Homily for Sunday, 4 August 2019

Readings of the day: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 2:21-23; Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17; Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11; Luke 12:13-21

18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Who went to Mass today to hear a discouraging message? I will venture to say that few if anybody here today is here to hear a discouraging message.

Yet do we not hear just this, a real “downer,” from the Book of Ecclesiastes today: “Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher… All is vanity.” All your toil “with wisdom and knowledge and skill”; your work, even if you work extended or irregular hours for some perceived good to yourself or to other people, our society, our country, or our world: All this means nothing. All the benefits of our hard work will be left behind “to be enjoyed by another.”

“All is vanity,” sorry. The Jesuit priest and columnist for the newspaper The Catholic Register out of Toronto, Fr. Scott Lewis, who taught me in a course at Toronto’s Regis College, says (I think rightly) in his Register column, “God’s Word on Sunday,” for this week that “the author of Ecclesiastes will never win a prize for being the most joyful or hopeful individual in the Bible.” In fact, Fr. Lewis says, the Jewish Rabbis a few centuries after the writing of Ecclesiastes who decided on which books to include in the Bible were leery of including Ecclesiastes in the Bible as we know it today for a number of reasons: Ecclesiastes is too discouraging. Its message could have been written for anybody already cynically dissatisfied with life enough to have been waiting for an authoritative message to support their cynicism. Ecclesiastes’ message is not particularly religious. The Book of Ecclesiastes barely mentions God.

For good or for ill, though, the Book of Ecclesiastes and its “vanity of vanities” message are in our Bible. But if we fast-forward to the chaotic 1960s, thanks to The Byrds’ 1965 single, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” it would seem that the message of the cynical teacher of Ecclesiastes has gained new receptivity. “To everything… there is a season… and a time to every purpose under heaven”: Today, over fifty years since “Turn, Turn, Turn” was released, its lyrics are engrained in the memory of many people. Is this maybe because, in the 1960s (I think this is true of any time period), people were reflecting on both the joys and the chaos of the time, individual and social successes and problems, by asking the foremost question, “What does it all mean”?

If we fast-forward again to our own just-as-chaotic time, are we not still asking similar questions? What does our life on earth mean? Of what benefit is wealth, or work, or anything? After all, the people who die with the most wealth, or having worked the hardest or the longest, still die. “Vanity of vanities,” it would seem still today, “All things are vanity.” Yet, at least by my observation, Ecclesiastes—not usually the reading we hear today, but the “to everything there is a season” reading, from Ecclesiastes 3—is a staple at Catholic funerals, when people are, I would think, searching for some message of hope or meaning in our own lives and in the life of our deceased loved ones.

These questions are age-old: What is the meaning of our life on Earth? Of what benefit is wealth, or work, or our acts of justice and kindness toward others? Why bother, anyway, if “all is vanity”? Our Psalm today, the letter to the Colossians, and the Gospel of Luke all speak to these enduring questions we have about the meaning of our earthly life and of our activity during it, although maybe not with the same cynical edge as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes.

Our Psalm speaks to the finiteness of our life on earth; our life that is “like grass that… in the morning… flourishes and is renewed [and] in the evening… fades and withers.” Still, for the Psalmist, our earthly life and work within it have great meaning and dignity. We ask God, through our Psalm, to bless our lives, however short, and our work: “Prosper for us the work of our hands.”

The letter to the Colossians invites us to prioritize “the things that are above… not… things that are on earth.” The context of Colossians is both a form of laxity in the practice of Christian faith that had developed within a few decades of the earthly life of Jesus, and a response to that laxity. The more time passed after Jesus’ ascension into heaven, we might understand, Jesus’ disciples got increasingly impatient for Jesus’ promised return to Earth at the end of time. The longer Christian disciples waited for Jesus’ return, the more they became lax or ignorant about accumulating material goods that, while not bad in themselves, risked distracting them from placing their foremost hope in God and in eternal life. The letter to the Colossians’ response to this laxity is radical, even for its time. Colossians asks its hearers to think of themselves as already dead: “For you have died, and your life is hidden in Christ with God.”

In case we think that this call in Colossians to think of ourselves as already dead is morbid or simply bizarre, I invite us to think of our own baptism. Our Church’s Rite of Baptism is full of references to death: Death to our finite earthly life so that we may rise to eternal life with Christ.

But do we not experience in our world today the same tension that would have inspired the letter writer to the Colossians to invite us to think of ourselves as dead to this finite world in order to place our priority and our hope on God and eternal life? On the one hand, do we not hear from some people even today an Ecclesiastes-like despair, without the context of the world and spirituality of the author of Ecclesiastes, who lament the “vanity”; the lack of any meaning in this earthly life? On the other hand, maybe more often today, we hear the “evil twin” of this despair of any meaning in our earthly life; we hear a “prosperity gospel” mentality that encourages greed and material accumulation, even under sometimes Christian pretexts. This “prosperity gospel” holds that either the material poverty of the poor is a curse from God and wealth a blessing, or social justice and an equitable distribution of earthly goods do not matter anyway, because God will make all our inequity and injustice right at the end of time, no matter how justly or unjustly we act now.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus offers us, I think, a counterweight either to a mentality that despairs of any meaning to our life on earth or to the “prosperity gospel” view, which, similarly to its evil twin, holds this earthly life to be of no meaning but, in doing so, encourages greed and social injustice, all too frequently under a religious mask. In our Gospel reading today, Jesus encounters a man who asks him to order his brother to divide his inheritance with him. In refusing to do as the man requests, Jesus turns to “the crowd” and warns them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”

Jesus does not say that the possessions themselves are bad, or even that the man he encounters at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading is unjust in demanding his share of his inheritance. For us to understand Jesus as teaching that material possessions are in themselves bad, or that this man’s demand for his inheritance is in itself unjust, would miss the point of Jesus’ teaching. Such an understanding would be inconsistent both with the balance of Biblical teaching and with our Church’s historical teaching on the meaning of our earthly life and on justice concerning earthly possessions or wealth.

Neither Jesus, in our reading today from Luke or elsewhere in the Gospels, nor the author of Ecclesiastes—especially if we read Ecclesiastes beyond his cynical-sounding “vanity of vanities” lament we hear today—nor the letter to the Colossians, nor the Psalmist consider all wealth, all human work, or earthly life to be in themselves meaningless. Instead, Jesus and the authors of Ecclesiastes, Colossians, and our Psalm ground all meaning of earthly, material wealth, of labour, and of life itself, in God.

Human wealth, labour, and even our work toward individual charity and social justice have great meaning and dignity, but only if they are grounded in God first. If these are anything but God first—might first, nation first, wealth first, or me first—they become empty, meaningless “vanity of vanities.” Only by placing God first in all we possess, do, and are may we have eternal life, the life of ultimate meaning. And only with God first does our prayer, that of our Psalm, have any meaning for us here and now: “Prosper for us the work of our hands.”

Homily for Sunday, 12 August 2018

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 19:4-8; Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51

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

How often are we asked to do or not to do something? Children and teenagers, maybe you have been asked occasionally to do or not to do something at home: Clean your room, make your bed, set the table, do the dishes, take out the garbage, do not argue with your brother, sister, or parents, and so on. Maybe you have been asked to go to bed, or to get out of bed on time. Anybody here who works: Maybe your supervisor or employer has asked tasks of you. If you are an employer, a supervisor, a parent, or anybody in a position of authority or responsibility for another, maybe you have asked others to do something, or not to do something, more or less frequently.

In our readings today, we hear several instances of people asking and being asked to do or not to do something. We hear of Elijah who, in 1 Kings, has fled “into the wilderness” to escape the murderous rage of Queen Jezebel of Israel. Elijah had just killed all the false prophets of the Baals, the false gods Jezebel was worshipping and encouraging the people of Israel of the time to worship. Elijah flees for his life, but soon begins to despair of his own life: “It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” (In no way do I wish to trivialize despair, or even what we might recognize nowadays as depression, or thoughts of or attempts at suicide. If anybody we know ever experiences despair or depression, or thinks or speaks about taking her or his own life, please reach out to this person. If anybody here has experienced or is living through depression or outright despair, please know the dignity of your life, and that I; our faith community; our Church is here to support you; to reach out to you.)

Amidst Elijah’s despair is when an “angel of the LORD” wakes him and asks him to do something, twice: “Get up and eat.” Might we empathize with Elijah: The last thing he probably wants to do is “get up and eat.” In fact, he wants to die. To his credit, though, Elijah does as the angel asks, gets up, and eats some cake and drinks some water. As one of my brother Basilians says whenever another of our priests eats cake or other sweets for breakfast, “Ah! The breakfast of champions”! And so, if I were to ask us to do anything (especially parents whose children might think tomorrow morning, “Father said at Mass last night that it was okay to eat cake for breakfast”!), it would be not to be upset with me. I did not give your children permission to eat cake for breakfast; the angel of the LORD in the Bible did, and only to Elijah because he was despairing for his life. I am sorry to anybody who is disappointed!

The letter to the Ephesians, as in the story of Elijah in 1 Kings, gives us instructions about what and what not to do as people of God: “Brothers and sisters, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God… Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice.” Our Psalm asks of us, “Taste and see that the LORD is good.” And today in John’s Gospel Jesus asks the people not to “complain amongst” themselves.

Our Scriptures include many instances of people asking others and being asked to do something: Get up. Eat cake for breakfast. Avoid “bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander… [and] malice.” “Do not complain among yourselves.” “Taste and see that the LORD is good.” But how often do we ask somebody or are we asked not to do something but to be or to behave in a particular way?

To ask or to be asked to be some way may be less common than ask or be asked to do something. Yet have we not still asked or been asked not to do something but to be or behave in a particular way: Be kind. Be careful. Be happy with what you have. Be humble. Be prayerful. Be on time. Be brave. Be hard-working…?

Nowhere in our reading today from 1 Kings does anybody ask anybody else to be some way. But we hear this kind of command today in the letter to the Ephesians: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

This kind of calling to be or to behave in a particular way is not present in our Gospel reading, either, at least not word-for-word. Jesus is more content to describe to the people who he is, not so much who the people are or should be. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” Of course, Jesus’ use of emphatic “I am” statements, twenty-four times in John’s Gospel, as many times as in the rest of the New Testament combined, is a characteristic of John. It is John’s particular way of identifying Jesus as the same God who has been present in history all the way back to the first moments of creation; the same God who once identified himself to Moses as “I am who I am.”

But Jesus rarely calls us to be or behave in a particular way in John’s Gospel, at least at first hearing. Today we hear Jesus identify both himself as “the living bread that comes down from heaven” and the bread as something (or somebody, himself; his flesh?) he “will give for the life of the world.”

Here, I ask us to go back to the beginning of our Gospel reading today, and to connect the beginning of our reading from John to the end of what we hear today. Our Gospel reading today begins with the people grumbling because Jesus had said he was “the bread that came down from heaven.” It ends with Jesus saying that this bread, in fact his own flesh, is “the bread [he] will give for the life of the world.”

What if I were to suggest that the people were not complaining about Jesus’ identification of himself as God, or because they were put off by Jesus’ suggestion that they would eat his flesh? At least this is not yet what they were complaining about. This would become the heart of the people’s complaint only later, when Jesus would link the people’s salvation with eating his flesh and drinking his blood. This is a good time for a spoiler alert on next Sunday’s Gospel reading, but today the people’s complaint is for a much simpler reason.

Let me suggest that, today, the heart of the people’s complaint is not Jesus’ identification of himself as God or because he commands the people to eat his flesh, or because Jesus asks the people hearing him to do anything else.

This bread that Jesus offers, his own self whom we receive sacramentally in our Eucharist, is beyond anything “the manna in the wilderness” could ever have been. Jesus’ gift of himself is greater than any other earthly food, because it alone changes who we are. It alone promises us eternal life. When Jesus says to us today, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” behind these words Jesus is asking us to change. My sisters and brothers, Jesus is asking us, with the help and grace Jesus offers us in this celebration, to be more and more like him; more and more like God. Jesus is asking us to be, as he is— “I am” — “bread for the life of the world.” This is extraordinary!

And so we, like the people following Jesus in John’s Gospel, could easily complain among ourselves, because changing who we are is difficult. But, as St. Augustine says, when we receive the Eucharist, “we are what we receive.” And so how do we become more like Jesus; like God in our world? Our Eucharist compels us to go out and give “life [to] the world” by our works of justice, of mercy, and of kindness. Our Eucharist compels us to repent from our failures and sins. Our Eucharist compels us to defend all life and creation and its God-given dignity. Our Eucharist compels us to do all these things, but in so doing it compels us to change: To be, at our very heart, different than we have ever been; to be more like God, like Jesus; to be “what we receive”; to be, ever more, “bread… for the life of the world.”

Homily for Monday, 30 March 2015‒ Monday of Holy Week

Readings of the day: Isaiah 42:1-7; Psalm 27:1, 2, 3, 13-14; John 12:1-11

“I… have called you for the victory of justice,” God says through the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading. Of whose “victory of justice” does Isaiah speak?

Holy Week is our final preparation for the ultimate “victory of justice”: Jesus’ death on a cross for us. This is not a “victory of justice” brought on by anything we have done right or in retribution for what we have done wrong. This is God’s “victory of justice,” willed freely by God for our salvation.

And so is this not also our “victory of justice”? We are not mere spectators to God’s justice, so how do we make God’s “victory of justice” our own? Our answer to this question may seem obvious. We know what is right and just, and so we are called to act in ways that are right and just. Our Christian faith calls us to protect basic human rights, first and foremost that of life from conception to natural death. Our Christian faith calls us to use the prosperity we have to benefit the most vulnerable: People who are poor; the working poor; people who lack adequate shelter, water, and food; people who are ill; refugees and migrants. To protect the dignity of those most in need is our foremost “victory of justice”; how we become united in God’s “victory of justice.”

But what if we have little to give to help those who are in need? What if we cannot, as individuals, change social structures of sin that keep many mired in poverty; in violence; in injustice even in our own country? What if, even when we reject or at least do not participate in gossip or political partisanship, we see these continue and even increase in our culture? How do we promote God’s “victory of justice” then?

A saying by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta comes to my mind when I think of how we might promote God’s “victory of justice” in our world today. Mother Teresa said: “We can do no great things; only small things with great love.” For whom have we or will we do a small act of kindness today? How will we show to somebody the “victory of [God’s] justice,” which is the same to me as the victory of kindness and mercy? Who has recently shown us God’s justice; God’s mercy; God’s kindness, even in a small way?

And, above all, when we know we have failed to show forth God’s “victory of justice,” may we never despair of God’s mercy. May we never despair, even when we fall into the same sins; the same lack of justice, and even confess these repeatedly. May we heed the words of our Gospel Acclamation to God this morning: “You alone are compassionate with our faults.”

Might Judas Iscariot’s greatest sin not have been stealing from “the contributions” to the poor; not have been his betrayal of Jesus, but despair? God keeps calling us to small acts of “great love,” so may we never despair! God knows our works, individually and socially, for and against justice. Still, God is “compassionate with our faults.” By Christ’s Passion and death God has redeemed us and made us co-workers in his “victory of justice.”