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.

Homily for Thursday, 18 June 2015– Ferial

Thursday of the 11th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 11:1-11;  Psalm 111:1b-2, 3-4, 7-8; Matthew 6:7-15

Have you ever encountered somebody who has said or done something foolish? Could it have been the person who made an unconvincing argument or the person who inattentively cut ahead of you in line or in traffic (I am guilty as charged on this count!)?

The Corinthians addressed by our first reading had encountered somebody they thought was foolish: Paul of Tarsus. Might we be asking, “Why be so irreverent and critical toward a great saint and apostle like St. Paul?” I love St. Paul, one of my favorite saints in Scripture, but in his second Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul even admits his own foolishness. He says to the Corinthians, “Brothers and sisters, if only you would put up with a little foolishness from me”!

What could possibly have made the great St. Paul appear foolish, at least in the Corinthians’ eyes? St. Paul admits that he is not the most gifted speaker. He admits that he is not like the philosophers in Corinth and other large pagan cities of the time who drew students to themselves and could command a fee for their teaching. “I preached the Gospel to you without charge,” St. Paul says to the Corinthians. But neither being “untrained in” speaking nor teaching “without charge” at the time would have made St. Paul appear foolish, even to the many arrogant Corinthians.

No, St. Paul is considered foolish by many Corinthians because he is in love. And we know that love is irrational; foolish even at times… St. Paul loves the Corinthians; loves and lives by the Gospel he is preaching, the Gospel of Christ crucified and risen. St. Paul is in love with the true Christ behind the Gospel message of our faith, and so the Corinthians label him as foolish!

And who is the true Christ whom St. Paul preaches in Corinth? The true Christ is the Christ of our Gospel reading; the Christ who invites us not to “babble like the pagans” but to trust in our “Father who knows what [we] need before [we] ask him.”

“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What kind of prayer is this, Jesus, in today’s world in which many do not revere God’s name; do not even know or want to know God; do not revere God in creation or in the dignity of all human life?

“Give us this day our daily bread.” What kind of prayer is this amid individualism that will not admit when we are in need; that we need God; Christ’s real presence in the “daily bread” of our Eucharist?

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive… and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” But can we not simply deny evil and sin;  deny our need for forgiveness; our need to forgive others if only for our own peace, as many do? 

What kind of prayer is this? This is a prayer of the foolish! Yet Jesus has made himself so foolish out of love for us that he died for us! And if Christ is a fool out of love, then he invites us to be fools for him, because we love as he loves us.