Homily for Sunday, 16 July 2023– Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 65:10, 11, 12-13, 14 (R: Luke 8:8); Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

I have been discovering a wonderful new podcast on Sunday homilies through the website of America Magazine over the last few weeks. The podcast is called “Preach.” This week on “Preach,” the featured homilist (who is a different person each week) is Fr. Bryan Massingale, a Black priest, theologian, and professor of social ethics at Fordham University.

Fr. Massingale begins his homily on “Preach” this week by asking how many of us have heard a preacher—a homilist, a retreat preacher—ask, about the Gospel reading we have just heard, something like: What kind of soil are you?

I will presume that we all know, and could practically recite without a text, Jesus’ parable of the sower in Matthew’s Gospel today. It is one of Jesus’ most memorable parables. The parable features four types of soil. Few of us, maybe even if, as Matthew’s Gospel says, we are lured away from our faith by “worldly anxiety and… riches” would readily admit to being the thorny soil. Few of us would admit to being the rocky soil, people of a joyless faith that does not allow the seed of the kingdom of heaven to take root. A few more of us might be willing to admit to being like the path: Those who hear “the word of the kingdom” but occasionally (or frequently) have difficulty “understanding it.” It would be very honest of us to admit when we are like the little wisp of soil that gets spread over a pathway, in which the seed of the kingdom cannot take root and sprout. Few of us (including myself) are Bible scholars; sometimes what exactly the Bible is saying—or what Jesus is saying—can be difficult for us to understand.

So it is fair, I think, that more of us could admit to being like the soil on a pathway than rocky or thorny soil. After all, the first Christians, before they first called themselves Christians at Antioch according to the Acts of the Apostles, were simply called “the Way.” They were “the Way,” the path. Maybe we are on to something if we consider that, even most of the time, we are the soil on the path, far from the most effective soil for sprouting and growing the fruits of the reign of heaven from seed.

I think that, only if we are really too proud and self-centered in our faith, will we most readily claim to be the good, rich soil that is most effective for growing the kingdom of heaven on earth. Often the greatest saints have also been the greatest at identifying their own deficiencies, even their own sins. So may we not delude ourselves into thinking that we are, even most of the time, like the rich soil that is most effective at sprouting and growing the kingdom of heaven among us.

What kind of soil are you; what kind of soil are we? Or, as Fr. Bryan Massingale might ask, does it matter what kind of soil we are? If we take the frequent approach to interpreting the parable of the sower, which is to assess how good we are (or not) at nourishing the seed that is God’s grace, God’s gifts to us that lead to salvation, we might become easily discouraged. If we are honest with ourselves—I know if I am honest with myself—we can point to many times in our lives when we have been anything but good soil to nourish the seed of grace God has sown in our lives and in our world. And if we are not so honest with ourselves, the only thing we nourish by the “quality of soil” approach to placing ourselves within Jesus’ parable of the sower is our own pride.

So please allow me to say that the “quality of soil” approach to interpreting the parable of the sower will never work well for us. We need to find another approach to interpreting this parable. The focus of Jesus’ parable of the sower is not us, or how good we are at nourishing the seed the sower, God, sows. No, the focus of the parable of the sower is—by the very name of the parable—the sower.

What is the most prominent quality of the sower in Jesus’ parable? The sower in this parable is ridiculous and reckless. This sower is messy. This sower scatters seed seemingly without care as to where it lands: On good soil, on the path, on rocky ground, or among thorns.

But for all this sower’s deficiencies—the sower is reckless, messy, careless as to where he sows seed—he seems awfully confident in the yield of his harvest; that even the small amount of seed that will land “on rich soil” will yield “fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” With exceeding confidence in his abilities as a sower, Jesus says to the crowds who hear his parable, “Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

I am surprised that, if we read on past the end of today’s reading in Matthew’s Gospel, the Gospel does not say that the crowds laughed heartily at Jesus’ ridiculous parable of the sower. No sower in his right mind would sow seed so indiscriminately, knowing that so little seed would fall on soil capable of nourishing it and allowing it to take root—No sower, that is, except God!

The focus of the parable of the sower is not us, or how “good” our soil is, which can vary from one moment to the next; the focus of the parable of the sower is and must be God, the sower of the seeds of grace, love, mercy, kindness, ultimately salvation. Jesus’ parable of the sower is and should be tremendously encouraging to us: God knows that the quality of our soil, so to speak, is variable. And only rarely will the seed of God’s saving grace land on the ideal soil. But enough of it will so that the world will be saved. Enough seed will land on good soil so that it will more than make up for our bad days, the times when we become discouraged by our own failings or the failings of others, the times when we sin, the times when we do the very best we can in the moment and, as Fr. Massingale says, through no fault of our own our best is simply not good enough. Yet enough seed will land on good soil as to increase the yield of good “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” Jesus’ message and its promise to us are remarkable!

I want to go back in our Christian history from our time, the time of excellent preachers like Fr. Bryan Massingale, oh, about seven hundred years to the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. In a part of his Summa Theologiae, the mother-of-all-theology-texts-of-all-time, St. Thomas imagines and addresses objections related to the Incarnation, God’s becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ. The first objection St. Thomas lists in this section of the Summa Theologiae is that “the Son of God ought not to have assumed human nature with defects of body,” like vulnerability to sickness (Did Jesus ever catch even a minor cold?), unsavory bodily functions, ultimately subjection to death.

St. Thomas Aquinas treats this objection graciously, but counters it by responding that the Incarnation, how it took place and the “defects of body” that Jesus assumed through it, are the will of God for our salvation. A shorthand for this argument of St. Thomas Aquinas is that God’s will for our salvation accounts for our deficiencies, our “defects,” even our sin. That is just the way God willed to save the world, to sow the seed of the reign of God in our world, in and through God’s Son, fully divine but also fully and perfectly human. And who are we to question how God willed to save the world through his Son? How are we to question how God sows the seed of God’s kingdom of heaven in our world, our experiences, our relationships, our successes and our failures?

God has a long history of sowing the seed of his grace through what he has created. We could say that God’s history of sowing this seed goes back to before the first moments of creation themselves. God’s way of sowing seed seems reckless, messy, careless as to where the seed lands. But God is confident in its yield, that enough will land on good, faithful soil as to produce “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”

The prophet Isaiah today speaks of this same confidence of God that God’s grace, God’s word “shall not return to [God] void, but shall do [God’s] will, achieving the end for which [God] sent it.” And the same confidence in the saving yield of God’s grace permeates St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, from which we hear today. St. Paul does not deny that we can experience times when we do everything we can with the utmost faith, goodness, and kindness, and it simply is not good enough. St. Paul admits that “all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now.” Anybody here who has ever experienced a long, difficult childbirth knows what St. Paul is speaking of better than I do and probably even better than St. Paul himself did. We labor, and sometimes we are successful; other times we feel like our labour in God’s name has been a failure. Still other times we are guilty of sin outright: St. Paul speaks in Romans of creation’s “slavery to corruption.”

But with God as the sower of seeds of grace, none of this matters. God has promised a great yield, “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold” or, as St. Paul says to the Romans, “the redemption of our bodies.” God will not be denied; we will be redeemed. We will be saved, sometimes with our (successful) cooperation by being the “good soil” for the seed of God’s grace, other times in spite of not being the ideal soil. Yet God continues to go out to sow, in God’s own reckless, messy way that is the only way in which we will be saved.

Homily for Sunday, 25 December 2022– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:7-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3, 3-4, 5-6; Hebrews 1:1-6; John 1:1-18

Sisters and brothers in Christ, Merry Christmas!

The word of God today, on this Christmas morning, is all about remembering beginnings so that we might discern what (or whom) God is revealing to us here and now.

This Christmas morning we hear the first words of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” I wonder if this is just because just because I am the consummate theology professor, my mind and spirit warped by sitting at my desk these last few days grading papers and exams, or if anybody else here finds it jarring to hear anything but the more typical Christmas story in our Gospel: The baby Jesus born to Mary into a manger in Bethlehem, because there was “no room for them in the inn,” and shepherds greeted by the song of an angel and told to go to the manger to greet the newborn Saviour of the world.

All of that happened. Other Gospels tell of those details of Jesus’ birth. But John has nothing about a baby, nothing about angels, nothing about Joseph. Mary is not named in John’s Gospel; she is “woman” at the wedding at Cana and “the mother of Jesus” at the foot of the cross. John’s Gospel has no shepherds and no manger scene. The first time John introduces us to Jesus is when he is an adult being baptized in the Jordan by John the Baptist.

Instead of the more familiar Christmas story, the kind we can put on greeting cards and show in a Nativity scene, John takes us back to the very beginning, not only of Jesus as a human being, but of the universe itself. The people who first heard John’s Gospel would have been attentive to its unmistakeable allusion to the first words of the entire Bible, in the Book of Genesis, about the first moments of the creation of the universe: “In the beginning.”

And what was there “in the beginning,” before God created anything of the universe, or anything in it? Well, there was nothing. Genesis says that “in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.”

That is it? “A formless void” and darkness over “the face of the deep”?! That sounds a little boring. But then God decides to create something. God breathes wind, God’s spirit, over the nothingness. And God creates light. Now we are talking, God; we have some excitement in the creation story!

John’s Gospel picks up on this creation of light motif just as well as Genesis does. John says in our Gospel today, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” And then John introduces to us John the Baptist. John the Gospel writer is clear: John the Baptist is “not the light, but he came to testify to the light.” John’s function is to point to Jesus, “the true light.”

So John the Gospel writer identifies Jesus as the Word, “and the Word [as] God.” The Word of God, with God the Father and the Spirit, was present when our universe was called into being: “‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” The Word, the Son of God, called forth the first light of creation. At the same time, he is the light identified by John the Baptist and John the author of our Gospel.

John connects these two events: The first movements of creation and God’s coming into our world in the person of Jesus Christ: Word from Word or, as we pray in our Creed, “God from God, light from light, true God from true God. Through him all things were made.” But John hearkens back to creation, back to the beginning, to set up the next movement of this magnificent prologue of his Gospel.

It would be one thing for John to remind us of the action of God in our favour—for our salvation—all the way back to the creation of the universe. But John does not stop there. Remember that the purpose of John’s invitation to us to remember back to “the beginning” is to help us to discern what, or whom, God is revealing here and now, in the present. The punch line in our Gospel reading this morning, the central point of John’s opening chapter (his prologue), is this: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

We are familiar enough with this statement from John that God, who existed before the universe was created, when nothing else existed, has put on our human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ “and dwelt among us.” Until this point in John’s Gospel, his first hearers would not have been too disturbed, either. In Jesus’ time and that of the Gospel writers, expectation of a Messiah, the world’s Saviour, was widespread. But, besides the small minority of people in the vast Roman Empire who had already come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah by John’s time, the people, Jews and Gentiles alike, did not expect (or readily accept) that God’s Messiah would enter the world quite in that way, in our human flesh.

For God to become human, to experience everything it means for us to be human—joys and sorrows, birth and death—was preposterous to most people in Jesus’ or John’s time. This is why John includes a bit of a reality check in our Gospel this morning: That “the world did not know,” did not recognize its creator and its Saviour in human form; “he came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

But, to the minority of people of John’s world (and, frankly, our own today) who did accept Jesus as the Saviour, God the creator of the universe “in the beginning” was revealing his ongoing plan for our salvation in a new way. And this new way of continuing old revelation—God has always been with us—changes who we are in relationship to God, John says. We have been given “power to become children of God.” We are now the human flesh, the hands and feet, the loving, kind, and just heart of Jesus, the Word, in our world. God’s work of our salvation that started with those first moments of creation, “in the beginning,” is not finished yet. And it will not be finished until Jesus returns in glory at the end of time.

“We have seen [God’s] glory,” John affirms in our Gospel today. We have seen the Word of God, made flesh and dwelling among us. But even the prophets, hundreds of years before Jesus, were proclaiming a message very similar to John’s. Isaiah was active during the exile of the people of Israel in Babylon, over five hundred years before Jesus. He was preparing the Israelites to return to their homeland after Babylon had been overtaken by the Persians, who allowed Israel’s return home. The Israelites were weary. They were worried about having to rebuild their land from ruins. So Isaiah convinces them to return home by returning to the beginning of his message. A significant part of the Book of Isaiah, the middle sixteen chapters, from 40 to 55 of Isaiah, begins with a message of comfort: “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem… that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins.”

Isaiah now concludes this section with a similar message. And, Isaiah says, “how beautiful on the mountains” of Israel “are the feet of the messenger who announces” this message of peace and comfort, of salvation and reconciliation with God. “Your God reigns,” Isaiah proclaims. The same God who reigned over the nothingness before creation and said, “Let there be light”; the same God who would take on our human flesh reigns and saves now and forever. Isaiah, like John, goes back to the beginning as if to say, “This is the same God, and our same relationship with God. Yet, in the context of old revelation, God is doing something new.”

We hear from the Letter to the Hebrews this morning essentially this same message: God has been with us through the prophets. God has created and ruled over “all things.” And now he has revealed himself as human, in the person of Jesus Christ. This is what we celebrate this morning, sisters and brothers: “We have seen [God’s] glory.” We can continue to proclaim with the Psalmist that “all the ends of the earth have seen the glory of God.” We have seen God take our human form in the person of Jesus Christ. We are reminded of God’s creating and saving power, all the way back to “the beginning,” to when the universe was nothing, “a formless void.” This is so that we can look forward to God completing the work of our salvation. We are invited to participate in God’s work of our salvation, to put human flesh on the presence of God in our world through works justice, kindness, and peace, until our Saviour, the Word, God made flesh, returns on the Last Day.

Homily for Sunday, 30 October 2022– Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Wisdom 11:2-12:2; Psalm 45:1-2, 8-9, 10-11, 13, 14; 2 Thessalonians 1:11-2:2; Luke 19:1-10

It is humbling, really, and even more so than ever with our science and technology for observing our universe, to look out into the heavens and realize how small we are. Here we are, on a nondescript planet that orbits an average star, the sun, in a galaxy (the Milky Way) that is dwarfed by many more spectacular galaxies, in a universe with an estimated diameter of 93 billion light years.

Yet, when Pope Benedict XVI was installed as Bishop of Rome in April 2005, in his homily at the Mass as he received the archbishop’s pallium, the garment of lamb’s wool around an archbishop’s neck with three crosses in front and three in the back that symbolizes his unity with Jesus, the Lamb of God, and the fisherman’s ring that marks the pope out as a successor of Peter, he said this: “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ.”

The week before Pope Benedict gave this homily, he addressed the cardinals who were about to choose him, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as the successor to Pope John Paul II. Cardinal Ratzinger warned of “a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

Let me say that I think we are invited to hold both these statements as true, as jarring as they are when we hear them together, from the same person, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger-Pope Benedict XVI. We cannot deny the pervasiveness of sin, individual and in the structures of our societies, politics, economies of the world.

A few days ago I tuned into a panel discussion on CBC’s The National about the possible causes of the current global economic crisis. The panelists acknowledged Russia’s war against Ukraine as a factor in the world’s economic problems. But then one of the panelists used a word I do not recall hearing before then, “Greedflation”: Price inflation driven at least in part by the greed of elites and large corporations for profits, which ends up (as economic problems tend to do) disproportionately affecting the (already) poorest and most socially disadvantaged.

Our world has struggled to respond to Russia’s unjust attack on Ukraine, its slaughter of innocent Ukrainian civilians and damage to Ukraine’s cities and essential infrastructure, and government and even religious officials’ attempts to justify the war. Much of public discourse, aided by the worst of social media, has been reduced to ideological polarization, peddling of conspiracy theories, and a kind of anti-intellectualism or general anti-authoritarianism.

Sin in our world is easy to find with very little effort. The “dictatorship of relativism” is a constant danger; the ethics of moral decisions becoming judged ultimately relative to “what is most beneficial for me,” with less to no regard for a common or universal good, any definitive direction or meaning of human life, which we Christians might call heaven. As St. Augustine of Hippo once prayed, “O God, our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

But sin, or this “dictatorship of relativism,” is not the original state of the human person, from the moment of creation or the moment each of us came to exist. Our original state, and indeed the original state of our entire 93-billion-light-year-wide universe, is one of having been blessed, loved, intended, willed by our God. Many theologians, including yours truly, have in recent years shied away from terms like “original sin,” because sin is not original or essential to our human nature. Our having been thought, willed, loved, deemed necessary, and blessed by God are original to our human nature as God has created us. Sin is a corruption of this original blessed, willed, loved state of the human person and creation.

There is no truth, to my knowledge, that is proclaimed more consistently in our Scriptures than this: “God blessed them… God saw everything that he had made and, indeed, it was very good,” the Book of Genesis proclaims at the end of its first creation account. And we hear this same proclamation, this same truth across our readings today. The Book of Wisdom was among the last Old Testament books to be written. It was written in a time when, if one wanted to find sin, corruption, relativism, decadence in Israel, one would find it easily. One foreign nation after another (the Greeks and then the Romans, during the time in which Wisdom was written) had ruled Israel, sometimes with brutality. And Israel’s home-grown elites were often no better: The regime of King Herod and his successors hoarded the wealth of the nation and became corrupt and brutal. There were the Pharisees and their scribes, and the temple priests. There were zealots who sought to respond to violence and corruption with more violence and more corruption.

Yet, amid all this social corruption and decadence, the Book of Wisdom says this of God: “Lord, you love all things that exist… How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? … You spare all things, O Lord, you who love the living.” Wisdom does not deny sin in the world by proclaiming this foundational truth of God’s love of all creation; on the contrary. The author of Wisdom knows all too well the corruption of sin in our world, but proclaims that God corrects “little by little those who trespass… so that they may be freed from wickedness.”

The author of Wisdom proclaims how little we really are in this great universe God has created: “The whole world before you, O Lord, is like a speck that tips the scales.” Still, sisters and brothers, Wisdom proclaims to us today nothing other than the mercy and love of God by which we and our whole universe was created and continues to exist. As Dr. Denis Lamoureux here at St. Joseph’s College would say, this is the foundational truth of creation, which God “ordains and sustains”: “Lord, you love all things that exist.” We are “like a speck,” but one that “tips the scales”: “Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary” beyond measure in God’s eyes.

This love, this blessing to us, our existence and sustenance and that of all creation leaves us with one response worthy of us before the merciful love by which we are “ordained and sustained,” by which, as the beginning of our Eucharistic Prayer proclaims, “we live and move and have our being.” Our Psalm speaks of our due response to this merciful, creative, and sustaining love of God: “All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and your faithful shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom, and tell of your power.”

The second letter to the Thessalonians is a prayer for each of us, that the creative and sustaining love of God may work in our world through each of us: May “the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…be glorified in you, and you in him.”

But perhaps few Bible passages speak as well to God’s merciful, creative and sustaining love for us, for all God has created, than our Gospel story today of the tax collector Zacchaeus’ encounter with Jesus. Zacchaeus, even without his sinful past as a factor, is literally and figuratively “short in stature.” He is, as the Book of Wisdom says, “like a speck,” but a speck that will tip the scales, somebody dearly beloved in the eyes of God.

So what does Zacchaeus do? He climbs a sycamore tree when he realizes Jesus is about to pass by him in Jericho. All who see this (we can admit) ridiculous scene of the rich little tax collector, probably with his tunic caught high in a sycamore tree, begin “to grumble…: [Jesus] has gone to be the guest of one who is a sinner.”

Yet these grumblers miss the point. Jesus has offered to be a guest at Zacchaeus’ house: “Zacchaeus, hurry down, for I must stay at your house today.” Indeed, Jesus has made this offer to all of us, an offer of pure mercy and love: “I will come and dwell in this house today, the house of the earth, the universe, and everything I have created in it. And by coming and dwelling in your house in human flesh, sisters and brothers, I will redeem it and wipe away your sin forever. I will come ‘to seek out and to save the lost.’”

If there is ever an act that shows God’s love for us and all he has created, every speck, this is it! Yes, there is sin in our world, acts of human ego-seeking, violence and injustice, greed and war. But this, nowhere else, is the house God in his Son Jesus has come to dwell and redeem. “Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” And Jesus asks us to hurry to this celebration, because Jesus “must stay at [our] house today.”

Homily for Sunday, 2 January 2022– The Epiphany of the Lord

Readings of the day: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 12-13; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

This is maybe no more than simple coincidence, but it seems to me that, over the last few years, at around this time of year, space exploration has been in the news. Three years ago, on January 1, 2019, the New Horizons space probe made a fly-by of a small, snowman-shaped object in the Kuiper Belt, outside the orbit of Neptune. This object was eventually named Arrokoth after the word for “cloud” in the Powhatan language once spoken by the Indigenous people of the area around Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, where Arrokoth was discovered. Arrokoth became the farthest object from Earth ever visited by a spacecraft.

And then, just a few days ago, on Christmas Day 2021, we may have heard news of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana. The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to observe deeper into space and farther into the infrared light spectrum (invisible to the human eye) than the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which discovered Arrokoth.

I think we can say that there is a natural human fascination with what is beyond our Earth: The heavens; the stars; the universe’s age and continuous expansion; or even whether there is intelligent life beyond Earth. And our fascination with this beyond pre-dates even the first, most rudimentary scientific instruments to aid our space observation, never mind Hubble or the James Webb telescopes. Our fascination with the beyond dates back to ancient times.

Our Gospel account of the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus and the main figures in this event is familiar to us. Matthew’s Gospel presents us with magi or “wise men from the East” who were drawn to Bethlehem by a star to pay homage to the newborn Messiah, Jesus. We know little about these “wise men from the East,” from Matthew or any other source, besides the gifts they brought to honour Jesus, and that they returned from honouring Jesus “to their own country by another road” to avoid the ill-intentioned Herod. The meaning of the gifts of the magi has been the focus of theological reflection: Gold is most often the gift for somebody royal, so the magi reveal the newborn Jesus as somehow a king. Frankincense is associated with prayer—incense, with its pleasing smell, rises to heaven; to God—so the magi reveal this child as somehow God. And myrrh is a burial spice, so the magi reveal Jesus as one who, although he is God and a king, has submitted himself to every aspect of our humanity, including our experiences of suffering and death.

I use the word “reveal”—by their gifts the magi reveal the newborn Jesus to our world as a king, as God, and as the one who will die to save us—because this is what our celebration today is about: Epiphany is a Greek word that means “making known” or “revelation.”

This Epiphany; this revelation of our God born into our world as fully human is to all peoples and nations. This Epiphany we celebrate is truly universal. But it begins with these “wise men from the East.” Who were these “wise men from the East”? Were they, as some have speculated, Zoroastrian astrologers from Persia who drew spiritual meaning from the movements of the stars? Were there three wise men—something about which Matthew’s Gospel is not clear; Matthew only says that they brought three gifts? All of this is hard to say.

We know about these “wise men from the East,” though, that something—a star—drew their attention toward the west. We know that the Epiphany of our Lord to all peoples; all nations; to the universe God created began with a very simple, yet profound act: These “wise men from the East” looked up. They looked up at the heavens with some kind of awe. And their awe, whether at the beauty of the heavens or the unusual appearance of that star to the west, led them to set off from their homeland. Their awe led them to set off toward a land that may well have been unknown to them.

The awe of these “wise men from the East”; their simple act of looking up, led them to discern that some event had taken place that had changed the world. Somehow, in the course of their journey, they discerned that a child had been born, one who was being called “king of the Jews.” Who had told them this, somewhere between their homeland and Jerusalem? And why were the magi interested in a Jewish baby, since they were probably not Jews? How did they know what gifts to bring the newborn Jesus, or the meaning of these gifts? Again, all this is hard to say.

But, most vital to the encounter the magi would have with the Christ child; most vital to the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth to the whole created universe as fully God and fully human (fully inscribed in God’s creation; his divinity clothed in created matter), is the starting point of this Epiphany encounter: The magi looked up with awe.

When was the last time we looked up; when we looked beyond ourselves with simple, profound awe? Maybe I have an advantage (at least I think I do, and I thank God for this) over many people, with some background in biology and a lively interest in the sciences; in any case my interest in science and what this means for us as people of faith leads me to look up and outward with awe almost constantly. God has created for us truly a beautiful world; a beautiful universe. And I am in awe, constantly, that our God (at least the God in whom I believe and I think our Catholic Church believes, most fundamentally) would create for us a world at the same time intelligible to our human senses and minds, but that would push us to want to discover more of what we still do not know.

In our time, we have sophisticated scientific instruments, like infrared telescopes, to help in our discovery of what we still do not know about our universe. We have the gift of hindsight: Of past events; past scientific observations affirmed as fact (or nearly) by repeatedly producing the same results. We have the gift of hindsight that the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ in Bethlehem is now over two thousand years past. Even Matthew’s Gospel today interprets the events of the Lord’s Epiphany based on hindsight. Matthew interprets these events based on Israel’s prophets who lived before him: “For so it has been written by the Prophet [in this case Micah]: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

We can be fairly sure that Israel’s prophets themselves relied on hindsight; on previous experience of Israel’s relationship with God. Micah’s prophecy that Matthew’s Gospel interprets in light of the Epiphany of our Lord (again, I think we can be sure) did not originally foresee God entering our world as a human baby in Bethlehem a few centuries after the prophet’s lifetime. Micah, like all Israel’s prophets, was interpreting events of his present in light of Israel’s past relationship with God. Even Isaiah, in the reading we hear today, interprets his and Israel’s present in light of God’s past relationship with God’s people. Israel of Biblical times was almost persistently in turmoil; in exile; under occupation. The prophets strove to remind Israel that they had (perhaps miraculously) survived as God’s people; as a nation to that point in history, and that whatever affliction they were facing would pass, if they trusted in God. This is why Isaiah is able to remind his people in past tense, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you”!

Once again, St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, had and used his gift of hindsight. “The mystery” of God made human, St. Paul says, “was made known to me by revelation.” St. Paul is able to interpret, from this past revelation—a past Epiphany—that God was in the process of revealing something new; something still more universal: “The Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body” of Christ, through God becoming human in the person of Jesus.

St. Paul, like Isaiah, Micah, and all Israel’s prophets; like Matthew and all the Gospels, invite us to make use of our gift of hindsight. It, too, is from God: The gift of discerning the hand of God in past events and applying this discernment to our present. But this hindsight; this discernment must lead us to something more. If it does not, our hindsight can be misused. Hindsight alone can close us in on ourselves. Hindsight alone can lead us to dwell on our experiences of evil; our experiences of suffering; our experiences that can lead us to doubt God’s hand in the creation and sustenance of our universe; our world and all things; all life in it. With hindsight alone, we could never set out, as the “wise men from the East” did, to encounter God’s Epiphanies that change our world; that are saving and will save our world.

What must act along with hindsight? In a word, awe: This must act along with the gift of hindsight. With awe, then, may we look up and out beyond ourselves. May we bring not perhaps the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to greet our newborn God, King, and Saviour; but may we simply and profoundly bring our gifts of awe and thanksgiving to God for God’s creation and sustenance of creation; of us. As the magi did, we lay before our God revealed to our universe as one like us our gifts of awe and thanksgiving. And we return from this encounter with our God in human flesh—this universal Epiphany we celebrate today—with overwhelming joy.

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 Wednesday, 1 January 2020– Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God

Octave Day of Christmas

Readings of the day: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 67:2-3, 4, 5, 6, 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

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

The LORD bless you and keep you;

The LORD make his face to shine upon you

and be gracious to you,

The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.

This prayer with which the LORD asks Aaron, through Moses, to bless the people of Israel in the Book of Numbers, in the reading we have heard today, is maybe one of the most recognizable blessings in the Jewish or Christian traditions; in our Bible. But what is peace? With what kind of peace was Aaron to bless his people as he and Moses led them through the desert back to their homeland, Israel?

The Hebrew word for “peace” in this Aaronic or “priestly blessing” of Numbers is, I am sure, a word many of us have heard before: Shalom. But is shalom not one of those notoriously difficult words from an ancient language to translate into a current language like English? Shalom may mean “peace,” in a sense, though, that is much richer than the absence of a dispute or of war. It may mean anything from wishing somebody wholeness or prosperity to a simple hello or even goodbye.

“The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you shalom.” This blessing of Aaron has several echoes throughout our Scriptures and our Mass. In John’s Gospel, at the Last Supper, Jesus blesses his disciples with a prayer for them reminiscent of Aaron’s prayer for the people of Israel in Numbers: “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.” And then, in the same Gospel, the risen Jesus greets the disciples three different times: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”

In a few moments here, we will echo these words of Jesus, which are in turn an echo of God’s voice through Aaron to his people: “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you… Shalom be with you.” In this way, we will exchange a sign of peace just before we receive communion, shalom given for us in the form of bread and wine. And then we will be sent forth from here at the end of this celebration: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you”… to be shalom to our world in profound need of our peace as a people of God.

Is it not appropriate, then, that each year, on January 1, New Year’s Day, in addition to this liturgical celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, as Church we also celebrate this day as the World Day of Peace? We have, I think, a lot to celebrate each year on this World Day of Peace, New Year’s Day, Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. Our world becomes more peaceful year by year: Fewer wars; more respect for freedom of thought, freedom of religious faith, and other basic human rights and freedoms; more governments and forms of government that uphold these human rights.

Still, our world is far from perfectly at peace, much less at shalom that is so much more than the absence of conflict; shalom that is peace only possible for us through God. Parts of our world still remain mired in war; still send record numbers of people fleeing from violence and abuse, in search of peace. Households, families, marriages still experience brokenness; shalom still eludes us at this most foundational level of any healthy human society.

Yet still we (rightly) celebrate as we pray for shalom; for peace. And we connect this celebration of and prayer for peace with a celebration of Mary as Mother of God. So what might Mary, Mother of God, have to do with peace, in our world, among and within nations, or within households and families? Let me suggest that our celebration of this Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, has a lot to do with peace; I will go so far as to say that a healthy Christian devotion to Mary is essential for our peace; for shalom.

Our Gospel today, from Luke, shows us this essential connection between the Blessed Virgin Mary and peace; shalom. When the shepherds first arrive at the scene of our Lord’s birth, we might imagine their excitement and the excitement and amazement of everybody present with them. Luke’s Gospel says in fact that, as the shepherds “made known what had been told them about this child… all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them.”

All this excitement, activity, and even amazement is a good thing, especially this time of year, is it not? Yet (and maybe we can all relate to what I am about to say) is this Christmastime not one of the more exhausting times of the year? Amid all the activity, we need time to rest; to pray; to celebrate with joy, yet still to be at peace. So, after Luke describes the excited joy of the shepherds, everybody’s amazement “at what the shepherds” had to say “about this child,” Jesus, Luke turns our attention toward Mary. Luke says that “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

My sisters and brothers, let me suggest that these two verbs, “treasured” and “pondered,” are most essential to the Gospel we have just heard. They are essential for our peace, in its fullest sense of shalom. Amid the noise, the excitement, the activity, the words of the shepherds, her own probable exhaustion at having just brought a child into the world, of all the people in our Gospel account today, Mary is the most “at peace.” And she teaches us something central to our own being “at peace”: Treasuring and pondering.

But to treasure and ponder as Mary does is not to hold onto the joy of this celebration of the Lord’s birth as if it is ours to keep to ourselves in a selfish way. The joy of this celebration has been given to us by God through Mary, a young woman God chose and preserved from sin in order to bring God’s own Son, Jesus, into our world. Because this joy; this gift of God’s Son through Mary that we treasure and ponder, has been given to us, God calls us now to hand on this gift of shalom enveloped in our human flesh to the world around us. And how might we treasure and ponder while handing on this gift we have received?

Again, may we look to Mary as an example of treasuring and pondering while handing on. From the moment Mary conceived Jesus in her womb, through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and Mary’s own assumption into heaven, body and soul, Mary allowed the peace, the shalom of God to settle into her very depths. Shalom became the foundation of who Mary was, treasuring and pondering, such that then this shalom was able to flow from her. God calls us now to the same willingness to treasure and ponder, to allow shalom to take on our human flesh and become the essence of who we are, not only the historical event of the birth of a child in Bethlehem two thousand years ago.

Every time our prayerful celebration here, our treasuring and pondering before the altar of the Lord, allows and strengthens us to act in even small ways of kindness, mercy, and justice toward one another, shalom incarnate becomes a little more who we are and flows from us as it did from Mary into the world.

Let me go back (briefly but to some time ago) in history, to the Council of Ephesus of 431. There, at Ephesus, our Church’s bishops first encouraged all Christians to pray through Mary under the title of Theotokos, “God-bearer” or, as we Roman Catholics usually refer to Mary, “Mother of God.” Outside the place where the bishops of Ephesus assembled, the faithful chanted, as if as a prayer for the unity of the bishops and the Church, which was anything but assured in 431, “Mother of God”…

Here, now, on this first day of 2020, may we join in this prayer of Ephesus: “Mother of God,” Mother and Queen of Peace, through your Son Jesus Christ, give us, our Church and our world the gift of shalom. May we treasure and ponder, allow to become incarnate in our depths, and then hand on this gift as you did. Shalom chaverim, as our Hebrew-speaking sisters and brothers might pray: “Let us go forth in peace” into this New Year to bear to the world, enveloped in our human flesh, the peace we have received, pondered, treasured, and that we celebrate today.