Homily for Sunday, 10 December 2023– Second Sunday of Advent, Year B

Readings of the day: Isaiah 40:1-5,, 9-11; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; 2 Peter 3:8-14; Mark 1:1-8

We find ourselves at the beginning, sisters and brothers: “The beginning,” Mark’s Gospel proclaims by its very first words, “of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Mark wastes no time in revealing to us who Jesus is, “the Son of God,” and that his coming to live as one of us, in our human flesh—his advent—is “good news.” Spoiler alert! Mark does not even give us a nice, long account of Jesus’ infancy and childhood, to help us ease into the story, this “good news” he proclaims. Mark begins with the powerful preaching of John the Baptist, “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” By this point Jesus is already an adult. Jesus, the one John announces as “more powerful” than he is, has probably already attracted followers. He has caused some “good [and necessary] trouble” in the minds and consciences of many already, the minds and consciences of the comfortable and powerful of this world.

So much for starting at the beginning of the story! And today we are not even at the beginning of Advent. We are a full week into the shortest possible Advent this year—three weeks and a day between the first Sunday of Advent, a week ago, and Christmas Day. And I do not know about any of us, but as of now I have yet to do much at all to prepare for Christmas. Gift shopping? Not started. Visiting family and friends I may not have seen for a while? Okay, I have done some visiting. Taking time to be with, or at least to pray for, people in need—the sick, the poor, those who find this time of year to be a struggle for many reasons? Okay, but I could do better. Tidying my physical spaces—my room, my office—let alone doing a little Christmas decorating?! Yikes! I think, if Jesus were to step into my room now, let alone the spiritual room that is my heart, my conscience, he might sound a little like my mother did when I was a kid: “Did a tornado hit here, or what”?!

(By the way, I will offer this little advertisement for those of us who want to do some spiritual—heart, mind, conscience—tidying soon: St. Joseph’s College’s Advent penance service is this Friday at 7:00 pm).

So, in a way it is okay if we are a little behind on our Advent-Christmas preparations, if our spiritual let alone physical spaces look chaotic to say the least. Advent offers us a new beginning. God meets us where we are in our present; in fact God sends messengers ahead of himself and his Christ—John the Baptist, the saints, holy people we know and meet in our own lives—to draw us closer to him and to eternal life. That is the “good news”!

Yet Advent is a bit of a strange time of year. We are at a beginning of the Church’s liturgical year, of the story of our world’s first encounter with God in the human person of Jesus. But we are, at the same time, well into this story, after many encounters in history and in our own lives already with God’s “good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Last Sunday, the first Sunday, the very beginning of Advent, our readings at Mass gave the sense more of an end, or a story very much in progress, than a beginning. We began this time of Advent by hearing from near the end of the Gospel of Mark: Jesus, just before his passion and death, urging his disciples to “keep awake,” ready for the events of Jesus’ passion and death that would happen right after that point, but more importantly for an unknown “Last Day” when Jesus will return in glory. St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians also oriented us toward that final “day of our Lord Jesus Christ,” exhorting the Corinthian Christian faithful to remain “blameless” until that day by the Lord’s strength and grace. The Psalm reinforced our plea for divine strength. And, a week ago, we heard Isaiah making final plans for the return of the people of Israel from a long exile in Babylon. That exile, it seems, had made the people of Israel stubborn; only a small “remnant” would return to their land to rebuild the nation and its temple in Jerusalem that had been the centre of the Jewish faith. So Isaiah pleads for divine intervention to break through Israel’s sin and hardness of heart: “O [LORD] that you would tear open the heavens and come down”!

Today, this second Sunday of Advent, our readings start back at beginnings: Mark speaks of “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” The second letter of Peter gives us a sense of being closer to a beginning than an end. The people for whom 2 Peter is written have become impatient. The first Christians of that community had suffered persecution. Many had already died. 2 Peter reminds them that, in God’s time, this is only the beginning: “The Lord is not slow about his promise… but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”

Peter’s message is very similar to that of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel. For John the Baptist, there is urgency to repentance to prepare for the coming of Jesus, the “one after” John. Yet, 2 Peter says, there is also urgency to know God’s mercy and peace, God’s meeting us in the sometimes-chaotic events of this world and our lives, even as we strive to repent, to tidy our spiritual spaces, our minds and consciences.

Our God has never been one to wait until we have everything in order—our hearts, our minds, our consciences—before coming to be with us in our present time. The second letter of Peter offers us a very typical (for a biblical text) vision of the end of time. It will be chaos: “The heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire.” But 2 Peter invites us not to worry about this chaos. Instead, lead “lives of holiness and godliness,” practice conversion and repentance here and now; “strive to be found by [the Lord] at peace.”

Jesus promised to return at the end of time. I think we can be almost certain that the end of time, when Jesus will re-enter this world, will be chaotic. We do not know what the world will look like when Jesus returns on the Last Day. But we can remain at peace if we think back to the beginning, the first time Jesus entered our world. God took our human flesh in a world that was chaotic then. Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary into a poor, chaotic, smelly stable with barn animals, at a time when the Romans ruled Jesus’ homeland by force.

God does not wait for us to have everything in order before entering into our present in a way that changes our existence profoundly and irreversibly. Well before Jesus’ time, the prophet Isaiah was calling to a people still in exile in Babylon, preparing to return to, well, chaos and ruin—a ruined temple—in Jerusalem. And Isaiah says, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid.”

Isaiah’s cry to Jerusalem is something like, “Yes, what you see, what is left of your homeland is chaos, ruin. But God is not waiting. God brings comfort, peace, justice, salvation now.” As the Psalmist says, here and now, “justice and peace” are about to “kiss each other.” This is a new beginning for the people of Israel!

God does not wait for us to have everything in order. God enters and changes our existence when God wills it. That is what we celebrate this Advent season, sisters and brothers! God has already entered this world, amid its chaos—our not having everything quite in order—many times. Ultimately, God entered our world in the human person of Jesus Christ, into a poor, chaotic, smelly scene, a nation ruled by foreign force.

Finally, Jesus promises us that he will enter our world again on the Last Day. All we can do to be ready for the Last Day, Jesus’ return in glory, is the same thing we can do be ready for this day, for the next day, the day after that, and so on: Remember how God has intervened in our world in the past. Remember that God did not wait until we had everything in order to bring peace, justice, order, comfort, mercy. May we be at peace, knowing and reflecting on this. Our time of Advent takes us back to those beginnings even as we anticipate with hope the Last Day, Jesus’ return in glory.

Today, in the midst of Advent, we remember the beginning of God’s comfort to Israel, still in exile, through the prophet Isaiah. We remember the preaching of John the Baptist, a message of repentance and hope. We pray with the Psalmist for a time when “justice and peace will kiss each other.” We remember 2 Peter’s exhortation to remain at peace. These have been our new beginnings in history, God entering our story when we most need God, with peace, justice, order, comfort, mercy. This is the “good news” our Scriptures proclaim today, “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

Homily for Wednesday, 22 February 2023– Ash Wednesday

Readings of the day: Joel 2:12-18; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 12-13, 8-9, 14, 17; 2 Corinthians 5:20-6:2; Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18

Sisters and brothers, in a few moments we will bless and distribute ashes to remember that we are sinners before God, in need of God’s grace to live this time of Lent as a time of repentance: We turn from our sin and toward God’s mercy and love.

Yet, in Matthew’s Gospel from which we have just heard, Jesus warns against outward actions of faith or piety that draw attention to ourselves. Jesus says that, when we give alms, pray, or fast, not to do these things so that we may be seen by others, but “in secret,” so that our “Father who sees in secret may reward” us.

So, when we receive ashes and go forth from here with this sign on our foreheads, will we not be acting against everything Jesus has said in our Gospel reading today? Well, not quite: We are still acting within the spirit of what Jesus says, as long as our intention behind wearing ashes on our foreheads in public is right. In other words, the ashes we display today are not about us. They are all about God and God’s love for us.

These ashes with which we will sign ourselves today are not about doom, gloom, or how awful sinners we are. No, these ashes are our sign of joy to the world as we begin this time of Lent.

To say that the ashes we will receive are a sign of joy does not deny that we are sinners, or that there is great sin and evil in our world. On the contrary: Our ashes proclaim to our world, loud and clear, that sin is real and that we are, individually and socially, afflicted by sin.

At the same time, the ashes we show the world proclaim God’s love and mercy toward us. Think of the prayer we hear when we receive ashes on our foreheads: “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Repentance, turning from sin so we can turn toward God, is only possible because God so loves us—“God so loved the world”—that he intervened in this world, giving us his Son, human like us in all things but sin, to give us the chance to be saved. God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, so that our repentance would have a point: We turn from sin to turn toward God, to recommit to living as God has lived among us in the person of Jesus. Without God’s initiative toward our salvation in this way, we would have no reason to repent: We would turn from our sin, but toward whom, if not God?

Repentance makes sense, and our salvation is possible, only because God loves us and wants us to be with him in eternal life. Yet it is not enough for God that God wants each of us to be saved. No, God wants us to proclaim this message to the whole world. God sends us forth, today with blessed ashes as a sign of God’s love, God’s mercy toward us, to be, as St. Paul says in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, “ambassadors for Christ.”

“Now is the day of salvation,” St. Paul proclaims. We proclaim this same message with ashes as St. Paul once proclaimed in words.

Undoubtedly, we might feel (and perhaps we should feel) a hint of unworthiness to be ambassadors, messengers, prophets of God’s salvation in Christ in the way God has sent us into the world to be. The older form of the prayer when we received ashes on Ash Wednesday was from the Book of Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: “Remember that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return.”

If we are honest with ourselves, I think it will be easy for us to remember how weak and sinful we are, our world is, the human condition is, fallen from the original state in which God created and blessed us. And we will be a bit broken-hearted about our sin.

The prophet Joel says to us today, “Rend your hearts and not your clothing.” We turn to God, our hearts broken by our sin. And God turns us back out into our wanting world, saying: O redeemed sinners, whom I have brought back to myself by the blood of the cross, now go out into the world wearing ashes. These ashes are not about you, God might say to us. This season of repentance we call Lent is not about us, sisters and brothers, or about our sin. Lent and our ashes are about God sending us back out into the world to be ambassadors of God’s love, grace, and mercy, for “now is the acceptable time; see, now is the day of salvation.”

Homily for Sunday, 27 February 2022– Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Sirach 27:4-7; Psalm 92:2-3, 14-15, 15-16; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45

Teaching two Bible courses as I am this semester here at St. Joseph’s College, I am realizing something more constantly and profoundly, but that I have known for as long as I can remember. I realize how much I appreciate the Bible not only as sacred, divinely-inspired text, but as works of literature. I appreciate the different literary genres and devices in the text: Works of poetry, prose or narrative; apocalyptic literature with its often fearsome and graphic symbolism; the use of irony, metaphor, and even hyperbole.

Yes, hyperbole: The writers of the Bible were not beyond using creative, literary exaggeration to make a point. Could we say that Jesus was not beyond hyperbole, either? We hear an example of it in today’s Gospel, from Luke. Jesus asks why his disciples who have a log in their eye do not notice the log in their eye, but readily notice “the speck in [their] neighbour’s eye.” Of course, Jesus means this, quite on purpose, to evoke the most ridiculous of images in his hearers’ minds: Somebody staggering about with a massive beam in their eye. First of all, by what kind of horrendous accident would somebody have taken a log beam through the eye? (I do not even want to think about this). Second, that person needs to be admitted to emergency immediately! Third, even the person hapless enough to have been stuck with a mere speck in the eye could experience a lot of pain.

Clearly, Jesus is exaggerating the size contrast between the speck and the log to make a point. And most if not all of us understand the point he is making: Sin can inhibit not so much our literal eyesight but the insight of our consciences into our own sinfulness and weakness, so that we become much less capable of discerning our own faults than we are at pointing out the faults of other people, even when they are less significant than our own.

I notice this as a university instructor and academic: I am much better at correcting even the fine details of somebody else’s writing than I am at correcting my own. I think to myself that, all those times in school when teachers would insist that we have somebody proofread our work for us, even if we thought we were good writers: My teachers were not kidding! When I write, I appreciate somebody who is adept at spotting all the specks (and the occasional log) in my written work. At the same time, I do not think most or any of us really appreciate the “speck-spotters” we encounter outside of maybe the academic setting; people who criticize others for every little fault, who are almost certainly not without fault themselves. But do we realize readily when we become the pedantic “speck-spotters”?

With the log and speck in the eye scenario, Jesus uses analogy and hyperbole to make a point that is very relatable to our everyday lives; to our experience as Jesus’ disciples. And Jesus introduces the log-and-speck saying with another parable, which also includes an element of hyperbole. He asks, “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into the pit? Like the log-and-speck analogy, the proverb of the blind person guiding another blind person plants a ridiculous image in our minds. “Can a blind person guide a blind person”? Jesus’ question is purposely designed to draw from us a decisive answer: “No, of course not”!

That is, we lean decisively toward answering “no” to whether a blind person can guide a blind person, until we change our perspective on this little hyperbolic proverb; until we think about it from the perspective of a blind person. Mary McGlone, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet in St. Louis who writes for the National Catholic Reporter in the U.S., asks whether another blind person might, in some situations, in fact be the best possible guide or teacher for a blind person. Somebody who is blind, says Sr. Mary McGlone, may in fact “be the best teacher of the blind”; the one who best understands “the challenges blind people have to overcome… A sighted teacher might talk about a white cane; the non-sighted teacher realizes that the learner [if the learner has never been able to see] has no concept of whiteness” or colour.

Today’s Gospel parables (or, really, proverbs that use hyperbole for effect), part of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, are all about changing our perspective. They are a good preparation for Lent, which, by the way, begins this upcoming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. In Lent, we speak of changing our perspective; changing our minds (which is the literal meaning of the Greek word metanoia that our Gospels use for “repentance”). And today’s Gospel reading gives us an opportunity, sisters and brothers, to practice this change of perspective; this change of mind and heart; this repentance to believe in and live the Good News that is essential to Christian discipleship.

Jesus invites us to change our perspective; our minds and our hearts; to repent. Even if we have not sinned (at least since our last confession); even if we are not blind: Think the word of God; interpret it; live it from the perspective of the blind person; from the perspective of the sinner. This is the only way to be a true, authentic disciple of Jesus and not a hypocrite.

Incidentally, the word “hypocrite,” one of Jesus’ most frequent reproofs in the Gospels, evokes somebody playing a part, pretending to be somebody or something that person is not; literally-speaking, one under a mask, as an actor in theatre in Jesus’ time. A hypocrite is somebody consumed by playing a part that is not them; that is not authentic. A hypocrite plays the part of one without sin; pretends that he or she is not a sinner. A hypocrite is unable (or unwilling) to interpret; to live; to be a disciple of Jesus and a person of God from the perspective of the blind; the weak; the sinner. A hypocrite becomes unwilling to change one’s perspective, one’s heart and mind, in the way Jesus asks of us.

Hypocrisy, if we think about it in this way, is a serious sin, if only because Jesus himself, although he never sinned, is the model for us of shifting perspective. Jesus became human, one like us in all things but sin. In so doing, Jesus saw the world from our perspective, the point of view of us sinners; the blind; the weak; the perspective ultimately of looking upon us and the world from the cross. Jesus is the model for us of metanoia, even though he never committed any sin.

And we celebrate this every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist. Every Mass, we begin our Eucharistic celebration by changing our perspective. We begin every Mass not by looking for the specks in the eyes of our neighbour while ignoring any potential logs in ours, but by praying, “I confess to almighty God… Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We pray for God’s mercy even if we are guilty of no sin, even if we have just been to confession minutes before Mass.

Why? We begin our Eucharistic celebration this way because none of this is about our sin. None of this is about us at all. All of it is about God, in Jesus Christ, having chosen freely to live from our perspective, that of our human nature weakened; blinded by sin, so that we might change our perspective to be more like that of God. That perspective of God is not one that seeks the faults of others to condemn them, but one that has mercy on our faults and seeks what is good in us, so that we might be saved.

Maybe paradoxically, we change our perspective to be more from God’s point of view of loving mercy toward us by changing our perspective to empathize more with one another and our weaknesses; our blindness; our susceptibility to sin. Sometimes the best teacher of the blind is another blind person! But how do we do this? In one word: Listen.

The Book of Sirach, from which we hear today, invites us to listen before we speak. To speak without listening first; without searching, as well as we are able, for good will in the other person first, is to reveal too soon where we lack wisdom. It is to reveal our faults; our sins. It is to reveal our uncanny ability to correct the work of others much better than we are able to correct our own. It is to reveal the ridiculousness of the logs in our own eyes while we spot the specks in the eyes of our sisters and brothers. It is to reveal our hypocrisy.

Instead, the word of God urges us—starting with me, first and foremost—to listen, to empathize, to discern good will in our sister; our brother, to change our minds and hearts (to repent!) before trying to change another person. This is authentic faith. This is wisdom. This is the way of the Good News of Jesus Christ that we celebrate and try to live, here and now.

Homily for Tuesday, 16 March 2021– Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 47:1-9, 12; Psalm 46:2-3, 5-6, 8-9; John 5:1-16

Do our readings today not give us, as is common especially during these high points of the Church’s year like Lent, an almost overwhelming amount of detail?

I visited the Holy Land and Jerusalem in 2013 during our Basilian Peace and Justice Pilgrimage with my confrère [and then-coordinator of the Basilian Centre for Justice and Peace,] Fr. Bob Holmes. I think the reason Pope Paul VI referred to the Holy Land as “the fifth Gospel” (Pope Benedict XVI echoed Paul VI in this sentiment more recently) is apparent for people who have visited the Holy Land: I will cherish memories of seeing these holy sites forever, or at least until (perhaps) my next visit…

The scene John’s Gospel sets for us today is near the Sheep Gate, at a pool whose Hebrew name is “Beth-zatha” or Bethesda. John plants in our minds a vision of a rather sophisticated pool, one with “five porticoes,” but also in this scene, John says, there “lay many invalids,” including the man who had been laying there “for thirty-eight years” and whom Jesus asks, “Do you want to be made well”?

Since I enjoy finding out the meanings especially of names of people and places, I find it fascinating that “Beth-zatha” or Bethesda mean “house of mercy” or “house of grace.” This could be a touch of irony from John, since the Pool of Beth-zatha was known, as John points out, to be a gathering place for the sick, “blind, lame, and paralyzed.” Despite its sophisticated structure, and the fact it was a major water supply for Jerusalem in Jesus’ time, with multiple deep pools joined by a system of locks or dams, the presence of the sick made it a place of dis-grace to the more well-off people of Jerusalem of the time; it was the opposite of the “house of grace” that Beth-zatha’s name suggests.

But by his healing of the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel, Jesus turns the ironic dis-grace of this place, and that of the paralyzed man personally, into a moment and place of grace and mercy. This also brings me to a memory from my own ministry: When I lived in Rochester, I often said Mass at a homeless shelter called House of Mercy, in a hardscrabble part of the city. House of Mercy is still run by the indomitable Sr. Grace Miller, a Sister of Mercy. It is a present-day Beth-zatha, a House of Mercy and, well, a house of grace for more reasons than the name of its founder and director.

The Biblical Beth-zatha is also near the beginning of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. Here, where Jesus healed the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel, he would begin his Way of the Cross. Again, a place of our dis-grace; our sin; our sickness would, starting from this place, be transformed—on a Sabbath, no less, as in today’s Gospel—into a place of grace, mercy, and salvation by our Lord.

Jesus, clearly, develops a reputation for transforming dis-grace; lack of mercy; sin; sickness; paralysis into grace, mercy, wellness, physical and spiritual movement and vigour. He does so for the paralyzed man in today’s Gospel and, soon thereafter, Jesus would do so for us, by giving his own life, beginning his Way of the Cross at the pool by the Sheep Gate called House of Mercy or House of Grace: Our Beth-zatha.

Homily for Friday, 28 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 34:11-16; Psalm 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6; Romans 5:5b-11; Luke 15:3b-7

What is mercy? What images can we think of that express the mercy of God?

We have prayed for the last nine days before a great image of God’s mercy, that of Jesus’ Most Sacred Heart. At the conclusion of this novena we have been celebrating here at St. Kateri Parish, in this St. Margaret Mary Church, named for one of the most important promoters of the worship of the Sacred Heart, we celebrate this Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with this Eucharist. The image of the Most Sacred Heart is most often that of the heart of Jesus, crowned with thorns, topped with a cross and burning fire, wounded and bleeding out of loving mercy for us.

This past week, my brother Basilian Fr. Kevin Mannara, Director of Campus Ministry at St. John Fisher College, took me on a tour of the lovely new Hermance Family Chapel of St. Basil the Great on campus. One of the too many highlights to count of the new chapel at Fisher is the large cross behind and above the sanctuary: Seven feet from the top of Jesus’ head to his toes, and seven feet from fingertip to fingertip, with Jesus’ arms spread wide on the cross. But it is Jesus’ gaze from the cross upon us, either the people who approach to receive communion at the foot of the sanctuary steps or priests, deacons, servers, or anybody preparing to enter the sanctuary at the beginning of Mass or exit it after Mass, that perhaps most strikingly expresses the Lord’s mercy. It is as though Jesus, crucified but still alive as he is shown on the cross in the Chapel of St. Basil the Great, is at the moment of saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” before he gives up his spirit.

Jesus’ gaze of mercy from this cross is so intensely beautiful as to be unnerving to anybody who should look up at Jesus’ face. There is nothing quite like a penetrating stare-down of mercy from our crucified Lord to express the depth of God’s saving love for us and all creation. The gaze of Jesus from the cross in the Hermance Family Chapel of St. Basil the Great is also inspired by and meant to evoke Pope Francis’ motto as a bishop, in turn derived from a text by the Venerable Bede: Miserando atque eligendo, literally, “By having mercy and by choosing.”

Our readings today propose for us yet another image of God’s mercy, that of a shepherd. Compared to a bleeding, wounded heart crowned with thorns and topped with a cross and flames, or a giant sculpture of the crucified Jesus gazing intensely into our eyes when we look up at him from in front of a church’s sanctuary steps, shepherds may not necessarily have the same unnerving quality to them. But then when was the last time anybody here has seen a shepherd? Shepherds may not be as unnerving an image to us as a bleeding, wounded, thorn-crowned, flame-and-cross-topped heart, or a sculpture of a crucified man gazing right into our eyes, but shepherds still share a strange, mysterious quality with these other depictions of God’s mercy.

And, if we listen more attentively to our readings today, a shepherd, or at least Jesus depicted as a shepherd, can be just as unnerving as Jesus’ wounded heart with thorns, a cross, and fire, or Christ crucified gazing into our eyes. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks, “Who ‘among you having a hundred sheep and losing one of them would not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after the lost one until he finds it’”? If we were among the first hearers of this parable, our answer, if we were in our right mind, would probably have been something like this: “Nobody, Lord. No sensible shepherd would leave ninety-nine of one hundred sheep to search the desert for one lost sheep. What an almost unnervingly ridiculous question”!

Yet if we think of God’s history of loving mercy toward us and all creation, dating back to the very first moments of creation, God’s history with us has been one of unnervingly ridiculous loving mercy, of leaving the ninety-nine sheep to search the desert for the one lost sheep. One of my favorite retreat talks of all time by the late founder of l’Arche, Jean Vanier, focuses on God’s first response to Adam’s and Eve’s sin of eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Jean Vanier invites the retreatants to remember the first directly-spoken words of God in the Bible. When nobody on the retreat is able to remember the first words God speaks in the Bible, Vanier gives the silenced group the answer: God says to Adam and Eve, “Where are you”? “God does not say to them, ‘You’re bad,’” Vanier emphasizes; God asks, “Where are you”?

From this earliest point in the history of God-with-us; Mercy-with-us, our ridiculously loving, merciful God has been leaving the “ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance”—in fact, this image is itself ridiculous, because each and every one of us, at one point or another, has been and will be in “need of repentance”—to seek out the few lost, vulnerable ones in the desert, beyond the pasture or garden: “Where are you”?

Still early in our history as a people of God, God-with-us; Mercy-with-us sent us prophets like Ezekiel, from whom we hear today, to speak God’s ridiculously unnerving loving-mercy to us. Ezekiel speaks to us from a time not, sadly, too different from our own in many respects, even and especially in our Church, when the elites in positions of power; those positioned to shepherd God’s people in God’s place, instead misled, scattered, wounded, and deceived the people. These bad shepherds, abusers of power, were more concerned with protecting their own power and afraid of appearing ridiculous by having mercy on the people they served; by going out, seeking and bringing back the most vulnerable purposefully and preferentially. So Ezekiel, speaking for God, promises the people; promises us: “The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal, but the sleek and strong I will destroy, shepherding them rightly.”

Ezekiel’s vision of a shepherd God would not be so ridiculous, or possibly unnerving, if Ezekiel were to restrict his vision of whom is to be shepherded to the people who were, for the most part, faithful to God, strong and morally upright. But no, Ezekiel’s vision is of a God who preferentially seeks out, brings back, and heals “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick” and destroys those who think they are among “the sleek and the strong” (or allows them to destroy themselves by their own pride).

St. Paul’s letter to the Romans takes Ezekiel’s “preferential option,” if you will, for “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick” to yet another level. St. Paul proposes for our belief, our worship as Christians, an unnervingly, ridiculously merciful God. St. Paul proposes for our worship a God and God’s Son, Jesus Christ, who did not shepherd only the worthy; those who would never stray far from pasture. St. Paul proposes for our worship a God who, in the person of God’s Son Jesus Christ, died for us “while we were still sinners… while we were enemies” of God and of one another.

My sisters and brothers, the readings we hear today on this Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the images themselves that we might associate with this celebration, put before us a God of unnervingly ridiculous, extravagant mercy: The shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one lost sheep; who preferentially seeks out “the lost… the strayed… the injured… the sick”; who dies for us “while we were still sinners… while we were enemies.” We worship and we celebrate on this day the unnervingly ridiculous God-with-us, Mercy-with-us, who gazes intensely into our eyes from the cross; whose wounded heart bleeds and is ablaze with love for us and who, in that great mercy of God that God calls us to imitate among ourselves, chooses us for his own.

Homily for Thursday, 16 August 2018– Ferial

Thursday of the 20th Week in Ordinary Time


Optional Memorial of St. Stephen of Hungary

Readings of the day: Ezekiel 12:1-12, 12-15, 18-22; Psalm 78:56-57, 58-59, 61-62; Matthew 18:21-19:1

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

How might poetry help us to put ourselves in Peter’s place in today’s Gospel; to empathize with Peter? And then how might a bit of background in poetry, specifically the poetry of the Old Testament prophet Amos, help us better to understand Jesus’ invitation to Peter to unlimited forgiveness?

When we think of Peter the Apostle, we might imagine him as a humble fisherman. We might imagine Peter, as one of Jesus’ best friends, hand-picked by Jesus to lead the community of Jesus’ disciples, the Church, after Jesus’ ascension to heaven. But I do not think we often imagine Peter as a poet.

Having said this, Peter the fisherman-turned-head of the Church was no slouch at poetry, or at Scripture for that matter. A faithful Jew of the time like Peter may well have known by heart a text like that at the beginning of the Book of Amos, and the culture behind it, in which Amos poetically condemns the nations that were Israel’s enemies: “For three times and for four.” In other words, one way of interpreting Amos is that God would forgive Israel’s enemies, and expected Israel to forgive its enemies, up to “three times and… four.”

And so Peter may have been creating a poetic parody of Amos as he asked Jesus, “How often would I forgive? As many as seven times”? Seven times were far beyond the “three times and for four” that Amos asked Israel to forgive its enemies. We may want to give Peter the benefit of the doubt more often than we do in our Christian tradition. Peter was already perhaps suggesting to Jesus that forgiveness and mercy meant going beyond the minimal demands of the Jewish Law and prophets: Forgive not only “three times and for four,” but “up to seven times.”

As a great teacher and pastor does, Jesus recognizes that his student and best friend, Peter, is on the right track, and then leads him toward an even greater truth. To forgive “three times and for four” is good. Peter’s proposal to go beyond “three times and for four” is better, not to mention his is an astute application of the poetry of Amos. But unlimited forgiveness is best: Not only “three times and for four”; “not seven times but seventy-seven times.” If Peter shows himself a decent poet and student of prophets like Amos, Jesus is even better. Jesus, as the Son of God, is the teacher and pastor of poets; of apostles; of each of us.

What, then, are our greatest strengths? Maybe not all of us are poets, or apostles, or teachers, or prophets. Perhaps not all of us would consider ourselves great at forgiving and reconciling with one another. But our Lord, gently if somewhat poetically, knows and uses our greatest strengths to lead us to something even better: Not only “three times and for four”; “not seven times but seventy-seven times.” Today, Jesus takes Peter’s greatest strengths to deepen his sense of forgiveness; of mercy. And today, Jesus takes our greatest strengths and leads us beyond our limits to be closer to God who, as we know, is limitless.