Homily for Sunday, 10 September 2023– Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 33:7-9; Psalm 95: 1-2, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 13:8-10; Matthew 18:15-20

When I served in Colombia as a postulant with the Basilians, we observed community spiritual practices that go way back in the Church and in religious orders, but which I found especially difficult: Culp and monitions. Culp is when you meet with a fellow member of the community (a postulant, seminarian, or priest) and tell him and ask his forgiveness for an offense you have committed, usually some wrong against the good of the community in the religious house. Monitions is when somebody in the local community confronts another about an offense he has committed.

It is not that I found culp easy: I could certainly think, without much difficulty, of a few ways in which I have tried and am still trying to live religious life better, be a better brother to the Basilians with whom I live; simply be a better human being. But, compared to culp, I sincerely disliked the practice in monitions of having to think of something of which to accuse one of my brother Basilians in the house. What if the offense of which I accused another made me look like a great hypocrite? Surely I am guilty of many things greater than the little offense of which I am accusing my brother, right? And I am not, by nature, confrontational.

I think this is healthy; I do not think I (or we) should go out of our way to reveal and confront the wrongs of others. If they are serious enough—like, real sins—they tend to reveal themselves quickly and widely in our social settings. And, contrary to the claim I hear occasionally that, because of increased secularization or other factors, our societies have “lost a sense of sin,” I think (maybe this is influenced by my experience of religious community life) that our societies, as secularized as they are, have increased in their sense of the social effects of evil, what we call sin, over its effects on the individual. This increase in awareness of “social sin” and its effects has been especially rapid in the last few generations, our lifetimes. I would like to know our thoughts on this.

But, I think, few of us enjoy confronting another person or a group, even if they are behaving in a truly wrong or sinful way. Nobody wants to be revealed as a great hypocrite for exposing the sins of others that may pale in comparison to the gravity of our own wrongs. Yet this is precisely the ministry God gives to the prophet in today’s reading from the Book of Ezekiel.

God has set Ezekiel as “a watchman for the house of Israel.” If Ezekiel refuses not only to confront a fellow Israelite who has sinned, but “to warn the wicked to turn from their ways,” he will meet the same end that they will. Ezekiel, like those who act wickedly, “will die in their iniquity.”

God asks quite the unenviable task of Ezekiel. Like most if not all the Old Testament prophets, I imagine that Ezekiel simply wanted to live a good life and go about his business without troubling anybody. Last week we heard from Jeremiah, another prophet who has a different vision for his life before God calls him to be a prophet to Israel. And when God calls Jeremiah to be a prophet, Jeremiah immediately wants to back out, but feels compelled—“enticed” is the word Jeremiah uses—to continue in the ministry to which God has called him, even though this has made him “a laughingstock” to his fellow Israelites.

So this is a common theme in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament: God insists on calling the prophets to a thankless ministry; the prophets’ reluctance to accept God’s call does not exempt them from it. In our Gospels, Jesus and his disciples are heirs to this same tradition of ancient Israel, the Jewish people. Jesus and his disciples, now we, are heirs to the same prophetic ministry as people like Ezekiel or Jeremiah exercised. So, what is this prophetic ministry? What does it look like for us to exercise it?

Inheriting the tradition and the ministry of the Old Testament prophets, of Jesus and his first disciples does not mean minding our own business, or even going about living our best lives as individuals when clearly evil exists and people do wrong in our world. Even if we are unsure if another’s actions are wrong or sinful enough to merit our intervention or confrontation—this was my problem with monitions—Jesus’ teaching and God’s call to Ezekiel say to us that it is not enough that we should simply mind our own business.

The greatest good not only of individuals but of the whole community—the “common good”—must be first and foremost when somebody has done wrong in a way that might have compromised the good of the community. Remember the beginning of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, before the Beatitudes in the same Gospel of Matthew from which we hear today. Jesus’ first teaching in Matthew in fulfillment of “the Law and the prophets” is: “When somebody wrongs you, first go and be reconciled with your brother or sister, and then offer your gift at the altar.”

That first teaching of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, “First be reconciled,” conditions Jesus’ teaching in today’s Gospel reading about what to do when a brother or sister, a sharer in our faith, a member of our Church wrongs us. “First be reconciled,” or, as Jesus says today, “Go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.”

And, by “go and point out the fault,” Jesus is not saying that we should point out another’s fault, even a serious one, in a nasty or vindictive way. In this first step of how to act when another person wrongs us, I hear almost a presumption on Jesus’ or Matthew’s part that, most of the time, this step will suffice to bring the person who has committed the wrong to remorse and penance. How many times has this happened to us: We are about to say to somebody, in the most forgiving and empathetic tone we can muster (please pray for the graces of forgiveness and empathy in these situations!), “What you did or said really hurt me”? And, before we are even able to say something like that, the person says, “I’m sorry. I did or said something very hurtful and wrong.” This has happened to me many times. And it is most humbling when a person to whom I am closest—a friend, maybe even a family member or a brother Basilian—asks (in fact, anticipates) my forgiveness in this way. Just as often, this happens when I go into an encounter of reconciliation with such a person thinking I was in the wrong; that I said or did something to irritate that person and provoke a harsh response.

Forgiveness, communal and individual, must rule these encounters, Jesus says, for any wrong not to weigh down and destroy the community of faith. Maybe we tend (I am not sure about any of us, but I speak for myself) to think of Jesus’ promise at the end of today’s Gospel reading in the context of the Eucharist, the Mass, or other communal prayer: “For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”

It is perfectly right for us to interpret Jesus’ promise in this way: Jesus is with us in this celebration, where there are “two or three,” or however many “gathered in [his] name.” But even with respect to the Eucharist, what is the first thing we do after the opening sign of the cross as a community, “gathered in [Jesus’] name”? As a community present together, we ask one another’s forgiveness. We pray a Penitential Act! Sisters and brothers, we are enacting the steps of today’s Gospel, our prophetic ministry after the likes of Ezekiel, every time we gather for Mass! That is quite remarkable, if you ask me.

And if encountering a brother or sister who has wronged us (or if we have wronged somebody) one-on-one in a spirit of reconciliation and forgiveness does not work, Jesus says, then bring witnesses: “Take one or two others along with you.” Those “one or two others” can be a check or balance if we are unsure whether the wrong of another really merits further action, if it has really hurt the good of the community. If it is a wrong worth pursuing further action and the enlisting of witnesses to forgiveness does not work, only then is it permissible to treat the person who has done wrong “as a Gentile and a tax collector,” Jesus says. And, even when it is necessary (on rare occasions this will happen!) to cast somebody out of the community—I think of the formal Church penalty of excommunication—the goal of such a penalty, of such exclusion must always be to remedy the break, the hurt caused by the sin. Even in this most extraordinary step, the goal must not be a vindictive, final exclusion, lacking hope for reconciliation.

When we seek first to forgive, Jesus is there among us. When we “first [are] reconciled,” alone with another who has wronged us or one whom we have wronged, and then with “one or two others” and then with the whole Church as witnesses, Jesus is there among us. When forgiveness and penance reign, we build a truly prophetic community of faith in which nobody is forever excluded “as a Gentile or a tax collector.” This last step becomes unnecessary when we are truly accountable not only for our own moral conduct or that of our brothers and sisters, but for how readily we forgive and are reconciled with one another. That, Jesus says, is at the heart of our identity as a Christian community of faith, the Church.

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 Tuesday, 21 August 2018– Memorial of St. Pius X

Tuesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 28:1-10; Responsorial Canticle: Deuteronomy 32:26-27ab, 27cd-28, 30, 35cd-36ab; Matthew 19:23-30

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

What does Jesus have against rich people, anyway? “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone to enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel. In other words, if we are rich, we have no chance of being saved, right?

Well, yes and no. Without God, our salvation is impossible. “But for God, all things are possible,” Jesus says. So what does Jesus mean by these words?

Having grown up and now whenever I return to visit here at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, I get an impression that this parish; this community of Sherwood Park is fairly well-off, especially compared to some communities and parishes in which I have served in various places in the world. Of course, there are poor people among us here at OLPH and in Strathcona County, as there are in any parish, especially of this size. But even our country; our society is quite materially rich. Does this lessen our chance of salvation?

Let me suggest that this is not quite what Jesus is saying in our Gospel reading today. We get a clue, I think, toward the end of our Gospel reading today to the point Jesus is trying to communicate. Jesus gives his disciples two key images of what heaven will be: First, they will “sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” Second, Jesus says that everybody “who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for [his] name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold” in return what they have left to follow him, “and will receive eternal life.”

Here Jesus is speaking in what we call apocalyptic tradition, which dates the Old Testament. By apocalyptic, I do not mean the images of fiery end-of-the-world disasters brought to us by Hollywood. “Apocalypse” means “to make known”; “to reveal.” Old and New Testament writers, and Jesus in his own teaching and preaching, responded to crisis experiences in their own times (such as the Roman occupation of Israel in Jesus’ time) with language designed to give the people hope that God would resolve their crisis, and then some.

If we understand Jesus as preaching in this kind of apocalyptic language, revealing a message of hope, the rest of our Gospel reading today makes more sense. Material richness in itself will not result in our being denied heaven. Yet the onus is especially upon those of us who possess worldly riches; who have the gift of strong, united families; who do not have to struggle to get enough to eat, or for shelter, or against forms of mental, physical, or spiritual illness, to be mindful at least of people who do struggle and even suffer in these ways.

The onus is on us never to believe ourselves to be self-sufficient; to be our own gods. This is the same lesson Ezekiel speaks to the prince of Tyre and that Jesus speaks to his disciples: Only “for God all things are possible,” including our salvation. And our salvation depends on letting go of our worldly riches; putting them at the service of people who have less. Our salvation depends on letting go of the good but still finite gifts of this world for something eternal. Our salvation depends on how well we let go of our self-sufficiency to hope in God who alone saves us.