Homily for Sunday, 27 November 2022– First Sunday of Advent, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122:1-2, 3-4, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:27-44

What words of hope we have heard today!

The prophet Isaiah says, about “Judah and Jerusalem, ‘In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains…raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream toward it.” Israel, faithful once again to its God—our God—would know no more injustice, no more war… swords beaten “into ploughshares and… spears into pruning hooks.”

This is quite the grand prophecy of a glorious future for Israel, for “Judah and Jerusalem.” This is especially true if we consider the sorry state Israel and its leadership were in during the time of Isaiah. The prophetic ministry of Isaiah overlaps with the reigns of two especially bad kings in Jerusalem, Jotham and Ahaz, and then the reign of Hezekiah, who tried to reform both religious practice (no more worship of idols; Israel would worship only the one God) and social practice (against corruption and disregard for the poor). But the damage was already done. Israel was on track to be sacked by the stronger nations around it, and its people exiled to Babylon.

Just before the prophecy we hear today from Isaiah, the prophet warns Israel of the consequences of its sin—idolatry and social injustice—in stark terms. Yet, even in that first chapter of Isaiah, there is hope for Israel. Isaiah gives Israel the opportunity to “set things right… Though your sins may be like scarlet, they may become white as snow.”

And then the prophecy we hear today, from Chapter 2 of Isaiah, is decidedly hopeful. Especially considering the depth of Israel’s sin, it is remarkable that Isaiah prophecies that sin, the invasion and destruction of Israel, Jerusalem and its temple, the succession of bad kings, the Babylonian Exile would not be the end of Israel as a nation. Israel would not only recover from all this, but Jerusalem would “be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.” The temple of Jerusalem would be rebuilt, even more magnificent than before. There would be peace, right worship of the one God of Israel, and special care for the poor and disadvantaged, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner.

In contrast to Isaiah 2—and similar to Isaiah 1—Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew today strikes a much starker, foreboding tone. Jesus speaks to his disciples—and to us—about the end of time, his return, “the coming of the Son of Man” to judge the world. Jesus compares the events of the end of time with those of Noah’s time, when God sent a flood to wipe out the entire human race except for Noah and his family, so great was human wickedness on the earth.

A frequent theme in our Gospel reading today is the unknown. Jesus says about the people of Noah’s time that “they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Likewise, Jesus says of his return at the end of time: “You do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

I am not sure that to say to somebody—to us—that we cannot know, cannot prepare for a future event is all that reassuring. Imagine if your instructor in a course here at the university, instead of presenting clearly when each assignment was due and when exams were, said in the syllabus, “You do not [and cannot] know on what day your exam will be held. Too bad.” I am sure that would do wonders for students’ already-heightened anxiety. Thankfully we, your instructors, do not do this! There is reason to be hopeful, both about our studies and about the end of time!

But then imagine the anxiety of Jesus’ disciples when he said to them that they could “not know on what day” he would return, what day would be the end of time. Thankfully, Jesus gives us a way in which we can be prepared for his return, even if we cannot know its precise day. He says to his disciples, “Keep awake, therefore,” and, “You must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

How do we maintain hope, especially in this Advent time of hopeful waiting for our Lord’s return, and not allow anxiety to get the better of us? Jesus says, very simply, “Keep awake… be ready.” Isaiah’s message is similar to Jesus’ message, many hundreds of years before Jesus. How were the people of Isaiah’s time to “keep awake” and “be ready”? Isaiah says that they were to do so by acting with justice, especially toward the poor, the disadvantaged. The people to whom Isaiah prophesied were to “keep awake” and “be ready” by worshiping only the one God of Israel, our God, and not the gods of other nations. They were to “keep awake” and “be ready” by not making military and political alliances with one great nation surrounding Israel in an effort to avoid invasion by another.

“Keep awake… be ready”: In his letter to the Romans that we hear today, St. Paul is as insistent as Jesus is in our Gospel about the nearness of Jesus’ return in glory: “Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep… The night is far gone; the day is near.” St. Paul uses powerful imagery of putting “on the armour of light” and living “honourably as in the day.”

Sisters and brothers, for us not to be overtaken by anxiety at these words and images of St. Paul, of Jesus, of Isaiah, but to understand and live this message as hopeful, we must “keep awake” and “be ready.” The word of God today and through this time of Advent invites us today to hope in the return of our Lord at the end of time in a way that spurs us into action. Hope is not and cannot be a passive virtue. Hope must lead us to act concretely for justice, for peace in our world beginning in our own hearts, our households, our workplaces, our places of leisure, our Church. As we pray in our Psalm today, hope must lead us to seek the good of “the house of the Lord our God.” Sisters and brothers, we are a living “house of the Lord our God.” Let us pray with growing urgency for one another, then, “‘Peace be within you.’ For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good.”

To seek one another’s good is to seek the salvation of one another by the end of time, but it is also to ensure that essential needs of our brothers and sisters are met now. If we are the living, active, hopeful “house of the Lord our God,” then the poorest and least advantaged of our world, of the people we ourselves encounter day to day, must be the cornerstone of the house of God that we are.

At Mass we pray, in the prayer Jesus taught us, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is the ultimate Advent prayer of hope. But it presupposes action on our part to build the reign of justice, peace, salvation that God wills for us, “on earth as it is in heaven.” We offer one another a sign of peace. As we do that, at every Mass, could we not pray quietly the words of the Psalmist for the person we are greeting with peace: For your sake, “for the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good”?

This is how we “keep [actively] awake.” This is how we nourish the hope that dawns anew in us in this time of Advent. Our worship connects with our seeking one another’s good, one another’s salvation ultimately. Isaiah speaks of this essential connection between right worship and right practice of justice, peace, loving kindness. St. Paul speaks in contrasts: Putting “on the armour of light” instead of darkness, acting as people “of the day” and not of night, passive and anxious.

It is no accident, elsewhere in St. Paul’s writings, that hope is the middle virtue, the hinge point, of the three so-called “theological virtues,” faith, hope, and love. Active hope arises from our faith and it naturally leads us to love God, our neighbour, and ourselves. “The greatest of these is love,” yes, but hope is the virtue of keeping awake so that we may love.

My sisters and brothers, as we begin this time of Advent, I pray, “Peace be with you… Peace be within you.” May we act with justice, act and live with kindness. May we be a people of hope: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” May we be a people that seeks one another’s good, a people who keeps awake and is actively ready for the return of the Lord, our salvation and our peace.

Homily for Sunday, 15 August 2021– Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Readings of the day: Revelation 11:19a, 12:1-6a,10ab; Psalm 45:10, 11, 12, 16; 1 Corinthians 15:20-27; Luke 1:39-56

A priest who is a theology professor at a university began his reflection on today’s Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a story from one of his classes. He asked his students if anybody could explain the Assumption of Mary. One student answered, “Yeah, that is when the Church teaches that we assume that Mary is in heaven”!

I have never had a student answer me this, or anything similar, about the Assumption of Mary in any of my classes at St. Joseph’s College. I suppose that if a student were to answer in this way, I would quickly but gently correct the student.

Today we celebrate our belief as Catholics that, at the end of her earthly life, Mary, Mother of God; Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, was taken by God (what we mean by “assumed”) body and soul into heaven, so no trace of her earthly existence was left on earth. This is about as simple and brief a definition of the Assumption of Mary as I think we can give.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was defined only in 1950 by Pope Pius XII as an essential point of our Catholic belief, that is, a dogma. But this does not mean that our belief that Mary was taken (assumed) body and soul into heaven does not go back much farther than the last seventy-one years. In fact our belief in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is among our Church’s most ancient beliefs, dating back to at least the third century after the earthly life of Jesus.

Until the early 300s after the time of Jesus, every so often the Roman Empire endured periods of political and social instability. In response to that instability, Roman emperors tended to persecute Christians and other minority peoples within the Empire—anybody who did not worship the Roman gods. These persecutions produced martyrs in the Church, people who died to uphold their Christian faith. Until the 300s, almost all saints—people the Church proclaims as in heaven—were martyrs. Only after persecution and death for one’s faith became rare in the Roman Empire, which by then had accepted Christianity and then made it the official religion of the Empire, did the Church consider other ways than dying for one’s faith—living an exceptionally holy life—as a sign that a person was in heaven; was a saint. During this time, a tradition started in the Church of collecting any physical remains (relics) of martyrs and storing them in a visible place (catacombs) for veneration by the faithful. These Roman Martyrs were especially celebrated on the anniversaries of their deaths, their “birthday,” the day on which God took them into heaven.

But how does the veneration of saints and their relics relate to the Assumption of Mary? At about the same time as the veneration of martyrs was beginning, the Church was becoming increasingly aware that, while we have from our beginning placed Mary first and most important among the saints, no relics; no physical reminders of her earthly existence have ever been found. By this time, a tomb at the foot of the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem was already being celebrated as the place where Mary was laid at the end of her earthly life. Let us remember that our Church has never taught, one way or the other, whether Mary died; only that her body never decayed before God assumed her into heaven. In fact our Eastern Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers focus today’s celebration more on Mary’s Dormition, or “falling asleep” at the end of her life on earth; we Roman Catholics focus more on God having taken her into heaven. We celebrate (rightly) two aspects of the same event.

And the great celebration of Mary’s “birthday” into heaven has been on this day, August 15, since the Church’s earliest centuries. But this tomb at the Mount of Olives was empty: No body. Coincidentally, it is near another empty tomb that many Christians consider to have been the tomb of Jesus between his death and resurrection. Based on the empty tomb the Church reasoned that God must have taken Mary’s whole being (what we mean by “body and soul”) to heaven, leaving no trace; no relic of her on earth. There is even a Biblical tradition in the Jewish as well as Christian faiths of God taking especially holy people into heaven, body and soul together: Enoch in Genesis and Elijah in 2 Kings, for instance.

Today’s celebration of Mary’s “birthday,” her Assumption body and soul, into heaven has a long and beautiful history, certainly longer than the dogmatic definition of the Assumption of Mary in 1950! Yet, please allow me to say something maybe a bit controversial here: That maybe the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is not a celebration about Mary, first and foremost, but about God and God’s Son our Lord, Jesus Christ, and about us.

What do I mean by this? Our reading today from the Book of Revelation is full of fantastic imagery that I will not dare to unpack in all its detail and symbolism. We are on scene of a great cosmic battle between a “great red dragon” with “seven heads and ten horns” with a diadem on each of its heads—I envision one ugly beast, I think we can say who stands for everything that is evil—and a woman, “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet,” crowned with “twelve stars,” in the midst of childbirth. Only since the Middle Ages has any frequent connection been made between this woman and Mary. A far more ancient tradition in the Church is to understand this woman as a metaphor for the whole Church; all of us in our resistance toward sin and evil, which will last until the end of time.

Yet to identify the woman of Revelation as Mary is not wrong, per se, because Mary stands for all of us, the Church, and our ultimate hope as a community of faith: Eternal life; heaven. This is to say that we hope (otherwise I do not think we would be here or profess faith in “the life of the world to come” in our Creed) to reach the same destination; the same end as Mary did by her glorious Assumption. We hope, at the end of our earthly lives, to be taken, as Mary was, not only soul but body, too, into heaven. After all, in our Creed, we profess our faith in the resurrection of the body.

Mary’s Assumption into heaven is not hers alone. It is a sign and a mystery of our collective hope as Church to be taken up into heaven, body and soul, at the end of our earthly lives; at the end of time. St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians makes this “order of things” clear today: First, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Because of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven, Mary; all the saints; all of us are called through the same process and the same end: Death, resurrection, ascension to heaven, body and soul. And only because of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension is any of this possible for us, and was any of this possible for Mary.

Today especially we greet Mary with great joy as Elizabeth did in Luke’s Gospel: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”! Yet I think it is important that, immediately after this joyful greeting by Elizabeth, Mary praises not herself but the Lord in the beautiful words of the prayer we know as the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” But, once again, the Magnificat is not Mary’s prayer alone. It is part of a long, and very Biblical, tradition of especially women praising God for God’s saving presence among his people. We have Deborah in the Book of Judges and Moses’ sister Miriam during the Exodus as some examples of Old Testament women who praise God for God’s presence and offer of salvation to a whole people in this way. Hannah’s prayer when she conceives Samuel is almost verbatim Mary’s Magnificat in Luke.

And now the Magnificat is our prayer. We, not as disconnected individuals but as a community; a communion of faith, offer this prayer of joyful praise to God that Mary did. Yet by this prayer we acknowledge and assent to God’s way of saving us: The weak are strengthened; the proud humbled and scattered. The powerful are brought low; the lowly raised up. The hungry are filled; the rich “sent… away empty.” In God’s mercy, heaven is seen as our worldly concepts of power and worth quite literally overturned. Mary is our first model of this overturning: The insignificant young Jewish woman of a tiny village, Nazareth, who becomes the Mother of our Lord and Saviour and is taken up into heaven this day. This is only so that we will follow Mary and the saints to our “birthday” into eternal life, where there is no excess wealth or food at the expense of those who have too little; no pride at the expense of the humble; no “me” disconnected from or at the expense of “us.” If we follow Mary’s example, we will gain heaven together as Church, God’s people, a communion of faith, body and soul.

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 Monday, 2 September 2019

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

Monday of the 22nd week in Ordinary Time

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

Today, do we not hear Jesus make a bold statement in Luke’s Gospel? After reading from “the scroll of the prophet Isaiah” on the Sabbath in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth, Jesus rolls up the scroll and sits down. Then, with “the eyes of all in the synagogue… fixed upon him,” Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

May I ask us, then, what would be the message that, if we heard it today, would be like that “scripture… fulfilled in [our] hearing”? Here, would we not want to be somewhat careful, so not to confuse a message we want to hear with a message we may need to hear?

There is certainly a distinction in today’s Gospel between the message the people want to hear and the message they need to hear from Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth. The people in the synagogue of Nazareth that day were happy with Jesus’ claim to be the one “anointed… 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, [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” But what did Jesus’ claim to be the anointed one to accomplish all this mean? Jesus’ proclamation of “good news to the poor… release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind,” freedom for the oppressed; Jesus’ proclamation of “the Lord’s favour” was not to be primarily for the people in the Nazareth synagogue that day. In fact, Jesus’ proclamation was not to be primarily for the people of Israel, but for foreigners, just as the Lord’s favour had been for the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian in the times of Elijah and Elisha.

The people who heard Jesus in the synagogue of Nazareth that day changed suddenly from all speaking “well of Jesus” to trying to “hurl him off [a] cliff.” Jesus’ inclusive offer of “the Lord’s favour,” not primarily for the people in the synagogue that day or even for the people of Israel but for foreigners, misfits; those for whatever reason unworthy of “the Lord’s favour” as Jesus’ hearers understood them, was not what the people in the synagogue in Nazareth that day wanted to hear. But it was the message they needed to hear. Not they; not any of us have a monopoly on “the Lord’s favour.”

Who, then, are “the poor… the captives… the blind” and “the oppressed” among us today? Who are the widows of Zarephath and the Naamans among us today, disfavoured because of our individual if not social prejudices?  If Jesus were to preach on this scripture from Isaiah today, would he not perhaps proclaim “the Lord’s favour” primarily toward our society’s poorest and most outcast, perhaps the unborn; refugees and migrants trying to integrate into Canadian society and our communities; people with disabilities; the elderly and the seriously ill; people who despair to the point of contemplating ending their lives or having physicians end their lives for them; people who have committed crimes and are trying to rebuild their lives and re-integrate into society, and so on.

Who will “proclaim… the Lord’s favour” to these people? Who will bring hope to those “who have no hope,” in St. Paul’s words today to the Thessalonians? Who will proclaim the inviolable dignity of all human life, without exception, even and especially when this message is ill-received and even ridiculed by people who hear it or see it in action from us?

“Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in [our] hearing.”

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

Tuesday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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