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 Sunday, 8 September 2019

Readings of the day: Wisdom 9:13-18b; Psalm 90:3-4, 5-6, 12-13, 14, 17; Philemon 9-10, 12-17; Luke 14:25-33

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

Full disclosure: Yesterday was my brother Eric’s and (officially) new sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Sherwood Park, a great celebration of love, family, friendship and, dare I say, Christian discipleship. What exactly, then, does Jesus mean when he says, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate their father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even their life itself cannot be my disciple”? How many of us here now, maybe with your family or friends, are here because you in fact really hate your father or mother, husband, wife, or children, brothers or sisters, or even your own life? And petty squabbles and, kids, sibling rivalries do not count. Jesus says we really need to hate each other to be his disciples, right?

Well, not quite. At least I hope that, having just celebrated my brother Eric’s and sister-in-law Chelsea’s wedding, I am now not supposed to hate them and the rest of my family if I want to be Jesus’ disciple! I think we may understand what Jesus says in today’s Gospel a little better with a brief lesson in Greek, because Jesus’ original meaning when he asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple gets lost in translation to English. When Jesus asks us to hate “father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in order to be his disciple, the word we hear as “hate” is from the Greek misei. In English, words like “miser” or “miserly,” for somebody who is not very generous with his or her money, derive from this Greek word.

So, does this mean that Jesus’ ultimate disciple would be somebody like Ebenezer Scrooge? Well, again, not quite. Misei in Greek means, more precisely, “to treat as nothing”; “as of minimal to no importance.” This may still be troublesome for those of us who love our families and like to spend a lot of time with them, as I do. One great blessing I have when I have taught here at St. Joseph’s College is to live, for a few months of the year, in the same city as most of my immediate family and many of my closest friends. I would have difficulty being Jesus’ disciple if this meant treating my family as if they were not important. This is simply not my reality; my experience.

But to be Jesus’ disciple, I think Jesus is saying to us today, is a question of priorities. Even if (as I hope we all do) we love our mothers and fathers, our wives, our husbands, our children, and know the beauty and dignity of our own lives, Jesus is asking us to put God first. Jesus is inviting us to put our relationship with God above all the other great relationships we may have with people closest to us and however much we may love our own lives. Compared with our relationship with God, Jesus invites us to consider even the greatest of our relationships with other people and with ourselves (and certainly our own ego) as of minimal to no importance. This is especially because all our relationships with other people—our families and close friends—and our ability to recognize and love the dignity of our own lives all find their source in God.

If we understand Jesus’ saying that, to be his disciple, we must “hate… father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and sisters… and even [our] life” in this way, this may also help us to place what Jesus says to us in the context of our other readings today, from Wisdom, the Psalms, and Philemon.

The Book of Wisdom, not surprisingly, invites us to prioritize and seek after wisdom. Now, the Book of Wisdom is a strange book of the Bible. It, like several books that make up the so-called “wisdom literature” of the Old Testament—Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Sirach, some of the Psalms, and Wisdom—barely mention God and at times include statements that are theologically problematic if they are not interpreted carefully. We hear even today, for example, that “a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind.” Texts like this would be used by people on the fringes of the early Church called Gnostics (from another Greek word, gnosis, that means “knowledge”), who taught that the human body is like a prison dwelling from which the soul had to free itself to go to heaven. This teaching, and the Gnostics’ view that there is knowledge, gnosis, that is essential for our salvation that is outside the Bible or the teaching of the Church handed on from Jesus’ Apostles, were eventually condemned by the Church as heresy. But the Biblical wisdom literature is also peculiar in that it mentions God sparingly and, at face value, tends to prioritize human faculties like wisdom over anything divine.

At least today’s reading from Wisdom acknowledges a divine source (who remains unnamed, but still) of wisdom. The Book of Wisdom asks, “Who has learned your counsel, unless you have given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high”? So, if Wisdom prioritizes or glorifies wisdom above all, we could say that it does so because to prioritize or glorify wisdom is to point us to the source of all wisdom, the ultimate source of “all that is good,” whom we call God.

Like the Book of Wisdom and Luke’s Gospel, St. Paul’s letter to Philemon also calls us to discern priorities. Philemon is the shortest and one of the latest of St. Paul’s letters that are included in our Bible. St. Paul writes from prison to a wealthy Christian of the time, Philemon, who was possibly a bishop or other leader of the Church and who owned slaves, but whose slave Onesimus had run away from him. In the meantime, Onesimus had become a Christian (possibly baptized by Paul) and was being accompanied and taught by St. Paul in the Christian faith. If the Old Testament Book of Wisdom prioritizes the human faculty of wisdom, Philemon gives pride of place to virtues like forgiveness and reconciliation. Like wisdom, forgiveness and reconciliation point us to our utmost priority, God. Who here has forgiven or reconciled with another person, or been forgiven, not least in the sacrament of reconciliation, and so knows of what I speak?

Philemon, whom St. Paul addresses with this brief yet moving letter, was in no way obligated to receive Onesimus back as his slave, much less as “a beloved brother” in Christ as St. Paul asks of him. St. Paul knows this; he knows Philemon’s legal rights toward Onesimus, yet he asks Philemon to receive Onesimus back anyway, using affectionate terms for Onesimus like “my child” and describing his relationship with Onesimus like that of a father to a son.

St. Paul’s letter to Philemon, Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, our Psalm today, and the Book of Wisdom all point us to our ultimate priority, who is God. But each reading we hear today points us to God in a different way. In the letter to Philemon, the way to God is through practice of the virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation, especially when we are not required to forgive somebody; to receive that person back as “a beloved brother” or sister. Forgiveness and reconciliation without conditions is how God acts toward us when we stray from God and hurt one another by our sin. Unlike Onesimus, though, we do not begin as slaves; we begin as beloved people, created in God’s own image and likeness.

Our Psalm, like the Book of Wisdom, prioritize wisdom among ways of seeking God first. To know the shortness of our earthly days is, in a way paradoxically, to know the “favour” and “steadfast love” of the LORD for us; to know God as the source of our life, both our finite life on earth and our eternal life with God in heaven for which this life is our preparation.

In this earthly life, family and close friends can help us to prepare for eternal life by acting as examples of God’s love toward us, and our acting as examples of God’s love toward them. It will be unlikely for us, but it does happen still in our world today that people, Christians, are asked to choose in a moment between love for family, friends, and this life, and God. It is for these moments especially that Jesus says, “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”

Whether in the rare event we will be called to give our life for the Lord, or whether we seek wisdom, or love of family and friends, or forgiveness and reconciliation—all of which are good things—may we allow our seeking after these things to point us toward God. All earthly realities are secondary: Wisdom, human love and relationships, even giving our lives for our faith. God is and must be first. God is the source of “all that is good”; all that God gives us in this life for our salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 18 August 2019

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10; Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

About one hundred years after Jesus’ earthly life, in the ancient city of Sinope, now part of Turkey, there lived a man named Marcion, whose teachings became important in shaping early Christianity. Why would I start with the story of Marcion, from so many centuries ago? Well, Marcion perceived some key differences between what became the Old and New Testaments of our Bible. In the Old Testament, Marcion saw that God was often angry and quick to punish people for wrongdoing. Marcion, though, saw the God of the New Testament, shown through the life of Jesus, to use my word here and not Marcion’s word, to be nicer than the Old Testament God.

In the course of ministry, I have heard people claim only once or twice that the God of the Old Testament is angry and punishing while the God of the New Testament is kinder and more forgiving. So maybe Marcionism is not really popular these days. After all, if we read enough of our Bible (something Marcion did not have the benefit of doing in his time, because the books to be included in the Bible as we know it were not set yet in Marcion’s time), we see instances when, in the Old Testament, God is quite kind and forgiving and, in the New Testament, when God—even Jesus—becomes angry and promises punishment of wrongdoers.

One of those instances when Jesus becomes angry is in the Gospel reading we have just heard. Jesus himself asks and then answers the question: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division”! This does not sound like a very nice Jesus; like the Jesus maybe many of us would associate with peace, forgiveness, love, does it? What does Jesus mean when he says that he has come to bring not “peace to the earth… but rather division”?

Let me suggest that we are right if we get the impression that Jesus is not very nice in today’s Gospel reading. In our Gospels, Jesus is often not very nice… Now, why would I say that? I insist: Jesus is not nice. In the Gospels, including in our Gospel reading today, Jesus is redemptive. Jesus is often tender and forgiving, even of some fairly serious evil and sin. Jesus is loving. Jesus always, even when he is angry or on a prophetic mission, looks out for our utmost well-being. Jesus shows us the way to salvation; he is our way to salvation. So Jesus is kind, in the sense of the kind of love he shows, that goes so far as to lay down his life so that we may have eternal life. But Jesus is not nice.

How do we use the word “nice”? Do we not usually mean somebody who is kind, loving, forgiving, a lot like Jesus usually is in the Gospels? This is nice, but this definition of “nice” is actually quite recent. Not too long ago—about two hundred years ago, which is a short time when we speak of how language changes—“nice” primarily meant “ignorant” or “stupid,” from its Latin origin, meaning “not knowing.” Only since then has “nice” fairly rapidly taken on the more usual sense of something or somebody pleasant, agreeable, or kind.

Then again, we still use “nice” in its older deprecating or insulting sense today. Have any of us ever shown lack of interest, or heard somebody show lack of interest in what another person was saying in a mocking tone, “That’s nice.” I suppose that what we mean by “nice” today is all about our tone and body language in using this word. When we are pleased by something or somebody, we say, “Aww, that’s really nice, thank you,” or simply, “Niiiice”! But we can mean nice in a dismissive way, as in, “I am not interested in this foolishness. Go away”… “That’s nice.”

So I suppose we could consider Jesus to be “nice” in this newer sense of somebody pleasing or kind, but is even this not a stretch when we hear Jesus in Luke’s Gospel today? Not “peace to the earth… but rather division” does not exactly sound nice in the sense of kindness or pleasantness. Rather, Jesus sounds a lot like the prophets of the Old Testament before him: People who spoke truth to power; people who spoke for God; who confronted God’s people and their leaders with truths they often did not want to hear; people who risked their own lives in doing so, and who were not exactly “nice” about it much of the time. Among those prophets was Jeremiah, who was so persistent in not being especially “nice” as an advisor to King Zedekiah that Zedekiah’s officials had Jeremiah thrown into a cistern and left him to die.

In a similar way, Jesus, “a prophet and more than a prophet,” was persistent in claiming to be God’s own Son; in warning his hearers that their eternal life depended on repentance from their sin; in speaking truth to powerful elites that they did not necessarily want to hear. Jesus was often enough not “nice” about insisting on seeking the utmost good, the salvation, of all people, such that those elites had Jesus crucified and left him to die. Does this not sound familiar?

The prophet Jeremiah was not, in one sense, nice. Jesus was not nice. There is a reason why both Jeremiah and Jesus were killed at the hands of the elites of their day. When Jesus proclaims that he had come not “to bring peace to the earth… but rather division,” he is not saying that he had intended to go out of his way to create divisions among his hearers; his disciples. This would not only not have been nice, but this would have been unkind, and against Jesus’ own rule governing his every action and word. Instead, Jesus always seeks our best interest; our salvation. Yet Jesus knew that, in seeking our best interest, our salvation, his words and actions would expose our division; our sin; everything that already exists to inhibit our way to salvation. Only in exposing our already-existent divisions, sin, unkindness, injustice, and everything that inhibits our salvation that God so dearly desires for us will those divisions, sin, unkindness, and injustices ever be healed and forgiven. And, as many if not all of us know by our own experience, divisions, unkindness, and sin are not distant realities from us. They exist within our own relationships. They exist and destroy the intimacy and trust even within our households and families, as Jesus reminds us today.

Jesus’ reminder of this state of our world into which he came, which has not changed much from Jesus’ time to ours, is hardly nice. It reveals a hard truth many people in Jesus’ time were unwilling to accept, and that many people in our time, I dare say, are no more willing to accept than they were in Jesus’ or Jeremiah’s time. True prophets, who accurately bring to light the state of the world; the state of our human relationships; the state of our relationship with God always speak and act for others’ best interest. Prophecy cannot be ego-driven. But this does not mean prophecy must be nice. Prophecy, if it is true, may go so far as to put at risk the prophet’s reputation, if not his or her very life, if it is true prophecy.

What, then, does this mean for us today? From the moment of our baptism we are called “priest, prophet, and king” in our Rite of Baptism itself. Our baptism calls us to take part in the prophetic mission (as well as priestly and royal missions, in the self-sacrificial sense) of Jesus. Our baptism calls us to seek and work toward one another’s salvation, not only our own. Nowhere, though, in our Rite of Baptism are we called to be “nice.”

This does not mean that we are to seek out opportunities to divide, to destroy relationships, to make enemies, or to scandalize one another unnecessarily. This would itself be sinful. Prophecy is never “all about me.” Instead, true prophecy is all about participating in God’s salvation of the world through prophets through the ages, like Jeremiah, and ultimately through Jesus Christ. Our baptismal prophetic mission is a participation in God’s salvation of the world. It will entail discernment of the sometimes fine line between revealing hard truths about the sin of the world, especially to people in positions of power, and contributing to the sin ourselves; between acting and speaking from our own ego and acting toward the best interests of one another; between being merely “nice” and being kind and just (the virtue we call Christian charity) even when we are angry (even justly so) at another person or at the sin of the world.

Without God, it may be possible to be at least superficially “nice,” but only by putting God first is it possible for us to be the prophets our baptism calls us to be, for one another’s salvation and the salvation of the world.