Homily for Friday, 15 April 2022– Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:15-53:12; Psalm 31:6, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 25; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

St. Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians in an unexpected way. He proclaims Jesus Christ as God, not because of Jesus’ great miracles or signs of his divinity. No, St. Paul’s starting point in 1 Corinthians—the focus of his claim that Jesus Christ is God, and that in fact no earthly or heavenly power has any power; any wisdom of its own, but owes all power and all wisdom to Jesus Christ; to our one God—is the cross. “We proclaim Christ crucified,” St. Paul says, “to those who are called… the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Today we focus, as St. Paul once did from the beginning of his first letter to the Corinthians, on the cross. We, too, today, “proclaim Christ crucified.” We have before us (and will process up to adore it in a few moments) a cross: A brutally simple symbol of death. In Jesus’ time, in lands like Palestine that were occupied by the Romans, the public display of crucified criminals, if they were not Roman citizens, was somewhat common. It was a humiliating, painful way to die; a terrifying public display of Roman state power.

“We proclaim Christ crucified”; we proclaim Jesus Christ who, by his cross, disempowered Imperial Rome; disempowered the religious leaders of his own people who had him put to death; disempowered the cross as a sign of visible humiliation and death; transformed the cross into the ultimate sign of life.

In John’s Gospel account of Jesus’ passion, which we hear today, Jesus is in charge from start to finish. Jesus is the source and focus of power; all other powers are emptied of their power. We begin in a garden “across the Kidron valley” from Jerusalem. John does not name this garden, as the other Gospels do. Instead, John’s setting of the garden, “across the Kidron valley,” calls to mind the powers of evil ambition who tried to kill King David and take over Israel’s throne. David flees his own son, Absalom, across the same Kidron valley. Absalom is killed in battle; David’s kingship survives. Jesus, Son of David and Son of God, will be all the more victorious.

Jesus does not so much flee the people who arrest him, led by Judas, the apostle-turned-traitor, but he meets this mob and willingly reveals himself to them—twice—in the garden across the Kidron valley: “I am he.” The mob that has come to arrest Jesus has no power over him. Here I think we can empathize with Peter as he lashes out with his sword and cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, Malchus: Mindless, panic-driven violence. But Jesus heals Malchus’ ear; violence is emptied of its power.

Jesus is bound and taken to the high priests, Annas and Caiaphas. Inside, where Jesus is on trial before the high priest, he testifies to the openness of his teaching, “in synagogues and in the temple… I have said nothing in secret.” Outside, Peter just as openly fulfills Jesus’ prediction that he would deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed. But neither the sham trial inside the high priests’ quarters, nor Peter’s denials outside, in the high priest’s courtyard, of ever having known Jesus, will have any power over Jesus.

Even Pilate knows this truth. Pilate asks, “What is truth”? The truths before Pilate at Jesus’ Roman trial are many: Jesus has done no wrong. Pilate can “find no case against him.” Jesus is truly a king, but one whose royal power is not from this world, because it created and sustains this world. Caesar, Pilate’s king, and Pilate himself, are powerless before the God-ruler of the universe: “You would have no power over me unless it has been given you from above.”

But Jesus submits to these earthly powers to transform them; to transform the death they will inflict (and still inflict) into eternal life. The crucified Jesus disempowers and transforms the powers of this world from the cross by giving his mother into the care of his “beloved disciple.” Jesus entrusts his Church, beginning with his mother, to us, beloved disciples, sisters and brothers, even though we are also weak sinners. The crucified Jesus disempowers and transforms even our sin, so that we are no less than redeemed, beloved disciples, all of us.

And, finally, Jesus gives up his spirit. Jesus’ victory over death itself “is finished.” He has been in charge, from start to finish. Yet even after death, Jesus’ transformation and overcoming of the powers of this world, even death itself, continue to be revealed. Nicodemus, who had met Jesus by night, now joins Joseph of Arimathea in asking Pilate for and laying Jesus’ body in the tomb. Nicodemus, in a way he was not previously able to grasp, is “born again” along with Joseph into the light of this victory that only has the appearance of death; failure; darkness. By Jesus’ death we, too, like Joseph and Nicodemus, are “born again”; redeemed; saved. Death no longer has power, over Jesus or over us.

And so “we proclaim Christ crucified.”

“We worship you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your cross you have redeemed the world.”

Homily for Sunday, 21 November 2021– Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Readings of the day: Daniel 7:13-14; Psalm 93:1, 1-2, 5; Revelation 1:5-8; John 18:33b-37

I am not sure how many of us realize this: When we pray the Nicene Creed, as we will in a few moments, we mention only three human beings by name; three people in the whole Creed. The first two are more obvious: Jesus and Mary. But the third human figure mentioned in the Creed is Pontius Pilate.

Pontius Pilate, according to ancient Roman records and those of Flavius Josephus, a Roman-Jewish historian of the time, was not whom we might consider a good, benevolent, much less effective ruler. He was Governor of the Roman province of Judea for about ten years, coinciding with the passion and death of Jesus. Pilate was known for impulsive and brutal acts of violence toward anybody he saw as a threat to his own or imperial Roman authority. This impulsiveness and brutality was possibly his downfall; Josephus records his suppression of “an armed Samaritan movement at Mount Gerizim” that resulted in Pilate’s removal by Caesar Tiberias (although maybe a comfortable retirement; this is unclear) as Governor of Judea. Pontius Pilate has been portrayed frequently as somewhat of a coward in art and speech: The term “to wash one’s hands” of responsibility for a decision derives from Pilate’s evasion of responsibility for Jesus’ condemnation to death by washing his hands.

But Jesus was no threat to Pontius Pilate’s, or Roman, authority. Pilate knew this, or so it would seem by his provocation of the Jewish authorities who had brought Jesus to him under the charge that he claimed to be a king; equivalent to Caesar; a threat to Roman authority. Can we not hear Pilate mocking the Jewish authorities who brought Jesus to him bound? “Ecce Homo,” Pilate sneers, “Behold the man”! Behold, this Jesus of Nazareth: “Really? A king? A threat to Caesar? Maybe this Jesus of Nazareth is a threat to my afternoon power nap, but he is no threat to Caesar’s or my authority.”

Yet Pilate also knew to humour the Jewish authorities who had disturbed him with such rabble. He had Jesus scourged—a beating that, even if it were not followed by crucifixion, would often be enough to kill a condemned person—and then presented him to the crowd: “Do you wish to irritate me further? Well, then, behold your ‘king,’ bloodied and on the point of death. Take him yourselves and crucify him”! Just to be sure, though, Pilate takes Jesus to his seat of judgment, and asks him the questions that are at the centre of today’s Gospel proclamation, from John. Pilate’s questions to Jesus are at the very centre of today’s Solemnity of Jesus Christ, King of the Universe: “Are you the king of the Jews?”…“So, you are a king”?

Jesus gives Pilate, and us, the key answer about his kingly identity: “My kingdom is not of this world… You say I am a king.” But what does Jesus mean when he says his kingdom “is not of this world”? If Pilate, a pagan Roman governor, struggled to understand a kingship “not of this world,” let me venture to say that our world, and maybe especially our Church, have struggled all the more since Jesus’ answer to Pilate to understand and apply what Jesus meant.

We can point to many instances in our Church’s history that show our Church’s often tense relationship with worldly power and authority; when and how it has claimed that authority for itself. Let me be clear: I am not saying (far from it!) that any claim or exercise by our Church of authority “of this world” is bad. Often it is necessary and even good. Yet our papacy and concepts of the ministry of the pope, bishops, and priests have historical foundations in challenging, but also often mimicking monarchical (absolute royal) forms of government; power; authority.

“My kingdom is not of this world”: Our struggle not to identify Jesus, much less the pope or other Church leaders, with worldly royalty goes back to the crowds in our Gospels who wanted to take Jesus away to make him king. Even our celebration today of “Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe” is historically grounded in our Church’s often tense relationship with worldly powers, if not its identification as a worldly power in its own right.

Today’s celebration of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe dates back in our Church to December 11, 1925. On that day, Pope Pius XI proclaimed this Solemnity of Christ the King in an encyclical letter to the bishops of the Church, Quas Primas (“In the First”; the title of any Church document is derived from its first words). Why “In the First”? “The First” there refers to Pius XI’s first encyclical letter, entitled Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio (“When in the Inscrutable Designs of God,” published just before Christmas, 1922), in which the pope lamented the “manifold evils in the world… due to the fact that the majority of people had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives.” If these evils continued, said Pius XI, “there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.” What did Pius XI propose as a solution to this problem? He created this Solemnity of Christ the King as a counterweight to “individuals and states [that] refused to submit to the rule of our Saviour.”

Also debated at the time was the so-called “Roman question”: Should the Church be granted sovereign rule over a physical territory, much like any nation state in our world? The Church had lost its rule over the Papal States in the second half of the 1800s. Then there was the massacre of World War I. Finally (and through a complicated and controversial process), in 1929 the Vatican City State as we know it today was created through a Church treaty with Mussolini’s Italy. The Church had its sovereign rule over a (very small) physical territory, just like any other nation state, and political and diplomatic independence from Italy and other nations. We see the tension in this: On the one hand, our Church had become a power sovereign over a physical territory and, by Church law, the pope enjoys universal jurisdiction over the whole Church but, on the other hand, we worship a king, Jesus Christ, whose “kingdom is not of this world.”

So what kind of kingdom or kingship is the kingdom or kingship of Jesus? Many if not most portrayals of Jesus as king, from the Infant of Prague with the sceptre in one hand and a globe in the other, or the icon of Jesus, Ruler of All (“Pantokrator”) show Jesus much like the monarchs of this world; they portray Jesus as the kind of worldly king he actively resisted becoming during his earthly lifetime.

“My kingdom is not of this world.” But even the readings we have just heard for this Mass witness to the limits of human language around kingship, especially when we apply kingship to Jesus; to God. We hear today of Daniel’s vision of “one like a son of man” (a common royal, messianic title in our Bible, which Jesus even uses of himself) who will have dominion over the universe: “His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed.”

Our Psalm, one of our Bible’s beautiful “royal Psalms,” speaks of the LORD as king, “robed in majesty… girded with strength.” The Book of Revelation speaks, at the beginning and end of our reading today, of Jesus as “ruler of the kings of the earth… ‘The Alpha and the Omega’… who is and who was and who is to come.” I find it fascinating, though, that, between these two statements about Jesus’ everlasting kingship, Revelation also affirms that we have a share in Christ’s kingship: Christ “made us a kingdom, priests serving his God and Father.”

How can we, as worldly creatures, have a share in Jesus’ kingdom that “is not of this world”? The simplest answer to this question, which Revelation gives us, is three words long: “By his blood.” Jesus is King of the Universe, not because he holds any traits of a worldly king. He has no physical territory to govern, no throne, no sceptre. He has no globe in his hands, but only the cruel marks of nails in his hands and feet by which he has saved our universe and everything and every creature in it.

“By his blood”… “My kingdom is not of this world.” And, by his blood, we have a share, sisters and brothers, in the kingship of Jesus Christ that indwells this world, and will fully so on the day of the Lord’s return in glory, but “is not of this world.” We share, by our baptism, a priesthood. And I do not mean the priesthood of the ordained (people like me); I mean priesthood in the sense of our having a share and a responsibility in the communication of the presence of God—the “other-worldly”—to this world by the way we live. Our priesthood and, in a perfect way, the one priesthood of Jesus Christ, is a priesthood of servant leadership. Our priesthood, in all we say, act, and do, serves God by serving and loving one another, to the point where we would be prepared to give our lives for one another, as Christ did for us.

This is the kingship of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. This is the kingship in which we share “by his blood”; a kingship evermore indwelling our world but not of this world; a kingship that is the only kingship that will save us, this universe, and everything and every creature in it.

Homily for Friday, 2 April 2021– Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:15-53:12; Psalm 31:6, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 25; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

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

Let me, if we will, propose two key terms, freedom and solidarity, through which we might remember the events we do today, of the Passion and death of our Lord Jesus.

In his recent reflection for Good Friday in America Magazine, published by the Jesuits in the U.S., Fr. Terrance Klein, a priest of Dodge City, Kansas, asks what exactly God might have willed in allowing Jesus to go to his death, on a cross no less. Did, or could God, in fact, will his Son Jesus’ death in this horrific and humiliating way? This question may be both a common puzzle for us as Christian faithful and a major obstacle, Fr. Klein says, to non-believers: Who would want to believe in a God who would will, or at least allow, his Son to undergo a death like this?

Yet John’s Gospel today invites us to behold not so much God as a Father who would will or permit his Son to be given up to death, but the Son, Jesus, as freely in command of his self-sacrifice on the cross to its final moment, when “it is finished.” Our faith proclaims this freedom of Jesus; the freedom, Jesus says of himself at one point in John’s Gospel, to lay down his life and “to take it up again.”

And, if we go all the way back to the first moments of creation, we see that, of all the creatures God created, God willed from the very beginning to give us the same freedom God has. This is quite remarkable! This was and is also quite risky on God’s part: God gave us the freedom that nobody else but God has, to accept and to love whom God has made us to be or to reject and to hate this; to accept and love God; to accept and love one another as God loves us, or to reject and refuse to love God and one another.

When we have chosen to misuse the freedom God gave us to accept and love or to reject and refuse to love—this to some extent willing rejection and refusal to love, we might call sin—God has not rejected us in turn, although God was free to do so. No, God has responded to our sin by continually calling to us and being with us in history, through the Law and the prophets and, finally, by becoming like us in all but sin in the person of Jesus Christ. And we remember today how Jesus, Son of God, completed his free act of solidarity with us sinners: By redeeming us from all our sin, our rejection, our violence and hatred; by submitting to all this at the hands of sinners, on a cross, and transforming this into our ultimate good; the only possible means of our salvation.

“It is finished” now, this free act of God of solidarity with us, the only way we can be freed from sin and saved. We are witnesses, this and every Good Friday, to God’s re-creation of us, as remarkable as God’s first act of creating us with God’s own freedom. We are witnesses to this renewed freedom God has given us to love, to accept, to enter into solidarity with one another, especially anybody in any way disadvantaged, rejected, or abandoned in our world, as God freely entered into solidarity with us; as God freely took on our human experiences of joy and sorrow; good and evil; life, death, and resurrection, we pray, to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 14 February 2021– Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Leviticus 13:1-2, 45-46; Psalm 32:1-2, 5, 11; 1 Corinthians 10:32-11:1; Mark 1:40-45

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

Is the exchange between the “man with leprosy” and Jesus in Mark’s Gospel today not remarkable?

“If you choose, you can make me clean,” the man with leprosy pleads with Jesus. “I do choose. Be made clean,” Jesus says to the man.

Our reading today from the Book of Leviticus gives us the context in Jewish Law of the conversation between the man with leprosy and Jesus in today’s Gospel. The religious law about leprosy and all kinds of skin diseases is outlined in great detail in Leviticus. If anybody had a disease like leprosy, not only did they have to contend with the disfigurement brought on by these diseases and the lack of knowledge and effective treatments for them but, Leviticus says, they were to tear their clothes, “let the hair of their head be dishevelled… cover their upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’” A person with one of these diseases was to isolate him or herself from other people and “live alone with their dwelling outside the camp.”

Now, before we judge the laws in Leviticus that required people with leprosy and similar skin diseases to isolate themselves from other people too harshly, might we place ourselves in the context of the people of Israel of the time? A disease like leprosy, especially when it was seen to be contagious, would have caused fear among the people. The spread of disease could be difficult to control, especially in a nomadic people like Leviticus describes. The most ancient people of Israel tended to live in tents in small groups or camps that moved often. More permanent settlements, as in cities or towns, tended to be small. And without effective medicines and doctors as we know them today, the religious elites—the priests—were the most educated people in these ancient societies. The people turned to them for the best advice not only on religious matters but for practical knowledge, too, like treating disease.

Still, can we not put ourselves in the place of a person in ancient Israel who was affected by one of these diseases, who had to isolate from society, even from loved ones, and “live alone… outside the camp”? For about a year now, we have been in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic. Many people, maybe many of us, know somebody who has had to self-isolate, either because she or he was sick, or was in contact with somebody who was sick, or returned from international travel. Governments and media (rightly, I think) report the latest numbers of people infected with COVID, numbers of deaths, rates of transmission and positive tests, and so on. But do we find maybe that the mental health toll of this pandemic goes more unnoticed than the rates of physical illness? Even if this is necessary for disease control, people are isolated; restricted from seeing family and loved ones. Others suffer and die alone. Like no other disease in memory for most or all of us, COVID has caused widespread fear and anxiety. And we have the science and medical expertise and treatments that the people of ancient Israel did not.

With this in mind, let us return to the conversation between Jesus and the man with leprosy in today’s Gospel: “If you choose”… “I do choose. Be made clean.” When we hear Jesus’ healing of this man with leprosy, or other actions of Jesus that challenge rules or taboos, how many of us think that this is awfully bold of Jesus to do so? I think we are right to think this; Jesus is bold, in this and other instances, to challenge rules or taboos or, more precisely, to orient us toward the heart of any good law or social or moral practice, which is to uphold human dignity and a common good.

But may I say that the man with leprosy in today’s Gospel is just as bold in challenging the established rules or taboos as Jesus is in the encounter between them in today’s Gospel? This man is bold enough to kneel before Jesus and ask him, before Jesus says a word, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Did this man know Jesus before this encounter, or did he know of Jesus’ reputation as a great preacher and healer? Was he simply desperate to be healed and reintegrated into the community? It is hard to say. Would the man not have known that, by approaching Jesus for healing, he himself was acting against the Jewish Law, the Law of Leviticus, which demanded he be isolated?

And the man with leprosy surely knew that Jesus owed him nothing; Jesus was as bound by the Law to keep distance from people with diseases like leprosy as the man with leprosy was. Yet the man asks Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Would the man with leprosy have been just as surprised as anybody—as we may be to hear these words in our Gospel reading—to hear Jesus reply the way he did: “I do choose. Be made clean”?

The man’s bold but unassuming request of Jesus, “If you choose” can only be met by Jesus’ just-as-bold response, “I do choose. Be made clean.” Jesus does not pause and count the cost of his choice to heal the man with leprosy. In fact, Mark’s Gospel says, “Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him.” My sisters and brothers, “moved with pity” is a rough translation of the Greek, which means something closer to (literally) “moved to his very depths.” The same Greek verb would be used to refer to the state of one’s gut when eating food that didn’t agree with us!

How many of us have heard of, or ever had, a “gut feeling,” as in, “I just knew in my gut that this was the right thing to do.” How often have we heard of people hailed as heroes for saving somebody’s life or acting in a situation dangerous to themselves, who say something like, “I was just trusting my gut. I’m no hero”?

By touching the man with leprosy, Jesus may have realized that he risked entering the same state of the man he touched to heal: He, too, could have been considered “unclean” and been shunned from the community. Yet what begins with Jesus’ “gut feeling” ends with a conscious choice: “I do choose. Be made clean.” Something in the letter of the Law is less important than this man’s health; this man’s dignity as a child of God; this man’s belonging to a social and faith community; this man’s wholeness.

But if we follow Jesus through our Gospels, this move from “gut feeling” to conscious choice for another’s good is a typical pattern of action for Jesus. His healing of the man with leprosy is only one instance of this greater pattern. Have we ever noticed, when we pray the Eucharistic Prayer we will pray in a few moments that, when we commemorate Jesus’ Passion, death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, we remember what Jesus did to save us as a willing action of God: “Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church and, recognizing the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcile us to yourself, grant that we, who are nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son and filled with his Holy Spirit, may become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

The former Master of the Dominican order, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, in his book on the Mass called “Why Go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist,” reflects on how Jesus willed to save us: Jesus “willed to reconcile us to” God by taking the place of the man with leprosy; taking our place; taking the place of everybody who has ever had to make their dwelling “outside the camp,” as Leviticus puts it. In fact, Jesus went so far, in his willingness to save us, that he would choose to die for us, says Fr. Radcliffe, “outside the camp”; outside the city walls of Jerusalem, on Golgotha, on a cross. And we remember this as the very reason for this Eucharistic celebration, every time we celebrate Mass.

Who, then, are the people to whom this willing act for our salvation by our Lord is calling to us to reach out? Who are the ostracized; the isolated; those “outside the camp”; the serious sinners; those outside the good graces of the Church, for whatever reason, in fact or because they simply feel unwelcome; the sick, physically but also mentally and spiritually, of our time and our experience? Have we ever had a “gut feeling”; been “moved with pity”? If this has been or will ever be our experience, to what extent have we or will we allow our “gut feeling” of what is right become bold action, putting ourselves at risk of being sent “outside the camp” ourselves? To what extent are we willing to echo those first words of Jesus to the man with leprosy: I do choose?