Homily for Tuesday, 19 January 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: Hebrews 6:10-20; Psalm 111:1-2, 4-5, 9, 10c; Mark 2:23-28

Tuesday of the 2nd week in Ordinary Time

One of the many points of wisdom that my novice master has handed on to me since my novitiate year was to ask myself what my most absolute convictions are, especially on more contentious issues, and on which issues or personal or faith convictions I would allow a bit (or a lot) more leeway. And when I determine what my most absolute convictions are, I still need to exercise due charity toward other people who may not share the same absolute convictions that I do, culpably or not: Be prepared to listen; to ask questions aimed at a better mutual understanding of truth and not questions “baited” with my own agenda, and so on.

Could we not say that, in the Church as in the secular world, all truths, teachings, or convictions are not created equal, so to speak? In the Church, the truths we hold to be the most directly divinely revealed, those more absolute truths and convictions, we call dogmas or definitive doctrines. Only a small proportion of our Church’s teachings and convictions belong to this category of what is essential for our faith.

So, in today’s Gospel, what did the Pharisees consider to be the essential tenets or convictions of their faith? On the surface, the heart of their complaint against Jesus and his disciples seems to be their breach of the Sabbath law. After all, Jesus’ final retort to the Pharisees today is that “the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.” But if the Sabbath law were at the heart of the controversy in today’s Gospel, then why were the Pharisees conveniently on scene to complain about Jesus’ disciples making a path “through the grain fields [and plucking] heads of grain”? By some interpretations of Jewish Law at the time, the Pharisees would have been doing work, therefore violating the Sabbath themselves, by having walked far enough from home to notice Jesus’ disciples making a path through the grain fields.

The Gospel passage we hear today is nestled within a series of similar controversy events in Mark involving Jesus or his disciples versus the Pharisees, so something a bit more complex and probably sinister is happening in today’s Gospel than the Pharisees simply complaining that Jesus’ disciples were violating the Sabbath.

Once again, Mark shows the Pharisees going out of their way to bait Jesus into excusing his or his disciples’ violations of Jewish Law that to them were an inexcusable breach of their essential convictions. Maybe we could say that they were an inexcusable breach if somebody other than the Pharisees were doing the breaching! Anyway, their essential convictions do not correspond with Jesus’ most essential conviction that meeting basic human need—feeding the hungry, for example—is more important than laws governing the Sabbath.

Here again, we have what Vatican II would call “a hierarchy of truths”: What are our most absolute, essential convictions? To which rules, religious or civil, are we willing to make exceptions, for ourselves or other people, and why? How willing are we to exercise charity toward people (even when they are in error and our truth is worth defending) who do not share our most absolute convictions? Maybe the Pharisees; maybe everybody could benefit from a figure like my novice master to invite us to keep these questions in mind.

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 Thursday, 1 August 2019– Memorial of St. Alphonsus Liguori

Readings of the day: Exodus 40:16-21, 34-38; Psalm 84:3, 4, 5-6a, 8a, 11; Matthew 13:47-53

Thursday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at the Kateri House Women's Residence Chapel, St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

What kinds of homes do we live in, and with what kinds of keepsakes or treasures do we fill our homes?

Is it fair for me to presume that, since we are near the middle of a major city, most of us live in houses, apartments, or other, say, permanent dwellings? Having said this, I think of and invite us to pray for everybody, especially in the midst of our city of Edmonton but around the world, who are homeless or who otherwise do not have a permanent home; a permanent and safe place to keep even a few treasures.

As a member of a religious order under a vow of poverty, my experience is nowhere near the experience of poverty, of uncertainty as to where to find safe shelter, food, and other necessities that homeless people experience. Yet, as a Basilian, I have had the experience of moving from one place and one form of ministry to another often enough that this tends to minimize the amount of material goods I and my Basilian brothers might accumulate. We have in our Basilian houses decorations that show both that these are religious houses and that they are places of warm hospitality, not only toward fellow Basilians but anybody who may visit our homes.

Today, the Book of Exodus features Moses, who builds the tabernacle that is to house the Ark of the Covenant, and all this within a structure called the Tent of Meeting. The impermanence of this structure, even though it was to be the dwelling of God himself among the people of Israel, is remarkable to me. The Ark of the Covenant and its tabernacle within the Tent of Meeting was designed to be disassembled and reassembled as the people of Israel under Moses’ leadership journeyed from Egypt to their more permanent homeland of Israel. It would be many more centuries before the home of the God of Israel on Earth would become a more permanent structure, the Temple of Jerusalem, and even this first temple and its successor would not last forever.

Our Gospel reading today, from Matthew, focuses on our most permanent dwelling of all: The Kingdom of Heaven. It is to be the dwelling of “the righteous,” those people who have acted according to God’s love for us toward one another, especially people most in need. The Kingdom of Heaven will not be a place for people with the greatest number of earthly treasures, but for people who have made in their hearts a permanent dwelling for our God, our ultimate treasure, “beauty ever ancient yet ever new,” as St. Augustine of Hippo once prayed.

Through the likes of Moses and Jesus, God proposes for us today a dwelling that is much more permanent than anything we have ever known. God proposes to make God’s dwelling, heaven, forever our home. All God asks of us is to make of our hearts God’s home on earth—a tabernacle of sorts, meant to move about, to change, to be disassembled and reassembled as our earthly pilgrimage progresses—but still God’s home on earth. As St. Alphonsus Liguori, whom we celebrate today, once said, “The human heart is, so to speak, the paradise of God.” Jesus, too, asks us to make of our hearts “the paradise of God,” the storehouse of “what is new and what is old,” while God prepares our permanent home in heaven.

Homily for Tuesday, 9 July 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 32:23-33; Psalm 17:1b, 2-3, 6-7ab, 8b, 15; Matthew 9:32-38

Tuesday of the 14th week in Ordinary Time

Optional Memorial of St. Augustine Zhao-Rong and Companions, Martyrs

This homily was given at the Kateri House Women's Residence Chapel of St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Is anybody here a fan of sports like wrestling, martial arts, or the maybe-not-so-new-anymore phenomenon of mixed martial arts? I must confess that, although I enjoy all forms of wrestling in venues like the Olympics, I have never been a fan of these kinds of sports as commercial products.

Yet today the Book of Genesis introduces us to Jacob the Wrestler, or maybe Jacob the Kickboxer or Jacob the Mixed Martial Artist. In one corner, we have Jacob the Decisive Underdog, whom none of the bookkeepers are giving much of a chance. In the other corner, we have the Undisputed Heavyweight (but Mysteriously Weightless-at-the-Same-Time) Creator-Champion of the World… God.

One would have expected this bout to go less than one round, but from the opening bell Jacob miraculously stays in the match. As expected, Jacob takes a beating from God (or the mysterious man who represents God in the ring against Jacob; nobody is really sure), but this match continues on and on. Jacob and God wrestle all night long, “until daybreak.” God injures Jacob’s hip, but Jacob still will not give up. Finally, the referee signals the end of this epic match, and announces the unanimous winner, barely able to believe the judges’ decision: “The winner of the Fight of the Centuries is… Jacob”!

Not only has Jacob defeated God (or God’s “mystery man”), on an injured hip to boot, but because of this win Jacob receives a new name from his opponent, God himself. Jacob is to be known as Israel, which means literally, “One who contends (or wrestles) with God”: “For you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed,” God says to Israel, the man whose victory named and built a nation.

This match results in Jacob gaining a new name, Israel, but God (or his mystery man in the fight, whoever he is) never reveals his name. This is maybe just as well; Israel is content to receive a blessing, and to have escaped this all-night barn burner with his life. In recognition of Jacob’s unprecedented emergence alive from a “face to face” bout with God, the place of the match is renamed Peniel, which is a play-on-words on “face to face” in Hebrew.

What does all this mean for us today, though? In one sense, Jacob-Israel was the first to encounter God “face to face” and to have survived, but he would not be the last. We believe as Christians that we have had the ultimate “face to face” encounter with God in Jesus Christ and, thankfully, we did not even need to fight him. Unlike Jacob-Israel, we did not sustain even an injured hip. Instead, Jesus chose freely to encounter us in our weight class; in the limitations of our human flesh. Jesus chose freely to bear our injuries; our sin; our death on the cross so that we might be saved; so that we, too, may yet contend “with God and with humans” and live to fight another day. Because of God, and God’s Son Jesus Christ, we, like Jacob-Israel, have a chance to be, for the ages, heavyweight champions of the world.