor widow, facing Jesus; facing the artist; facing us. Her eyes are downcast in a shamed gaze. She is carrying a small child, at least in Tissot’s painting. And the wealthy men continue to socialize; continue to boast of their wealth and status. One reaches for a horn, one of seven next to the temple treasury box that the wealthy would blow to announce that they had made a substantial donation. All these men ignore the poor widow, whom Tissot depicts as she walks away, after having dropped her “two small copper coins” in the treasury box. All ignore her, except the unseen but ever-present Jesus.

Jesus notices the poor widow. And he takes this opportunity to teach his disciples: Pay attention to the widow. Do not, in your pride, in your wealth, in any spirit of self-absorption that can even affect our prayer, ignore this widow and what she has just done! “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all of those who are contributing to the treasury.”

There is profound meaning in just these few words of our Lord. And, of course, we would be right in observing a recurring pattern of this kind of event—of encounter with the poor; the widow; the orphan; the stranger, resulting in a teaching moment—in our Bible. For good reason, our Church has us hear the Gospel account of the widow’s mite alongside our reading today from 1 Kings about the encounter between Elijah and a widow with a young son at Zerephath.

Understandably, the widow of Zerephath is focused on conserving what little food she has so she and her son will not starve. Yet, just then, Elijah asks this woman to be boldly generous—Elijah asks the widow, not the other way around, for “a little cake”! And somehow (1 Kings does not say why) the widow at Zerephath trusts Elijah. Maybe Elijah simply had that great a reputation as a prophet. Anyway, Elijah’s prophecy comes true: The jar of meal and the jug of oil last until the LORD sends rain to relieve the terrible famine in the land, which was disproportionately affecting the poorest people.

I think it is reasonable for us, when we hear about the widow at Zerephath in 1 Kings; the widow at the temple treasury in Mark’s Gospel, to focus on how each widow is exceedingly generous with very little, or on the trust each widow shows in God, directly or through a prophet like Elijah. But in each event, with each widow, there is more depth of meaning than generosity or trust. And, please allow me to say, the added depth of meaning has nothing to do with each widow’s starting lack of food or money. The focus, in either event, is not primarily on either widow but on the abundance of God.

The widow at Zerephath obeys Elijah and makes him “a little cake” from her meal and oil, and then she and her son receive more food by the word and hand of the LORD than they needed to survive until the rain ended Israel’s crop failure and famine. The widow at the temple treasury quite possibly gives the second greatest gift anybody gives in our Gospels. What do I mean by this?

It is helpful, I think, to place the event of the widow at the temple treasury and her “mite”—her two small copper coins—in its broader context within Mark’s Gospel. We are drawing toward the end of the Church’s liturgical year. By the way, Advent is only three weeks away; the beginning of a new Church year (just saying!). We have followed Mark’s Gospel roughly in order this year on Sundays. After this account of the widow’s mite, Mark includes only one more short chapter before Jesus enters Jerusalem, and his Passion and death take place. At the point where we hear from Mark today, the Pharisees and the scribes, the religious elites of Israel, are murderously angry with Jesus. Jesus continues to criticize them for their blindness to their worst sin, and they are on the cusp of having Jesus killed.

Jesus’ death on a cross is the first and most generous gift that anybody gives in our Gospels; in the whole of the Bible and of human history. In the immediate foreshadow of Jesus’ gift of his very life for our salvation is the gift of the widow and her two small copper coins, “everything she had” out of her poverty. A more historically distant sign, but still a sign, of God’s supreme generosity that culminates in Jesus’ gift of eternal life by his death on a cross is the gift of food of the widow at Zerephath to Elijah.

On the cross, God gave us in Christ “everything [he] had to live on” so that we might live forever. God invites us not to ignore this, but to imitate it by giving generously according to our means, as a sign that we, like the hidden but ever-present Jesus in the Gospel scene, the artist of our creation and our salvation, have taken notice.

Homily for Sunday, 21 March 2021– Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33

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

What would we think if I said, “The days are surely coming”; that some event or great news we have been looking forward to, maybe for a long time, was imminent? What if God were to say this to us, or somebody we think of as a prophet—like Jeremiah was to ancient Israel, but in our own time—or a person otherwise in a position of authority were to announce to us, “The days are surely coming”?

“The days are surely coming, says the LORD” through his prophet Jeremiah and to us anew today! I wonder, though, how the people who heard Jeremiah in their time announce this to them felt at first. Would they have been especially excited or joyful? Would they have wondered what this “new covenant” God was announcing through Jeremiah meant? Would they have felt guilty for their sins as a people since, as we hear from Jeremiah, the very reason God was proclaiming a “new covenant” with Israel was that Israel had broken the first covenant with God? Israel, God’s people, had been unfaithful to God, in a way similar to when there is infidelity between spouses in a marriage. But would the people of Israel, when they heard Jeremiah’s promise of “a new covenant” between them and God, been all the more resolved not to remain paralyzed by their guilt, but to repent?

Maybe many of them would have thought Jeremiah to be too dramatic and simply ignored him or become irritated by him (after all, Jeremiah is known among the Old Testament prophets to have been especially dramatic, fiery, even angry in his speech). Many may have been moved by Jeremiah’s tireless passion to listen to his announcement of this “new covenant” between them and God. More than likely, ancient Israel’s initial responses to Jeremiah’s announcement of “the days… surely coming” were a bit of “all of the above.”

“The days are surely coming”! How do we continue to hear and discern this message in our time? For about a year now, since the first COVID-19 control measures started, I have been praying Evening Prayer over Zoom every day with a group of relatives and friends from different places where I have ministered as a priest. Within the last few weeks, people in our prayer group have announced and been receiving doses of the vaccines against COVID-19. And, this past week, [one of our Basilian confrères in our house], whom many of us may know from his time at St. Joseph’s College, was so excited that he was finally able to book an appointment to receive a vaccine.

I was and am so happy for him! I could not help think of God’s first words to the people of Israel through Jeremiah in today’s reading: “The days are surely coming”! The days are surely coming when this pandemic will be in the past; a memory. The days are surely coming when we will be able to gather safely in our chapels at St. Joseph’s College for Mass. The days are surely coming when COVID-related restrictions on in-person attendance at Masses will be relaxed and then be no more; when we will be able to celebrate Eucharist and other sacraments freely, without anxiety about becoming sick, and as the health and nourishment of our souls, minds, and bodies requires.

These “days are surely coming”; this gives me great hope, and I cannot wait to welcome all of us, St. Joseph’s College’s worshipping community; faculty; students; staff colleagues, back to in-person worship; classes; prayer and work at our College as soon as we are able. “The days are surely coming” and, may I say, the days are already upon us (and not only because we have weathered a pandemic) when we have acquired an acute sense of Christ-like service to and prayer for anybody in need; anybody who is especially poor or disadvantaged, or simply anybody who longs (as we do) to gather together in one worship space to pray; hear God’s Word; sing; take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes Christ’s body, given for us and for our salvation, together. I am deeply grateful and joyful, sisters and brothers, whenever I look upon our community of faith here at St. Joseph’s College, whether (for now) in little insets in a Zoom window or (in not too long, we pray) in our College chapels, halls, offices, and classrooms.

“The days are surely coming” or, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel today, “The hour has come.” Now, when Jesus says in our Gospel, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” is this not a rather ominous reference to “the death he was to die”? Once again (Fr. Jim spoke a bit about this last Sunday), John’s Gospel today repeats Jesus’ connection between his being raised on the cross and the bronze serpent in Moses’ time being raised on a pole to heal the people of poisonous snakebites.

The crowd of Greeks who approach the Apostle Philip at the beginning of our Gospel today simply “wish to see Jesus.” I imagine this crowd is a lot like us: We, too, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus.” My prayer for us, sisters and brothers, is that our simple and noble “wish to see Jesus,” to worship and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, be granted very soon; that this “hour has come”; that at least those “days are surely coming” for us. Yet the crowds’ “wish to see Jesus” in John’s Gospel is met not with immediate consolation but with Jesus’ unsettling, even morbid at first hearing, reference to his approaching death on a cross.

And Jesus says that, for us to be in any way like him—like whom we are called to be through our baptism—means that we, too, will have a share in his passion and death. We, too, will be like the “grain of wheat [that] falls into the earth and dies.” If not, we will “remain just a single grain” but, to the extent we share in Jesus’ passion and death, we, like the grain of wheat that dies, will spring from the earth and “bear much fruit.”

My sisters and brothers in Christ, I feel impelled to think, with Christian hope, that we have been through a “grain of wheat” experience for a long while now. And, as the Lord knows, certainly better than me, many if not all of us have been through maybe several “grain of wheat” experiences in our lives: Maybe we have been ill, or a loved one or friend has experienced illness. Maybe we have loved ones who have died. Maybe we have served among the poor or those who lack basic necessities, or been in those situations ourselves. May any of us who have ever suffered know the Lord’s solidarity with you in your suffering. Today, we hear from the Letter to the Hebrews, the same reading we will hear again on Good Friday, of Jesus who “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death.”

These same “prayers and supplications… loud cries and tears” Jesus now offers for all who suffer in any way; for all who, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus”; for all who long to be able to gather and worship in one space again soon, to take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes for us the Body of Christ, together in person again; for all of us who have experienced and continue to experience in mind, body, or spirit, what Jesus meant when he referred to the “grain of wheat” that must fall “into the earth” and die, in order to bear “much fruit” and “keep it for eternal life.”

With Jesus’ solidarity with us in times of suffering; privation; isolation, we are and will be the grains of wheat that spring from the earth and give it and one another life and joy. Already we sense the signs that those “days are surely coming.” In and through Christ’s passion and death, which we know by faith will end in the joy of resurrection, for us as once for Jesus, our “hour has come,” for our good and God’s glory forever.

Homily for Friday, 28 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 34:11-16; Psalm 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6; Romans 5:5b-11; Luke 15:3b-7

What is mercy? What images can we think of that express the mercy of God?

We have prayed for the last nine days before a great image of God’s mercy, that of Jesus’ Most Sacred Heart. At the conclusion of this novena we have been celebrating here at St. Kateri Parish, in this St. Margaret Mary Church, named for one of the most important promoters of the worship of the Sacred Heart, we celebrate this Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with this Eucharist. The image of the Most Sacred Heart is most often that of the heart of Jesus, crowned with thorns, topped with a cross and burning fire, wounded and bleeding out of loving mercy for us.

This past week, my brother Basilian Fr. Kevin Mannara, Director of Campus Ministry at St. John Fisher College, took me on a tour of the lovely new Hermance Family Chapel of St. Basil the Great on campus. One of the too many highlights to count of the new chapel at Fisher is the large cross behind and above the sanctuary: Seven feet from the top of Jesus’ head to his toes, and seven feet from fingertip to fingertip, with Jesus’ arms spread wide on the cross. But it is Jesus’ gaze from the cross upon us, either the people who approach to receive communion at the foot of the sanctuary steps or priests, deacons, servers, or anybody preparing to enter the sanctuary at the beginning of Mass or exit it after Mass, that perhaps most strikingly expresses the Lord’s mercy. It is as though Jesus, crucified but still alive as he is shown on the cross in the Chapel of St. Basil the Great, is at the moment of saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” before he gives up his spirit.

Jesus’ gaze of mercy from this cross is so intensely beautiful as to be unnerving to anybody who should look up at Jesus’ face. There is nothing quite like a penetrating stare-down of mercy from our crucified Lord to express the depth of God’s saving love for us and all creation. The gaze of Jesus from the cross in the Hermance Family Chapel of St. Basil the Great is also inspired by and meant to evoke Pope Francis’ motto as a bishop, in turn derived from a text by the Venerable Bede: Miserando atque eligendo, literally, “By having mercy and by choosing.”

Our readings today propose for us yet another image of God’s mercy, that of a shepherd. Compared to a bleeding, wounded heart crowned with thorns and topped with a cross and flames, or a giant sculpture of the crucified Jesus gazing intensely into our eyes when we look up at him from in front of a church’s sanctuary steps, shepherds may not necessarily have the same unnerving quality to them. But then when was the last time anybody here has seen a shepherd? Shepherds may not be as unnerving an image to us as a bleeding, wounded, thorn-crowned, flame-and-cross-topped heart, or a sculpture of a crucified man gazing right into our eyes, but shepherds still share a strange, mysterious quality with these other depictions of God’s mercy.

And, if we listen more attentively to our readings today, a shepherd, or at least Jesus depicted as a shepherd, can be just as unnerving as Jesus’ wounded heart with thorns, a cross, and fire, or Christ crucified gazing into our eyes. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks, “Who ‘among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it’”? If we were among the first hearers of this parable, our answer, if we were in our right mind, would probably have been something like this: “Nobody, Lord. No sensible shepherd would leave ninety-nine of one hundred sheep to search the desert for one lost sheep. What an almost unnervingly ridiculous question”!

Yet if we think of God’s history of loving mercy toward us and all creation, dating back to the very first moments of creation, God’s history with us has been one of unnervingly ridiculous loving mercy, of leaving the ninety-nine sheep to search the desert for the one lost sheep. One of my favorite retreat talks of all time by the late founder of l’Arche, Jean Vanier, focuses on God’s first response to Adam’s and Eve’s sin of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Jean Vanier invites the retreatants to remember the first directly-spoken words of God in the Bible. When nobody on the retreat is able to remember the first words God speaks in the Bible, Vanier gives the silenced group the answer: God says to Adam and Eve, “Where are you”? “God does not say to them, ‘You’re bad,’” Vanier emphasizes; God asks, “Where are you”?

From this earliest point in the history of God-with-us; Mercy-with-us, our ridiculously loving, merciful God has been leaving the “ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance”—in fact, this image is itself ridiculous, because each and every one of us, at one point or another, has been and will be in “need of repentance”—to seek out the few lost, vulnerable ones in the desert, beyond the pasture or garden: “Where are you”?

Still early in our history as a people of God, God-with-us; Mercy-with-us sent us prophets like Ezekiel, from whom we hear today, to speak God’s ridiculously unnerving loving-mercy to us. Ezekiel speaks to us from a time not, sadly, too different from our own in many respects, even and especially in our Church, when the elites in positions of power; those positioned to shepherd God’s people in God’s place, instead misled, scattered, wounded, and deceived the people. These bad shepherds, abusers of power, were more concerned with protecting their own power and afraid of appearing ridiculous by having mercy on the people they served; by going out, seeking and bringing back the most vulnerable purposefully and preferentially. So Ezekiel, speaking for God, promises the people; promises us: “The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal, but the sleek and strong I will destroy, shepherding them rightly.”

Ezekiel’s vision of a shepherd God would not be so ridiculous, or possibly unnerving, if Ezekiel were to restrict his vision of whom is to be shepherded to the people who were, for the most part, faithful to God, strong and morally upright. But no, Ezekiel’s vision is of a God who preferentially seeks out, brings back, and heals “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick” and destroys those who think they are among “the sleek and the strong” (or allows them to destroy themselves by their own pride).

St. Paul’s letter to the Romans takes Ezekiel’s “preferential option,” if you will, for “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick” to yet another level. St. Paul proposes for our belief, our worship as Christians, an unnervingly, ridiculously merciful God. St. Paul proposes for our worship a God and God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who did not shepherd only the worthy; those who would never stray far from pasture. St. Paul proposes for our worship a God who, in the person of God’s Son Jesus Christ, died for us “while we were still sinners… while we were enemies” of God and of one another.

My sisters and brothers, the readings we hear today on this Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the images themselves that we might associate with this celebration, put before us a God of unnervingly ridiculous, extravagant mercy: The shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one lost sheep; who preferentially seeks out “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick”; who dies for us “while we were still sinners… while we were enemies.” We worship and we celebrate on this day the unnervingly ridiculous God-with-us, Mercy-with-us, who gazes intensely into our eyes from the cross; whose wounded heart bleeds and is ablaze with love for us and who, in that great mercy of God that God calls us to imitate among ourselves, chooses us for his own.

Homily for Friday, 31 August 2018– Ferial

Friday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time


Readings of the day: 1 Corinthians 1:17-25; Psalm 33:1-2, 4-5, 10-11; Matthew 25:1-13

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

We pray today in our Psalm response, “The earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.” And, at least deep down, do we not know this to be true? We know the truth of the presence of the Lord in the goodness of his creation, of the earth and the universe, well enough that this truth is in some way what draws us here to worship as Church, many of us daily.

For many of us, is this truth, the goodness of God present in the world, not maybe more present in our everyday experience than for others? From the beginning of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, from which we hear today, we might get the sense that St. Paul’s experience of the world and God’s presence in it is not the same as that of the earliest Christian community in Corinth. St. Paul addresses a prosperous Corinthian community that believes itself to be self-sufficient. The Corinthians are hostile to the apparently foolish message of St. Paul of allowing the power of the cross of Christ to speak for itself.

But the gospel the Corinthians of St. Paul’s time wanted to hear and many still want to hear today, is not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel St. Paul preaches, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is ridiculous to the Corinthians of his time and today’s proponents of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” a gospel wherein the rich and self-sufficient are blessed and the poor cursed.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ does not cynically deny that, as our Psalm says, truly “the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD.” But the Gospel of Jesus Christ, most often best preached not by the most eloquent or showy, but by everyday unheralded people (and I do not doubt many of us saints), is a Gospel of God’s goodness and presence in the world that transforms the world.

Neither does the Gospel of Jesus Christ deny the evil in the world; the evil perpetrated by members of the Church and even of its leadership. No, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the good news, at its heart, that even the worst possible evil will not have the last word. God will have the last word.

This emboldens St. Paul to preach the raw power of “the cross of Christ” to the Corinthians. “The cross of Christ” stands as the worst evil this world has ever known, the Son of God put to death as a criminal. But the cross of Christ also stands as the greatest witness to how full the world is of God’s goodness.

If this paradox—the world’s greatest evil is also the greatest-ever witness to God’s goodness—sounds ridiculous, it is. But, for many of us perhaps, this paradox resonates with our experience. Despite the violence in our world, the wars, the people forced from their homelands, the abuse of vulnerable people, we still believe and hope enough in God’s goodness to be here to worship our God.

This looks like foolishness to much of the world. We gather here, and I speak here now, with no special eloquence or wisdom. We gather here because we believe in a Gospel of Jesus Christ that includes and yet overcomes the cross. We believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which alone transforms the greatest evil into the good that saves us, “the goodness of the LORD” that has always filled the world.