Homily for Sunday, 31 March 2024– The Resurrection of the Lord, Mass of Easter Sunday

Readings of the day: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

Sisters and brothers: Christ is risen, alleluia! He is truly risen, alleluia!

Within the Scripture readings we have just heard on this Easter Sunday morning, I am always profoundly drawn to the descriptions of Jesus’ first disciples, the diversity of their experiences of Jesus’ resurrection and the preaching of apostles like Peter about Jesus’ resurrection.

First, I invite us to focus our attention on Mary Magdalene. She, not any of the Twelve, is the first to see the empty tomb of Jesus, with the stone rolled away from its entrance. She runs to tell Simon Peter “and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved,” that the tomb is empty. But at this point, Mary Magdalene’s experience is not one of excitement and joy; it is one of confusion. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

In her anxiety and confusion, Mary Magdalene reaches for the first logical conclusion that comes to her mind: Somebody has stolen, has relocated Jesus’ body. Peter and the beloved disciple run together to the tomb to investigate Mary’s claim that the tomb is empty. I imagine that, when Mary Magdalene first tells Peter and the beloved disciple that the tomb is empty, they would have thought this was preposterous. But, to their credit, the two men go to the tomb. Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb, too, but remains in the garden outside it, weeping.

Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter the tomb. They see the stone rolled away, the burial cloths rolled up in separate places, the head cloth from the body cloth. And the next line in John’s Gospel always amazes me, every time I hear it: The beloved disciple (and we can presume Peter, too) “saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

The beloved disciple believed first. Only later would Jesus’ disciples understand this mystery of the resurrection: “He must rise from the dead.” In the Church, dating back to the eleventh century Benedictine monk St. Anselm of Canterbury, we have a neat little phrase to sum up the goal of the Christian intellectual tradition: It is “faith seeking understanding”—fides quærens intellectum.

Now, maybe this speaks to the smallness of my faith, or maybe it is a more widespread phenomenon of contemporary Western thought (I will leave this question to the philosophers), but I have real trouble believing in something if I cannot first begin to understand it intellectually. I have trouble believing something if it is not at least reasonable to me. Simon Peter and the beloved disciple believe before Jesus’ rising from the dead becomes something reasonable, understandable to them. This is very bold on their part!

And Mary Magdalene, lingering, weeping in the garden outside the tomb, is bold in her own right in John’s account of Easter morning that we have just heard. She does not understand why Jesus’ tomb is empty any better than Simon Peter and the beloved disciple do. She thinks that somebody has taken Jesus’ body and laid it elsewhere. But Mary Magdalene does not flee her complex set of emotions and thoughts, her experience of the present moment: Confusion, anxiety, sadness because, as far as she knows, Jesus is still dead. Mary Magdalene remains in the garden to encounter this experience head-on. And she is blessed, because of her boldness, with an encounter with the risen Lord. Jesus asks her, “Woman, whom are you looking for”?

At that moment, Mary Magdalene recognizes the voice of her Lord, our Lord, immediately: “Rabbouni”! But she is still caught up in trying first to understand before she can believe that he is truly risen, that nobody has taken Jesus’ body away. Jesus reminds her, and reminds us, that the greatest faith precedes understanding—having everything worked out intellectually. Faith seeks understanding, ideally, not the other way around.

“Do not hold onto me,” Jesus tells Mary Magdalene. “Do not hold onto” this very human desire to understand, to make rational sense, before we can believe. “But go to my brothers,” Jesus says, “And say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

So Mary obeys Jesus. She goes and announces to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” And then they, too, come to believe that Jesus is truly risen from the dead. They become vocal preachers, witnesses by their way of life, to Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus’ disciples can at last begin to understand, once they have believed. And then they can act on their faith, their understanding, to found and grow the Church, this communion of “witnesses” to the risen Christ as Peter calls those who hear him preach in the Acts of the Apostles, our first reading this morning.

But this story all begins in a garden, with the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Lord, and in the tomb, when Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter to find the tomb empty and the burial cloths displaced. That our first encounters, in John’s Gospel, with the risen Christ happen in a garden and inside an empty tomb is no accident.

It was in a garden where, Genesis says in its account of the creation of the first humans, God created Adam and Eve. It was in a garden where Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lie that eating the forbidden fruit would make them wise, would make them their own god, able to understand everything as God does, without the need to believe and depend on God whose goodness had created them and sustained them and all things. Yet it was in a garden where, when Adam and Eve sinned, God’s Spirit first blew through Eden and whispered to them, “Where are you”: Where are you, not a wise and all-knowing God but naked and ashamed? And it was in a garden, still, before Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, where God first promised to redeem us from, overcome, destroy sin and its effects.

This promise reaches its peak in the mystery we celebrate today: God has sent his only Son to redeem us, to overcome and destroy sin by his death and resurrection from the dead. And this promise will reach its fulfillment when the Christ returns in glory at the end of time, as we hear today from the Letter to the Colossians: “When Christ [our] life is revealed, then [we] will be revealed with him in glory.”

It is in a garden, just as it was in a garden “in the beginning,” in those first moments of our creation and fall into sin, where God once again calls out. God’s “Where are you” to Adam and Eve becomes Jesus’ question to Mary Magdalene, “Whom are you looking for”?

While this Easter encounter with the risen Christ is still a mystery, God’s Christ calls to us, invites us to enter the empty tomb, to acknowledge that he is risen and is present with and through us. God invites us to do all that, starting in a garden and an empty tomb on Easter morning, before we could ever fully understand this mystery. God invites us, as he did Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, to believe first. Only once we believe, might we understand. And then, as God called Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, the beloved disciple, and all the other Christian disciples after them through the ages, God now calls us to be witnesses.

God calls us to “go and tell [our] brothers” and sisters: We believe. “We are witnesses to all that [Christ] did.” And now Jesus Christ, who died to redeem us, is risen. He is truly risen. Alleluia!

Homily for Sunday, 8 May 2022– Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C (Good Shepherd Sunday)

Readings of the day: Acts 13:14, 43-52; Psalm 100:1-2, 3, 5; Revelation 7:9, 14b-17; John 10:27-30

Appropriately, on this Good Shepherd Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter, our readings present us with all kinds of images and metaphors of shepherds and shepherding; of lambs and sheep. And, every fourth Sunday of Easter, especially if I am in an urban area with few if any sheep or shepherds (like Edmonton), I think how amazing it is that this image of shepherding; of sheep is still one of the most pervasive images we have of Jesus. This is true even of people who have little or no experience of sheep or shepherding.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We have art and icons that depict Jesus slinging a lamb over his shoulders, carrying it to safety. Today we hear the end of Jesus’ Good Shepherd Discourse from John’s Gospel. Jesus makes bold claims to be no ordinary shepherd. While the best of shepherds, we could presume, would protect their sheep from predators and other threats to their life and well-being in this life, only Jesus can claim that he, the Good Shepherd, guarantees his sheep “eternal life”: “They will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

If we continue in John’s Gospel just past the end of today’s reading, John says that the Jewish leaders who listened to Jesus became infuriated with him: They “took up stones again to stone him.” Going back to the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, stoning was the penalty prescribed for blasphemy; for claiming to be God.

Today Jesus clearly claims to be one and the same with the one God of Israel: “The Father and I are one.” To address God in this way, let alone claim to be God, was preposterous and a great evil in Israel of Jesus’ time. Such a claim would violate the great commandment-prayer of Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is God; the LORD is one.” If the LORD is one, Jesus, this man of Nazareth, could not possibly be the LORD, God of Israel, so the Jewish leaders thought, in a way reasonably.

Put another way, as I remember Dr. Denis Lamoureux, Science and Religion professor here at St. Joseph’s College, saying, Jesus’ claim to oneness with the one God of Israel would have left the people hearing Jesus with three ways to interpret his claim: First, that Jesus is out of his mind; second, that he is a liar; and third, that he is in fact God.

We know the answer as to which of these three options is true. Or at least we presume and believe it, or else we would not be here: Jesus is God. But we (I think we need to understand) have the gift of hindsight that the people who first heard Jesus claim, “The Father and I are one,” did not have.

Even before Jesus got to this decisive line, “The Father and I are one,” his use of shepherding metaphors were clear references to the depiction of the God of Israel as a shepherd in the Old Testament. We can think of one of the most memorable Psalms of trust and consolation, Psalm 23: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” The prophet Isaiah also depicts the God of Israel; our God as a shepherd: “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” And we know that when the St. Louis Jesuits write a hymn after a Bible passage, it is a memorable passage: “Like a shepherd he feeds his flock, and gathers the lambs in his arms; holding them carefully close to his heart, leading them home.”

There are other people in the Bible who are shepherds. We might think of Moses, “tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law” before he climbed Mount Horeb and encountered God in the burning bush. And King David is first introduced as a shepherd in 2 Samuel. But these great biblical shepherd figures are really stand-ins for the God of Israel. David was the shepherd-king after the LORD’s own heart. God worked through Moses to shepherd the people of Israel back to their homeland from slavery in Egypt.

The main point in all this, though, is that, when Jesus applies the image of the Good Shepherd to himself, it is no accident. Already, well before Jesus explicitly identifies himself as one with God the Father, he has claimed to be one with Israel’s God by invoking these Old Testament images of God the shepherd.

These are images that carry over into the New Testament. One of the most frequent ways of depicting God; depicting Jesus in the New Testament is that of the shepherd. We hear this today from the Book of Revelation, but with a counter-intuitive twist. In John of Patmos’ vision of the “great multitude” of the saved—the “great multitude” of those who had given their lives for our faith—the Lamb seated on the heavenly throne is also the shepherd. This lamb, also the chief shepherd, Jesus Christ, “will guide” these martyrs for our faith, all who are saved, “to springs of the water of life, [where] God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

The image of the sacrificial lamb who becomes the chief shepherd, and who leads the saved to springs of living water, also recalls several Old Testament depictions of lambs and shepherding, and other images of agriculture; growth and giving of life. If we were at the Easter Vigil, the mother-of-all-church-celebrations that begins this fifty-day celebration from Easter to Pentecost, we would have heard (not really a shepherding metaphor, but) the majestic song from the prophet Isaiah to which we respond, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” Psalm 23 refers to the LORD as shepherd leading the Psalmist “beside still waters.” Our Psalm today speaks of us as God’s “people, the sheep of his flock.”

In the familiar story of the first Passover, the people of Israel are prepared to escape slavery in Egypt, shepherded by Moses and Aaron. The LORD tells the people of Israel to slaughter a lamb per household and eat it hurriedly. The people of Israel are also to put blood from their lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their houses. The LORD will pass through Egypt and “strike down every firstborn” of Egyptian households but leave the firstborn of any house showing lamb’s blood at its entrance.

These images that compare God; compare Jesus to a lamb, a shepherd, or both at the same time continue in history through the prayer of the Church; our liturgical prayer as a community of faith and individual prayer. Our prefaces that introduce our Eucharistic Prayer during Eastertime are especially rich in these images of the Lord as a lamb. The preface we will pray today says that Christ “never ceases to offer himself for us, but defends us and ever pleads our cause before [God]: He is the sacrificial Victim who dies no more, the Lamb, once slain, who lives forever.” In our prayer after communion, we will pray, “Look upon your flock, kind Shepherd, and be pleased to settle in eternal pastures the sheep you have redeemed by the Precious Blood of your Son.” And, of course, just before we receive communion (and at the beginning of Mass, during the Gloria), we pray together, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us… Lamb of God… Grant us peace.”

So we remain familiar with these images and metaphors of lambs, sheep, and shepherding to describe the Lord and his relationship with us, down to the present day. And it does not matter whether we have ever (or often) seen a real shepherd or sheep.

We understand, we believe, and we celebrate, sisters and brothers: Jesus Christ is both lamb and shepherd. He is the Passover lamb sacrificed once for all, “who dies no more.” Yet he is the shepherd who “leads us by still waters” to nourishment, peace, protection from evil, and to eternal life. He is not out of his mind, or a blasphemer, or a liar. He is God; the Good Shepherd-“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” In him and only in him, the Good Shepherd, do we find salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 17 April 2022– The Resurrection of the Lord, Mass of Easter Sunday

Readings of the day: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

The Motherhouse Chapel of the Vincentian order, the Congregation of the Mission, in Paris includes a Latin inscription along the arch above the tabernacle and high altar: Pertransiit benefaciendo, “He went about doing good.” This inscription is surrounded by illustrations of Vincentians doing works of goodness and charity, especially among the poor, for which the order is so famous.

When I lived in Paris, my apartment was across a courtyard from the Vincentian Motherhouse. So this inscription in the Motherhouse chapel, Pertransiit Benefaciendo, “He went about doing good,” resonates especially with me. It is taken from the reading we hear this Easter morning from the Acts of the Apostles. In our reading, St. Peter describes Jesus’ ministry in this way as he preaches in the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion who would become an early Gentile disciple of Jesus Christ. “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power,” Peter proclaims; “he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”

The earliest Church, in the years right after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, and God’s sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, had a problem. I would describe it as a good problem to have. The problem is that—if we follow the Acts of the Apostles’ account of events—on the one hand, the Church was expanding; people were being baptized, both Jews and Gentiles like Cornelius, exceptionally quickly and in great numbers. Acts gives us a sense of an early Christian Church blessed with great fervor; great piety; people dedicated to going about “and doing good,” following Jesus’ own example. Acts says that, in these earliest Christian communities, “nobody had need”; the wealthiest gave of their excess to support the least well-off. All was well. This was, without doubt, the work of the Holy Spirit, as Acts so often emphasizes. Peter says of Jesus in Cornelius’ house that he was “anointed… with the Holy Spirit and with power.” Truly, this could have been a description not only of Jesus, but of any Christian disciple; any of us. Each of us, sisters and brothers, have been “anointed… with the Holy Spirit and with power” from the moment of our baptism. We have been anointed, after Jesus himself, to go out and do good.

On the other hand—and the earliest Christian disciples would have been acutely aware of this, especially as the Church expanded rapidly beyond the Jewish world and into the Gentile world, its cultures and customs—nobody directly witnessed Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Church had a problem.

The person closest to witnessing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead directly is Mary Magdalene, in John’s Gospel from which we hear on this Easter morning. But when Mary Magdalene arrives at Jesus’ tomb, the resurrection has already taken place, only Mary does not know this yet. The stone at the tomb’s entrance has been rolled away. John very deliberately says that Mary arrives at Jesus’ tomb “while it was still dark.” Mary Magdalene does not (yet) encounter the risen Christ. Instead, her first encounter is with darkness; confusion; emptiness. Mary Magdalene presumes the worst when she returns to tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

The beloved disciple and Simon Peter “set out” to the tomb to investigate. But, like Mary Magdalene, they, too, encounter darkness; confusion; emptiness; no body, much less that of the risen Lord. John says of the beloved disciple and Simon Peter: “As yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

The beloved disciple and Simon Peter return “to their homes.” But, to her great credit, Mary Magdalene remains on scene. She remains to grapple with the darkness; the confusion; the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene is often called “the apostle to the apostles,” because she is the one who returns to the (male) apostles to announce to them that Jesus is indeed truly risen. Yet, in John’s Gospel, she does not return to the eleven remaining apostles until the very end of this episode; this encounter with the empty tomb. She remains there for some time to grapple with; to ponder in the darkness; the confusion; the emptiness. It is there, where Mary Magdalene is before the empty tomb; where Mary Magdalene at first mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener (a subtle reference to God the creator-gardener of Genesis’ Eden; Jesus has been “with God”—he is God—from before “the beginning” of creation), where the Church is born.

Only then is Mary Magdalene ready for the great revelation: The gardener is the risen Lord; her and our Rabbouni; her and our Teacher. But now Mary must not remain there; she must not grasp onto Jesus as she has until now tried to grasp onto the mystery of the empty tomb. Otherwise there would be no Church. Our Easter story would have ended there, in the darkness; the confusion; the emptiness. “Do not hold onto me,” Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Only then is Mary Magdalene ready to return to Jesus’ disciples and announce to them, “I have seen the Lord.” And only then (thankfully because, again, had it been otherwise, there would be no Church) are Jesus’ disciples ready to believe Mary’s witness: She has seen the risen Lord!

That they believe her is remarkable, because there was no body in that tomb when Mary Magdalene, and then the beloved disciple and Simon Peter, first saw it on the morning of the third day after Jesus’ death. So the Church still has a problem. It is a problem with which Peter grapples as he preaches to the household of Cornelius, sometime after Jesus’ resurrection and to a pagan, Gentile household at that.

All Peter is able to say in Acts about the first witnesses to the risen Christ concerns later events. Nobody saw Jesus rise from the dead. But, Peter insists, “God raised him on the third day.” And God “allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses”: To Mary Magdalene; to Jesus’ apostles; then maybe to a slightly larger group of Jesus’ disciples… To a rational, critical mind, and especially to Gentiles a step further removed from Jesus than his inner circles of disciples, Peter’s testimony to the appearances of the risen Christ to a limited group of witnesses must have seemed absurd. If Jesus is truly risen, why did he only appear to this select group of witnesses? Why did he send Mary Magdalene to tell his disciples that he had risen? How did such conviction that Jesus was truly risen and had commissioned them beyond an inner circle to communicate this news to all the world emerge from darkness; confusion; one woman peering into an empty tomb?

The conviction in the resurrection of the Lord and his mission to us must have emerged and spread from the Holy Spirit’s continued action through these first disciples. It is the only possible explanation. This conviction in God’s mission must have spread through the Church, all the way through history to us, so that we Christians (not perfectly, because we are sinners, but somehow still intelligibly and convincingly to the world) have continued to act as Christ did.

Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him,” Peter proclaims on this Easter morning. Pertransiit benefaciendo: Peter was describing Jesus, his life and ministry; his death and resurrection, to a Gentile household of a Roman centurion, Cornelius. But Peter could just as well be describing us. Peter could just as well be describing the commissioning of every Christian from the moment of our baptism.

Sisters and brothers, from the moment we are baptized, the Holy Spirit of our risen Lord impels us to go about “doing good.” Our Easter story begins, as we have heard, in the darkness and confusion before an empty tomb. But it cannot remain there beyond a short time: “Do not hold onto me, but go to my brothers [and sisters] and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.’”

“Do not hold onto me,” but go forth “doing good,” Jesus invites us. The risen Jesus lives in us. His Spirit is poured out on our world every time we do good; every time act with kindness and mercy; every time we care for the sick; the poor; the disadvantaged; every time we simply listen for the presence of the risen Lord and his Spirit in one another; every time we heal divisions and reject any form of violence. When we go about doing good, the Church is reborn, time and again, in our longing world.

So may our Easter proclamation be active in our going “about doing good.” Christ is risen; he is truly risen! Alleluia!

Homily for Sunday, 18 April 2021– Third Sunday of Easter, Year B

Readings of the day: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9; 1 John 2:1-5a; Luke 24:35-48

“Peace be with you,” alleluia!

How many of us have noticed that today, for the second Sunday Gospel reading in a row, Jesus’ first words to his disciples when he stands among them after he rises from the dead are, “Peace be with you”? Jesus’ greeting has become very familiar to us. And I imagine that Jesus’ greeting to his first disciples quickly became very familiar to them, too, after his resurrection. After all, both Luke’s and John’s Gospels, from which we have heard this Sunday and last, feature the risen Jesus greeting his disciples in this way. In fact, in John’s Gospel (think back to last Sunday), the risen Jesus greets his disciples not only once but three times—first to his disciples, except for Thomas, on the evening of the day he rose; a second time immediately after that, when Jesus also breathes the Holy Spirit on his disciples; and then a third time with Thomas present: “Peace be with you.”

Luke has Jesus greet his disciples only once, in Emmaus, “Peace be with you.” But it is effective. I imagine that, at this point, although Luke says that Jesus’ disciples were still “startled and terrified,” they began to think, “This is bizarre, even terrifying, but we have heard this greeting sometime, someplace before.”

And we hear from Luke today the second major part of the Easter story that, in Luke, begins with Jesus among only two of his disciples on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. By the beginning of today’s Gospel, these two disciples have already met up with and “told the eleven [apostles] and their companions what had happened on the road to Emmaus, and how Jesus had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

My sisters and brothers in the risen Christ, Jesus is still making himself known by this same simple action; this same simple greeting as he did those first times to his first disciples: He “had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” He made himself known to them by greeting them, “Peace be with you.”

There is a reason why, since Vatican II, the sign of peace has been included as part of what we call the Communion Rite at Mass, which extends from the Our Father until we receive communion. To greet one another in the risen Jesus’ words, “Peace be with you,” is essential in order to recognize Jesus “in the breaking of the bread.” When we greet one another at Mass, “Peace be with you,” we recognize the Christ really and truly present in one another, in the Church. We need to recognize the Christ really and truly present in one another, in the Church, before we are able to recognize and worship him as really and truly present in the Eucharistic bread and wine that become his Body and Blood.

“Peace be with you” and “the breaking of the bread” are inseparable. But is the sign of peace, where it has been in the Order of Mass for over fifty years now, not still a bit startling? Most if not all of us have, I suppose, gotten used to the sign of peace where it is now in the Mass. Certainly it is not terrifying as Jesus’ disciples found it when Jesus greeted them, “Peace be with you,” that first time in Emmaus. And maybe we have gotten used to our “text of peace” during our Masses streamed over Zoom for the last year or so, even if it still commands our attention in (I still find) a bit of a jarring way when we exchange peace through Zoom’s chat function: Make sure we exchange a sign of peace with panelists and participants, and so on…

During Vatican II, where the sign of peace was to be placed within the Mass, and whether everybody in the assembly or only clergy during a Solemn Mass (as had been before Vatican II) would exchange peace ritually, were hotly-debated among the bishops at the Council. The English former Master of the Dominican order, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, tells one of my favourite stories about the sign of peace when it was inserted back into the Mass just after the Our Father after Vatican II. Two French Dominicans Fr. Radcliffe visited at that time, Frs. Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, both important figures at Vatican II, had very different approaches to the sign of peace although both lived in the same house in Paris. Congar’s sign of peace “was a grave and formal gesture, whereas Chenu affectionately punched and hugged… and pulled one’s hair”!

“Peace be with you”: We hear the same oh-so-familiar greeting; it is the same Christ really and truly present in one another as in the “grave and formal” Congar, the excitable Chenu, or the terrified disciples who had just witnessed Jesus’ death on a cross and “thought they were seeing a ghost.” It is the same Christ who makes himself known “in the breaking of the bread” and who opens our “minds to understand the Scriptures”: That death no longer has power over the risen Christ, or over us; that we are invited to proclaim the “repentance and forgiveness of sins” that Jesus’ resurrection has made possible, “to all nations.”

This seems to be a daunting task, does it not? How are we to proclaim this “repentance and forgiveness of sins… to all nations” in Jesus’ name? Well, we could begin with a familiar greeting, one that captured its hearers’ attention when Jesus said it, and still does whenever we say it and live it: “Peace be with you”; shalom!

The familiar peace Jesus offers us stirs the world to attention because it does not and cannot come from this world. Jesus’ shalom captures our attention, but it also consoles, reconciles, empowers each and every one of us not only to speak this greeting to one another, but to live it: To seek to console, to reconcile, to empower and so to point out God’s work to still more people in our world and to point one another to God, our only everlasting peace and salvation.

In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter gives us an example of how to proclaim and live the risen Christ’s shalom. Yet, I will admit, I find the way in which Peter addresses the people “at the temple gate” in Jerusalem a bit troubling at first hearing. His preaching sounds at first to be heavy on the fire and brimstone, speaking to the people about “Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate… You killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead,” Peter rails. This is not a homily I think I would be capable of giving!

But, if anybody knew their need for Jesus’ shalom—“Peace be with you”—it was Peter. It was Peter who stood before the temple gate, a redeemed sinner, witnessing to his reconciliation and peace with God made possible only by Jesus’ death and resurrection and that is now available to all of us, redeemed sinners whom we are. “Repent therefore, and turn to God”; turn toward the one who greets us, “peace be with you”… “so that your sins may be wiped out.” How remarkable is Peter’s message from the temple gate?

And the first Letter of John proclaims the same message, the same greeting at its heart, in a slightly different way than Peter. Jesus Christ is “our advocate with the Father… the atoning sacrifice for our sins” and the sins “of the whole world.”

Jesus Christ, crucified at the hands of sinners,

Jesus Christ, “our advocate with the Father” and the redemption of sinners,

Jesus Christ, our reconciliation with God,

Jesus Christ, who calls us to proclaim his peace to all peoples and nations,

Jesus Christ, really and truly present in all the Scriptures, in the Eucharist, and in each of us and our signs of peace,

Jesus Christ, of the familiar greeting that stirs the world to attention; that forgives; that quells fears and doubts; that saves,

Jesus Christ, risen from the dead,

Jesus Christ, our shalom.

“Peace be with you.”

Homily for Sunday, 4 April 2021– The Resurrection of the Lord, Mass of Easter Sunday

Readings of the day: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

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

Christ is risen! He is truly risen! Alleluia, alleluia!

If I can name one person, besides our risen Lord Jesus, my family, friends, or brother Basilians, who especially drew me toward religious life and priesthood, simply by the example of holiness she lived, it was perhaps my great aunt (my maternal grandmother’s sister), Jeanne d’Arc Brunelle. Aunt Jeanne was a sister of the Congregation of Holy Cross, in religious vows for 71 years. Just before and during my time in seminary as a Basilian, and for my first years of ordained ministry as a deacon and then a priest, I lived near enough to Aunt Jeanne while I was in Toronto and Rochester and she in Cornwall and then Montreal that I could drive to see her fairly often. And, for as long as I can remember, Aunt Jeanne would call our home at Christmas, and we e-mailed back and forth constantly.

Especially if it had been longer than usual since Aunt Jeanne and I had heard from or written each other, she would apologize for having taken so long to show “signs of life from your old, great aunt”! Aunt Jeanne, suffice it to say, lived with an attractive, holy, and fearless joy. She suffered with cancer for the last fourteen years of her life, but the disease never took away her joy and mildly sassy edge; it never took away those “signs of life” from our Aunt Jeanne. Her funeral, at Pavillon Saint-Joseph, the Holy Cross infirmary in Montreal, four years ago this past November, was about as joyful as a funeral could be. In fact, I do not remember a wake service, ever, with as many peals of laughter and tears of joy as from the (mostly) elderly sisters at Pavillon Saint-Joseph at Aunt Jeanne’s wake service, as memories of Aunt Jeanne’s 71 years of religious life, living and ministering in countless countries in the world (some very poor or marred by violence) were recounted.

A funeral, we may think, is a strange place to encounter “signs of life.” Yet I had a feeling I would encounter just this when the Superior of Pavillon Saint-Joseph contacted me to let me know Aunt Jeanne had died, so I could plan to attend her funeral. Today, our Gospel recounts another event, one central to our Christian faith, when the people involved, Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and Jesus’ beloved disciple, go to the scene—the tomb of Jesus—not expecting, we can be sure, to find “signs of life” there.

We have the gift of hindsight. We know this is just what Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the beloved disciple find: The ultimate sign of life; the empty tomb; our Lord Jesus, risen. But Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the beloved disciple did not know that they would find any signs of life at Jesus’ tomb. After all, it was a tomb; a resting place of the dead, not a place to encounter signs of life. So unexpected was it for each of them to encounter our risen Lord that this encounter, in a different way for each of Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the beloved disciple, was truly jarring.

Each of them—Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the beloved disciple—encounter signs of life where they expected to find death. Yet, in a way none of them realized in the moment, each of them brought their own “signs of life” when they went, that first Easter morning, to Jesus’ tomb. They brought with them signs of life in the depths of their hearts; signs of life that, as John’s Gospel recounts this event, anticipated the resurrection of Jesus.

How is this so? John’s Gospel is not clear why Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb at first, only that she goes to the tomb “while it [is] still dark” and finds the stone removed from the tomb’s entrance. But there is a tradition in our Church, from Mark’s and Luke’s Gospel accounts of Mary Magdalene’s Easter morning arrival at the tomb, of Mary as the first to bring spices to anoint Jesus’ body. Even the name Mary derives from myrrh, which was used then as a burial spice.

My sisters and brothers, the Easter morning visit to Jesus’ tomb by Mary, the “myrrh bearer” of Magdala, is a supreme act of love; a first sign on the part of Mary Magdalene of the risen Lord’s own life deep within her, before she even realizes it is there. And this love of the “myrrh bearer” and the Lord’s life source within Mary Magdalene overwhelm and overflow from her. She cannot remain at the empty tomb, but returns to tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, with some alarm: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” The three disciples of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, and the unnamed disciple “whom Jesus loved,” return together to the tomb. But only Mary remains there, weeping, until she is able to encounter her beloved; our beloved, the Risen One, Jesus. Maybe just as unnervingly for Mary Magdalene as it was to find the stone rolled away and the tomb emptied of the Lord’s body at first, we hear Jesus command Mary sharply, “Do not hold onto me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

“Do not hold onto me”: It is as if Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “Do not hold onto the source of love; the sign of life that is already within you and that you communicated so freely and beautifully already by going to the tomb to anoint my body with myrrh, and then by returning to tell my disciples that I had risen. “Do not hold onto” Love; I must be free to ascend “to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God,” Jesus says. This is the only way that the source of love, the sign of the life of the risen Lord that is already within Mary Magdalene, may be received by God the Father and then showered on the whole world in the person of God the Holy Spirit.

My sisters and brothers, what we begin to celebrate today—our Easter time that runs from today’s celebration of our Lord’s resurrection, through the celebrations of Jesus’ ascension to heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost—Mary Magdalene and then Simon Peter and the beloved disciple experience in an instant. They are able to experience this entire Paschal mystery in an instant and then to found our Church on it because, in a sense, it is only possible to encounter love of this magnitude if we who set out to encounter love, to encounter the Lord’s “signs of life” in our world, already have that love within us and are willing to give it to the world freely, not to “hold onto” it simply for ourselves.

“Do not hold onto me”: At this point the risen Jesus gives Mary Magdalene the strength to release God’s love already within her, the love that enabled her to go to the tomb that first Easter morning in the first place, upon the world with an attractive, holy, and fearless joy. And amid these events at the empty tomb, Simon Peter and the beloved disciple are given this same strength, which they show in different ways: The beloved disciple arrives ahead of Simon Peter and enters the tomb. This “sign of life,” the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” enters a place of death and finds it, physically, empty of any body; empty not only of life or death, but simply empty. Biblical experts have commented on how this encounter of the beloved disciple with the emptiness and utter absence of the tomb may be John’s way of directing our memory back to the earliest tradition of Israel of the Ark of the Covenant of the Old Testament. The ancient people of Israel traveled with an empty box under a tent; emptiness in which God was believed to dwell.

So the beloved disciple encounters ultimate presence in utter absence. The beloved enters the absence of the tomb, as the Carmelite reformer St. John of the Cross would write centuries later in a poem in which he is the seeker, “seeking love.” And the beloved disciple finds the ultimate presence of the Love he seeks in the absence. “He saw and believed,” John’s Gospel says. Simon Peter does not enter the Presence of the empty tomb that has become the new Ark of the Covenant; the new Holy of Holies. Instead, he contemplates from outside. Simon Peter is set on a mission to understand these “signs of life” by which God chose to save the world; “to understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

We, too, celebrate today because we love and have come to encounter Love Risen. We seek to understand this encounter in light of the Scripture, “that he must rise from the dead.” We believe once we realize we have encountered ultimate, saving love in utter emptiness. And our faith drives us to release the “signs of life” we have deep within us already, the love of the risen Christ, upon our world with attractive, holy, and fearless joy.

Homily for Thursday, 7 May 2015– Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 15:7-21; Psalm 96:1-2a, 2b-3, 10; John 15:9-11

Have any of us ever found ourselves at a crossroads in our lives? Perhaps we have experienced the arrival of a loved one or new family member; a child, grandchild, great-grandchild, niece, or nephew. Maybe it was when we were married or a marriage or relationship broke down. Maybe we have experienced the loss of a loved one. Maybe it was a new job, or the loss of a job. Maybe we were faced with one or more important decisions in our lives. Maybe we have experienced severe illness or that of a loved one.

Many events can place us at a crossroads in our lives. In the Acts of the Apostles today, we hear of a point at which the whole Church was at a crossroads. And what placed the Church at this crossroads? It was love that placed the Church at this crossroads; God’s love for us.

A key to the entire Book of Acts is the action of the Holy Spirit. God’s Holy Spirit is the presence of God’s love in our world. The Holy Spirit is continually portrayed as somewhat scary and mischievous, but always for our good. The Holy Spirit, the presence of God’s love in our world, is not held back or contained by the limits we can sometimes place on God; on God’s love.

Very quickly after Jesus’ disciples experience the presence of the Holy Spirit in our world, at the first Pentecost, they realize how unlimited the Holy Spirit; how unlimited God’s love for us is. God’s love is still with the Jewish people, the first to hear God’s Word, but now it has expanded to include the Gentiles as well: People with foreign cultural customs, different religion, different languages, and who ate food the Jews would have considered unclean.

Peter is moved to accept these people as Christians as they confess their belief in Jesus and are baptized. These Gentile Christians receive and act by the Holy Spirit just as the Jews who accepted Jesus as God before them did. Peter asks why these Gentiles should not be accepted into the Christian community, the Church, just as the Jewish Christians had been. After all, God’s love is not limited to Jew or Gentile.

But Peter brings together the first Apostles, the leaders of the early Church, in Jerusalem to discuss this issue of Church expansion to the Gentiles. God’s unlimited love has placed the Church at a crossroads, and so Peter convokes a kind of “council” of Apostles. We can think of many times at which the Church has been at a crossroads, perhaps faced crises, and has called councils of its leaders. We think of Nicaea and Constantinople to discuss the full divinity of the persons of the Trinity in the fourth century; Trent in response to the Reformation; most recently Vatican II.

The small but significant Council of Jerusalem in Acts was a response to God’s love that defies our limits; that is for Jew and Gentile alike. The Church, at its first major crossroads, trusted the Holy Spirit, the presence of God’s love in the world. And Peter’s and the other Apostles’ example invites us to trust in God’s Spirit of limitless love, especially when we are at a crossroads.

Homily for Wednesday, 22 April 2015– Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 8:1b-8; Psalm 66:1-3a, 4-5, 6-7a; John 6:35-40

Has anybody ever experienced somebody who is joyful, even when this person is experiencing great suffering or distress?

Ever since my first time serving as a Basilian in Cali, Colombia, seven years ago, the Easter season has brought to my mind many experiences there of people who showed great joy amid the suffering and distress of deep poverty. My first Palm Sunday in Colombia was especially moving. We Basilians were carrying bundles of palm branches we had cut through the poorest neighborhood of the parish we serve in Cali. Along the way, children left their shelters (often made of scrap metal or even cardboard) three; four; five; six at a time to embrace us and greet us with bright smiles. These children showed so much joy and gratitude for the service of the Basilians in their neighbourhood; their parish. This remains one of my most moving moments of my life as a Basilian: Great joy amid such great distress; suffering; poverty!

I see similar joy amid suffering and distress when I minister with the poor in our own inner city of Rochester: House of Mercy, Bethany House with the Sisters of St. Joseph… On Easter Sunday at Sanctuary Village, a tent city relocated to a loading dock, over one hundred fifty people, most homeless, joined us in worship with lively song to greet our risen Lord. How beautiful, this joy amid homelessness; poverty; hunger! I also see this joy amid suffering when I visit the sick in hospitals and homes; when I anoint the sick with blessed oil.

This joy amid suffering; distress; persecution is the experience of the people in our first reading today, from the Acts of the Apostles. The persecution led by Saul (who would later be converted and become the great St. Paul) had “scattered” all but the Apostles “throughout the countryside of Judea and Samaria.” Facing persecution, the Apostles do not give up their ministry. We hear in Acts especially of the ministry of the Apostle Philip: Preaching, healing the sick and those with “unclean spirits.” And we hear of how the people responded to Philip’s ministry in Samaria: “There was great joy in that city.”

The people of Samaria recognized the presence of Christ risen in the Apostles, even amid great suffering; distress; persecution. They recognized and hoped in the presence of the Lord who says in John’s Gospel to us today: “I am the bread of life… This is the will of my Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him may have eternal life, and I shall raise him on the last day.” They recognized and hoped in the signs of eternal life that were already with them in the Apostles’ loving service. Our Psalm response today was the song of these people, even amid their suffering: “Let all the earth cry out to God with joy”!

And the risen Christ invites us to make this song our own, by serving especially amid those who suffer; who are sick; dying; homeless; displaced; persecuted. Many of us know already, I am confident, how, when we serve with joy, we receive joy, even from people who suffer; people in distress; people whose only gift (but what a gift!) to us is joy.