Homily for Sunday, 5 March 2023– Second Sunday in Lent

Readings of the day: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22; 2 Timothy 1:8b-10; Matthew 17:1-9

When we think about our identity—what reveals to the world around us who we are—where do we start? We might start with our names, the identity we were given when we were born. I was born Warren Roger. Roger recalls the French heritage on my mother’s side. It was my great-grandfather’s name, and I also have an uncle (my mom’s brother) whose name is Roger. Warren is Old Germanic, related to caring for animals. I do not think my parents—unless they have a special ability to see into the future that I do not know about—could have predicted how much I love animals when they named me at birth. But I think my name is fitting.

At baptism, we (if we are baptized as adults or older children) or our parents (if we are baptized as infants) give our name to the Church. We take on a new identity, a new name of baptized Christian. How many of us took another name, often a saint’s name, when we were confirmed? At confirmation, once again, our identity changes. We become a new being, sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Today in the Book of Genesis, we hear about Abram. God tells Abram to set out from his homeland, Ur (in what is now Iraq near the Persian Gulf), to an unknown, unnamed place. All God tells Abram is that the place to which he will relocate will be a place of blessing: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”

At this point, Abram is seventy-five years old. He would have to wait until he was eighty-five to have his first son, Ishmael, with Hagar. Abram was ninety-nine years old when God gave him a new name, Abraham. And, finally, when Abraham was one hundred years old, God followed through on his promise to give Abraham a son, Isaac, with his wife Sarah. The process of Abraham’s change of identity, from Abram to Abraham to the father in faith of many nations, takes time in the Book of Genesis. But already we hear the first movements of God giving Abram that new identity. Not only will the land where Abraham will settle be blessed, or Sarah and Abraham together be blessed with a child in their old age, but Abram will bless the land and its people where he settles. God has already given Abram a new name, a new identity, even before he leaves Ur: “You will be a blessing.”

The process for Jesus and for us, Jesus’ disciples, toward taking on a new identity before God is much shorter than it was for Abram. Jesus’ public ministry through the founding of the Church at Pentecost lasted maybe a few years; Abraham moved to a new home at seventy-five, waited over eighty years for a new name, and one hundred years for a child with Sarah.

Today from the Gospel of Matthew we hear the account of Jesus’ transfiguration. Of all the Gospels, Matthew is the most focused on questions of identity: Who is Jesus? Who were Jesus’ ancestors? Who are we, Jesus’ disciples, the Church? Matthew begins his Gospel with a spectacular genealogy of Jesus, a list of forty-two generations of names, before identifying “Jesus, who is called the Messiah,” as the son “of Joseph, the husband of Mary.”

In the order of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ transfiguration happens right between two other important “identity” sections in Matthew. Just before Jesus’ transfiguration, Jesus takes his disciples to the far northern reaches of Israel at Caesarea Philippi. There, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am”? Among all the different identities the people were associating with Jesus—“Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets”—Jesus’ apostle Simon Peter is the only one to identify Jesus correctly: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” And Simon receives a new identity in the process of correctly identifying Jesus as the Messiah: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.”

Just after Jesus is transfigured, it seems that Jesus’ disciples are very confused, not only about Jesus’ identity and mission but their own. When they are barely down the mountain of the transfiguration, Jesus’ disciples question, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”? Jesus places a child among them, saying that the only way to go to heaven, never mind be identified as “the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” is to be as humble and dependent on God as the child is on those who care for it. And then Peter, who had almost aced the identity of Jesus as the Messiah before the transfiguration (I have a lot of empathy for Peter for his trouble grappling with the need for Jesus to suffer and die), stumbles on the question of forgiveness.

Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times must I forgive him”? By this point, Jesus has already turned this issue about how many times to forgive a sinner into a question about the identity of the whole faith community, the whole Church, all of us. Jesus has told the parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to seek the one lost sheep and bring it back to the fold. And then Jesus gives us our new identity and mission. It is the same identity and mission Jesus had given only to Peter at first, when Peter identified Jesus as the Messiah. Now that identity and mission belongs to all of us, sisters and brothers. Jesus repeats his identification and commissioning of Peter to all of his disciples: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven… For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

In other words, we now all share in the identity and mission of Jesus himself: An identity and mission of forgiveness and mercy, not only “seven times” (in Peter’s figure of speech), “but seventy-seven times.” We now share without limit, infinitely, in Jesus’ identity and mission of forgiveness and mercy. At this moment we become “other Christs” who are anointed and sent out to “take away the sins of the world” and lead one another to God, to eternal life.

And, in between these two “identity vignettes” in Matthew’s Gospel—exchanges between Jesus and his disciples that are all about who Jesus is as the Messiah, who Peter and Jesus’ other disciples are, and who we are—Jesus goes up the mountain with Peter, James, and John to be transfigured. Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, so correctly identified by Peter, does not change in his transfiguration. Jesus’ identity is only revealed in a way to us that is almost overwhelming. Jesus’ transfiguration reveals him to us more fully than before as the fulfilment of the Law and the prophets (remember how Jesus identifies himself in this way earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount).

Yet the transfiguration not only reveals Jesus’ identity to us more fully than ever before. And the transfiguration reveals to us our own identity—who we are through, with, and in Christ—more fully than ever before, so fully that we cannot help in the moment but be overwhelmed.

When the voice from the cloud says of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” this voice, the voice of God, also says this of us. Sisters and brothers, we are transfigured in this very moment. God looks down on us and says, “These are my beloved sons. These are my beloved daughters. This is my beloved Church.”

God reveals to us a new name, a new identity, a new mission. Abram becomes Abraham. Peter reveals Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus reveals us, identifies and commissions us, as the community that will bind and loose, that will seek the lost sheep in infinite forgiveness and mercy. From the cloud God reveals Jesus once again as “my beloved Son.” In the same moment God identifies, commissions, transfigures us as his beloved daughters and sons. In this Eucharistic celebration God sends the Holy Spirit upon us to solidify our identity and commissioning as “one body, one spirit in Christ.”

But from the moment of the transfiguration we still have one more major step so that God might reveal to us fully Jesus’ identity and mission, and ours. That last step we call, we experience as the Paschal Mystery: The events of the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven of Jesus Christ. This is why, after Jesus’ transfiguration in our Gospel today, Matthew says that the disciples are “overcome with fear.” Now, fear is not a feeling that we like to experience, I do not think. But our experience of suffering, our experience of death, an end to this earthly life, is necessary for us if who we are is anything like who Jesus is. By his passion and death, Jesus has transformed (we could say transfigured) the last event in our human experience that needs to be transformed and transfigured: Death itself.

In the time we have left this Lent, between now and Easter, we will continue to have God reveal our fullest identity to us. God does so one step, one event at a time, sharing with us in Christ our human sufferings but also joys: Between the mount of the transfiguration and the mount of Calvary, between Calvary and heaven, where Jesus has ascended and awaits us. There, in heaven, awaits our fullest vision of Jesus—the Messiah, the Son of the living God—and our fullest vision of who we are: Beloved daughters, beloved sons, beloved Church; beloved, redeemed, and saved disciples of the Son of the living God.

Homily for Thursday, 5 January 2023– Christmas Weekday

Readings of the day: 1 John 3:11-21; Psalm 100:1b-2, 3, 4, 5; John 1:43-51

Today John’s Gospel picks up just as Jesus has chosen Andrew and Peter to be his first disciples. And immediately after choosing Andrew and Peter, Jesus decides “to go to Galilee.”

I find it interesting about this beginning of our Gospel reading today that Jesus’ choice “to go to Galilee” after calling Andrew and Peter to be his first disciples immediately suggests that Jesus is not in Galilee, the region of Israel that includes his hometown, Nazareth. And neither are Andrew and Peter, Galilean fishermen whose calling to be Jesus disciples Matthew, Mark, and Luke all situate on the Sea of Galilee—John differs from the other Gospels in this respect—near their homes when Jesus chooses them to be his disciples in John’s Gospel.

Andrew, Peter, and also Jesus are away from home when Jesus’ call of his first disciples takes place. So are Philip and Nathanael, the next two people John says became Jesus’ disciples.

Sisters and brothers, I think that here John is suggesting that to be Jesus’ disciples will occasionally (if not frequently) mean being called beyond our homes, figurative if not literal and physical; beyond our comfort zones.

We hear that this is true of Andrew and Peter. This is certainly true of Jesus. His being called outside of his home, his comfort extended all the way to his being called to die on a cross outside of Jerusalem, the city at the heart of Israel, yet so far and different from Galilee’s peace and tranquility.

To have been called outside of their home, their region, their comfort was true of Philip and then Nathanael. This is clear from Nathanael’s response to Philip’s invitation to be the disciple of this “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Nathanael asks Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth”?

Nathanael is called at that moment beyond the comfort of his own biases. It was probably a bias against people from Nazareth shared among many people. The reason for this bias, or Nathanael’s anti-Nazareth comment, is unclear. Maybe Nazareth was the rival village to other Galilean communities like Bethsaida, home to Philip, Andrew, and Peter. Maybe this bias was like Edmonton versus Calgary today… It is hard to say.

Yet Philip’s invitation calls Nathanael beyond this bias, beyond identifying strictly with his home, his region, or any other comfortable markers of identity. Now Nathanael will identify first as a disciple, an apostle of Jesus.

But how jarring this must have been for Nathanael! Incredulous (but, as Jesus says of him, without deceit), Nathaniel’s first question of Jesus is, “Where did you get to know me”? To know Jesus is an important theme throughout John’s Gospel and letters in our Bible. Remember the Gospel reading of a couple of days ago: John the Baptist, by his own admission, did not know Jesus until God revealed Jesus to him as “the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” And only then does John readily testify that Jesus “is the Son of God.”

Nathanael does something very similar to John the Baptist earlier in John’s Gospel: Jesus replies to Nathanael that he got to know him when he saw him “under the fig tree.” Nathanael gets to know Jesus at the invitation of Philip, and is then able to identify Jesus, very correctly: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel”!

Nathanael’s correct identification of Jesus as “the Son of God” is possible, even from within a (somewhat) comfort zone. Our worship here, sisters and brothers, is good and right, yet possible from comfort. Jesus will always acknowledge our good will—our rightness and goodness in loving and serving him as his disciples, and in loving and serving one another in Jesus’ name. But Jesus will call us, little by little, beyond our comfort, until we are ready, he says, to “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending above the Son of Man.”

In these days in which our Church mourns the death yet celebrates the life of a true Servant of the Servants of God, Pope Benedict XVI, I am reminded of a line from his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi. Pope Benedict says in Spe Salvi: The human person “was created for greatness—for God himself; [each of us is] created to be filled by God. But [our] heart is too small for the greatness for which it is destined. It must be stretched.”

Our hearts “must be stretched” beyond mere comfort to be true hearts of disciples of our Lord; to enter eternal life, the “greatness” for which God has created us, to be forever with Jesus our Saviour; to “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending above the Son of Man.”

Homily for Tuesday, 9 September 2014– Memorial of St. Peter Claver

Tuesday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Corinthians 6:1-11; Psalm 149:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6a, 9b; Luke 6:12-19

How does becoming Christian change who we are?

St. Paul is at his angry best in our first reading today from 1 Corinthians. Of all the churches to whom Paul wrote and served and brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Corinthians were the most troublesome. In St. Paul’s time, Corinth was a thriving double port city, a business hub in the center of the Roman Empire. Many Corinthians thought themselves to be self-sufficient. They were entitled, even, and this culture of entitlement spilled over to the baptized Christians in Corinth. Even worse, wealthy Corinthian Christians were bringing lawsuits against one another over petty disagreements. And so St. Paul confronts them with this reminder: “Now you have had yourselves washed; you were sanctified; you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.” In other words, your Christian baptism has changed who you are. Live up to your dignity as a people “washed… sanctified… justified.”

Becoming Christian, a member of the Body of Jesus Christ; of the Church changes us profoundly and forever. Being chosen as Jesus twelve closest friends changed the first Apostles, of whose calling we hear in our Gospel reading today. They were no longer just Simon Peter, “Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the Son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.” No, now they were Apostles. By having been chosen by Jesus to be Apostles, who they were was changed profoundly and forever.

St. Peter Claver, whose feast we celebrate today, is known for having baptized thousands of African slaves in Cartagena, which is now in Colombia. In Christian baptism, the identity of these slaves was changed profoundly and forever. Slavery of non-Christians in Peter Claver’s time was accepted if not promoted; slavery of Christians was unconscionable. Peter Claver exposed the deep injustice of the slave trade by bringing the Gospel and baptism to the slaves of Cartagena. But this is not why the ministry among the slaves made so many, even among St. Peter Claver’s brother Jesuits, angry with him. Yes, baptism of the slaves of Cartagena changed who they were, profoundly and forever. The slaves became Christians, and so legally had to be freed.

But, more importantly, St. Peter Claver also brought to question how being Christian had changed the slave traders and traffickers; how being Christian had changed those who promoted the slave trade, knowing it was wrong; how being Christian had changed slave owners; how being Christian had changed all of us.

Our readings today and the example of St. Peter Claver are an invitation and a reminder to us: How has being Christian, professing the faith we do, change who we are? We are changed by our becoming Christian; by our baptism; by our continued profession of our faith, profoundly and forever.

Homily for Sunday, 24 August 2014

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Isaiah 22:19-23; Psalm 128:1-2, 2-3, 6, 8; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20

This homily was given at Anglin House at the Cardinal Flahiff Basilian Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada. Many thanks and blessings to the women religious and to my Basilian confrères of the Cardinal Flahiff Centre who took part in this celebration of Sunday Mass.

“Who do people say the Son of Man is”? And then “who do you say that I am”? These are questions about identity. To understand just how significant Jesus’ questions about identity, his and ours, were when he first asked them of his disciples, it may help us to understand the geographical setting of the Gospel reading we hear today.

Let us place ourselves in Caesarea Philippi, about twenty miles north of the Sea of Galilee. Caesarea Philippi had been the pagan town of Paneas, named for the Greek god Pan. Philip the Tetrarch, son of Herod the Great who ruled this region on behalf of Rome in Jesus’ time, rebuilt Paneas and renamed it for Caesar Tiberius, hence Caesarea Philippi.

This region gives context to several of the pagan references in our Gospel reading. Peter answers Jesus’ question about his identity: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Of course, Peter is correct. And yet the Roman emperors were often referred to as “sons of God.” But Jesus is greater than any emperor on earth; not merely the son of Jupiter or any other Roman deity but Son of the one God; “of the living God”; our God.

Jesus blesses Peter with the keys, a sign of authority in pagan societies of the time. However, Peter did not earn this authority as an emperor might have. Authority is given him by “the Son of the living God”; given him by Jesus Christ. Peter is now no ordinary authority with just any keys; he is made under Christ’s authority a “son of the living God.”

“On this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it,” Jesus says to Peter. The “rock” and “the gates of Hades” may have referred to a cave in a rock near Caesarea Philippi that pagans understood to be an entrance to “Hades”; the netherworld; the home of the dead or simply a metaphor for the wild and unknown, of which Pan was god in Greek mythology.

Again, Peter is given great authority as leader of the community of Christian disciples, the Church. But this authority; Peter’s new identity as a “son of the living God” is not from him. It is from God through Christ and is only effective in service to the community; the Church. Not the pagan gods, not Peter by his own efforts, but the Church in Christ will prevail even over death itself.

And so here, in the pagan context of Caesarea Philippi, we hear in today’s Gospel several great statements of identity: Christ’s identity; Peter’s identity; but also our identity.

Who were people in Jesus’ time expecting him to be? Perhaps even the Jewish people who believed that Jesus was the Messiah were expecting their Messiah to be a great prophet after Jeremiah or Elijah, or a fire-and-brimstone preacher of the need for repentance after John the Baptist, or the one to overthrow the oppressive Roman regime. Perhaps, if the non-Jews near Caesarea Philippi were encountering Jesus, they may have thought him to be a kind of god, like Pan, who kept the wild; the unknown; “Hades” at bay.

“But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks his disciples. For a moment, when it matters most, Peter gets it right: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Peter is not only correct as to the identity of Jesus, but he is correct as to his own identity and also our identity.

What do I mean by this? If someone were to ask us, “Who do you say that you are?” would we be bold enough to answer, “I am a son or daughter of the living God”? This is who we are!

But would we not more typically answer the question of our identity; of who we are most fundamentally with responses such as: “I am a Basilian. I am a Catholic priest. I am a Loretto Sister. I have been professed or ordained for x number of years. I am a scholar. I have been involved in high school or university education or administration. I am retired,” and so forth…

All these answers to the question of our identity are true. But if we were to answer the questions, “Who do you say that you are; who do you say that I am,” with “We are sons and daughters of the living God,” would not some think our response to be somewhat triumphalistic? And yet if, at our core, we identify ourselves as any less than sons and daughters “of the living God,” we are selling our God-given human dignity, the dignity and identity given us by our Christian baptism, short.

We are sons and daughters “of the living God.” This is only triumphalistic, a statement of misplaced pride, if we believe that our being Christian; our living up to our identity as sons and daughters “of the living God” is a solo effort. It is not. We are sons and daughters “of the living God” in community; as Church. Our religious community life is a sign of this broader community of sons and daughters “of the living God, the Church. Peter did not make his confession of faith alone; he did not identify Jesus as “the Messiah, the son of the living God” alone and by his own strength, but with God’s grace and with the support of the community of disciples.

And so the authority; the blessing Jesus gives Peter is not to him alone. It is the authority and blessing given to the Church; to the community of disciples whose identity we share with the earliest Christian disciples and with all Christians from all the ages, on earth and in heaven. And so we are blessed with this identity; blessed with this authority from “the Messiah, the Son of the living God” whom we confess in faith.

“Flesh and blood has not revealed this to [us], but [our] Father in heaven… The gates of Hades shall not prevail against” Christ’s Church; against us, Christ’s community of sons and daughters “of the living God.”