Homily for Sunday, 21 July 2024– Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23:1-3, 3-4, 5, 6; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

One theme is clear through all of the readings we hear today: That of shepherding. What (or who) is a shepherd; what defines a shepherd? What does God (or what does Jesus, in our Gospel) expect insofar as the conduct of a shepherd? How is God a shepherd; how does Jesus model for us how a shepherd is supposed to act?

In the Book of the prophet Jeremiah, all the shepherds, without exception, have been bad. And so God and God’s prophet, Jeremiah, scold them angrily: “Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the LORD”! But, still, who are the shepherds who have drawn God’s and the prophet’s anger? Who are “flock of [God’s] pasture” according to Jeremiah?

In the Ancient Near East at the time of the prophet Jeremiah, in the territory we would call the Middle East today (so not only Israel), the kings and tribal rulers of many nations were compared to shepherds. So it would seem that Jeremiah, whose prophecy mostly targeted the kings of Judah, the part of Israel that included Jerusalem, compared the kings of Judah to bad shepherds.

What were the kings of Judah doing wrong? Jeremiah wastes no time in laying out the charge against them: The kings of Judah, several of them, one after another, have misled and scattered “the flock of [God’s] pasture.” This is a serious accusation! I am not sure how well we are acquainted with sheep and shepherds, sisters and brothers. I have not seen many sheep around here; there is not much room for sheep to pasture in a city like Rochester, so say the least. But sheep need two almost competing things to survive and thrive: Sheep need a large amount of land to graze, to pasture. And they need somebody, a shepherd, to tend to them, to limit the (however large) area in which they are allowed to pasture, so that they do not become lost, injured, or prey to a predator.

From my limited understanding about sheep, it is actually quite difficult for a shepherd to scatter, to “mislead” sheep. Sheep will tend to stay near a shepherd for protection. It takes intent for a shepherd to scatter, to drive away, to do violence to sheep, to put them in dangerous situations so that they will flee the shepherd against their instinct. Sheep—figuratively, the “flock of [God’s] pasture,” the people of Judah—are vulnerable creatures. God’s flock in Jeremiah is the vast majority of the people of Judah of the time who were poor peasants, who may have earned enough wages from their work to subsist from one day to the next. The “flock” depended on the kings and other wealthy elites of Judah—the small minority of the people of Judah—to give them just wages for their labor; not to abuse their labor, take land away from the poor or do violence toward them.

So, this is why I say that, for Jeremiah to charge the shepherds, the kings of Judah, with misleading and scattering God’s flock is a serious accusation. Jeremiah charges Judah’s kings with intentionally endangering, doing violence and injustice toward the most vulnerable, the most marginalized, the poorest of the people of Judah, and enriching themselves greedily in the process. In Jeremiah’s time, the prosperity gap between the few wealthy and the many poor was great and becoming greater.

I do not like that my mind drifts in this instant toward a great little French phrase with some “bite” to it, but that is where my mind is going: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”) I feel compelled to ask: Is our society (or is the society of my home country, Canada, for that matter) any better than the one the prophet Jeremiah rebukes for its injustices toward the many poor and vulnerable, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few?

I think this is an important question to ask ourselves, especially as we approach an election in this country, just a few short months from now. I want to be clear on a couple of points: First, it is not my place to endorse or denounce any specific candidate or party for public office, especially in the very midst of an election race as this country finds itself. You will not hear such an endorsement or condemnation of a party or candidate from me, with the power of the pulpit behind my words. I know (and I am sure many of us have heard) priests and other religious authorities endorse or denounce candidates or parties. I consider this to be an example of the kind of intentional scattering, misleading of the flock; an abuse of shepherding power that prophets like Jeremiah condemned.

Second, though, I think it is appropriate—and in line with the social teaching of our Church—to appeal to all of us (strongly) to vote, when it is time to vote, for the candidates who will best protect not our self-interested accumulation of wealth if we have it, but the basic dignity and rights of the most vulnerable, the least of our sisters and brothers. I want to be clear again: It is not wrong to be materially wealthy. Our Church defends the right to private property. Yet property, wealth, prosperity must serve the more fundamental rights of those who have the least. These must serve what our Church calls “the common good.” So, it is not wrong to be rich, but it is profoundly wrong when a few accumulate vast wealth while anybody—especially in a country as rich as these United States of America—lacks the means to obtain the basic necessities of life: Food, shelter, medical care, education…

Our Church says that “the common good” should govern how we vote. It should govern those who serve our nations in public office: Not material wealth or money first; not self first; not America first (or, in my case, Canada first) or any particular nation’s interests first; not military might first, but the most vulnerable, the least of our sisters and brothers, first. So I ask each and all of us: In good conscience, formed by prayer and through our Catholic faith, please consider how well the “shepherds” for whom you are inclined to vote, those who serve in public office, serve the least of our sisters and brothers first; serve “the common good” first. No candidate and no party will do this perfectly—far from it—but there will always be perhaps good choices, better choices, and best choices on the ballot. We have a beautiful thing called a democracy, something that the poor of the prophet Jeremiah’s time and still many people in many nations around the world today do not have. Please do not take this for granted; please vote.

Please exercise your good conscience in doing so, because the alternative to our free and wise exercise of conscience in this way is the triumph of evil. It is the triumph of injustice, self-interest at the expense of the poor, sin, vast wealth and power in the hands of few. And it is already bad enough, as the prophet Jeremiah shows us today, when bad shepherds are allowed to abuse their power, to mislead and scatter the sheep, God’s people, unchecked.

But there is something still more insidious than when “bad shepherding,” ignorance of the fundamental rights of the most vulnerable, the poor, is allowed to continue unopposed. Today Jeremiah includes an interesting play-on-words: He speaks of tending to, or caring for, the basic needs of the poor. Through Jeremiah, God accuses the kings of Judah, the bad shepherds: “You have not cared for” my sheep; tended to them. But God says, “I will take care to punish your evil deeds.” I will attend to, in other words, the condemnation of the bad shepherds’ inattention to the poor, the LORD says through Jeremiah.

And, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus shows us what attending to justice, to the needs and rights of the vulnerable, looks like. Our Gospel reading today begins with Jesus’ apostles reporting to Jesus (I imagine with some pride, justifiably so) “all they had done and taught.” Yet Jesus says to them, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” Rest—for the greatest of apostles, prophets, ministers of our Church to the most newly-baptized member of the faithful—is essential. None of us can, or should be expected to, labor without rest, lest our work, including our service, our ministry in God’s name should become a kind of idol, a replacement for God.

Jesus balances his disciples’ need for rest, their vulnerability to idolizing activity, with our need for attentiveness, our need to attend to the poorest, those who most need his presence, his teaching; those who are “like sheep without a shepherd.” This is a difficult balance for us to keep; I know this all too well! This past week, I was on retreat with priests of my order. It was a much-needed time to “come away… and rest a while.” If we are good servants of the Lord, good Christians, God will constantly give us opportunities to attend preferentially to the least of our sisters and brothers. But God also calls us to attend to balancing our work (service, ministry) with rest.

We not only want to avoid becoming bad shepherds or being governed by bad shepherds, uncritically, unwisely, or selfishly choosing bad shepherds to govern us or, worse yet, not choosing (voting) at all. But our Lord also invites us to “come away… and rest a while.” The Lord is “moved with pity” for those for whom work, wealth, might, nation, partisan ideology, violence, and self-interest have become idols.

And he invites us to attune our ear, our spirit, our conscience so that we can better attend to the voice of justice, the voice of the common good, the voice of the most vulnerable to injustice and exploitation. That voice is the voice of Christ our Lord and God, the Good Shepherd.

Homily for Sunday, 24 March 2024‒ Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord

Readings of the day: At the procession with palm branches: Mark 11:1-10. During the Mass: Isaiah 50:4-7; Psalm 22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24; Philippians 2:6-11; Mark 14:1-15:27

I have yet to become a major aficionado of the series, “The Chosen,” not by any means because I dislike it or think it is overhyped, but… I need some time to catch up on viewing it. From what I have seen, it is a very well-done series.

Yet in one episode of “The Chosen,” Jesus returns to his hometown, Nazareth, which is overrun with people wanting to see him. Jesus has sent his disciples out on mission to heal the sick and work wonders. He cuts through the noise of all the people who want to see him, the hometown crowds, his friends growing up… And he visits his mother Mary for dinner.

In the introduction credits scene of this episode, Jesus is shown as a little child. Mary and Joseph are affectionate toward Jesus and each other. Jesus receives toys and other gifts from relatives. It is a festival scene. Jesus takes his first steps. One of the gifts he receives at that feast is a bridle for a donkey’s colt. It is a gift from Joseph. A donkey’s bridle would be a strange gift for a toddler, except that this bridle had been passed down through generations to Jesus on Joseph’s side, all the way from King David.

In the homecoming dinner scene between Jesus and Mary, Mother and Son have a long conversation. Mary wants to know all about Jesus’ disciples, his “students”: Who is doing well, what they are doing, who is having a rough time. Jesus says that they are all “quite well” at that moment. And then he pauses; he takes Mary’s hand. And then Jesus asks Mary for the box with the bridle. Mary’s face suddenly shows discomfort.

And Mary asks Jesus, “Are you sure this is your last time here” at home? Jesus replies, “I believe that my time is coming.” This part of the conversation ends with Mary saying to Jesus, “I don’t know that I’m ready.” And Jesus replies finally to Mary, with Mary speaking his words back to him at the same time: “I know how you feel. But you also know that I must do the will of him who sent me.”

Sisters and brothers, on this Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord, we are not ready. But Jesus has visited his earthly homes, probably his childhood home, the home of his mother Mary, one last time. He is now at the gates of Jerusalem. We greet Jesus, picking up palm branches and casting them at his feet as he rides through the city gates on the donkey, restrained by the bridle Jesus had picked up during his last visit home. We cry out joyfully, as we have to open this Mass: “Hosanna to the Son of David… Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”!

We are not ready for what is happening or about to happen. We can commemorate this Palm Sunday, Holy Week of which today is the beginning, once every year, all our lives. And we will never be ready for what this Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, for what the Lord’s Passion, death, and resurrection that we will celebrate all within this next week, will mean for us. This Holy Week we can and will hear two different accounts of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus, in the voices of three readers each: Today, Mark’s account of Jesus’ Passion and, on Good Friday, John’s account of the same events.

We can, and we will, hear Isaiah’s four prophetic hymns of a “suffering servant”: The third of four today; the four in order on Holy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Good Friday this week. And we will not and cannot be ready. We can and will hear St. Paul’s hymn to the Philippians of a Messiah whom, paradoxically, we worship because, “although he was in the form of God… he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” And we will not and can never be ready for Jesus to accept this, “death on a cross.”

I speak for myself first and foremost, a sinner preaching to sinners: I will never be ready for Palm Sunday, for Holy Week, for Holy Thursday of the Lord’s Supper, Good Friday, Easter of the Lord’s Resurrection, no matter how many times I celebrate these days with us. If Mary was not ready—the sinless Virgin Mary—then we can never be ready.

Jesus does not wait for us to be ready, sisters and brothers. Jesus walks from Nazareth to Jerusalem’s gates carrying a bridle, the last thing he retrieves from home, for a donkey’s colt. He will go from carrying a bridle to carrying a cross, from riding on that donkey to dying on that cross, within less than a week. Jesus does not wait for us to be ready, to accept death for us, to save us from our sin. No, so single-mindedly does Jesus choose to do “the will of the one who sent” him. And the will of the one who sent him is our salvation, our life forever, in our heavenly home.

Homily for Sunday, 10 December 2023– Second Sunday of Advent, Year B

Readings of the day: Isaiah 40:1-5,, 9-11; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

We find ourselves at the beginning, sisters and brothers: “The beginning,” Mark’s Gospel proclaims by its very first words, “of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Mark wastes no time in revealing to us who Jesus is, “the Son of God,” and that his coming to live as one of us, in our human flesh—his advent—is “good news.” Spoiler alert! Mark does not even give us a nice, long account of Jesus’ infancy and childhood, to help us ease into the story, this “good news” he proclaims. Mark begins with the powerful preaching of John the Baptist, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” By this point Jesus is already an adult. Jesus, the one John announces as “more powerful” than he is, has probably already attracted followers. He has caused some “good [and necessary] trouble” in the minds and consciences of many already, the minds and consciences of the comfortable and powerful of this world.

So much for starting at the beginning of the story! And today we are not even at the beginning of Advent. We are a full week into the shortest possible Advent this year—three weeks and a day between the first Sunday of Advent, a week ago, and Christmas Day. And I do not know about any of us, but as of now I have yet to do much at all to prepare for Christmas. Gift shopping? Not started. Visiting family and friends I may not have seen for a while? Okay, I have done some visiting. Taking time to be with, or at least to pray for, people in need—the sick, the poor, those who find this time of year to be a struggle for many reasons? Okay, but I could do better. Tidying my physical spaces—my room, my office—let alone doing a little Christmas decorating?! Yikes! I think, if Jesus were to step into my room now, let alone the spiritual room that is my heart, my conscience, he might sound a little like my mother did when I was a kid: “Did a tornado hit here, or what”?!

(By the way, I will offer this little advertisement for those of us who want to do some spiritual—heart, mind, conscience—tidying soon: St. Joseph’s College’s Advent penance service is this Friday at 7:00 pm).

So, in a way it is okay if we are a little behind on our Advent-Christmas preparations, if our spiritual let alone physical spaces look chaotic to say the least. Advent offers us a new beginning. God meets us where we are in our present; in fact God sends messengers ahead of himself and his Christ—John the Baptist, the saints, holy people we know and meet in our own lives—to draw us closer to him and to eternal life. That is the “good news”!

Yet Advent is a bit of a strange time of year. We are at a beginning of the Church’s liturgical year, of the story of our world’s first encounter with God in the human person of Jesus. But we are, at the same time, well into this story, after many encounters in history and in our own lives already with God’s “good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Last Sunday, the first Sunday, the very beginning of Advent, our readings at Mass gave the sense more of an end, or a story very much in progress, than a beginning. We began this time of Advent by hearing from near the end of the Gospel of Mark: Jesus, just before his passion and death, urging his disciples to “keep awake,” ready for the events of Jesus’ passion and death that would happen right after that point, but more importantly for an unknown “Last Day” when Jesus will return in glory. St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians also oriented us toward that final “day of our Lord Jesus Christ,” exhorting the Corinthian Christian faithful to remain “blameless” until that day by the Lord’s strength and grace. The Psalm reinforced our plea for divine strength. And, a week ago, we heard Isaiah making final plans for the return of the people of Israel from a long exile in Babylon. That exile, it seems, had made the people of Israel stubborn; only a small “remnant” would return to their land to rebuild the nation and its temple in Jerusalem that had been the centre of the Jewish faith. So Isaiah pleads for divine intervention to break through Israel’s sin and hardness of heart: “O [LORD] that you would tear open the heavens and come down”!

Today, this second Sunday of Advent, our readings start back at beginnings: Mark speaks of “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The second letter of Peter gives us a sense of being closer to a beginning than an end. The people for whom 2 Peter is written have become impatient. The first Christians of that community had suffered persecution. Many had already died. 2 Peter reminds them that, in God’s time, this is only the beginning: “The Lord is not slow about his promise… but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

Peter’s message is very similar to that of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel. For John the Baptist, there is urgency to repentance to prepare for the coming of Jesus, the “one after” John. Yet, 2 Peter says, there is also urgency to know God’s mercy and peace, God’s meeting us in the sometimes-chaotic events of this world and our lives, even as we strive to repent, to tidy our spiritual spaces, our minds and consciences.

Our God has never been one to wait until we have everything in order—our hearts, our minds, our consciences—before coming to be with us in our present time. The second letter of Peter offers us a very typical (for a biblical text) vision of the end of time. It will be chaos: “The heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire.” But 2 Peter invites us not to worry about this chaos. Instead, lead “lives of holiness and godliness,” practice conversion and repentance here and now; “strive to be found by [the Lord] at peace.”

Jesus promised to return at the end of time. I think we can be almost certain that the end of time, when Jesus will re-enter this world, will be chaotic. We do not know what the world will look like when Jesus returns on the Last Day. But we can remain at peace if we think back to the beginning, the first time Jesus entered our world. God took our human flesh in a world that was chaotic then. Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary into a poor, chaotic, smelly stable with barn animals, at a time when the Romans ruled Jesus’ homeland by force.

God does not wait for us to have everything in order before entering into our present in a way that changes our existence profoundly and irreversibly. Well before Jesus’ time, the prophet Isaiah was calling to a people still in exile in Babylon, preparing to return to, well, chaos and ruin—a ruined temple—in Jerusalem. And Isaiah says, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.”

Isaiah’s cry to Jerusalem is something like, “Yes, what you see, what is left of your homeland is chaos, ruin. But God is not waiting. God brings comfort, peace, justice, salvation now.” As the Psalmist says, here and now, “justice and peace” are about to “kiss each other.” This is a new beginning for the people of Israel!

God does not wait for us to have everything in order. God enters and changes our existence when God wills it. That is what we celebrate this Advent season, sisters and brothers! God has already entered this world, amid its chaos—our not having everything quite in order—many times. Ultimately, God entered our world in the human person of Jesus Christ, into a poor, chaotic, smelly scene, a nation ruled by foreign force.

Finally, Jesus promises us that he will enter our world again on the Last Day. All we can do to be ready for the Last Day, Jesus’ return in glory, is the same thing we can do be ready for this day, for the next day, the day after that, and so on: Remember how God has intervened in our world in the past. Remember that God did not wait until we had everything in order to bring peace, justice, order, comfort, mercy. May we be at peace, knowing and reflecting on this. Our time of Advent takes us back to those beginnings even as we anticipate with hope the Last Day, Jesus’ return in glory.

Today, in the midst of Advent, we remember the beginning of God’s comfort to Israel, still in exile, through the prophet Isaiah. We remember the preaching of John the Baptist, a message of repentance and hope. We pray with the Psalmist for a time when “justice and peace will kiss each other.” We remember 2 Peter’s exhortation to remain at peace. These have been our new beginnings in history, God entering our story when we most need God, with peace, justice, order, comfort, mercy. This is the “good news” our Scriptures proclaim today, “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Homily for Sunday, 7 November 2021– Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 17:10-16; Psalm 146:7, 8-9, 9-10; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

In the language of the Bible, there are few people depicted as poor and downtrodden as widows. From many different texts of the Old Testament, we have the oft-repeated triplet, “the widow, the orphan and the stranger (or resident alien),” which stands for the lowest of the low classes in the society of Israel of the time. We hear the widow-orphan-stranger motif in our Psalm today: “The LORD loves the righteous, and watches over the strangers. The LORD upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”

Girls and women through Biblical times had few rights independently of their fathers and then their husbands, and children had few rights independently of their parents. So a child whose parents had died, or a woman who had lost her husband, would be extremely poor and excluded from the power structures of those ancient societies.

Can we not think of many examples when Jesus preferentially calls upon children, women, and sometimes widows; when he makes these underprivileged people the centre of the event? We hear a clear example of Jesus doing this in today’s Gospel, the story of the so-called “widow’s mite.” In fact, both Mark’s Gospel and our reading from 1 Kings today centre on the heroic widow figure. (And if we are thinking that the term “heroic widow” is self-contradictory, an oxymoron even to our ears today, that is because it is. Our Bible offers us this jarring image of the widow, the lowest of the low classes, who becomes the heroine; the main driver or protagonist of the event).

When I think of the widow’s mite, I think of one of my favourite paintings, one by the French painter James Tissot, called “The Widow’s Mite” or “Le denier de la veuve.” Tissot is known for his set of 365 distinctive watercolour (or gouache) paintings, which he painted late in his life and many of which are scenes from the Bible. But much of his earlier work is of well-dressed, wealthy, attractive women in the rich neighbourhood of Paris where Tissot lived. And then, one day, James Tissot visited Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris to paint a portrait of a choir singer. There, he experienced a vision of Jesus tending to the very poorest people, and soon he returned to a devout practice of his Catholic faith.

It strikes me (whether this is intentional on Tissot’s part or coincidence, I am not sure) how similar the temple treasury area in Tissot’s “The Widow’s Mite” looks to the limestone façades of Saint-Sulpice and many other churches in Paris. I lived within a fifteen-minute walk of Saint-Sulpice for five years in Paris. And the scene of people milling about the temple treasury in “The Widow’s Mite” reminds me of a frequent scene around the entrances to Saint-Sulpice and other churches in Paris: Well-dressed elites, but the (still) many poor people the elites have been almost conditioned to ignore.

But there is one person noticeably not shown in Tissot’s painting, “The Widow’s Mite.” That person is Jesus. Tissot is also famous for at least two (that I can think of) of his later watercolours that are from Jesus’ perspective. One is Tissot’s “Crucifixion, Seen from the Cross,” which is from the crucified Jesus’ view, looking down upon the crowds—closest to him, his mother, the women who served Jesus during his ministry, and the beloved disciple—at the foot of the cross. And the second of these paintings is “The Widow’s Mite.”

Midway through today’s Gospel reading, Mark says, fairly innocuously, that “Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” Tissot’s unseen Jesus paints the watercolour for us: A crowd of men in fine robes, the scribes Jesus has just criticized for their boastfulness, even in prayer, as “they devour widows’ houses.” This crowd is wealthy, proud, and self-serving. And in their midst is a poor widow, facing Jesus; facing the artist; facing us. Her eyes are downcast in a shamed gaze. She is carrying a small child, at least in Tissot’s painting. And the wealthy men continue to socialize; continue to boast of their wealth and status. One reaches for a horn, one of seven next to the temple treasury box that the wealthy would blow to announce that they had made a substantial donation. All these men ignore the poor widow, whom Tissot depicts as she walks away, after having dropped her “two small copper coins” in the treasury box. All ignore her, except the unseen but ever-present Jesus.

Jesus notices the poor widow. And he takes this opportunity to teach his disciples: Pay attention to the widow. Do not, in your pride, in your wealth, in any spirit of self-absorption that can even affect our prayer, ignore this widow and what she has just done! “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all of those who are contributing to the treasury.”

There is profound meaning in just these few words of our Lord. And, of course, we would be right in observing a recurring pattern of this kind of event—of encounter with the poor; the widow; the orphan; the stranger, resulting in a teaching moment—in our Bible. For good reason, our Church has us hear the Gospel account of the widow’s mite alongside our reading today from 1 Kings about the encounter between Elijah and a widow with a young son at Zerephath.

Understandably, the widow of Zerephath is focused on conserving what little food she has so she and her son will not starve. Yet, just then, Elijah asks this woman to be boldly generous—Elijah asks the widow, not the other way around, for “a little cake”! And somehow (1 Kings does not say why) the widow at Zerephath trusts Elijah. Maybe Elijah simply had that great a reputation as a prophet. Anyway, Elijah’s prophecy comes true: The jar of meal and the jug of oil last until the LORD sends rain to relieve the terrible famine in the land, which was disproportionately affecting the poorest people.

I think it is reasonable for us, when we hear about the widow at Zerephath in 1 Kings; the widow at the temple treasury in Mark’s Gospel, to focus on how each widow is exceedingly generous with very little, or on the trust each widow shows in God, directly or through a prophet like Elijah. But in each event, with each widow, there is more depth of meaning than generosity or trust. And, please allow me to say, the added depth of meaning has nothing to do with each widow’s starting lack of food or money. The focus, in either event, is not primarily on either widow but on the abundance of God.

The widow at Zerephath obeys Elijah and makes him “a little cake” from her meal and oil, and then she and her son receive more food by the word and hand of the LORD than they needed to survive until the rain ended Israel’s crop failure and famine. The widow at the temple treasury quite possibly gives the second greatest gift anybody gives in our Gospels. What do I mean by this?

It is helpful, I think, to place the event of the widow at the temple treasury and her “mite”—her two small copper coins—in its broader context within Mark’s Gospel. We are drawing toward the end of the Church’s liturgical year. By the way, Advent is only three weeks away; the beginning of a new Church year (just saying!). We have followed Mark’s Gospel roughly in order this year on Sundays. After this account of the widow’s mite, Mark includes only one more short chapter before Jesus enters Jerusalem, and his Passion and death take place. At the point where we hear from Mark today, the Pharisees and the scribes, the religious elites of Israel, are murderously angry with Jesus. Jesus continues to criticize them for their blindness to their worst sin, and they are on the cusp of having Jesus killed.

Jesus’ death on a cross is the first and most generous gift that anybody gives in our Gospels; in the whole of the Bible and of human history. In the immediate foreshadow of Jesus’ gift of his very life for our salvation is the gift of the widow and her two small copper coins, “everything she had” out of her poverty. A more historically distant sign, but still a sign, of God’s supreme generosity that culminates in Jesus’ gift of eternal life by his death on a cross is the gift of food of the widow at Zerephath to Elijah.

On the cross, God gave us in Christ “everything [he] had to live on” so that we might live forever. God invites us not to ignore this, but to imitate it by giving generously according to our means, as a sign that we, like the hidden but ever-present Jesus in the Gospel scene, the artist of our creation and our salvation, have taken notice.

Homily for Sunday, 12 September 2021– Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Isaiah 50:5-9a; Psalm 116:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35

One of the great advantages of living in a religious community of priests, as I do with my brother Basilians Frs. Jim, Dave, and Glenn here in Edmonton, is the depth and diversity of conversation we get into among us. I pray this is also true in our families and households. But recently, just as classes were starting here at St. Joseph’s College and the University of Alberta, Fr. Jim (a philosopher) and I (a theologian) were having our usual deep conversation over breakfast. Fr. Jim asked me an interesting and important question: As a Christian, an academic theologian and instructor at our College, what sets Christianity apart? Why am I a Christian and not of any other noble faith in our world, or of no faith? And what gives me the passion to teach, preach, and study our faith as I do?

I found that, even for somebody who has had as much time to think about these questions as I have, to answer Fr. Jim’s question was difficult. After a long pause, and a short walk over to the coffee pot to fill my mug with the coffee that, for me, is essential to be able to answer such questions early in the day, I blurted out the best answer my insufficiently-caffeinated brain could come up with: The Incarnation. That God, in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity who takes on our human nature, shares fully in all our experiences that make us human, including suffering and death, is to me what distinguishes Christianity from any other faith. The Incarnation, first and foremost, gives me the passion to preach, teach, and study our Christian, Catholic faith as I do.

As I reflect on my answer to Fr. Jim that morning, I do not want to put myself on the level of St. Peter in his answer to Jesus’ question in today’s Gospel: “Who do you say that I am”? But I think there are similarities between my answer and Peter’s answer to Jesus in our Gospel. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include substantially this same event of Peter’s identification of Jesus as the Son of God, “the Christ.” The Gospels differ in some details, though. Only Matthew has Jesus emphasize to Peter how right his answer is, but that he could not possibly have answered so correctly had this not been revealed to him by God “the Father in heaven.” In Luke and Mark, Peter seems to identify Jesus much more fortuitously—“flying by the seat of his pants,” or maybe his tunic, so to speak. Of course, God’s grace in revealing to Peter Jesus’ identity as the Christ is implied by its context in Luke and Mark, if it is not as explicit as in Matthew.

But however Peter is able to answer Jesus’ answer about his identity correctly, amid all kinds of competing options—“John the Baptist… Elijah, and still others, one of the prophets”—with God’s grace (undeniably), before or after his morning coffee, Peter, thanks be to God, gets his answer right. For Peter as for me, the Incarnation is central to who Jesus is. In Jesus, the Son of God, already fully possessing the same eternal divine nature as the Father and the Spirit, has become fully human, fully one of us, and shares in every feature that makes us human, except sin. He takes on human flesh and blood, is born of a human mother, grows up a human child cared for by human parents, breathes, eats, sleeps, prays, serves, heals, teaches… dies a horrific, torturous death, rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven…

Wait, did we just go off script? Even if Jesus is human, he is also God. God cannot suffer and die, right? A significant part of me wants to leap to Peter’s defense when Jesus scolds him so harshly: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do.”

Truly, though, I think part of me is so eager to defend poor Peter because I am so much like him. We are all so much like him. We would not be here, and we would not profess in our Creed all that we do about God who, in the Second Person of the Trinity, as Jesus, the Christ, became fully human if the Incarnation were not, as it was for Peter; as it is for me and for all of us, so essential to our faith. But, alas, like Peter, I tend; we all tend to think “not as God does, but as humans do.” This is not a criticism against us. If it were, I should be foremost in being criticized, because I have that much more responsibility, as a priest who studies and teaches theology, to understand and teach our faith accurately. We cannot help thinking “not as God does, but as humans do.” Our only experience is that of being human. We are not and cannot be God. We need God’s grace to reveal God’s self to us, Father, Son, and Spirit, so that we can think as God does and seek God in all things, all our thoughts, all our experiences, in our natural world and in heaven.

We are all so much like Peter. We are all here because we have all or will all, at some point, answer correctly; profess our faith correctly, as Peter did: “You are the Christ”…“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

Yet we are all so much like Peter. We all constantly need God’s grace to accept and enact the most difficult thing we say we believe: That Jesus, the Christ, suffered, died (or is even able to suffer and die), rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. We, like Peter, need God’s grace to put Satan behind us; Satan who would never allow us to make the profession of faith we do in a God who can and does take our human nature, including our suffering and death, only to transform it into resurrection and ascension to eternal life.

If the Incarnation is truly, as we profess that it is, essential to our Christian faith, then we must be very much like Peter. We must be very much like the “suffering servant” whose hymn we hear today through the prophet Isaiah. Today’s reading from Isaiah is the third of four “servant hymns” in Isaiah. It is the lament of somebody who is suffering horribly for relief from that suffering, but it is also a hymn of hope; of trust in God. This hymn anticipates God’s final vindication of the suffering servant, but also places that vindication in the present tense: “The LORD God helps me… I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near.”

In our Church’s tradition, Isaiah’s servant hymns have long been connected to the passion and death of Jesus Christ. We hear the four servant hymns in order from the Book of Isaiah during Holy Week, just before Easter, each year. But who are Isaiah’s servants, really? (Isaiah was written centuries before Jesus’ time, so I think it is fair to say that Isaiah could not have been referring directly to a future coming of Jesus. Prophets do not foretell the future; they point out God’s action on our behalf in the present). Are the servants of Isaiah the prophet himself, suffering the reproach of Israel’s people, who were not open to his prophecy? Are they other prophets who spoke for God in Israel’s history? Do they stand for the entire people of Israel? Are they meant to remind us of ourselves as a people of God?

I ask this last question especially because, if we ourselves have not suffered, I think most if not all of us know somebody or know of somebody who has. How many of us have known somebody who has suffered greatly, yet has maintained faith and trust in God, that their suffering or even death will not have the final word? And, if we are not the person suffering in this way, yet continuing to believe and hope, how often do we tend to be drawn to those people; to the strength of God working through them?

This, I think, is at the heart of St. James’ bold claim that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” If our faith is true; if the Incarnation is the centre of our faith as we say it is, then our faith will necessarily lend itself to solidarity with others, especially those who suffer in any way. This is so because our solidarity with those who suffer is in imitation of Jesus Christ who, in an unprecedented way in history—in a way no other world religion claims its founder did—entered into full solidarity with us by becoming human like us. In this way, Jesus is Isaiah’s servant, projected into our human history, but so are we.

In this way the Incarnation becomes enacted in our own lives. Jesus continues to take flesh and blood, die, rise, and ascend to heaven in us, insofar as we enter into solidarity with the suffering servants of our time; as we pray and act preferentially for their well-being. This allows us then to sing together the servant’s hymn of lament, but also of hope and trust in God, that eternal life and not suffering or death will have the final word.

Homily for Sunday, 29 August 2021– Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; Psalm 15:2-3, 3-4, 4-5; James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Perhaps not many topics in the Bible are as contentious as the Law. In what ways is the Law—and in the Bible we specifically mean the Law of Moses; the religious Law—a good thing or a benefit, and in what ways can the Law hold us back from the most right and just practice of our religious faith?

This tension about the Law is woven through each of our readings today. In Deuteronomy, Moses presents the religious Law as a gift from God, as a good in itself. Observance of the Law, while neither adding or taking anything away from the commands of God to Israel, would be Israel’s way of showing its greatness and its wisdom as a nation. Observance of the Law would be a sign of Israel’s closeness to God: “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people,” other nations would say of Israel.

In Moses’ time, we know that the people of Israel were in the process of returning from Egypt to their homeland, promised them by God. Imagine ancient Israel, a people small in number, prosperity, and military might compared to powerful nations that surrounded it. Israel could not compete with these other nations insofar as these worldly signs of national power. The source of Israel’s power and greatness was not itself, but God and God’s Law, given through Moses.

These other nations around Israel believed in and worshipped all kinds of gods, but Israel would stand out for its belief and worship of only one God. This was not only because the God of Israel would uphold Israel militarily and economically against Israel’s much more powerful neighbours—although we hear often in our Bible when God does just that for Israel—but because the God of Israel desired to enter into a relationship of love with Israel. The God of Israel cared for Israel in a way that the gods of other nations did not for those other nations. This was to be the core identity of the people of Israel, and Israel’s obedience to the Law of God given through Moses would be a sign that Israel acknowledged and desired this personal, loving, caring relationship with its God as much as God desired a personal, loving, caring relationship with Israel.

But from time to time the people and the nation of Israel would forget that their religious Law was meant as a gift and a sign of the mutual relationship of love between Israel and God. The people; the leaders of Israel would use the Law to reinforce their own power and status instead of to show the goodness and love of God on Israel’s behalf to the world.

This manipulation of the religious Law by Israel’s elites, the Pharisees and the scribes in Jesus’ time, is the focus of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees and the scribes in today’s Gospel. “Hypocrites,” Jesus calls the Pharisees and scribes, remembering a similar scathing criticism of Israel’s elites by the prophet Isaiah: “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

Where are the hearts of Israel’s elites, the Pharisees and scribes, while they profess adherence to the Law of Moses, down to the finest details like the ritual washing of hands, vessels, and food? The hearts of these elites of Israel are not focused on God as the source of all that is good: Of the Law itself; of any prosperity and religious or social status they may have, and so on. The hearts of the Pharisees and scribes are focused on preserving their own power and status, against those they see as not as obedient to the letter of the Law, like Jesus and his disciples. The “look at me” attitude of the Pharisees and scribes toward the law is incompatible with looking toward God as the source of all goodness. This is why Jesus scolds them the way he does.

And who stands to lose the most when elites, whether social or religious, manipulate what is good as the Pharisees and scribes do in today’s Gospel? Inevitably those with the least power, the least status, the least wealth stand to lose the most when what is good is manipulated in this way. The Letter of James, from which we have just heard, is emphatic on this point: What is essential to true and right practice of our religious faith, “religion that is pure and undefiled before God”? James says that the care for the least well-off and most vulnerable, “care for orphans and widows in their distress,” is of the utmost priority. Here, James’ attention to social justice, especially to the benefit of “the least of [our] sisters and brothers,” is continuous with long-standing Biblical tradition. I think of Jesus’ own teaching: “Whatsoever you do to the least of these”… I think of the prophet Micah: God asks of us only that we “do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with [our] God.”

And the Psalm we hear today is very much in line with this radical call through our Scriptures to social justice that does not reinforce human power or status but shows forth the goodness and glory of God. Our Psalm today offers us a long litany of the people God praises; the people who will gain eternal life, a dwelling in God’s tent: The one who “walks blamelessly” and rightly; who “speaks the truth from [the] heart; who “does no evil to a friend”; who does not take up “a reproach against a neighbour” or “a bribe against the innocent”; “whoever stands by their oath even to their hurt” (now that is radical!)…

This constant call to justice in a way that especially benefits the least of our sisters and brothers is so radical, even and maybe especially today, though, that might we be tempted to hear the Word of God today and think, “That is easier said than done”? The temptation, and frequent succumbing to the temptation, to seek our own power, status, wealth, self-sufficiency in a way that fails at least to appreciate God as the source of what is good, and deprives the most vulnerable and disadvantaged of these “goods,” is age-old. This is not a problem limited to the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ time, to the people of Israel of Moses’ time, to James’ time or the Psalmist’s time. No, the temptation to manipulate what God gives us—religious and civil laws, even just ones; material wealth; individual freedom and autonomy; authority; education—for our own gain at the expense of those less-advantaged is just as present in our time as in Biblical times.

But what could remedy this problem? Our readings today give us a hint toward the remedy to this problem; this temptation from human weakness and sin to manipulate the good God gives us for our own gain at the expense of others. God’s Law, from the time it was given to the people of Israel through Moses, was meant so that Israel could point to the goodness and love of God and its relationship of love with God, not to Israel’s self for its own sake. The many laws and rituals the Pharisees and scribes urged the Jewish people of Jesus’ time to follow to the letter were again designed to strengthen the relationship of the people who piously observed these laws with God. The same is true of the gift of the Word of God itself: St. James stresses that the Word of God necessarily directs us to care for one another, especially the less-advantaged.

If we care for the less-advantaged, James says, we become “doers of the Word, and not merely hearers.” We point one another not to our own power or status—not toward “me” or “us” for our own sake—but toward God who, regardless of our power, wealth, status, or authority in this world, calls not only each of us as individuals, but all of us as one People of God, to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 11 July 2021– Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

We might find it curious that, in the Bible, nobody God calls to be a prophet wants to be a prophet. Why is this? There are several reasons why the Biblical prophets do not tend to want to be prophets. Some of them are all too aware of their own inadequacy, moral or otherwise, for the task. I think of Isaiah, who pleads with God, to no avail, to choose a better prophet than him, “a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips,” or Elijah, who hides from God in a cave to avoid being sent out as a prophet: “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”

Other prophets in the Bible have other reasons for being reluctant to accept God’s call to prophesy. Prophets during the time of Israel’s kings in the Old Testament tended not to have good reputations, or they were not widely accepted by the people who were meant to receive their messages. Many kings of the time hired “professional” prophets, who usually told the kings what they wanted to hear. Some prophets of Israel’s royal court were not simply flatterers to the king in this way, but these court prophets who challenged the king (much less got away with it with their lives or reputations intact) were few.

Enter Amos, whose call to be a prophet we hear about today. Amos is no professional prophet of any royal court. He is a humble “herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees.” In fact, Amos is not even from the Kingdom of Israel, but from Judah. Now, this becomes a bit confusing: After the death of King Solomon, son of King David, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah, centered around Jerusalem, in the south. Judah often claimed to have held onto belief in only the one God, whereas Israel and its kings believed in or worshipped many gods. This led to Israel and Judah resenting each other, so we can understand a bit better why “Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” orders Amos to return to Judah and “never again prophesy at Bethel.”

The setting of Bethel for Amos’ call as a prophet is appropriate; it is also a bit ironic. Bethel literally means “house of El” or “house of God” (El is a Hebrew name for God). It was near the border between Israel and Judah. Bethel is where the Book of Genesis says Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth took place. Yet because Bethel is situated where it is—not as far away as Jerusalem, for people who lived in the northern Kingdom of Israel—Jeroboam, the first king of Israel as a kingdom separate from Judah, built golden calves, one at Bethel, so that the people of Israel did not have to travel all the way to the temple of Jerusalem to worship. Does this story of a golden calf sound familiar? The presence of a golden calf in Bethel led the people of Israel to worship it, an idol, instead of the one God of Israel, just as the golden calf in Exodus had led the people of Israel into idolatry back then. Bethel, the “house of God,” had become a house of idol worship; a house of a false god.

God sends Amos to Bethel to preach against this worship of false gods, and all the unfaithfulness and injustices that went along with it. And, we can imagine, Amos and his message were not well-received by the king of Israel, the officials of his court, or most of the people of Israel. It would be as if a foreign leader or influential person were to travel to another country today and criticize the leaders and people of that country on their own soil. This is usually not received well, even if the criticism is justified.

“Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” essentially tells Amos to go home to Judah and spare Israel and its king the criticism Amos directs against them. This would be well and good if Amos were one of those professional royal court prophets kings of that time were used to. But Amos’ prophetic mission is not his own; it is from God. Amos never wanted to be a prophet, but God had called him from tending his flock and sycamore trees to prophesy in Israel.

In Mark’s Gospel today, we meet more people—Jesus’ twelve apostles—who never wanted to be prophets and probably could not have dreamed of the mission with which Jesus would entrust them. Yet Jesus does just that: He entrusts his apostles with a prophetic mission; a difficult mission at that. They are to travel light, so to speak, with only a staff. (This would be a good skill for me to practice, as a priest of a religious order who has traveled and served in many places.) Jesus’ apostles are to be totally reliant on God and the hospitality of the people they meet. Should the people in any place “refuse to hear” the Twelve, they are to leave, shaking the dust off their feet “as a testimony against them.”

Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve highlight the difficulty of their journey and the message they are to preach. It is a message of repentance, after all. And maybe Jesus’ instruction to his apostles to shake the dust from their feet should some people not receive their message well especially calls to mind the difficulty of the apostles’ journey and message. Nowadays, like many good Biblical sayings, though, “shake the dust from your feet” has become a convenient, catchy phrase: Do not let a disagreement, or somebody’s ill reception of a message we want to communicate, bother us; simply move on. But, whenever I hear this Gospel, with this instruction of Jesus to his apostles, I try to understand it as a challenge to listen more attentively, especially as a priest and especially to people who disagree or are not receptive, for whatever reason, to my idea or message. I think a key prophetic skill for today might be to develop this reflex to listen; not to misunderstand “shake the dust from your feet” as an excuse not to listen to those with whom we differ (or even find disagreeable).

Another key characteristic of a prophet, if we look at Jesus’ Apostles, or Amos in the Old Testament, is that a true prophet recognizes that prophecy is a gift and a commissioning from God. Amos was not a professional prophet of a royal court, somebody who wanted to be a prophet. In fact, God called him to prophesy on foreign soil to a king and people who were not receptive to his message. The same was true of Jesus’ Apostles, in many ways. To what extent is the same true of us?

This may sound far-fetched to many people (maybe less so within this group), but God calls each of us, in virtue of our baptism, to be prophetic. In baptism, each and every one of us is anointed, as Christ himself was, “Priest, Prophet, and King.” This does not necessarily mean that we will accomplish great feats of faith, or be great and powerful communicators or educators of our faith, although some of us will be or are already.

Ultimately, a prophet by definition is one who speaks for God. Our speaking (or acting, or listening) in the place of God, impelled by the call of God, may lead us to communicate a message that is unpopular, in a place or time where we will be dismissed as strange or even ridiculed. This was Amos’ reality, as he preached faithfulness to one God to the unreceptive ears of Israel’s king and his court. Our prophetic baptismal calling may be more like that of Jesus’ first apostles, whom Jesus sent forth to preach repentance (similarly to how Amos was sent forth but, in the apostles’ case, they worked more as a team or in small groups than the more solitary prophets of the Old Testament, like Amos, did), but also to console and to heal the sick. More often, we will live out our prophetic mission in unassuming ways, making God known and heard through small everyday acts of kindness and mercy.

There are perhaps countless ways to live our prophetic calling from God, but each of us holds in common a baptismal calling to act, speak, listen—to do all we do—in a way that makes God most present in our world. And, as the letter to the Ephesians reminds us, we did not choose this prophetic calling from God, but God has chosen us for a purpose. God has chosen us “in Christ,” not only in baptism but “before the foundation of the world.” This is remarkable language from Ephesians!

In whatever particular way we live our prophetic calling from God, we can be assured, Ephesians says, that we have been blessed “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” We are called, yet also equipped with every blessing, to be God’s prophets in our time: To be God’s ears that listen, God’s mouth that speaks, God’s hands that work; that heal; that console, God’s feet that carry us to each encounter with God’s people, while we trust fully in God’s strength and blessings to see our prophetic journey through.

Homily for Sunday, 27 June 2021– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24; Psalm 30:2, 4, 5-6, 11, 12, 13; 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15; Mark 5:21-23

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

This week, I just finished teaching a Spring Term (May and June) Introduction to Catholicism course through St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta. The last lecture of the course was based on a topic the students proposed, which was meant to apply in a more focused way a theme we had discussed earlier in the course. The topic the students chose for the final lecture of this Spring Term centered on Catholic theology, ritual, and pastoral and ethical issues around death and dying.

How is that for a morbid way to end a course term? (I kid, but only to a point). I find it fortuitous that the last lecture of our course is so coherent with our readings for today. “God did not make death,” our reading the Book of Wisdom begins today. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus performs two interwoven miracles; the beginning and end of the Gospel reading we hear proclaimed focus on Jesus’ raising of the twelve-year-old daughter of a synagogue official, Jairus, who “is at the point of death” as today’s Gospel opens.

Also fortuitously, as we hear from the Book of Wisdom, “God did not make death,” from Mark’s Gospel Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter, and in our Psalm response a hymn of thanksgiving for God’s victory over death—“I will extol you, Lord, for you have raised me up”—today [yesterday] we mark the first anniversary of the death of my grandmother, Barbara Schmidt. [We offer today’s Mass in her memory.] At Grandma’s funeral, and every funeral I attend, I am especially drawn to the beginning of what is called the prayer of commendation. At the end of a funeral Mass, we commend or leave our loved one who has died to the mercy of God. The priest prays: “Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our sister (or brother) in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she (he) may rise with him on the last day.”

I will admit that, at Grandma’s funeral Mass, since I was the presiding priest, it was especially difficult for me to pray those words: Sure and certain hope. Now, I consider myself immensely blessed, particularly as the priest in the family, to have ministered to Grandma as I did, especially in her last years. She was a person of tremendous and holy Christian hope; a hope that showed itself throughout her life through acts of outstanding generosity. Grandma was generous with every gift she had; with her time; with any wealth, even though for most of her life she could hardly have been considered wealthy. She became a widow at a young age, and raised five children on her own after Grandpa died, while also caring for her father until his death. Grandma embodied during her life what the prayer of commendation during a funeral Mass expresses, “Sure and certain hope” in our God who saves and raises us even from death.

Still, if I am honest with myself—and maybe many if not all of us will be able to relate—I consider myself a person of hope; of faith in a merciful and saving God. But am I a person of sure and certain hope? Sometimes I am not so sure my hope and my faith are that strong. In those moments, sure and certain hope becomes more of a prayer for God to fill in what I lack than a statement of something I have. This was certainly true at Grandma’s funeral, as I prayed those words, “in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she may rise with him on the last day.” This was true as I looked out upon family and a few of Grandma’s closest friends; as we remembered and prayed for Grandma in the midst of a COVID pandemic that also has made sure and certain hope difficult to come by for so many people.

Sometimes are we not (as I know I am) more like Jairus, who pleads desperately for Jesus to heal his sick daughter in today’s Gospel; Jairus who, after Mark purposefully has members of Jairus’ household tell Jesus that Jairus’ daughter has died, needs Jesus to remind him, “Do not fear, only believe”? I wonder what Jairus thought when Jesus spoke these words to him: “Do not fear, only believe.”

We know that the crowds at Jairus’ house “make a commotion and weep”; that they laugh at Jesus when Jesus says that “the child is not dead but sleeping.” We know that Jesus allows “no one to follow him,” but only the girl’s “mother and father and those who were with” Jesus; that Jesus puts everybody else outside the house. But Mark says little about Jairus until after Jesus raises his daughter. After Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter, Mark says that Jairus and all who witnessed Jesus’ miracle “were overcome with amazement,” that Jesus orders them not to make known his raising of Jairus’ daughter to anybody, and to give the girl “something to eat.”

Contrast this with the explicit faith of the woman, midway through today’s Gospel reading, who touches Jesus’ clothes and is healed of twelve years of hemorrhaging that no physician could treat, but only made worse. “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your disease,” Jesus says to the woman. This woman’s faith and hope that Jesus could heal her, if she only touched his clothing, is more obviously “sure and certain” than that of Jairus in today’s Gospel. Her faith is at least extremely bold.

Many Biblical experts have commented on how this woman’s flow of blood over twelve years would not only have been a physical health problem, but it would have put her in a state of ritual impurity. She would have been considered an outcast in Israel’s society of the time, so clearly, she has nothing to lose by desperately reaching for Jesus’ clothing so that he might heal her. But one commentator I read, more than pointing to the ritual impurity and social ostracism the woman’s hemorrhaging would have brought her, focuses on Jesus first address to her, as “Daughter.”

In Israel in Jesus’ time and well before then, “daughter” not only represented one person but was a metaphor for all of the people of Israel, especially the poor, sinners or, for whatever reason, outcast or exiled. Many times, the Old Testament prophets address Israel’s people as “daughter Jerusalem” or “daughter Zion” when they want to console and strengthen the people, or call them back from exile to their homeland. On the one hand, the woman with the hemorrhage in today’s Gospel could represent the people of Israel as a whole, especially the majority who were poor and many who were outcast, but who still lived with bold hope and faith that God would intervene in their favour. On the other hand, the synagogue official Jairus represents Israel’s elites, who needed to be challenged in a different way than the poor and outcast to live lives of bold hope and faith that were shown by acts of justice, mercy, and generosity.

Jesus’ last command to Jairus and his household is to give his daughter “something to eat.” I wonder if Jairus, in a way, represents us, to the extent that we have something to offer from what God has given us, especially to anybody who is poor, sick, outcast, or even “at the point of death.” The miracle is by God’s grace: “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your disease”; “Talitha cum… Little girl, get up”! But God entrusts us to receive God’s grace with hope and faith, as well as we are able, and then to communicate that saving grace to the world as generously as we have received it. “Give her”—give this world—“something to eat,” something that will nourish, sustain, and save!

“Sure and certain hope,” boldness in faith, are processes more than they are a destination. Each in their own way, the woman with the hemorrhage who touched Jesus’ clothes, Jairus who pleaded (with some boldness in his own right) for Jesus to heal his daughter, and each of us have the faith and hope in us that we need to receive God’s grace and to nourish the world with it. We may not (or maybe only rarely) feel that our faith; our hope in God is anything close to “sure and certain.”

In this case, “sure and certain hope” becomes not a statement about where we are, but our prayer for the process; our pilgrimage of faith: “God, make our faith; our hope in you ever more ‘sure and certain.’ Help us to overcome all fear and unbelief, to be generous with any gifts and blessings we have received. Give us the boldness of the woman who touched your clothes and was healed. Like Jairus, may we be sent forth to nourish a world you will to be raised up and saved. You did not make death, but have ‘made us for incorruption’; for eternal life. May we live to praise and ‘extol you, Lord, for you have raised [us] up.’”

Homily for Sunday, 21 November 2021– Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Readings of the day: Exodus 24:3-8; Psalm 116:12-13, 15-16, 17-18; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

Near the beginning of Pope Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) are words that stand out to me both for their truth and their beauty. In Deus Caritas Est, not speaking of the Eucharist directly (considering we celebrate today the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ) but of the very essence of what it is to be a Christian, Pope Benedict says: “To be Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

My sisters and brothers of the Church, Christ’s Body now on Earth: The very essence of our Christian faith, and the Eucharist within it, as Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium says, as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life,” is first and foremost about “the encounter with an event, a person.” Our Christian faith; our celebration of Eucharist is about our personal encounter with Jesus Christ perpetuated in our history and life and faith experiences.

I will grant that this Solemnity we celebrate of the Body and Blood of Christ is multi-dimensional; so much so that it defies being reduced to a collection of ideas, concepts, or titles. We call this celebration the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi. We speak of the Eucharist as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life.” We speak of it as the Real Presence; the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. We speak of the Eucharistic celebration as a sacrament; a sign that is what it is, something we perceive with our human senses, but that points to a reality beyond itself, the real, true, bodily presence of Jesus Christ. In this way, French philosopher Paul Ricœur would speak of Eucharist and other sacraments as having a “surplus of meaning”; a meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses.

We speak of Eucharist as “the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” And our readings today certainly focus heavily on the dimension of sacrifice. Mark’s Gospel speaks of Jesus’ re-focusing of the Jewish commemoration of the Passover, when God spared the people of Israel from death and allowed their escape from slavery in Egypt, as long as they marked their doorposts with lambs’ blood as God commanded them. In the Book of Exodus today, we hear how Israel’s first Passover became a ritual memorial: An altar dedicated with lambs’ blood, animals sacrificed as burnt offerings to God. These sacrifices take on meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses: They point to a covenant; a promise by God that Israel would always be God’s people, and a response by the people of Israel to be “obedient” and faithful to God.

The Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples re-focuses; re-configures the Passover sacrifice in memory of the Exodus. Instead of repeating animal sacrifices each year in memory of the Passover, Jesus becomes the once-and-forever sacrifice for us. Jesus becomes the focus of our Passover; our only way to “pass over” to eternal life. No other sacrifice—not of animals, not of ourselves in heroic acts of faith—is capable of making eternal life possible for us. And although this sacrifice, like that of the Passover during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, is repeated ritually through our celebration of Eucharist—the Mass—it is one and the same sacrifice, that of Jesus through his Passion and death, that is projected through our history as Church. The Letter to the Hebrews emphasizes this once-and-forever nature of Jesus’ sacrifice of self. No longer is “the blood of goats and calves,” offered to God an infinite number of times, necessary; Jesus offers his own Body and Blood to us, for our salvation, once, forever.

This all becomes very complicated; mysterious, even: How the sacrifice of Jesus for us from the Last Supper through his death on the cross is both once-and-forever, and ritually celebrated by our Church as our Eucharist; how Jesus offers us his Body and Blood and, at the same time, how we, the Church, are rightly called the “Body of Christ.” I invite us to pause for a moment on this dimension of sacrifice in our Eucharist. Clearly, sacrifice is central to our Eucharist: We commemorate Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his Passion and death, and at the same time Jesus makes his sacrifice not simply a past event, but one with real meaning for our present time.

But without present “encounter with… a person,” sacrifice remains only a finished past event. If our Eucharist is anything less or other than the high point of a continuous encounter with Jesus Christ that spans our whole lives, then it is only sacrifice, a one-and-done past event, with no present meaning. So how is our Eucharist the high point, “fount and apex” of our lifelong encounter with God in the person of Jesus Christ? Our Eucharist is not only the (usually) small wafer of bread and maybe sip of wine we may receive in communion at Mass, which we believe have become by that point in the Mass the Body and Blood of Christ. Our Eucharist is not only the “essential” words, spoken by the priest during the Eucharistic Prayer and which Jesus spoke at the Last Supper (and we hear today in Mark’s Gospel), when somehow ordinary bread and wine becomes Christ’s Body and Blood.

The effects of our Eucharist extend beyond this celebration; beyond the church buildings in which we celebrate it; beyond (for now) our computer screens onto which our Eucharistic celebration is live-streamed. The Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, Thomas Collins, when he was Archbishop of Edmonton, would make a strong case that we live our identity as a Eucharistic people not only when we are together at Mass, but, for the most part, during the rest of the week when we are not at Mass. It is no accident, Cardinal Collins would say, that the last line of the Mass is a command to us to “go”: “Go in peace”; “Go… glorify God by your lives”! Cardinal Collins would humorously paraphrase the Latin of this line, “Ite, Missa est,” as “Get out of here; now you have work to do”!

My sisters and brothers, fellow Eucharistic people in Christ, our work, announced by “Ite, missa est” is, at its heart, to be the means by which everybody we encounter in our lives in some way encounters Christ, real and present. But how are we to be the means by which the world encounters Christ, real and present, by our every action; our every word? Surely we are weak sinners, and cannot be expected to configure ourselves perfectly to Christ at all times; to be the means at every moment by which everybody we meet encounters Christ through us, right?

We might think of plenty of instances in our history; in our Church when the encounter with Christians has been one with human sin, even to the point where sin has become embedded in social structures and attitudes. The imperialism and racism against this country’s Aboriginal peoples that drove its residential school system, with Church and state complicity, is an especially horrific example of this. So it is true; we are weak sinners. This is all the more reason for us to turn to our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist, that first and foremost point of encounter between God and us. Our graced encounter with Jesus Christ in this celebration can then strengthen us for our encounters with one another: For encounters that express sorrow and resolve to repent for when we have wronged other people as individuals, as a society, as a Church; encounters that increase our awareness, without defensiveness, of ways in which we benefit from socially-embedded patterns of sin; encounters that bring healing and reconciliation.

Most of the time, we will be (and have been) the means of encounter between Christ and everybody around us in the simplest of ways. We frequently do not and will not realize that we are bearing Christ’s real presence to our world through each simple smile or act of kindness. We know well that sometimes to be the means by which the world encounters Christ will be more difficult: Listen attentively, especially to people who differ from us, even if we may determine their views to be wrong; or to people who challenge biases we may not be aware we have; or to people who are suffering in any way. Prayerfully think of somebody we need to forgive (even if that person has never asked our forgiveness), and then begin the process, again prayerfully, of forgiving that person. Live purposefully with joy and thanksgiving toward God and anybody who has been good to us. After all, “Eucharist” (from sas eucharistō, “thank you” in Greek) is originally another word for “thanksgiving.”

St. Augustine of Hippo famously said of us as Eucharistic people, “You are what you receive.” So may we be, to the world, what we receive and celebrate: The Real Presence of Christ we now bear to our world for eternal life; the point of personal encounter between Christ and everybody we meet. Now, may I say, we have work to do…