Homily for Tuesday, 16 March 2021– Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 47:1-9, 12; Psalm 46:2-3, 5-6, 8-9; John 5:1-16

Do our readings today not give us, as is common especially during these high points of the Church’s year like Lent, an almost overwhelming amount of detail?

I visited the Holy Land and Jerusalem in 2013 during our Basilian Peace and Justice Pilgrimage with my confrère [and then-coordinator of the Basilian Centre for Justice and Peace,] Fr. Bob Holmes. I think the reason Pope Paul VI referred to the Holy Land as “the fifth Gospel” (Pope Benedict XVI echoed Paul VI in this sentiment more recently) is apparent for people who have visited the Holy Land: I will cherish memories of seeing these holy sites forever, or at least until (perhaps) my next visit…

The scene John’s Gospel sets for us today is near the Sheep Gate, at a pool whose Hebrew name is “Beth-zatha” or Bethesda. John plants in our minds a vision of a rather sophisticated pool, one with “five porticoes,” but also in this scene, John says, there “lay many invalids,” including the man who had been laying there “for thirty-eight years” and whom Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well”?

Since I enjoy finding out the meanings especially of names of people and places, I find it fascinating that “Beth-zatha” or Bethesda mean “house of mercy” or “house of grace.” This could be a touch of irony from John, since the Pool of Beth-zatha was known, as John points out, to be a gathering place for the sick, “blind, lame, and paralyzed.” Despite its sophisticated structure, and the fact it was a major water supply for Jerusalem in Jesus’ time, with multiple deep pools joined by a system of locks or dams, the presence of the sick made it a place of dis-grace to the more well-off people of Jerusalem of the time; it was the opposite of the “house of grace” that Beth-zatha’s name suggests.

But by his healing of the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel, Jesus turns the ironic dis-grace of this place, and that of the paralyzed man personally, into a moment and place of grace and mercy. This also brings me to a memory from my own ministry: When I lived in Rochester, I often said Mass at a homeless shelter called House of Mercy, in a hardscrabble part of the city. House of Mercy is still run by the indomitable Sr. Grace Miller, a Sister of Mercy. It is a present-day Beth-zatha, a House of Mercy and, well, a house of grace for more reasons than the name of its founder and director.

The Biblical Beth-zatha is also near the beginning of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Here, where Jesus healed the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel, he would begin his Way of the Cross. Again, a place of our dis-grace; our sin; our sickness would, starting from this place, be transformed—on a Sabbath, no less, as in today’s Gospel—into a place of grace, mercy, and salvation by our Lord.

Jesus, clearly, develops a reputation for transforming dis-grace; lack of mercy; sin; sickness; paralysis into grace, mercy, wellness, physical and spiritual movement and vigour. He does so for the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel and, soon thereafter, Jesus would do so for us, by giving his own life, beginning his Way of the Cross at the pool by the Sheep Gate called House of Mercy or House of Grace: Our Beth-zatha.

Homily for Tuesday, 3 September 2019– Memorial of St. Gregory the Great

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 5:1-6, 9-11; Psalm 27:1, 4, 13-14; Luke 4:31-37

Tuesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Luke’s Gospel says today that the people of Capernaum, where Jesus taught “on the Sabbath,” “were astounded at his teaching because he spoke with authority.” How did Jesus speak “with authority,” and what would it mean for us to speak and act “with authority” after Jesus’ example?

Our Gospel gives us some indication of ways in which Jesus “spoke with authority.” Today, we hear how Jesus healed a man with an unclean spirit in the same synagogue at Capernaum. Simply by placing this scene on the Sabbath in a synagogue, Luke is relating that Jesus had a sizeable audience for his teaching. A few years ago, during a pilgrimage I was on to the Holy Land, our group visited Capernaum. For the time, Capernaum would have been a sizeable community for a population centre other than Jerusalem in Roman Palestine, a town of about 1 500 people built around fishing on the Sea of Galilee. And its synagogue from Jesus’ time, now an archaeological site, is an imposing structure with its Greco-Roman columns. I easily imagine this space having been full that day for Jesus’ teaching and healing of the man with the unclean spirit. Jesus’ reputation as somebody who not only spoke well but backed up his teaching and preaching with actions like this miraculous healing would have spread quickly from a place like Capernaum.

But speaking well or powerfully is not necessarily enough for somebody to be regarded as authoritative, at least in a good way. Might we say that actions that show power, even in the presence of large crowds, are not in themselves enough to constitute authority?

Can many of us not think of a long list of world leaders and dictators who have spoken and acted with power, even people who were considered “authoritative” in their time? But there is a difference between authority and tyranny. Gregory the Great, the sixth-century pope whose feast we celebrate today, made this distinction between authority and tyranny, even within the Church. Gregory said, “No one does more harm in the Church than he who has title or rank of holiness and acts perversely.”

The rightful exercise of authority is never about me; it is about God. Authority empowers another and empowers our Church as a communion of faith with God’s grace. This is what Jesus did on that Sabbath in the synagogue in Capernaum and what Jesus continues to do through us today.

And it begins with our baptism: By baptism we all, not only ordained members of the Church, are given the power and the responsibility in Christ to speak and act with authority; to speak and act in a way that channels God’s grace to one another; to speak and act in a way that reconciles and forgives sin; to speak and act in a way that brings us to salvation together.

Homily for Tuesday, 7 August 2018– Ferial

Tuesday of the 18th Week in Ordinary Time


Optional Memorial of Sts. Sixtus II and Companions and St. Cajetan

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 30:1-2, 12-15, 18-22; Psalm 102:16-18, 19-21, 22-23, 29; Matthew 14:22-36

This homily was given at the Kateri House Women's Residence Chapel at St. Joseph's College, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Could our readings today be the Biblical version of “Mission: Impossible”?

In the book of Jeremiah, God promises the people of Israel the impossible, in light of the social and political situation of Israel at the time. And in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus enables Peter, the other Apostles, and then all the people in the region of Lake Gennesaret to do what would have been impossible without Jesus’ stilling of the storm and healings: To have faith in him as the Son of God.

The book of Jeremiah raises a theological question, more than other Biblical prophetic books do, as to whether God is capable of abandoning his people completely if the sin of the people of Israel becomes great enough. Jeremiah, more than any other prophet, leans toward a “yes” answer to this question. Also, Jeremiah says to the people of Israel, they are already at the point at which their sin, their injustice and, worst of all, their worship of other gods has put them beyond redemption; beyond the ability even of God to save them from the consequences of their wrongdoing.

We might imagine how this message did not make Jeremiah a popular figure in Israel. To Israel’s people, Jeremiah’s message was as if to say that God’s unbreakable relationship, called a covenant, with his people, was in fact breakable; that God could be unfaithful to his own covenant. This contradicted what other prophets of Jeremiah’s time and before and after were saying.

Yet, amid Jeremiah’s harsh message, like any true prophet he offers his people hope. Indeed, the evil Israel was committing would entail consequences, finally exile to Babylon. Even God was not going to prevent due consequences for Israel’s sin. But out of the destruction and exile of Israel, God would do the almost impossible: God would bring Israel back to its homeland and rebuild Israel around social justice and right worship of the one true God. “I am going to restore the fortunes of the tents of Jacob, and have compassion on his dwellings,” God says through Jeremiah. In light of Israel’s sin and unfaithfulness to their covenant with God, this restoration of Israel would be like “Mission: Impossible,” except for God.

In Matthew’s Gospel, the storm on the lake is not because of anybody’s sin, but still it must have seemed to Jesus’ disciples in the boat that everybody and everything, including, as Matthew says, even “the wind was against them.” Amid this chaos, of which the Gospel writer may have thought as a parallel to God’s ordering the chaos in the first Genesis creation account, Jesus invites Peter to walk toward him on the water.

Peter almost makes “Mission: Impossible” possible, until his focus shifts from God’s presence, which alone makes possible the impossible, to his own fear. At this point, he recognizes how “little faith” he truly has; how much greater his fear is than his faith. But his “little faith” is enough, together with God’s great grace in Jesus Christ. God’s grace in Jesus Christ allows Peter’s “little faith” to multiply and spread. “Those in the boat,” and then the people in the region, worship Jesus. If only we “might touch even the fringe of his cloak,” the impossible might become possible for us, too: Healing; quelling chaos and fear; salvation.

Our “little faith,” too, upheld by God’s grace, is just enough to make possible the otherwise impossible. It is just enough to save us.

Homily for Monday, 4 September 2017– Ferial

Monday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Psalm 96:1, 3, 4-5, 11-12, 13; Luke 4:16-30

This homily was given at St. Clare Church, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

What is it possible for us to know about heaven? How much of eternal life, of being saved, is dependent on our own effort or works versus God’s free gift of grace?

On this Labour Day, our celebration of work and everybody who works, our readings point more toward eternal life as God’s free gift than as having anything to do with our effort. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, St. Paul writes words of tremendous hope. “Jesus died and rose again,” St. Paul says, and for this and no other reason, we have the possibility of eternal life. “Through Jesus,” who has died and has risen from the dead through no merit of ours, “God will bring with him those who have died.” All St. Paul asks of us is to “encourage one another with these words.” It is no wonder, then, that today’s reading from 1 Thessalonians is often one of the selections at funerals in our Church, a time when we want to be encouraged; to know that our God is merciful and wills most of all that we might have eternal life.

Luke’s Gospel, too, emphasizes God’s gratuitous gift. Neither the possibility of eternal life nor God’s presence with and care for us in this life is limited by our effort or factors like our ethnicity or religious tradition. God is the creator of the universe and so is the universal giver of the possibility of eternal life. When Jesus speaks this truth through the images of outsiders like the “widow at Zerephath in Sidon” receiving the prophet Elijah in a time of famine or “Naaman the Syrian” being cleansed before any of the “lepers of Israel,” the people in the synagogue of Nazareth become furious with him. How is it that these outsiders receive God’s preferential treatment? Does it matter that we believe in the right God in order to be healed; in order to be saved? Do our efforts matter for our salvation?

If we listen attentively to our Gospel reading today, we hear that our efforts and our right worship do matter for our salvation, but perhaps not in the way we might most naturally think. Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’ basic “mission statement: “To bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

But this is not only Jesus’ mission; it is ours also. How, then, are we bringing good news to those in need? How are we, in St. Paul’s words, encouraging one another by our words and our deeds? How are we working to free the oppressed and the marginalized and to welcome and integrate the outsiders? How are we doing all this without worrying about whom God will save and whom he will not?

Heaven is God’s gift of grace, but we are still called to cooperate in this life in making God’s gift of grace known universally. French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once said, “To love another is to say to that person, ‘You shall not die.’” To love is to will and work for eternal life for everybody and all creation, and to trust God’s grace to make this will; this dream of ours a reality. We are called to dream this dream and work to realize it; to love one another. If we do simply this, the rest of the work of our salvation is God’s.