Homily for Sunday, 21 July 2024– Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Psalm 23:1-3, 3-4, 5, 6; Ephesians 2:13-18; Mark 6:30-34

One theme is clear through all of the readings we hear today: That of shepherding. What (or who) is a shepherd; what defines a shepherd? What does God (or what does Jesus, in our Gospel) expect insofar as the conduct of a shepherd? How is God a shepherd; how does Jesus model for us how a shepherd is supposed to act?

In the Book of the prophet Jeremiah, all the shepherds, without exception, have been bad. And so God and God’s prophet, Jeremiah, scold them angrily: “Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the LORD”! But, still, who are the shepherds who have drawn God’s and the prophet’s anger? Who are “flock of [God’s] pasture” according to Jeremiah?

In the Ancient Near East at the time of the prophet Jeremiah, in the territory we would call the Middle East today (so not only Israel), the kings and tribal rulers of many nations were compared to shepherds. So it would seem that Jeremiah, whose prophecy mostly targeted the kings of Judah, the part of Israel that included Jerusalem, compared the kings of Judah to bad shepherds.

What were the kings of Judah doing wrong? Jeremiah wastes no time in laying out the charge against them: The kings of Judah, several of them, one after another, have misled and scattered “the flock of [God’s] pasture.” This is a serious accusation! I am not sure how well we are acquainted with sheep and shepherds, sisters and brothers. I have not seen many sheep around here; there is not much room for sheep to pasture in a city like Rochester, so say the least. But sheep need two almost competing things to survive and thrive: Sheep need a large amount of land to graze, to pasture. And they need somebody, a shepherd, to tend to them, to limit the (however large) area in which they are allowed to pasture, so that they do not become lost, injured, or prey to a predator.

From my limited understanding about sheep, it is actually quite difficult for a shepherd to scatter, to “mislead” sheep. Sheep will tend to stay near a shepherd for protection. It takes intent for a shepherd to scatter, to drive away, to do violence to sheep, to put them in dangerous situations so that they will flee the shepherd against their instinct. Sheep—figuratively, the “flock of [God’s] pasture,” the people of Judah—are vulnerable creatures. God’s flock in Jeremiah is the vast majority of the people of Judah of the time who were poor peasants, who may have earned enough wages from their work to subsist from one day to the next. The “flock” depended on the kings and other wealthy elites of Judah—the small minority of the people of Judah—to give them just wages for their labor; not to abuse their labor, take land away from the poor or do violence toward them.

So, this is why I say that, for Jeremiah to charge the shepherds, the kings of Judah, with misleading and scattering God’s flock is a serious accusation. Jeremiah charges Judah’s kings with intentionally endangering, doing violence and injustice toward the most vulnerable, the most marginalized, the poorest of the people of Judah, and enriching themselves greedily in the process. In Jeremiah’s time, the prosperity gap between the few wealthy and the many poor was great and becoming greater.

I do not like that my mind drifts in this instant toward a great little French phrase with some “bite” to it, but that is where my mind is going: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. (“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”) I feel compelled to ask: Is our society (or is the society of my home country, Canada, for that matter) any better than the one the prophet Jeremiah rebukes for its injustices toward the many poor and vulnerable, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few?

I think this is an important question to ask ourselves, especially as we approach an election in this country, just a few short months from now. I want to be clear on a couple of points: First, it is not my place to endorse or denounce any specific candidate or party for public office, especially in the very midst of an election race as this country finds itself. You will not hear such an endorsement or condemnation of a party or candidate from me, with the power of the pulpit behind my words. I know (and I am sure many of us have heard) priests and other religious authorities endorse or denounce candidates or parties. I consider this to be an example of the kind of intentional scattering, misleading of the flock; an abuse of shepherding power that prophets like Jeremiah condemned.

Second, though, I think it is appropriate—and in line with the social teaching of our Church—to appeal to all of us (strongly) to vote, when it is time to vote, for the candidates who will best protect not our self-interested accumulation of wealth if we have it, but the basic dignity and rights of the most vulnerable, the least of our sisters and brothers. I want to be clear again: It is not wrong to be materially wealthy. Our Church defends the right to private property. Yet property, wealth, prosperity must serve the more fundamental rights of those who have the least. These must serve what our Church calls “the common good.” So, it is not wrong to be rich, but it is profoundly wrong when a few accumulate vast wealth while anybody—especially in a country as rich as these United States of America—lacks the means to obtain the basic necessities of life: Food, shelter, medical care, education…

Our Church says that “the common good” should govern how we vote. It should govern those who serve our nations in public office: Not material wealth or money first; not self first; not America first (or, in my case, Canada first) or any particular nation’s interests first; not military might first, but the most vulnerable, the least of our sisters and brothers, first. So I ask each and all of us: In good conscience, formed by prayer and through our Catholic faith, please consider how well the “shepherds” for whom you are inclined to vote, those who serve in public office, serve the least of our sisters and brothers first; serve “the common good” first. No candidate and no party will do this perfectly—far from it—but there will always be perhaps good choices, better choices, and best choices on the ballot. We have a beautiful thing called a democracy, something that the poor of the prophet Jeremiah’s time and still many people in many nations around the world today do not have. Please do not take this for granted; please vote.

Please exercise your good conscience in doing so, because the alternative to our free and wise exercise of conscience in this way is the triumph of evil. It is the triumph of injustice, self-interest at the expense of the poor, sin, vast wealth and power in the hands of few. And it is already bad enough, as the prophet Jeremiah shows us today, when bad shepherds are allowed to abuse their power, to mislead and scatter the sheep, God’s people, unchecked.

But there is something still more insidious than when “bad shepherding,” ignorance of the fundamental rights of the most vulnerable, the poor, is allowed to continue unopposed. Today Jeremiah includes an interesting play-on-words: He speaks of tending to, or caring for, the basic needs of the poor. Through Jeremiah, God accuses the kings of Judah, the bad shepherds: “You have not cared for” my sheep; tended to them. But God says, “I will take care to punish your evil deeds.” I will attend to, in other words, the condemnation of the bad shepherds’ inattention to the poor, the LORD says through Jeremiah.

And, in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus shows us what attending to justice, to the needs and rights of the vulnerable, looks like. Our Gospel reading today begins with Jesus’ apostles reporting to Jesus (I imagine with some pride, justifiably so) “all they had done and taught.” Yet Jesus says to them, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” Rest—for the greatest of apostles, prophets, ministers of our Church to the most newly-baptized member of the faithful—is essential. None of us can, or should be expected to, labor without rest, lest our work, including our service, our ministry in God’s name should become a kind of idol, a replacement for God.

Jesus balances his disciples’ need for rest, their vulnerability to idolizing activity, with our need for attentiveness, our need to attend to the poorest, those who most need his presence, his teaching; those who are “like sheep without a shepherd.” This is a difficult balance for us to keep; I know this all too well! This past week, I was on retreat with priests of my order. It was a much-needed time to “come away… and rest a while.” If we are good servants of the Lord, good Christians, God will constantly give us opportunities to attend preferentially to the least of our sisters and brothers. But God also calls us to attend to balancing our work (service, ministry) with rest.

We not only want to avoid becoming bad shepherds or being governed by bad shepherds, uncritically, unwisely, or selfishly choosing bad shepherds to govern us or, worse yet, not choosing (voting) at all. But our Lord also invites us to “come away… and rest a while.” The Lord is “moved with pity” for those for whom work, wealth, might, nation, partisan ideology, violence, and self-interest have become idols.

And he invites us to attune our ear, our spirit, our conscience so that we can better attend to the voice of justice, the voice of the common good, the voice of the most vulnerable to injustice and exploitation. That voice is the voice of Christ our Lord and God, the Good Shepherd.

Homily for Sunday, 30 January 2022– Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; Psalm 71:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 15-17; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

One of my brother Basilian priests has said that, when we hear readings as we do today in which we hear a short verse or two, and then the reading skips over a section before continuing on, it is sometimes a good idea to pay attention to the part that is skipped over.

So what gets skipped over in our readings today? From the Book of Jeremiah we hear God’s call of Jeremiah to serve as God’s prophet. Luke’s Gospel also features a prophetic call story, that of Jesus, beginning his public ministry in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth.

The Book of Jeremiah begins with God’s call to the prophet, lines from our Scriptures than which few are more beautiful: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” For me, God’s opening revelation to Jeremiah, the beginning of God’s call to Jeremiah to be his prophet, is always a beautiful reminder that, whatever I had planned for my life; however we have discerned how God is calling us to live and serve God in our lives, God had a plan, for me and for each one of us, before we were even conceived!

But what if we do not want to do or be exactly who God is calling us to be? What if the vocation to which God is calling us is, say, one that will put our life in danger? Such is the case with Jeremiah. As soon as Jeremiah hears the call of God to be a prophet to God’s people, he senses the real danger to his life, and immediately tries to refuse God’s call.

And this is the part of God’s call to Jeremiah that our reading skips over today. Jeremiah protests: “I do not know how to speak. I am too young.” God, do you not know that every prophet before me has been a laughingstock in Israel; that some have even been killed? Yet Jeremiah’s protests are to no avail. God has his heart set on Jeremiah as God’s prophet, and even promises to protect Jeremiah against the worst the people would do to him. “They will fight against you,” God reassures Jeremiah, “but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you… to deliver you.”

I will admit that the part our Gospel reading from Luke skips over today is not really skipped over. We heard last Sunday what today’s Gospel reading does not repeat: The mission statement of Jesus’ public ministry, in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth. Jesus is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Our Gospel reading picks up again today where Jesus rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says to everybody gathered in the synagogue, with all eyes in the assembly “fixed on him”: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I find it consoling to be reminded that Jesus’ public ministry started well that day in his hometown. In that synagogue of Nazareth, Luke says, “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Even the assembly’s identification of Jesus as “Joseph’s son” is spun positively in Luke’s Gospel, whereas in the other Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and John), when the people who hear Jesus ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”, they mean it in an insulting way. And, I do not know how all of us feel but, when Jesus’ audience belittles him by asking, “Is this not Joseph’s son”; the son of the carpenter, I begin to feel just a little indignant, wanting to defend not only Jesus but Joseph, the humble, righteous man whom God chose to mentor Jesus like a father in this world.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ public ministry begins well, even in the eyes of the people of his hometown. This is in marked contrast to Jeremiah, or in fact most if not all the prophets: Their ministry is poorly-received by the people from the start. It is no wonder that Jeremiah, from the beginning of the biblical book in his name, wanted to get out of being a prophet to Judah as God had called him from before he was even conceived in the womb.

But the good will of the people toward Jesus would not last. We know this from what we hear in Luke’s Gospel today. And we know this from the fact that, even though Jesus escapes the murderous rage of the mob who wants to “hurl [Jesus] off the cliff” at the end of today’s Gospel reading, his destiny—the focal point of our Gospels—is to be tortured and crucified; to die for us in this exceedingly cruel way.

It is unclear from Luke’s account what the people in the assembly that day in Nazareth wanted to hear from Jesus. But maybe they wanted to hear a message that would support elements of tribalism and sectarianism in their social and religious attitudes. Maybe they were unaware, until those tribalistic and sectarian attitudes were kindled into open fury at Jesus’ message in their synagogue, of the extent to which those attitudes had affected them and become engrained in them.

We, sisters and brothers, are not exempt, either, from the kind of insular tribalism and sectarianism—a “silo mentality”—that nearly led to Jesus being killed on the very first day of his public ministry, in his own hometown. It was the movement and the mentality among Jesus’ own people that cried out, “We are God’s chosen people,” over and against the people of other nations and faiths: The Phoenician people, represented in Jesus’ commentary in today’s Gospel by the widow of Zarephath, to whom Elijah was sent in a time of famine in 1 Kings; the Syrians, represented by the Syrian king’s general, Naaman, who is afflicted with leprosy but healed by Elijah’s prophetic successor, Elisha. “We are God’s chosen people,” the people in the synagogue of Nazareth protested. “God’s promise of salvation; God’s covenant; God’s presence would never be with other people as it is for us”! Why should we be concerned for the other; for people not of our nation? It was Israel first, after all. And so their rage was kindled against Jesus.

But how often do we hear or observe the same silo mentality at work today? How often do we hear cries of “our country first”; our tribe first; our religious creed first; our social “in” group first; and ultimately me first? Why should I be concerned about the other person, especially the poor or otherwise excluded person? Why should I be concerned (some say today) about protecting public health, out of love of neighbour, in the face of the public health crisis our world continues to face, and that disproportionately affects the already-disadvantaged? Jesus’ counter-message to this entitled and selfish insularity is as challenging and as controversial today as when he preached it in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth. It is challenging and controversial to many of our sister and brother Christians of our time.

Jesus’ message is challenging and controversial still, first because it did not begin with Jesus and, second, because his message is not some superficial all-inclusiveness, but an inclusiveness that is preferential toward the people whom this world’s elites exclude in the name of nation first; the well-to-do of society first; the advantaged first; me first. Jesus’ vision of the reign of God on earth—think of this when we pray, as part of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”—is one that is preferentially inclusive of the poor, the disadvantaged, the outsider, the poor first. Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God is one preferentially inclusive of those whom the entitled and advantaged exclude: Not one Israelite, but the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian!

This vision of God’s reign on earth was the vision of God’s prophets: Isaiah, whose scroll Jesus reads and interprets in the synagogue of Nazareth; Jeremiah, whom we hear first from the word of God this morning. Isaiah’s message was preferentially inclusive: All the nations would know and be invited to witness the glory of God that had saved Israel time and again. Jeremiah’s message was preferentially inclusive: Israel’s slavishness to the temple of Jerusalem would mean nothing if its people did not open their hearts to practice justice preferentially toward the least well-off: The poor, the foreigner, the widow, the orphan.

So, indeed, may we pay attention to the parts our readings at Mass skip over. But, also, may we pay attention to those parts God is urging us not to skip over: The parts of the word of God that trouble us; that are controversial to us; that challenge us or our societies in fairly well-off countries like our own to open our hearts to the least-advantaged among us first.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” This is God’s vision of justice; God’s vision of the reign of God on earth for which we pray. It is a vision that calls us beyond ourselves; beyond our social circles; often beyond our comfort, to be “good news to the poor.” It is a vision we are invited not to skip over; a vision to ensure that God’s word of our Scriptures continues to be “fulfilled in [our] hearing.”

Homily for Sunday, 21 March 2021– Fifth Sunday in Lent, Year B

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15; Hebrews 5:7-9; John 12:20-33

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

What would we think if I said, “The days are surely coming”; that some event or great news we have been looking forward to, maybe for a long time, was imminent? What if God were to say this to us, or somebody we think of as a prophet—like Jeremiah was to ancient Israel, but in our own time—or a person otherwise in a position of authority were to announce to us, “The days are surely coming”?

“The days are surely coming, says the LORD” through his prophet Jeremiah and to us anew today! I wonder, though, how the people who heard Jeremiah in their time announce this to them felt at first. Would they have been especially excited or joyful? Would they have wondered what this “new covenant” God was announcing through Jeremiah meant? Would they have felt guilty for their sins as a people since, as we hear from Jeremiah, the very reason God was proclaiming a “new covenant” with Israel was that Israel had broken the first covenant with God? Israel, God’s people, had been unfaithful to God, in a way similar to when there is infidelity between spouses in a marriage. But would the people of Israel, when they heard Jeremiah’s promise of “a new covenant” between them and God, been all the more resolved not to remain paralyzed by their guilt, but to repent?

Maybe many of them would have thought Jeremiah to be too dramatic and simply ignored him or become irritated by him (after all, Jeremiah is known among the Old Testament prophets to have been especially dramatic, fiery, even angry in his speech). Many may have been moved by Jeremiah’s tireless passion to listen to his announcement of this “new covenant” between them and God. More than likely, ancient Israel’s initial responses to Jeremiah’s announcement of “the days… surely coming” were a bit of “all of the above.”

“The days are surely coming”! How do we continue to hear and discern this message in our time? For about a year now, since the first COVID-19 control measures started, I have been praying Evening Prayer over Zoom every day with a group of relatives and friends from different places where I have ministered as a priest. Within the last few weeks, people in our prayer group have announced and been receiving doses of the vaccines against COVID-19. And, this past week, [one of our Basilian confrères in our house], whom many of us may know from his time at St. Joseph’s College, was so excited that he was finally able to book an appointment to receive a vaccine.

I was and am so happy for him! I could not help think of God’s first words to the people of Israel through Jeremiah in today’s reading: “The days are surely coming”! The days are surely coming when this pandemic will be in the past; a memory. The days are surely coming when we will be able to gather safely in our chapels at St. Joseph’s College for Mass. The days are surely coming when COVID-related restrictions on in-person attendance at Masses will be relaxed and then be no more; when we will be able to celebrate Eucharist and other sacraments freely, without anxiety about becoming sick, and as the health and nourishment of our souls, minds, and bodies requires.

These “days are surely coming”; this gives me great hope, and I cannot wait to welcome all of us, St. Joseph’s College’s worshipping community; faculty; students; staff colleagues, back to in-person worship; classes; prayer and work at our College as soon as we are able. “The days are surely coming” and, may I say, the days are already upon us (and not only because we have weathered a pandemic) when we have acquired an acute sense of Christ-like service to and prayer for anybody in need; anybody who is especially poor or disadvantaged, or simply anybody who longs (as we do) to gather together in one worship space to pray; hear God’s Word; sing; take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes Christ’s body, given for us and for our salvation, together. I am deeply grateful and joyful, sisters and brothers, whenever I look upon our community of faith here at St. Joseph’s College, whether (for now) in little insets in a Zoom window or (in not too long, we pray) in our College chapels, halls, offices, and classrooms.

“The days are surely coming” or, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel today, “The hour has come.” Now, when Jesus says in our Gospel, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified,” is this not a rather ominous reference to “the death he was to die”? Once again (Fr. Jim spoke a bit about this last Sunday), John’s Gospel today repeats Jesus’ connection between his being raised on the cross and the bronze serpent in Moses’ time being raised on a pole to heal the people of poisonous snakebites.

The crowd of Greeks who approach the Apostle Philip at the beginning of our Gospel today simply “wish to see Jesus.” I imagine this crowd is a lot like us: We, too, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus.” My prayer for us, sisters and brothers, is that our simple and noble “wish to see Jesus,” to worship and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, be granted very soon; that this “hour has come”; that at least those “days are surely coming” for us. Yet the crowds’ “wish to see Jesus” in John’s Gospel is met not with immediate consolation but with Jesus’ unsettling, even morbid at first hearing, reference to his approaching death on a cross.

And Jesus says that, for us to be in any way like him—like whom we are called to be through our baptism—means that we, too, will have a share in his passion and death. We, too, will be like the “grain of wheat [that] falls into the earth and dies.” If not, we will “remain just a single grain” but, to the extent we share in Jesus’ passion and death, we, like the grain of wheat that dies, will spring from the earth and “bear much fruit.”

My sisters and brothers in Christ, I feel impelled to think, with Christian hope, that we have been through a “grain of wheat” experience for a long while now. And, as the Lord knows, certainly better than me, many if not all of us have been through maybe several “grain of wheat” experiences in our lives: Maybe we have been ill, or a loved one or friend has experienced illness. Maybe we have loved ones who have died. Maybe we have served among the poor or those who lack basic necessities, or been in those situations ourselves. May any of us who have ever suffered know the Lord’s solidarity with you in your suffering. Today, we hear from the Letter to the Hebrews, the same reading we will hear again on Good Friday, of Jesus who “offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death.”

These same “prayers and supplications… loud cries and tears” Jesus now offers for all who suffer in any way; for all who, simply and nobly, “wish to see Jesus”; for all who long to be able to gather and worship in one space again soon, to take, bless, break, and eat the bread that becomes for us the Body of Christ, together in person again; for all of us who have experienced and continue to experience in mind, body, or spirit, what Jesus meant when he referred to the “grain of wheat” that must fall “into the earth” and die, in order to bear “much fruit” and “keep it for eternal life.”

With Jesus’ solidarity with us in times of suffering; privation; isolation, we are and will be the grains of wheat that spring from the earth and give it and one another life and joy. Already we sense the signs that those “days are surely coming.” In and through Christ’s passion and death, which we know by faith will end in the joy of resurrection, for us as once for Jesus, our “hour has come,” for our good and God’s glory forever.

Homily for Sunday, 18 August 2019

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 38:4-6, 8-10; Psalm 40:2, 3, 4, 18; Hebrews 12:1-4; Luke 12:49-53

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

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

About one hundred years after Jesus’ earthly life, in the ancient city of Sinope, now part of Turkey, there lived a man named Marcion, whose teachings became important in shaping early Christianity. Why would I start with the story of Marcion, from so many centuries ago? Well, Marcion perceived some key differences between what became the Old and New Testaments of our Bible. In the Old Testament, Marcion saw that God was often angry and quick to punish people for wrongdoing. Marcion, though, saw the God of the New Testament, shown through the life of Jesus, to use my word here and not Marcion’s word, to be nicer than the Old Testament God.

In the course of ministry, I have heard people claim only once or twice that the God of the Old Testament is angry and punishing while the God of the New Testament is kinder and more forgiving. So maybe Marcionism is not really popular these days. After all, if we read enough of our Bible (something Marcion did not have the benefit of doing in his time, because the books to be included in the Bible as we know it were not set yet in Marcion’s time), we see instances when, in the Old Testament, God is quite kind and forgiving and, in the New Testament, when God—even Jesus—becomes angry and promises punishment of wrongdoers.

One of those instances when Jesus becomes angry is in the Gospel reading we have just heard. Jesus himself asks and then answers the question: “Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division”! This does not sound like a very nice Jesus; like the Jesus maybe many of us would associate with peace, forgiveness, love, does it? What does Jesus mean when he says that he has come to bring not “peace to the earth… but rather division”?

Let me suggest that we are right if we get the impression that Jesus is not very nice in today’s Gospel reading. In our Gospels, Jesus is often not very nice… Now, why would I say that? I insist: Jesus is not nice. In the Gospels, including in our Gospel reading today, Jesus is redemptive. Jesus is often tender and forgiving, even of some fairly serious evil and sin. Jesus is loving. Jesus always, even when he is angry or on a prophetic mission, looks out for our utmost well-being. Jesus shows us the way to salvation; he is our way to salvation. So Jesus is kind, in the sense of the kind of love he shows, that goes so far as to lay down his life so that we may have eternal life. But Jesus is not nice.

How do we use the word “nice”? Do we not usually mean somebody who is kind, loving, forgiving, a lot like Jesus usually is in the Gospels? This is nice, but this definition of “nice” is actually quite recent. Not too long ago—about two hundred years ago, which is a short time when we speak of how language changes—“nice” primarily meant “ignorant” or “stupid,” from its Latin origin, meaning “not knowing.” Only since then has “nice” fairly rapidly taken on the more usual sense of something or somebody pleasant, agreeable, or kind.

Then again, we still use “nice” in its older deprecating or insulting sense today. Have any of us ever shown lack of interest, or heard somebody show lack of interest in what another person was saying in a mocking tone, “That’s nice.” I suppose that what we mean by “nice” today is all about our tone and body language in using this word. When we are pleased by something or somebody, we say, “Aww, that’s really nice, thank you,” or simply, “Niiiice”! But we can mean nice in a dismissive way, as in, “I am not interested in this foolishness. Go away”… “That’s nice.”

So I suppose we could consider Jesus to be “nice” in this newer sense of somebody pleasing or kind, but is even this not a stretch when we hear Jesus in Luke’s Gospel today? Not “peace to the earth… but rather division” does not exactly sound nice in the sense of kindness or pleasantness. Rather, Jesus sounds a lot like the prophets of the Old Testament before him: People who spoke truth to power; people who spoke for God; who confronted God’s people and their leaders with truths they often did not want to hear; people who risked their own lives in doing so, and who were not exactly “nice” about it much of the time. Among those prophets was Jeremiah, who was so persistent in not being especially “nice” as an advisor to King Zedekiah that Zedekiah’s officials had Jeremiah thrown into a cistern and left him to die.

In a similar way, Jesus, “a prophet and more than a prophet,” was persistent in claiming to be God’s own Son; in warning his hearers that their eternal life depended on repentance from their sin; in speaking truth to powerful elites that they did not necessarily want to hear. Jesus was often enough not “nice” about insisting on seeking the utmost good, the salvation, of all people, such that those elites had Jesus crucified and left him to die. Does this not sound familiar?

The prophet Jeremiah was not, in one sense, nice. Jesus was not nice. There is a reason why both Jeremiah and Jesus were killed at the hands of the elites of their day. When Jesus proclaims that he had come not “to bring peace to the earth… but rather division,” he is not saying that he had intended to go out of his way to create divisions among his hearers; his disciples. This would not only not have been nice, but this would have been unkind, and against Jesus’ own rule governing his every action and word. Instead, Jesus always seeks our best interest; our salvation. Yet Jesus knew that, in seeking our best interest, our salvation, his words and actions would expose our division; our sin; everything that already exists to inhibit our way to salvation. Only in exposing our already-existent divisions, sin, unkindness, injustice, and everything that inhibits our salvation that God so dearly desires for us will those divisions, sin, unkindness, and injustices ever be healed and forgiven. And, as many if not all of us know by our own experience, divisions, unkindness, and sin are not distant realities from us. They exist within our own relationships. They exist and destroy the intimacy and trust even within our households and families, as Jesus reminds us today.

Jesus’ reminder of this state of our world into which he came, which has not changed much from Jesus’ time to ours, is hardly nice. It reveals a hard truth many people in Jesus’ time were unwilling to accept, and that many people in our time, I dare say, are no more willing to accept than they were in Jesus’ or Jeremiah’s time. True prophets, who accurately bring to light the state of the world; the state of our human relationships; the state of our relationship with God always speak and act for others’ best interest. Prophecy cannot be ego-driven. But this does not mean prophecy must be nice. Prophecy, if it is true, may go so far as to put at risk the prophet’s reputation, if not his or her very life, if it is true prophecy.

What, then, does this mean for us today? From the moment of our baptism we are called “priest, prophet, and king” in our Rite of Baptism itself. Our baptism calls us to take part in the prophetic mission (as well as priestly and royal missions, in the self-sacrificial sense) of Jesus. Our baptism calls us to seek and work toward one another’s salvation, not only our own. Nowhere, though, in our Rite of Baptism are we called to be “nice.”

This does not mean that we are to seek out opportunities to divide, to destroy relationships, to make enemies, or to scandalize one another unnecessarily. This would itself be sinful. Prophecy is never “all about me.” Instead, true prophecy is all about participating in God’s salvation of the world through prophets through the ages, like Jeremiah, and ultimately through Jesus Christ. Our baptismal prophetic mission is a participation in God’s salvation of the world. It will entail discernment of the sometimes fine line between revealing hard truths about the sin of the world, especially to people in positions of power, and contributing to the sin ourselves; between acting and speaking from our own ego and acting toward the best interests of one another; between being merely “nice” and being kind and just (the virtue we call Christian charity) even when we are angry (even justly so) at another person or at the sin of the world.

Without God, it may be possible to be at least superficially “nice,” but only by putting God first is it possible for us to be the prophets our baptism calls us to be, for one another’s salvation and the salvation 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.