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, 26 June 2022– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21; Psalm 16:1-2, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11; 1 Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9:51-62

Who would follow somebody so demanding as Jesus; who would dare be the disciple of somebody who asks for our focus to be exclusively on following him? This is the question one of my favourite columnists reflecting on the word of God on Sundays lately, Sr. Mary McGlone of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, outside of St. Louis, asks in her reflection this week for the National Catholic Reporter.

She asks the question this way: “Who in their right mind would take up with an unarmed, violence-avoiding preacher headed to the big city to face jealous, powerful foes who would stop at nothing to get rid of him”? Sr. McGlone proposes two images of people of our own time who boldly, resolutely, visibly chose non-violence in response to violence, war, evil. The first image Sr. McGlone proposes is the “tank man” of the Tiananmen Square protests of June 5, 1989, who stood unarmed before a line of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing the day after the Chinese government had violently cleared the square of protesters. The second image she reflects on is of Ukrainians during the still-ongoing war there handing cell phones to Russian soldiers so they can call their mothers.

Who in their right mind would go, unarmed, to look death in the face: Before a line of tanks; before the guns of the invading enemy? But this is precisely how Jesus asks us to follow him. And these acts of non-violence have disarmed and will disarm, at least momentarily, a world still beset by violence and threats to the dignity of human life across its span, from conception to death.

Yet we hear from Luke’s Gospel today how the discipleship Jesus asks of us was difficult for his first disciples. Today’s Gospel begins as “the days [draw] near for [Jesus] to be taken up,” when he sets “his face to go to Jerusalem.” Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where he will die, rise, and ascend to heaven, is the single longest continuous section of Luke. It takes up more than one-third of Luke’s Gospel.

The words Luke uses in this short introduction to today’s Gospel reading are rich in subtle but important details. The word in Luke’s Greek we hear translated as to be “taken up” is an unmistakeable reference to the cross of Jesus. This same Greek word can also mean ascension to heaven. So the connection of this one word to Elijah, of whom we hear today in our reading from 1 Kings calling Elisha to succeed him, is a little less intentional on Luke’s part than its connection to the crucifixion and death of Jesus, but it is still fairly obvious. Before he is taken up to heaven on a chariot of fire (in 2 Kings), Elijah chooses Elisha to succeed him (in 1 Kings). And before Jesus is “taken up” on a cross outside Jerusalem, he likewise chooses disciples who will succeed him.

But do Jesus’ disciples understand what Jesus will ask of them as he sets “his face to go to Jerusalem”? They are decidedly not prepared for what Jesus will ask of them as disciples. From this point our Gospel reading today can be broken into two main parts. The first part focuses on people who are already Jesus’ disciples, in particular James and John. The second part of today’s Gospel focuses on people who want to, or whom Jesus calls, to be his future disciples.

By this point in Luke’s Gospel, James and John have been following Jesus as his disciples for some time. But they are about to experience something new, a bit of a dark turn in their story; their relationship with Jesus. Jesus sets “his face to go to Jerusalem,” where he will be “taken up” to die a horrific death. Surely James, John, and Jesus’ other disciples knew the risk Jesus was taking by so decisively setting out for Jerusalem. As Sr. Mary McGlone says, Jesus, the “unarmed, violence-avoiding preacher,” was “headed to the big city to face jealous, powerful foes who would stop at nothing to get rid of him.”

Worse yet, Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem from Galilee had to pass through Samaria. And we know that the Samaritans, especially in Luke’s Gospel, are synonymous with “most hated enemies,” especially if one were a Jew in Jesus’ times. Going back to Old Testament times, the Samaritans had intermarried with the pagan Assyrians who invaded Israel. So devout Jews hated their half-pagan, half-Jewish neighbours of Samaria. And, to add insult to injury, as Jesus and his disciples pass through this enemy territory, they are (not surprisingly) denied hospitality by the Samaritans. James and John ask Jesus if he wants them “to command fire to come down from heaven and consume” the Samaritans. Jesus immediately rebukes his somewhat overzealous disciples. Jesus’ way, our way to salvation, will be the way of non-violence. It will be, paradoxically in his disciples’ eyes, the way of submitting to inhospitality, to violence, and ultimately to death on a cross outside Jerusalem. It will be a way that I would not be surprised if James, John, and Jesus’ other disciples to this point thought was completely senseless; if, in his disciples’ eyes, Jesus was out of his mind.

Yet the story continues after Jesus and his disciples pass through Samaria. Somebody on the road, a would-be disciple, calls out to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” At face value, this offer by a would-be disciple to follow Jesus wherever he goes seems like one he could not refuse, right? But Jesus’ reply to this first prospective disciple seems strange at first hearing: Jesus does not accept this disciple, but does not really refuse him, either. Jesus only reminds him of the single-minded focus following him demands. That focus cannot be on worldly comforts or even necessities. Discipleship of Jesus is total dependence on God for our needs, until death, with the hope of eternal life.

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”: This little, bizarre proverb reminds me of when I first became a Basilian; when I took first vows, and then final vows; when I was ordained. At each point in my Basilian journey, I have said to Jesus through my brother Basilians (sometimes in writing, as our Rule and Church law demand), “I will follow you wherever you go.” And, if I may say so, this is easier said than done. It is easier said than done when, sealed by the Spirit at confirmation, we say “Amen”; we choose for ourselves to be disciples of Jesus. Although I was too young to remember my own baptism, I am sure it was a case of eager discipleship, but easier-said-than-done in reality, when my parents and godparents—our parents and godparents—replied to the question from the priest or deacon, “Do you clearly understand what you are undertaking”: “Yes.” It is easier said than done when we promise, those of us who are married in the Church, “to be faithful… in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health.” It is easier said than done when we say, “Amen,” when we receive communion.

“I will follow you wherever you go,” we say to Jesus at each of these points in our lives. Fairly often, I hear, even from family, relatives, and close friends: “You have given up so much to be a priest: Being married, raising a family, and so on.” And I usually respond, “Maybe, but I have gained so much more than I have given up.” And, besides this, I am far, in my own estimation, from depending totally on God even for necessities, let alone comforts. This again reminds me of Fr. Joe Trovato, whom I mentioned in my homily a week ago. Our parish at the time, St. Kateri in Rochester, would have delicious and filling fish and chips meals prepared by the Boy Scouts on Fridays during Lent. At table, Fr. Joe would invariably look at me, with his hint of a smile, and say gently, “You know, we are not suffering”! We really are not sacrificing anything, for Lent or otherwise.

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says to the first prospective disciple on his way to Jerusalem. And he is not done yet. Jesus meets two other would-be disciples in our Gospel today. But instead of them asking to follow him, Jesus takes the initiative with the other two: “Follow me.” Each time, though, these two would-be disciples have other priorities: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father… Let me first say farewell to those at my home.”

These two disciples’ priorities are legitimate, we must admit. To bury one’s dead relatives was the supreme act of honour to another person. To greet one’s family when entering or leaving home was close behind burying the dead as a supreme act of honour and mercy in Jewish culture of Jesus’ time. These are still considered corporal works of mercy in our Church today. And it was what we hear in our reading today that Elijah allowed Elisha to do before he accepted to follow Elijah and succeed him. So it is strange to us that Jesus would refuse these would-be disciples’ requests to bury their dead or to bid farewell “to those at [their] home.”

What, then, does our Gospel today say about discipleship, following Jesus? Discipleship of Jesus, sisters and brothers, does not tolerate violence in word or action. Discipleship of Jesus includes everybody; excludes nobody, even (and maybe especially) our enemies, from God’s grace. Discipleship of Jesus demands single-minded focus: Dependence on God for our needs in this life, if we are to set our faces in the direction Jesus travels; toward Jerusalem, toward the cross, with the hope of eternal life.

Homily for Friday, 25 December 2020– Nativity of the Lord

Readings of the day (for Christmas Mass at Night): Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

Merry Christmas, sisters and brothers! How many of us can remember an event or several events, dates and places of local, even personal significance to us, but also of more worldwide significance? These are the events when we might say, “We know where we were when”…

Some of us, if we go back some time ago, may remember where we were when various wars began or ended: For example, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or more recent conflicts in the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Afghanistan. Some of us, or people we know and love, may have fought in or lost loved ones in these wars.

Within the Church, some of us might remember where we were when a so-called “caretaker pope,” St. John XXIII, shocked both the Church and the world by calling the Second Vatican Council, not because the Church or the world were in a particular crisis, but to open the Church and the world to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit in light of world events, “the signs of the times.” Vatican II, with a number of bishops in attendance never before seen at a Council in our Church’s history, as well as many Catholic expert theologians and non-Catholic observers, discussed topics ranging from the nature and mission of the Church itself, to its liturgy and sacraments, to the meaning of religious freedom and other human rights, to themes of peace and justice, to the role of social communications.

Many of us may remember where we were at the end of the Cold War, as the Berlin Wall was dismantled and the Soviet Union collapsed. From the first landing on the moon to the long-awaited approval and distribution of vaccines against COVID-19 (and many more events in between): We know where we were when these local events with worldwide, even universal significance, happened.

It may seem that 2020 has not given us much to be cheerful about. The news has been dominated by COVID-19, a disease with virulence not experienced since the flu pandemic after World War I. My experience has been that even conversations with friends, family, and my brother Basilian priests are often dominated by the latest COVID news: How many new cases today? How many deaths? Is the government about to put in place new restrictions? Terms like “physical distancing” have become part of our vocabulary. Mental and spiritual health concerns amid the distancing and aloneness have compounded with the physical health crisis of the pandemic itself. Our churches and businesses, if not shuttered completely, are allowed a small fraction of their capacity of people.

With that, I want to make a point of acknowledging with gratitude everybody who is joining us from afar, via livestream, to worship, and especially to celebrate this Christmas, the Nativity of our Lord. I thank you. I thank everybody who is here in person. I thank volunteers, cleaners, parish staff, priests and other liturgical ministers, people who serve the disadvantaged and vulnerable—everybody who has made it possible for us to celebrate here at all. Again, a Merry Christmas to everybody!

Back in March, the evening before COVID-19 forced many countries, including France where I was living then, into lockdown, I remember where I was: Hearing confessions in a small parish in Paris. That evening, the church was full of people trying anxiously to receive the sacrament of reconciliation before Easter. The next day, and for two months after that, the churches were closed, and all of France went into lockdown.

In the midst of this pandemic, on May 25, George Floyd, a Black man, was killed on a street in Minneapolis. This and other similar incidents ignited protests and a nationwide, even worldwide reckoning with socially systemic racism and abuses of power. I remember where I was, in the days after George Floyd’s death, on the phone with an African American friend from my first years as a priest in Rochester, New York; my friend who was distraught at the violence, the racism, the slurs to which she personally had been subjected; my friend who gave me that graced opportunity simply to listen, to pray with and for her as she spoke.

The COVID-19 pandemic, the reckoning with and protests against systemic racism and brutality in law enforcement: These are recent events with local, but also very universal dimensions. We know where we have been, but these events have affected the whole world. This relationship between the local and the universal brings to my mind a prayer our Basilian communities in Colombia often pray (and prayed while I served in several stints in those communities), based on part of Chapter 12 of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Let us rejoice with those who rejoice; let us weep with those who are weeping”… How, then, do we accomplish what we pray for in that prayer?

How do we rejoice with those who rejoice, especially in this celebration of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus? How do we weep with those who weep; with those who are ill in mind, body, or spirit; with those who have been subject to racism, other forms of unjust discrimination or abuses of power; with those who have lost loved ones, or lost their livelihoods; who have lost the ability to worship in person and receive communion during this pandemic?

Perhaps our rejoicing with those who rejoice, and weeping with those who weep—in a word, solidarity—depends on our remembrance of where we are in the midst of world events and events that affect us personally. And, better yet, our solidarity with one another depends on our remembrance of who we are: A People of God, the Church, called together to celebrate this night and forevermore the birth of a child, Jesus Christ, Emmanuel (God-with-us; God in solidarity with us!) into a manger in Bethlehem; called together to celebrate this local event that has universal significance; that is essential to our salvation, not as disconnected individuals but together.

From the moment of Jesus’ birth, Luke’s Gospel says to us tonight, everybody who experienced this event was acutely aware of both its local and universal significance. Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and the angel who first spoke to the shepherds the “good news of great joy” of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem: Everybody knew where they were in those moments, but that this event held significance far beyond them.

Luke, the Gospel writer, the historian par excellence among the four Biblical Gospel writers down to the finest details, emphasizes the very local dimensions of Jesus’ birth. Caesar Augustus ruled the vast and powerful Roman Empire, which included Israel, land of Jesus’ birth, as the Roman province of Palestine. Quirinius, who is only mentioned this once in the entire New Testament, governed Syria, a rather insignificant part of the Roman Empire at the time. Mary and Joseph, a humble, we can imagine fairly ordinary Jewish couple, travel from “Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the City of David called Bethlehem,” Joseph’s hometown, to register in the Roman census. Mary, in a detail Luke gives us that is at least bizarre if not scandalous for the time, is engaged to Joseph but finds herself “with child.” She gives birth “to her firstborn son and [wraps] him in swaddling clothes, and [lays] him in a manger, because there [is] no place for them in the inn.”

Angels appear very specifically to “shepherds living in the fields.” These shepherds, and the place where the angels announce our Saviour’s birth to them, are what Pope Francis might call at “the peripheries”: Poor, dirty, smelling like their sheep, and probably feared or at least ignored by most people who lived in the cities and villages.

This, sisters and brothers, is how God chose to enter into solidarity as one like us, human, in all things but sin: To rejoice with us as we rejoice; to weep with us when we weep; to open to us the gates of salvation; to call us to remember where and who we are. The Nativity of our Lord was a very local event: Augustus ruled from Rome; Quirinius governed Roman Syria; a typical first-century Jewish couple, Mary and Joseph (typical except for Mary’s pregnancy) brought a baby into the world from its peripheries—into a manger!

The first announcement of this birth was equally “peripheral,” humble, local: From angels to shepherds. Yet, like so many of our world events but more decisively, this peripheral, humble, local event holds universal significance. Into a manger in Bethlehem, in first century Roman Palestine, is born for us; for the universe, for all times and places, “a Saviour, who is the Christ, the Lord.”

Homily for Tuesday, 22 December 2020– Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Advent

Readings of the day: 1 Samuel 1:24-28; Responsorial Canticle: 1 Samuel 2:1, 4-5, 6-7, 8abcd; Luke 1:46-56

Here is bit of Catholic trivia for us: How many Catholics have been named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”? The answer is fifteen.

The fifteenth and latest, of course, is U.S. President Elect Joe Biden, alongside Vice President Elect Kamala Harris (not a Catholic) for 2020. But the sixth of these fifteen Catholics to be named Time’s “Person of the Year” was Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, alongside fellow Apollo 8 crew members Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, in 1968. Anders took a famous photograph of the “earthrise” from just above the surface of the moon.

In the Time interview for 1968’s “Person of the Year” issue, Anders asked rhetorically about his “earthrise” photo that made him consider how insignificant the Earth is in the universe: “Are we really that special”?

In Luke’s Gospel today, in a similar but somewhat more eloquent way than Bill Anders, Mary acknowledges that, well, we are really not all that special. In fact, we are nothing on our own, but we are everything to and with God. Mary prays in her “Magnificat” that we hear today: “My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, for he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.”

I credit a former director of campus ministry at St. Joseph’s College [of the University of Alberta in Edmonton] for first pointing out to me that Mary’s “Magnificat” is almost verbatim the prayer of Hannah in the Old Testament in thanksgiving after conceiving her son Samuel. Hannah prays, and we hear in our Responsory Canticle today, “[God] brings low; he also exalts.”

To us, really not all “that special” as Bill Anders once pointed out, God has appeared to us as a fellow “lowly servant”; as human. And so we enter into these final preparations for our Christmas celebration of God having “looked with favour on” us, his “lowly servant(s),” a tiny speck in this immense universe and, by his Son, Jesus Christ, having exalted us; having become human like us; having made us special beyond all telling; having saved us.

Homily for Sunday, 14 July 2019

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 30:10-14; Psalm 69:14, 17, 30-31, 33-34. 36, 37 or 19:8, 9, 10, 11; Colossians 1:15-20; Luke 10:25-37

15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, Edmonton, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life”? The question the lawyer asks of Jesus in our Gospel, from Luke, today sounds perfectly legitimate, right? After all, would everybody here, and at least all Christians or people of faith, not share some kind of desire to “inherit eternal life”? If anybody is here who does not hope to “inherit eternal life,” I would sincerely like to speak with you after Mass, because I cannot understand why anybody would gather to worship God in this Eucharistic celebration if we did not hope to “inherit eternal life.”

In response to the lawyer in today’s Gospel—in fact the lawyer at first answers his own question correctly—Jesus says how he, and we, might “inherit eternal life”: “Do this and you will live.” “Do this”: Act in the way the lawyer in Luke’s Gospel knows all too well, and answers correctly, that will gain him, and us, eternal life: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself.”

“Do this.” Again, this sounds like a simple enough commandment by which to live; by which we are to “inherit eternal life,” right? The lawyer’s answer to Jesus’ question—“What is written in the Law? What do you read there”?—should be no surprise to us. His answer, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbour as yourself,” is the combination of the two laws regarded by Jews of Jesus’ time and even to this day as the most important in the Torah. Devout Jews still pray, morning and night, a variation of the first part of Jesus’ command and the lawyer’s answer: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God; the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This prayer, the Shema, is named after its opening exhortation, “Hear, O Israel,” or “Shema, Yisrael.” It is found in our Bible, in Deuteronomy 6:4-5. The second part of the lawyer’s answer is taken from the Book of Leviticus [19:18]: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself. I am the LORD.”

So should the first part of this command, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God; the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might,” not be easy enough to observe, especially if we take this foremost commandment of God’s Law to heart and to prayer? Today we hear a similar commandment to “turn to the LORD [our] God with all [our] heart and with all [our] soul” in another part of Deuteronomy today (a near-repetition of Deuteronomy 6:4-5). This commandment to love or to “turn to” our God wholly is not “too far away.” “It is not in heaven… neither is it beyond the sea,” but “it is very near to us.” It is accessible to us, “in [our] mouth and in [our] heart,” so that we might observe it easily, at least in theory.

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind”: This command; this invitation to go from command to prayer to action is easy to memorize by rote, but is it so easy for us to put into practice? In one sense, I think it is. Just as I do not believe we would be here to celebrate this Eucharist if we did not, in some way, want to go to heaven, to “inherit eternal life,” I do not believe (even if you are a child or a teenager to whom your parents or somebody had to insist a bit that you be at Mass today!) that any of us would be here if we did not, in some way, love God and recognize this celebration in this place as a way of expressing our love for God.

But how accessible or practical is the second part of Jesus’ commandment, spoken by the lawyer in today’s Gospel and derived from Leviticus, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself”? Again, in one sense, this commandment to “love our neighbour as” ourselves is very accessible and practical to us. When I am in this place to preside at Mass, I see how this commandment to “love [our] neighbour as” ourselves is lived out in many, diverse holy and fruitful ways. Many of us are ministers within our Church, as servers, ministers of holy communion, musicians, hospitality ministers, and so on. Many of us show our love of neighbour and our love of our Church through works of community service and social justice. Many of us show our love of neighbour with a simple smile or acts of kindness one or several times every day.

Love of neighbour presumes that we love ourselves; that we acknowledge ourselves and live in some way as created in God’s image and likeness. Yet how many of us here or in our world suffer with mental illnesses, including addictions, or know somebody who does? Mental illnesses, like physical or spiritual ones, do not necessarily inhibit us from loving our neighbour as Jesus invites us. The late Dutch priest and contemplative Henri Nouwen developed the term “wounded healer,” coined by the psychologist Carl Jung, to describe people who show great love of neighbour in word and action despite (or maybe because of) their own mental, physical, and spiritual afflictions, which strengthen empathy for other people in similar situations. Similarly, Pope Francis offers us the image of the Church as a “field hospital”: The ill, afflicted, and suffering so often helping the ill, afflicted, and suffering by genuine and purposeful love of neighbour, leading one another to “inherit eternal life.”

How many of us, though, suffer through difficulties with our own body image? How many of us suffer from mental (or physical or spiritual) illnesses, diagnosed or not? How many of us suffer from addictions or know somebody who does: Addictions to alcohol, drugs, pornography, and so on? To some extent, our inabilities to love ourselves as creatures in God’s image and likeness (intentional or, in many cases, not so intentional) will inhibit our ability to love our neighbour, and our inabilities to love our neighbour will eventually inhibit our ability to love God.

Besides difficulties with body image; with mental, physical, or spiritual health; with addictions, these possible barriers to loving ourselves as befits the creatures in God’s image and likeness we are, other difficulties arise with respect to love of neighbour, and ultimately love of God, which make the lawyer’s question to Jesus, his attempt “to justify himself,” all the more real and personal to us.

The lawyer, having answered Jesus’ first question correctly as to the most essential commandment of God’s Law; the most essential commandment for us to “inherit eternal life,” then asks Jesus: “And who is my neighbour”? Before we scoff at the lawyer in today’s Gospel, let us ask ourselves the lawyer’s question: “Who is my neighbour”? Is my neighbour among the poor and disadvantaged? Is my neighbour an unborn child, or somebody in a crisis pregnancy situation? Is my neighbour an immigrant, a refugee, or a trafficked person, especially an undocumented migrant? Is my neighbour somebody of a non-Christian religion? Is my neighbour somebody with a mental, physical, or spiritual illness or addiction? Is my neighbour an acquaintance, a co-worker, somebody in the Church, a friend, or a family member with whom we have fallen out of regular and healthy relationship or even speaking terms? Is my neighbour an elderly person; somebody with a terminal illness or with an illness like dementia; somebody who perceives life itself to have become almost unbearable; somebody who has lost hope; somebody in great pain? Is my neighbour that Samaritan (a synonym in our Gospel today for our worst enemy conceivable) who encounters me when I am in my greatest need, at least figuratively-speaking, “half dead” on the side of the road? Is my neighbour the “half dead” person I encounter on the road?

Of course, our neighbour is all these people. Will we show neighbourly, life-giving mercy to our neighbour in all these and other vulnerable forms, then, or will we pass by her or him “on the other side” of the road? Will we or will we not choose to encounter Christ, the incarnate, fully human, visible “image of the invisible God,” in our neighbour? In his book The Holy Longing, the Oblate priest Ronald Rolheiser says that “the God of the incarnation tells us that anyone who says he or she loves an invisible God in heaven and is unwilling to deal with a visible neighbour on earth is a liar.”

“Who is my neighbour,” then? Our neighbour is anybody Jesus invites us to treat with the loving mercy befitting one created in God’s image and likeness. “Do this and [we] will live.”

Homily for Monday, 1 January 2018– 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, 5, 6, 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

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

How many names and devotional titles can we think of by which we, as Catholics, celebrate Mary? We often give her, as in the name of today’s celebration, two names, “blessed” and “virgin.” When we speak of Mary as “the Blessed Virgin,” we combine two different Gospel accounts of Mary around the conception, birth, and infancy of Jesus: Matthew, who applies Isaiah’s prophecy to Mary, “A virgin shall be with child,” and Luke, in whose Gospel Mary’s relative, Elizabeth, first calls Mary “blessed.”

The second part of the title of today’s celebration of Mary, “Mother of God,” is a simplified form of a complicated Greek title given Mary at the First Council of Ephesus in 431, theotokos or “God-bearer.” The main purpose of the bishops at Ephesus was to affirm the truth of the two natures of Christ, both divine and human. Mary, then, was said not to have borne Jesus in his human nature but also in his divine nature in her womb; Mary is not only “Christ-bearer” but “God-bearer.”

And we have a long list of less-complicated names for Mary than theotokos. Anybody here whose name is Mary or a variation of Mary: I do not want to be too gloomy, but your name derives from myrrh, the burial spice brought by the magi in Matthew’s Gospel alongside gold and incense. The name Mary— Mariam, “myrrh-bearer”— reminds us of the suffering Mary would endure alongside her Son Jesus through his passion and death. No saint has as many titles or is called upon for as many causes as Mary. Right here [in the Vernon area], Mary is the namesake of our church, Our Lady of the Valley. When I was a teenager, my family moved to a parish called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, outside of Edmonton, Alberta. Pope Francis has helped to popularize the devotion to Our Lady, Untier of Knots, which was not a very common devotion until Francis became pope. Whole countries and regions, like the United States under Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception or the American continents under Our Lady of Guadalupe, are dedicated or, we say, consecrated to Mary.

Mary is called upon in times of illness. She has been called upon to defend nations in times of conflict. She is the patron of many a religious order, of refugees and migrants, of the homeless, the dying, of widows, and of those in situations of unplanned or crisis pregnancies. From the “Black Madonnas” of Częstochowa in Poland and Montserrat in Spain to her appearance to humble shepherd children of Fátima in Portugal; from Lourdes in France to atop a pillar in Spain; from Kazan in Russia to Australia’s Mary, Help of Christians, to Notre-Dame-du-Cap in Trois Rivières, Quebec, here in Canada, and beyond, the number of devotions to Mary and the causes associated with her are countless.

We also often call Mary “Queen of Heaven.” Two glorious mysteries of the Rosary, Mary’s Assumption and heavenly Crowning, recall our belief that Mary has been taken up body and soul into heaven, and reigns there as the greatest of all the saints. When we end our Rosary, and at other times, we pray, “Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope”… and, during the Easter season, we might pray the “Regina coeli”: “Queen of heaven, rejoice, for the Son you merited to bear has risen as he said, alleluia”!

But what does it mean for us to recognize Mary as “queen”? I have to admit some personal fascination with royalty. Lately, as I have been staying with family over this Christmas season, I have caught a few episodes of the Netflix series “The Crown.” This series is about the rise to the throne and reign of Queen Elizabeth II. In several scenes of “The Crown,” Queen Elizabeth is sought for her government and diplomatic skill. She is consulted by Prime Ministers in dealing with sometimes tense events in the world early in her reign. “The Crown” portrays Elizabeth as a competent, strong yet calm queen. And yet I am even more drawn to how frequently “The Crown” portrays Elizabeth as a devoted and even tender wife to Prince Philip and mother to their children.

To a much greater extent than of Queen Elizabeth, indeed perfectly so, the same is true of Mary. She is Queen of Heaven, and yet also Mother. Mary is Mother of God; she is Mother of Christ; she is our Mother. Mary’s queenship and motherhood are inseparable. When we pray, “Hail, Holy Queen,” we add immediately, “Mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness, and our hope.” Our Regina coeli acknowledges Mary as “Queen of Heaven” (these are the prayer’s first words), and then immediately as the joyous one who bore her, and God’s, now-risen Son. Our Advent and Christmas hymn, Alma Redemptoris Mater, again acknowledges the inseparable queenship and motherhood of Mary: “Loving mother of the Redeemer, gate of heaven, star of the sea, assist your people who have fallen yet strive to rise again. To the wonderment of nature you bore your Creator, yet remained a virgin after as before. You who received Gabriel's joyful greeting, have pity on us poor sinners.”

St. Thérèse of Lisieux was known for her reverence and yet familial relationship with Mary. St. Thérèse knew Mary intimately as both queen and mother; as queen because Mary is our Mother. Some of the last words St. Thérèse spoke were these: “We know well that the Blessed Virgin is Queen of heaven and earth. But, I believe, she is more Mother than Queen, [because she] greatly increases the splendor of” her children.

As our Mother, the Mother of the Church, the Blessed Virgin Mary does not keep the splendor of queenship to herself. Instead, she guides us tenderly toward and reflects upon us the same splendor of heaven. Through Mary, Mother and Queen, God blesses us in the same way he once asked Moses to bless his people: “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.” Through Mary, our Queen because she is our Mother; Mother of Christ, Mother of God, St. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians, we are made sons and daughters of the same God. “And if son [and daughter], then” we are also heirs (do we hear the royal language here?) to the salvation to which Mary is leading us.

Luke’s Gospel, we hear today, says that, when the shepherds arrived at the manger in Bethlehem where the newborn Jesus lay and “made known what had been told them about this child,” Mary “treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” Treasuring and pondering: These are the actions of a devoted, loving mother. As Mary once treasured and pondered the shepherds’ words about her Son Jesus, we can be assured, sisters and brothers, that Mary still ponders and still treasures us in her heart, the heart of a mother.

And so today we celebrate many things, including the beginning of a new year, no less. But, as we ring in this New Year, we celebrate first and foremost our Church’s Mother’s Day. We celebrate Mary, the one who ponders and treasures; the one who blesses and leads us toward heaven, toward God and God’s Son, Mary’s Son, Jesus Christ. Today we celebrate this joyful feast of Mary, greatest among the saints; woman of countless names, titles, and devotions; woman of our age and for all ages; Queen because she is first Mother. She, the Blessed Virgin Mary of Nazareth, is Mother of Christ; Mother of God; Mother and model of the Church; our Mother, for the salvation and greater splendor of her children.