Homily for Sunday, 2 September 2018

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

This homily was given at St. James and Our Lady of the Valley Churches, Vernon and Coldstream, BC, Canada. 

What do we make of the tensions in today’s readings between internal intentions and external actions; between observance of religious laws and traditions and what Jesus teaches is most important to God?

To some extent, I anticipate that most if not all of us have a high regard for laws, rules, and traditions, whether they are from God or from people; religious or secular. And there is nothing wrong with having a high regard for laws, rules, and traditions. In Canada, as in most or all developed countries at least, we speak of the “rule of law”—the Constitution and its Charter of Rights and Freedoms, civil and criminal law, precedent set by the rulings of several levels of courts of law—as a principle to govern our society. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses instills among the people of Israel a “rule of law” system. Israel is to be ruled by God’s laws, which will not be difficult for the people to discern and observe. God’s laws, Moses says to the people of Israel, are not to be seen as an imposition or a nuisance, but as a gift.

Other nations around Israel at the time worshipped several gods, and many worshipped their human rulers as gods. Many gods and human rulers as gods meant complicated systems of laws for the people to follow. What, then, does God propose through Moses to Israel’s people? If there is one God, then there is one simplified system of laws to communicate to Israel the nearness to it of its God; the care of God for Israel. And so God asks rhetorically through Moses: “For what other great nation has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is whenever we call to him? And what other great nation has statutes and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today”? The point is that no other nation would enjoy such closeness to its God. No other nation would enjoy the gift of a rule of law so intelligible and just as Israel would enjoy. This law would be a perfect echo of God’s voice, caring for and sustaining our well-being on earth, so there would be no need to add to or take away from it.

There is nothing wrong with laws, rules, and traditions, as long as we do not allow these laws, rules, and traditions in themselves to become our gods. This is the point Jesus makes in the Gospel of Mark from which we hear today; in his dispute with the Pharisees and scribes who come from Jerusalem to investigate how well Jesus and his disciples observe the laws about food, laws about the ritual purification of dishes and vessels for food and drink and their bodies.

Neither Jesus nor Mark, the Gospel writer, simply dismiss this set of laws the Jews had inherited from Moses’ time as unimportant. In fact, in this part of Mark’s Gospel we get a sense that, very soon after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the earliest Christian communities had to contend with both Jews, who knew and followed the law given them through Moses, and Greek and Roman pagans, who did not, joining them. This is most likely why Mark explains the long list of laws the Jews had about food preparation and washing the food, the vessels to prepare the food, and themselves. The first Christian leaders after Jesus decided immediately that, as Jesus had taught and lived among them, their communities would include everybody: Jews and pagans alike who had come to believe in Jesus. This would create some uneasy tensions among different groups of people, each with their laws, rules, and traditions.

These laws, rules, and traditions would remain important, though, and even constructive of Christian community as long as these laws, rules, and traditions did not become gods in themselves. These laws, rules, and traditions would be praiseworthy as long as they were observed as a gift that pointed the people to the one God, who cares for and sustains our life and well-being here on earth. Neither could religious or cultural laws, rules, and traditions become reduced to decrees we merely follow externally, while they fail to change our hearts and bring us closer to God.

This is at the heart of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees and scribes of his time, based on the words of the prophet Isaiah centuries before Jesus: “You hypocrites… ‘this people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’” I offer this with a caveat that most Pharisees and other religious leaders of Jesus’ time followed with their hearts the sometimes-rigorous outward observance of religious law that they expected of themselves and everybody else. Mark’s Gospel today features a small group of Pharisees and scribes “from Jerusalem.” These were the self-proclaimed official police of observance of the Law of Moses, who thought themselves to be important because they had come from Jerusalem, the city at the centre of the Jewish faith. For them, the laws, rules, and traditions of faith were no longer a gift from God to point us back to God and to eternal life. They were no longer a sign of God’s care for us and for creation, but had been reduced to a means to power and prestige by this minority of religious leaders of Jesus’ time.

And when laws, rules, and traditions become inflexible, static means to power and prestige, how often does this show itself as self-righteous judgmentalism, in our own time as often as in the time of Jesus? If we appoint ourselves judges based on external observance of laws, rules, and traditions, we risk failing to discern accurately, as well as possible, the condition of the hearts of the faithful before God, which may or may not be well-reflected in external observance.

Yet how often do we hear, if we have not said ourselves, things like, “People who have committed or supported such-and-such an action should not receive communion? Those people come to Canada to take our jobs and change our culture and customs! How dare that person openly question that teaching; she or he is a heretic! That couple is ‘living in sin’”!

“This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me,” I imagine Jesus thinking of the people for whom laws, rules, and traditions become means to their own power and prestige instead of means toward patiently bringing external observances closer into line with the more universal longing of our hearts for God.

What, then, are the remedies for this self-righteousness; what we might call “Phariseeism”; for reducing laws, rules, and traditions, religious and otherwise, to means to power and prestige? First, I think it is important, as Jesus says in today’s Gospel, to recognize that evil (but also good) does not come from outside us; from external observances, no matter how faithful. Goodness or evil are conditions of the heart, of what is inside us. Second, as we hear in the Letter of James [the patron saint of this church], an important remedy to judging based on externals is to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive” ourselves.

We become “doers of the word” when we are deeply aware of the condition of our own hearts; the presence within each of us of good and evil. We become “doers of the word” when our external observances are a sincere reflection of the condition of our hearts; when we expect of others only what we ourselves are capable; when we consider everybody as loved by God and called to eternal life; when we consider nobody as excluded from the eternal life God offers us.

We become “doers of the word,” and our hearts are drawn to the heart of God, when the law becomes not a means to power if not to an abuse of power; when laws, rules, and traditions are not gods in themselves but a gift from God to point us to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 12 August 2018

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 19:4-8; Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Ephesians 4:30-5:2; John 6:41-51

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

How often are we asked to do or not to do something? Children and teenagers, maybe you have been asked occasionally to do or not to do something at home: Clean your room, make your bed, set the table, do the dishes, take out the garbage, do not argue with your brother, sister, or parents, and so on. Maybe you have been asked to go to bed, or to get out of bed on time. Anybody here who works: Maybe your supervisor or employer has asked tasks of you. If you are an employer, a supervisor, a parent, or anybody in a position of authority or responsibility for another, maybe you have asked others to do something, or not to do something, more or less frequently.

In our readings today, we hear several instances of people asking and being asked to do or not to do something. We hear of Elijah who, in 1 Kings, has fled “into the wilderness” to escape the murderous rage of Queen Jezebel of Israel. Elijah had just killed all the false prophets of the Baals, the false gods Jezebel was worshipping and encouraging the people of Israel of the time to worship. Elijah flees for his life, but soon begins to despair of his own life: “It is enough now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.” (In no way do I wish to trivialize despair, or even what we might recognize nowadays as depression, or thoughts of or attempts at suicide. If anybody we know ever experiences despair or depression, or thinks or speaks about taking her or his own life, please reach out to this person. If anybody here has experienced or is living through depression or outright despair, please know the dignity of your life, and that I; our faith community; our Church is here to support you; to reach out to you.)

Amidst Elijah’s despair is when an “angel of the LORD” wakes him and asks him to do something, twice: “Get up and eat.” Might we empathize with Elijah: The last thing he probably wants to do is “get up and eat.” In fact, he wants to die. To his credit, though, Elijah does as the angel asks, gets up, and eats some cake and drinks some water. As one of my brother Basilians says whenever another of our priests eats cake or other sweets for breakfast, “Ah! The breakfast of champions”! And so, if I were to ask us to do anything (especially parents whose children might think tomorrow morning, “Father said at Mass last night that it was okay to eat cake for breakfast”!), it would be not to be upset with me. I did not give your children permission to eat cake for breakfast; the angel of the LORD in the Bible did, and only to Elijah because he was despairing for his life. I am sorry to anybody who is disappointed!

The letter to the Ephesians, as in the story of Elijah in 1 Kings, gives us instructions about what and what not to do as people of God: “Brothers and sisters, do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God… Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice.” Our Psalm asks of us, “Taste and see that the LORD is good.” And today in John’s Gospel Jesus asks the people not to “complain amongst” themselves.

Our Scriptures include many instances of people asking others and being asked to do something: Get up. Eat cake for breakfast. Avoid “bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander… [and] malice.” “Do not complain among yourselves.” “Taste and see that the LORD is good.” But how often do we ask somebody or are we asked not to do something but to be or to behave in a particular way?

To ask or to be asked to be some way may be less common than ask or be asked to do something. Yet have we not still asked or been asked not to do something but to be or behave in a particular way: Be kind. Be careful. Be happy with what you have. Be humble. Be prayerful. Be on time. Be brave. Be hard-working…?

Nowhere in our reading today from 1 Kings does anybody ask anybody else to be some way. But we hear this kind of command today in the letter to the Ephesians: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

This kind of calling to be or to behave in a particular way is not present in our Gospel reading, either, at least not word-for-word. Jesus is more content to describe to the people who he is, not so much who the people are or should be. “I am the bread of life,” Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” Of course, Jesus’ use of emphatic “I am” statements, twenty-four times in John’s Gospel, as many times as in the rest of the New Testament combined, is a characteristic of John. It is John’s particular way of identifying Jesus as the same God who has been present in history all the way back to the first moments of creation; the same God who once identified himself to Moses as “I am who I am.”

But Jesus rarely calls us to be or behave in a particular way in John’s Gospel, at least at first hearing. Today we hear Jesus identify both himself as “the living bread that comes down from heaven” and the bread as something (or somebody, himself; his flesh?) he “will give for the life of the world.”

Here, I ask us to go back to the beginning of our Gospel reading today, and to connect the beginning of our reading from John to the end of what we hear today. Our Gospel reading today begins with the people grumbling because Jesus had said he was “the bread that came down from heaven.” It ends with Jesus saying that this bread, in fact his own flesh, is “the bread [he] will give for the life of the world.”

What if I were to suggest that the people were not complaining about Jesus’ identification of himself as God, or because they were put off by Jesus’ suggestion that they would eat his flesh? At least this is not yet what they were complaining about. This would become the heart of the people’s complaint only later, when Jesus would link the people’s salvation with eating his flesh and drinking his blood. This is a good time for a spoiler alert on next Sunday’s Gospel reading, but today the people’s complaint is for a much simpler reason.

Let me suggest that, today, the heart of the people’s complaint is not Jesus’ identification of himself as God or because he commands the people to eat his flesh, or because Jesus asks the people hearing him to do anything else.

This bread that Jesus offers, his own self whom we receive sacramentally in our Eucharist, is beyond anything “the manna in the wilderness” could ever have been. Jesus’ gift of himself is greater than any other earthly food, because it alone changes who we are. It alone promises us eternal life. When Jesus says to us today, “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh,” behind these words Jesus is asking us to change. My sisters and brothers, Jesus is asking us, with the help and grace Jesus offers us in this celebration, to be more and more like him; more and more like God. Jesus is asking us to be, as he is— “I am” — “bread for the life of the world.” This is extraordinary!

And so we, like the people following Jesus in John’s Gospel, could easily complain among ourselves, because changing who we are is difficult. But, as St. Augustine says, when we receive the Eucharist, “we are what we receive.” And so how do we become more like Jesus; like God in our world? Our Eucharist compels us to go out and give “life [to] the world” by our works of justice, of mercy, and of kindness. Our Eucharist compels us to repent from our failures and sins. Our Eucharist compels us to defend all life and creation and its God-given dignity. Our Eucharist compels us to do all these things, but in so doing it compels us to change: To be, at our very heart, different than we have ever been; to be more like God, like Jesus; to be “what we receive”; to be, ever more, “bread… for the life of the world.”

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.