Homily for Sunday, 24 December 2023– Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year B

Readings of the day: 2 Samuel 7:1-5, 8b-12, 14a, 16; Psalm 89:2-3, 4-5, 27, 29; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38

I do not wish to dampen our mood too much. But traveling around this City of Edmonton—walking around the neighbourhood where I live, seeing the poverty and the homelessness; seeing the encampments of homeless people whenever I drive through downtown—quickly makes me sad these days. How do we respond to the many complex social problems that lead to more people without adequate shelter, more people with mental and physical health challenges, addictions; more people living in tents where their safety and sometimes the safety of the public is at risk?

Sisters and brothers, there are no easy answers to these questions. But I often wonder: If I; if we were able to contribute to enough social services and to the building of enough affordable housing for everybody who needs shelter in this city—or even just one person each—would we?

Today, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, which happens to fall this year on the day before Christmas, we hear the noble idea of King David in the Second Book of Samuel: He wants to build God a house! Now, if King David lived in our time and place, I might want to ask him if I were in the place of, say, his prophet Nathan: It is wonderful that you want to build a house for God. But are all the poor, the marginalized in your kingdom sheltered, fed, cared for?

Old Testament tradition presents David as a good king (with some very significant flaws). So it is probable—and the Bible points to this in places—that David did care for, feed, and shelter the poor, as well as look after the spiritual needs of his people. If any king in ancient Israel were close to worthy to build a house for God, having done his best to care for his human subjects, it was David.

In 2 Samuel the prophet Nathan seems to agree with this. He approves David’s plan: “Go, do all you have in mind, for the LORD is with you.” But then, that night, we hear, God appears to Nathan and vetoes the king’s plan. David is not to build God a house. Instead, God will “make for [David] a great name,” an everlasting reign. God will do this by coming to dwell in our homes and our hearts.

Until the reign of David’s son and successor, King Solomon, who built the first temple—God’s first stationary house, we can say—in Jerusalem, God’s earthly dwelling was a tent, the Ark of the Covenant. And the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle at its centre were mobile. The Ark of the Covenant traveled where the tribes of ancient Israel traveled. God was always with God’s people.

Now, there are advantages to building God a stationary house, a temple, over having God dwell under a tent that traveled around with the tribes of Israel. The temple that David planned to build (and Solomon had built) would be imposing and ornate. It would call to mind God’s greatness, God’s sovereignty over the people and leaders of Israel.

On a much smaller scale but still beautiful, this chapel here at St. Joseph’s College serves the same purpose. The lovely stained-glass windows draw our attention upward toward heaven. They tell the story our Scriptures tell, from God’s creation of our universe through the ascension and reign of Christ the King in heaven, but in glorious bursts of colour, sunlight filtering through them. The Blessed Sacrament chapel invites us, right at this chapel’s entrance, to stop a while, pray, adore Jesus present in the tabernacle (and sometimes in the monstrance on the altar, especially every Friday evening when classes are in session). The altar centres our attention during Mass, calling to us with the Lord’s own invitation, “Come and eat.”

But there are possible disadvantages to building a stationary house for God. King David surely knew this; King Solomon and his successors would know this all too well. There is an ever-present temptation to immobilize, to limit God to our imaginations, our boxes, our houses that we build for God. So, in our comfortable enclosures, God can only fill with grace and blessing those who are somehow worthy of that divine grace and blessing. That bread and wine only becomes the real sacramental presence of Jesus Christ—body, blood, soul, and divinity—at that specific point in the Eucharistic prayer when the priest prays the words of institution…

If we begin to think in these ways, we have begun to forget God’s warning to King David through the prophet Nathan: It is not up to us to build God a house, stationary and static. No, God will make of us, sisters and brothers, a house. We are God’s dwelling when we emerge from this place, having partaken of the Eucharist, and we bring God’s grace and blessing out to the world by how we act with kindness, with love, with peace, with joy, especially toward those on the margins. Let us heed God’s reminder to King David at his most noble: “Are you the one to build me a house to live in”?

God wants to make of us a house, a living, moving Ark of the Covenant in which he will dwell. And the realization in history of God coming to dwell with us as one of us in all things but sin begins with the message of the angel Gabriel to a humble virgin, Mary of Nazareth. Mary is the first and most perfect model of the living, moving Ark of the Covenant, the earthly dwelling of God that God wants us all to be.

Now imagine us going out to our world, encountering somebody in special need of hearing the words Gabriel spoke to Mary: “Hail, full of grace; the Lord is with you.” And let us speak those words to at least one person today, tomorrow, this week in which we celebrate the Nativity of our Lord: “Hail, full of grace”; “May God bless you.” Our greeting can be as simple as that! And then let us enact that grace and blessing, that real presence of God that dwells in each of us, especially as we leave this Eucharistic celebration, as we celebrate Christmas tonight and tomorrow: Be kind; be at peace; forgive and be reconciled with somebody who needs forgiveness and reconciliation through us; try to remind ourselves to see and experience God’s presence primarily in somebody who lives on the margins, somebody outside the fixed houses, the places of worship we build for ourselves and for God.

If we are wondering or, in our Gospel’s words today to describe Mary upon hearing Gabriel’s greeting, if we are “perplexed” at why I am insisting on this, in a way this is good. Mary is “much perplexed,” Luke says, “by [Gabriel’s] words.” She says “to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin’”? Who am I to bear the Son of God in human flesh into this world? Who am I (and who are we) to be the focus of God’s blessing into the world right now, God’s living, moving Ark of the Covenant here and now?

I am sure that St. Paul, as he traveled and wrote his letters—the magnificent conclusion to his Letter to the Romans we have heard today—felt the same perplexity that Mary did. “Who am I,” St. Paul asks in a few places in his letters, “to be the messenger of peace and salvation, the apostle to the Gentiles? Who am I but a persecutor and a murderer (at first) of the disciples of Jesus”?

Who is St. Paul to be an ark, a living and moving home to bear God, to write about this new promise (covenant) of salvation in Christ to the ends of the world?! He is as worthy of that mission as Mary was, as we are. That is, not worthy at all, because this mission to be God’s living, moving home in this world does not depend on our worthiness. It did not depend on how noble King David was, or how perfect and humble Mary was (except that God made her exceptionally humble and sinless), or how fit Paul was to be an apostle.

God calls us, invites us, now with less than a full day to go before Christmas: “Who are you ‘to build me a house to live in’? I will make of you (of each of us, of our Church as a communion of faith) a living, moving house of grace, of blessing, of peace, of reconciliation, of joy, of welcome and shelter to those on the margins. And I will send you (all of us) to the ends of the earth to be home to my presence, my salvation that first entered the world in human flesh just over two thousand years ago through the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem.”

Homily for Sunday, 27 August 2023– Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 22:19-23, 6-7; Psalm 138: 1-2, 2-3, 6, 8; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20

Two images stick in my mind when I hear today’s readings from Isaiah and the Gospel of Matthew: One of keys and the other, of clothing.

The image of keys is the more obvious one of these two; it is explicitly included in Isaiah and in Matthew. In Isaiah, the chief steward of the royal house of King Hezekiah—like Hezekiah’s Prime Minister—is Shebna. And Isaiah condemns Shebna for many wrongful actions, abuses of his power. Today’s reading from Isaiah skips over a few lines that lay out the prophet’s charge against Shebna: He has tried (unsuccessfully) to persuade King Hezekiah to ally with Egypt in a revolt against Assyria (historically, the Assyrians had invaded Israel and Judah and made Hezekiah their puppet king, some years before Babylon would invade the same territory). And Shebna had built monuments to himself, including his tomb, in high places where his self-importance would be most visible.

So Isaiah says that Shebna will be “pulled down from [his] post” and his role at the right hand of the king—the robe, sash, and keys—be given to “Eliakim, son of Hilkiah.” Isaiah uses the images of a peg and of keys. The peg is the symbol of stability: Eliakim would bring stability and prosperity to the reign of Hezekiah and his successors in the royal line of King David. But the keys are a symbol of power. And, as I think we all know, power can be used for good or not-so-good purposes.

Isaiah’s handing over of Shebna’s keys to Eliakim is a bit ironic, considering what we know happened to Hezekiah and the House of David after him. Hezekiah would refuse Shebna’s advice that he ally with Egypt against Assyria, but he would ally with Assyria and essentially become a puppet king of the Assyrians. And his successors would fare even worse in trying to play one power among Israel’s neighbours off against the others and failing to trust in Israel’s God alone for Israel’s peace, stability, and prosperity.

But then the Gospel of Matthew presents us with the same image of keys as the prophet Isaiah does to speak of Eliakim’s rise within the royal court of Hezekiah. In Matthew, it is Jesus’ apostle Peter who receives the keys: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus says to him.

For Jesus to give the “keys of the kingdom of heaven” to Peter, of all people, is as curious (if not more) than when God, through Isaiah, gives the keys to the kingdom of David and his successors to Eliakim in place of Shebna. Not long before this point in Matthew’s Gospel, if we remember from last Sunday’s Gospel reading, Peter asks Jesus to be able to walk toward him on the stormy sea. But then he becomes afraid and sinks. Jesus calls Peter out, “You of little faith, why did you doubt”?

Today Peter repeats the cycle of bold statement—bold profession of faith—by God’s grace, followed by being surprised, unnerved we might say, by his own boldness, and then retreat from it, afraid of what such a profession of faith means for him. We do not hear the retreat, the fearful reservation part of the episode to which our Gospel introduces us today. We only hear Peter get the answer right, as he so often does and which is why Jesus entrusts him with so much; why Jesus gives Peter the “power of the keys.” Peter says what every other disciple of Jesus knows is true—what we all know by faith to be true but, people of little faith that we are, hesitate to say it: Jesus is a herald of the kingdom of heaven like John the Baptist, a prophet like Elijah, Jeremiah, or “one of the [other] prophets.” But he is more than they are. Peter says quite rightly: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

But even at this point, we have a clear sense that, for Peter or for any of us as Jesus’ disciples, first this is not the end of the story or the destination of our process of discipleship. And, second, like Peter, none of us can make this astounding profession of faith without God’s grace. Jesus says just that to Peter: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”

In a few moments, sisters and brothers, we will pray the Creed. But do we ever pause, after we have prayed the Creed, and hear Jesus say to us, “Blessed are you… For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven”? I invite us to try this at this Mass: Pause briefly after the Creed, before we offer our Prayer of the Faithful, and hear, imagine Jesus blessing us just as he blessed Peter after his profession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Because we know that this is not the end of the story, for Peter or for us. Almost as soon as Peter professes his faith in “the Christ, the Son of the living God,” if we continue to follow Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus leads Peter, James, and John up the Mount of the Transfiguration. There, the three apostles see a vision and then hear Jesus predict that he will die and rise for us. Jesus will die and rise for all of us who, like Peter, are men, women, and children “of little faith.” Jesus will die and rise for all of us who, like Peter, may be able to make an astounding profession of faith, as long as it is on our terms. The very next thing Peter says to Jesus after, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” after the end of today’s Gospel reading, is, “God forbid it, Lord” that you should die like this! “God forbid it” that I should profess my faith in a Christ, a God who will suffer for me, for my sin, for every time I am afraid of the bold words that, by God’s grace, escape from my mouth, and I retreat from them. “God forbid it, Lord,” that I will go so far as denying even knowing you, yet you will restore me to grace, remind me of why you gave me the keys and the power to bind and loose on earth what is bound and loosed in heaven!

“God forbid it, Lord”—But the Lord does just that, through each of us. Not long after Peter’s profession of faith, the gift of the “keys of the kingdom of heaven,” and then Jesus’ Transfiguration, in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus gives the same power to bind and loose, the same gift of participating with God in the restoration to grace, the salvation of the whole world, to all of us, sisters and brothers!

And this is where I want to go back to the beginning of what I have said here today, to my image of the keys but then also of clothing. Specifically, who here has ever bought clothing for an infant or maybe a teenager—those times in our lives when we grow physically (and in other ways) the fastest? When we buy clothing for somebody who is growing quickly, it is wise to buy clothing a few sizes too big for that person, so that they will grow into it.

This is what God, through Isaiah, does for Eliakim in the Book of Isaiah from which we hear today. This is what Jesus does for Peter in our Gospel reading today. This is what Paul speaks of to the Romans, as if he is unwrapping a gift of divine clothing that is too big for him or the Roman Christian community in the present moment: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways”! Actually, Paul is saying to us, to the Romans, that the clothing God has just bought for us will never fit us quite right (Sorry!). It will always be a bit (or a lot) big on us, this clothing of God’s grace that saves us. But then some baggy clothing is quite fashionable these days, right?

In the time of Isaiah—and Matthew picks up on this image when Jesus gives Peter “the keys of the kingdom of heaven”—keys were not so much the pocket-sized ones with which we unlock doors. For a king or royal official like Eliakim, the keys that they would receive would be part of their royal clothing: Large, decorative, and slung over the shoulder. So the robe, the sash, and the key given to Eliakim in Isaiah are not really two separate images or analogies—that of keys and that of clothing—but the same one.

God gives Eliakim the robe, the sash, and the keys that are too big for him in that moment. Jesus gives Peter a gift that, despite his astounding profession of faith, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” is too big for him in that moment. Peter will have to grow into those clothes and those keys. He will have to experience his frailty, his own “little faith,” most poignantly as Jesus dies on the cross and Peter denies ever knowing him.

We, too, dear Church, will have to continue to grow into the same clothing and the same keys that, for the moment, are just a little (or a lot) too big for our “little faith.” Still, though our “little faith” helped by none other than God’s grace, God enables us to profess with the astounding boldness of Peter the creed that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Homily for Sunday, 20 August 2023– Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 56:1, 6-7; Psalm 67: 2-3, 5, 6, 8; Romans 11:13-15, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

I am not sure how many of us, if anybody here, attended the recent World Youth Day in Lisbon, Portugal, or watched coverage of it on television. I ran a quick search of the official text of Pope Francis’ Address during the Welcome Ceremony to World Youth Day pilgrims on the first day of the event. In that speech, Pope Francis uses the word “everyone” (todos in Portuguese) eighteen times!

Clearly, I think, Pope Francis desires a Church that is inclusive of all kinds of people. During a key part of his speech at the World Youth Day Welcome Ceremony, each time Pope Francis repeated “everyone” (todos), he encouraged the young people present to chant back to him, “Todos, todos”:

“In the Church, there is room for everyone, everyone. In the Church, no one is left out or left over. There is room for everyone, just the way we are. Everyone. Jesus says this clearly. When he sends the apostles to invite people to the banquet a man had prepared, he tells them: ‘Go out and bring in everyone,’ young and old, healthy and infirm, righteous and sinners. Everyone, everyone, everyone! In the Church there is room for everyone. ‘Father, but I am a wretch; is there room for me’? There is room for everyone… That is the Church, the Mother of all. There is room for everyone. The Lord does not point a finger but opens his arms. It is odd: The Lord does not know how to do this [pointing] but that [opening his arms wide]. He embraces us all. He shows us Jesus on the cross, who opened his arms wide in order to be crucified and die for us.”

This was not the first or the only time during the World Youth Day events when Pope Francis pleaded for a Church open to all people. The day before his Welcome Ceremony speech, in a meeting with Portuguese bishops, priests, religious, and lay pastoral ministers, Pope Francis invited them: “Please, let us not convert the Church into a customs office,” which admits only the “just, good,” and “properly married ‘while leaving everyone else outside.’… No, the Church is… a place for righteous and sinners, good and bad, everyone, everyone, everyone (todos).”

On the flight back to Rome after World Youth Day, journalists were unpacking just how far the pope meant to go toward a Church that includes “everyone.” Pope Francis responded to a question about various people and groups often excluded from the Church and her sacraments by saying, “The Church is open to all, but then there are rules that regulate life inside the Church.”

I will admit I have some difficulty understanding what Pope Francis meant by this: “The Church is open to all,” but, once we are within the walls of the church, once we are baptized, we are subject to its rules that do indeed distinguish good and bad, those who adhere faithfully at least to the Church’s most important teachings (and which are these?) and those who do not, those who may or may not receive the Church’s sacraments. Which is it?

I do not say all this to criticize Pope Francis; far be it from me to do that! I say what I have to draw a parallel between Pope Francis’ claim that, on the one hand, the Church is fully open to all (todos) and, on the other hand, that it has rules to regulate the practice of the faith once we are inside, and a similar tension we hear in our readings today.

Pope Francis’ appeal to todos—all, everyone—in an all-inclusive Church is in the spirit of what we hear from the prophet Isaiah today. In this part of the Book of Isaiah, the prophet is preparing the people of Israel to return to their homeland from a long exile (about seventy years) in Babylon. Persia has conquered Babylon and decreed that the people of Israel should return home and rebuild their temple in Jerusalem that the Babylonians had destroyed. The problem is that, by the time of the Persian conquest of Babylon and the writing of this part of Isaiah, many people from Israel had become quite comfortable in Babylon. Many had forgotten their homeland, their faith, their worship of the one God of Israel. At the same time, Israel lay largely in ruins. The people the Babylonians had not deported from there to Babylon were mostly poor peasants.

Isaiah encourages the people of Israel in Babylon to return to their homeland and to rebuild especially the temple of Jerusalem. But the rebuilt temple, like our Church today, Isaiah says, should be a place where not only the people of Israel are welcome, but “all peoples” of all nations. But there is a catch to Isaiah’s inclusiveness! Foreigners will be welcome in the rebuilt temple, but only those “who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, [who] love the name of the LORD,” are willing “to be his servants… who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it, and [who] hold fast [God’s] covenant.”

It is unclear which “foreigners” Isaiah has in mind. It would make more sense if the “foreigners” in Isaiah were in fact people from Israel who had lived for some time in a foreign nation (Babylon) in exile. Otherwise, how many non-Israelites would want to worship in a rebuilt temple, what would become a rather exclusively Jewish place of worship? How many non-Israelites would willingly adhere to God’s covenant with Israel, an exclusive promise that Israel would be God’s people and God would be Israel’s God alone? Not many, I suspect.

Isaiah seems to say that all are welcome—todos, todos—as long as they play by our Israelite, Jewish rules. We Catholics have (and I think most if not all religious traditions do in some way) expressed this same kind of inclusiveness with strings attached as Isaiah does, or Pope Francis did on the flight from Lisbon back to Rome. How many of us here, for example, were Protestant Christians who became Catholics? Until at least Vatican II, sixty-plus years ago (and a small but significant number of Catholics still hold this view today), the dominant Catholic view was that non-Catholics were welcome to become Catholic. The reverse was strongly discouraged: Say, if a Catholic married a non-Catholic and worshipped in the non-Catholic spouse’s religious tradition. A person was welcome to “swim the Tiber” (be a non-Catholic who became Catholic) but not the Bosphorus (a Catholic who became Eastern Orthodox), the Forth (a Catholic becoming Presbyterian), the Rhine (becoming Lutheran), or the Thames (becoming Anglican). What theologians refer to as an “ecumenism of return,” a one-way street leading the faithful to Rome, was much more dominant in our Catholic Church than it is today.

Yet in Matthew’s Gospel today we hear about a foreigner, the Canaanite woman who pleads with Jesus to heal her daughter of possession by “a demon.” Jesus’ first move is to exclude her, twice: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel… It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Is Jesus’ tone with the Canaanite woman not quite insulting? After all the Canaanite woman could be forgiven for not being willing or even ready to follow the rules of the Jewish faith (to swim the Jordan, maybe?); all she wants is for Jesus to heal her daughter of a demon. She follows a more fundamental rule than the more exclusive demands of the Jewish Law or the law of any religion; the Canaanite woman is guided by the law of seeking the help of the most qualified, the holiest person she knows (Jesus) out of desperation.

And so the Canaanite woman persists with Jesus: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ tables.” If we cannot admire the Canaanite woman’s faith at this point, then surely we can admire her wit! She has enough faith—and follows the rules of what faith she has, as well as she can—to call Jesus “Lord” and to plead for his healing help. And Jesus eventually relents; he includes her, includes her daughter among those he heals: “Woman, great is your faith”!

Jesus tests the Canaanite woman; why he tests her like this is a mystery that defies the explanation of the best experts on the Bible and its Gospels. And she is up to his challenge. She recognizes that she has no claim to the faith, the covenant, the houses of worship of the Jewish people, the people of Israel. She acknowledges that she has less of a claim to the faith of Israel and Jesus’ attention than even the people of Israel with claim to Israel’s faith, covenant, house of worship and all, who would reject Jesus as the Messiah by St. Paul’s time. (This greatly distresses St. Paul, as we hear today in the Letter to the Romans. Yet St. Paul still commends Israel’s people who reject Jesus as their Messiah to God’s mercy, which is truly all-inclusive, more than any church or religious institution on Earth, I think we need to acknowledge).

And the Canaanite woman, an example of faith to us all, sisters and brothers, knows that she, too, is not beyond the reach of God’s mercy. Even “the crumbs that fall from [the] masters’ table” will be enough to nourish her, heal her daughter, draw her closer to God who is the merciful creator, sustainer, saviour of everyone—todos, todos.

Homily for Sunday, 16 July 2023– Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 65:10, 11, 12-13, 14 (R: Luke 8:8); Romans 8:18-23; Matthew 13:1-23

I have been discovering a wonderful new podcast on Sunday homilies through the website of America Magazine over the last few weeks. The podcast is called “Preach.” This week on “Preach,” the featured homilist (who is a different person each week) is Fr. Bryan Massingale, a Black priest, theologian, and professor of social ethics at Fordham University.

Fr. Massingale begins his homily on “Preach” this week by asking how many of us have heard a preacher—a homilist, a retreat preacher—ask, about the Gospel reading we have just heard, something like: What kind of soil are you?

I will presume that we all know, and could practically recite without a text, Jesus’ parable of the sower in Matthew’s Gospel today. It is one of Jesus’ most memorable parables. The parable features four types of soil. Few of us, maybe even if, as Matthew’s Gospel says, we are lured away from our faith by “worldly anxiety and… riches” would readily admit to being the thorny soil. Few of us would admit to being the rocky soil, people of a joyless faith that does not allow the seed of the kingdom of heaven to take root. A few more of us might be willing to admit to being like the path: Those who hear “the word of the kingdom” but occasionally (or frequently) have difficulty “understanding it.” It would be very honest of us to admit when we are like the little wisp of soil that gets spread over a pathway, in which the seed of the kingdom cannot take root and sprout. Few of us (including myself) are Bible scholars; sometimes what exactly the Bible is saying—or what Jesus is saying—can be difficult for us to understand.

So it is fair, I think, that more of us could admit to being like the soil on a pathway than rocky or thorny soil. After all, the first Christians, before they first called themselves Christians at Antioch according to the Acts of the Apostles, were simply called “the Way.” They were “the Way,” the path. Maybe we are on to something if we consider that, even most of the time, we are the soil on the path, far from the most effective soil for sprouting and growing the fruits of the reign of heaven from seed.

I think that, only if we are really too proud and self-centered in our faith, will we most readily claim to be the good, rich soil that is most effective for growing the kingdom of heaven on earth. Often the greatest saints have also been the greatest at identifying their own deficiencies, even their own sins. So may we not delude ourselves into thinking that we are, even most of the time, like the rich soil that is most effective at sprouting and growing the kingdom of heaven among us.

What kind of soil are you; what kind of soil are we? Or, as Fr. Bryan Massingale might ask, does it matter what kind of soil we are? If we take the frequent approach to interpreting the parable of the sower, which is to assess how good we are (or not) at nourishing the seed that is God’s grace, God’s gifts to us that lead to salvation, we might become easily discouraged. If we are honest with ourselves—I know if I am honest with myself—we can point to many times in our lives when we have been anything but good soil to nourish the seed of grace God has sown in our lives and in our world. And if we are not so honest with ourselves, the only thing we nourish by the “quality of soil” approach to placing ourselves within Jesus’ parable of the sower is our own pride.

So please allow me to say that the “quality of soil” approach to interpreting the parable of the sower will never work well for us. We need to find another approach to interpreting this parable. The focus of Jesus’ parable of the sower is not us, or how good we are at nourishing the seed the sower, God, sows. No, the focus of the parable of the sower is—by the very name of the parable—the sower.

What is the most prominent quality of the sower in Jesus’ parable? The sower in this parable is ridiculous and reckless. This sower is messy. This sower scatters seed seemingly without care as to where it lands: On good soil, on the path, on rocky ground, or among thorns.

But for all this sower’s deficiencies—the sower is reckless, messy, careless as to where he sows seed—he seems awfully confident in the yield of his harvest; that even the small amount of seed that will land “on rich soil” will yield “fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” With exceeding confidence in his abilities as a sower, Jesus says to the crowds who hear his parable, “Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

I am surprised that, if we read on past the end of today’s reading in Matthew’s Gospel, the Gospel does not say that the crowds laughed heartily at Jesus’ ridiculous parable of the sower. No sower in his right mind would sow seed so indiscriminately, knowing that so little seed would fall on soil capable of nourishing it and allowing it to take root—No sower, that is, except God!

The focus of the parable of the sower is not us, or how “good” our soil is, which can vary from one moment to the next; the focus of the parable of the sower is and must be God, the sower of the seeds of grace, love, mercy, kindness, ultimately salvation. Jesus’ parable of the sower is and should be tremendously encouraging to us: God knows that the quality of our soil, so to speak, is variable. And only rarely will the seed of God’s saving grace land on the ideal soil. But enough of it will so that the world will be saved. Enough seed will land on good soil so that it will more than make up for our bad days, the times when we become discouraged by our own failings or the failings of others, the times when we sin, the times when we do the very best we can in the moment and, as Fr. Massingale says, through no fault of our own our best is simply not good enough. Yet enough seed will land on good soil as to increase the yield of good “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” Jesus’ message and its promise to us are remarkable!

I want to go back in our Christian history from our time, the time of excellent preachers like Fr. Bryan Massingale, oh, about seven hundred years to the time of St. Thomas Aquinas. In a part of his Summa Theologiae, the mother-of-all-theology-texts-of-all-time, St. Thomas imagines and addresses objections related to the Incarnation, God’s becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ. The first objection St. Thomas lists in this section of the Summa Theologiae is that “the Son of God ought not to have assumed human nature with defects of body,” like vulnerability to sickness (Did Jesus ever catch even a minor cold?), unsavory bodily functions, ultimately subjection to death.

St. Thomas Aquinas treats this objection graciously, but counters it by responding that the Incarnation, how it took place and the “defects of body” that Jesus assumed through it, are the will of God for our salvation. A shorthand for this argument of St. Thomas Aquinas is that God’s will for our salvation accounts for our deficiencies, our “defects,” even our sin. That is just the way God willed to save the world, to sow the seed of the reign of God in our world, in and through God’s Son, fully divine but also fully and perfectly human. And who are we to question how God willed to save the world through his Son? How are we to question how God sows the seed of God’s kingdom of heaven in our world, our experiences, our relationships, our successes and our failures?

God has a long history of sowing the seed of his grace through what he has created. We could say that God’s history of sowing this seed goes back to before the first moments of creation themselves. God’s way of sowing seed seems reckless, messy, careless as to where the seed lands. But God is confident in its yield, that enough will land on good, faithful soil as to produce “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.”

The prophet Isaiah today speaks of this same confidence of God that God’s grace, God’s word “shall not return to [God] void, but shall do [God’s] will, achieving the end for which [God] sent it.” And the same confidence in the saving yield of God’s grace permeates St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, from which we hear today. St. Paul does not deny that we can experience times when we do everything we can with the utmost faith, goodness, and kindness, and it simply is not good enough. St. Paul admits that “all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now.” Anybody here who has ever experienced a long, difficult childbirth knows what St. Paul is speaking of better than I do and probably even better than St. Paul himself did. We labor, and sometimes we are successful; other times we feel like our labour in God’s name has been a failure. Still other times we are guilty of sin outright: St. Paul speaks in Romans of creation’s “slavery to corruption.”

But with God as the sower of seeds of grace, none of this matters. God has promised a great yield, “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold” or, as St. Paul says to the Romans, “the redemption of our bodies.” God will not be denied; we will be redeemed. We will be saved, sometimes with our (successful) cooperation by being the “good soil” for the seed of God’s grace, other times in spite of not being the ideal soil. Yet God continues to go out to sow, in God’s own reckless, messy way that is the only way in which we will be saved.

Homily for Sunday, 2 July 2023– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Readings of the day: 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a; Psalm 89:2-3, 16-17, 18-19; Romans 6:3-4,, 8-11; Matthew 10:37-42

A week ago, I was preaching a retreat for our Basilian novice Bishoy Dawood, who is at the end of his novitiate year here in Edmonton and will profess first vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience within my order next weekend. I invite us please to pray for Bishoy; some of us might remember him from when he served weekday Mass with me here at OLPH once or twice during his novitiate year. (And implicit in my opening lines here is a call for anybody who may be discerning a call to religious life, maybe as a Basilian—in which case, please come and see me—or to the diocesan diaconate or priesthood). On retreat, I preached conferences on our vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, and on our order’s motto, “Teach me goodness, discipline, and knowledge.”

I feel, every time I have spoken publicly on the religious vows, especially that of poverty, that I should have an official license made somewhere: Class one hypocrite. Because, visibly-speaking (I can speak for myself as a religious priest), I am not suffering. We live in an affluent country [and, here in Sherwood Park, an affluent community, on average]. We have food on the table and a roof over our heads. Now, there are poor and disadvantaged persons among us, I will guess even in this parish. I and my brother Basilians live at St. Alphonsus Parish on 118 Avenue in Edmonton, a neighbourhood that visibly reminds me of Jesus’ words to Judas Iscariot in our Gospels, every time I look or go outside: “You will always have the poor, but you will not always have me.” I learned recently that there are 80 000 Aboriginal people in the City of Edmonton, many living with trauma inflicted upon them over generations. There are many poor concentrated in our area of the city, people with addictions, recent migrants and refugees, and so on.

Whenever I speak on our vow of poverty, I do the common “preacher thing” of outlining the traditional Bible passages associated with poverty. Last weekend, I spoke about Jesus’ first Beatitude in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I spoke about the Gospel story of Jesus’ encounter with the rich man who wants to be Jesus’ disciple, has followed all the commandments since his youth, yet goes away sad because, the Gospels say, he is unable to part with his “possessions.”

On Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, let me emphasize that his material wealth is not the problem, the obstacle to discipleship. The possessions he is unable (or unwilling) to let go have nothing to do with money or material goods. The problem for the rich man is that everything becomes an object to him, something to be counted and costed, something of which he is unable to let go: His wealth, yes, but also the number of commandments to which he is faithful (and how faithful, and for how long he has been faithful), and discipleship of Jesus itself.

Contrast the rich man of the Gospels with the woman of Shunem in today’s reading from 2 Kings. Our reading begins by describing the Shunammite woman as “wealthy.” For the Shunammite woman as in Jesus’ encounter with the rich man, wealth is not and will not be the obstacle (or a help) toward right relationship with God and other people, toward acting in a right and godly way.

The woman in 2 Kings notices that the prophet Elisha, Elijah’s successor, is “passing through Shunem” as he frequently did. And Elisha apparently had a favourite café pit stop in Shunem each time he was in town. This reminds me of my pre-priesthood, pre-Basilian life when I was a lab technician and occasionally did house calls as far away as Rocky Mountain House. My favourite pit stop for lunch on house call days on that route was just outside of Bentley, Alberta, a coffee and sandwich shop called “Bean There.” Or, if any of us are ever traveling toward B.C. on the Trans-Canada Highway, your last chance for gas at Alberta prices and a decent lunch (if you are hungry) before the B.C. border is at the Husky at the top of the hill in the morbidly named village of Dead Man’s Flats. So, there are a couple of road trip pit stop recommendations from me.

The Shunammite woman recognizes Elisha as a frequent visitor to her town, so she calls her husband to help her to prepare her home to receive Elisha “whenever he comes to” them. Elisha is grateful for the Shunammite couple’s hospitality. So he calls “his servant Gehazi,” we hear, who says to Elisha that the only desire this otherwise well-to-do woman has is to bear a child. Here we have the frequent biblical motif of an elderly woman or couple longing for a child. (Please allow me to insert a prayer here for anybody among us or anybody we know experiencing infertility. This can be agonizing). Elisha ends this visit with the Shunammite couple by prophesying that, “in due time, [they] shall embrace a son.” And, if we continue in 2 Kings, Elisha’s prophecy comes true. And, still later in 2 Kings, the son dies, sadly, but Elisha raises him back to life.

The Shunammite woman and her husband are the picture of poverty. They live poverty in the way I, under a public religious vow of poverty, would like to live it, better than I do. Wait, did I just say that the Shunammite couple in 2 Kings today are the picture of poverty? I did. Why?

The Shunammite couple of whom we hear today in 2 Kings is such a great example of poverty not despite or, somehow ironically, because of their wealth. They are a great example of poverty because they are so unreservedly hospitable toward Elisha as he passes through their town. The Shunammite couple does not count the cost to themselves of building a whole new “small roof chamber with walls” onto their house and furnishing it with “a bed, a table, a chair, [and] a lamp,” all for when Elisha visits their town.

Now, maybe they do not count the cost of the home improvements because they are just that rich. Yet, if we think for a moment about some of the details 2 Kings gives us about this couple, we realize they are Shunammites. Shunem was a simple agricultural village in the Jezreel Valley near the Sea of Galilee, in the northeast of Israel. It was susceptible to drought. So, even though the Shunammite woman in today’s reading is said to be wealthy, her and her husband’s wealth is precarious.

The son they long for dies, only to be raised by Elisha, all within the same chapter 4 of 2 Kings from which our first reading is drawn today. And then, a little later in 2 Kings, Elisha advises the Shunammite family to flee to Philistia for seven years. They live there, in a foreign (non-Israelite, Gentile) land, to wait out a famine. All their wealth is lost—their home, with its rooftop addition built for Elisha, and their land— before Elisha ends the famine and restores to the Shunammite family what they had lost.

Wealth in and of itself is not the measure of how poor the Shunammite woman, her husband, and her son are. The measure of their poverty, which is always exemplary and does not vary with the cycles of gain and loss through the many vignettes of their story in 2 Kings, is that their wealth (or periodic loss of it) is never an object to be counted. They are generous and hospitable toward Elisha. And God rewards this pious family from a little agricultural Galilean village with restoration of their longed-for son to life, their home, their land, and with great friendship with the itinerant prophet Elisha when Elisha was probably looking for a simple coffee shop in town.

Jesus’ message in Matthew’s Gospel today is difficult for us to hear. I hope Jesus does not literally mean that I am not supposed to love my father and mother nearly as much as I love Jesus. [I should be careful here, since my mom and dad are among us at Mass this morning]! I think, in line with Elisha’s encounter with the Shunammite family in 2 Kings, Jesus is inviting us to be somehow like the Shunammite woman and her husband are toward Elisha: Welcome the prophet to town, into our homes, no matter how much or little material wealth we have. Be grateful and generous for the opportunity to be hospitable. Do not count the cost of hospitality and of discipleship, even if it is to the point of giving our lives: “Take up [your] cross and follow me.”

In his letter to the Romans, St. Paul says that baptism is our initiation into the poverty to which Jesus invites us. We have all “been buried with [Christ] by baptism into his death, so that, just as Christ was raised by the glory of the Father”—and just as God, through Elisha, raised the Shunammite couple’s son and saved them from famine and loss of everything—“we too might walk in the newness of life.” We, too, might know the restoration of our eternal wealth, eternal life in Jesus Christ.

This is an invitation to poverty, sisters and brothers: Not necessarily to give up our material wealth, unless this has become no more than a precious, countable commodity, more important than God and each other in our lives. We never know when or how we will encounter God in another person, in the situations of our lives—in a small agricultural village in Galilee, in our care for somebody in need or in a situation of pain or loss, in a small coffee and sandwich shop in Bentley or Dead Man’s Flats, Alberta—until we have lived the poverty, the gratitude and hospitality without cost and commodification, to which our Lord invites us today.

Homily for Sunday, 27 November 2022– First Sunday of Advent, Year A

Readings of the day: Isaiah 2:1-5; Psalm 122:1-2, 3-4, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:27-44

What words of hope we have heard today!

The prophet Isaiah says, about “Judah and Jerusalem, ‘In days to come the mountain of the LORD’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains…raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream toward it.” Israel, faithful once again to its God—our God—would know no more injustice, no more war… swords beaten “into ploughshares and… spears into pruning hooks.”

This is quite the grand prophecy of a glorious future for Israel, for “Judah and Jerusalem.” This is especially true if we consider the sorry state Israel and its leadership were in during the time of Isaiah. The prophetic ministry of Isaiah overlaps with the reigns of two especially bad kings in Jerusalem, Jotham and Ahaz, and then the reign of Hezekiah, who tried to reform both religious practice (no more worship of idols; Israel would worship only the one God) and social practice (against corruption and disregard for the poor). But the damage was already done. Israel was on track to be sacked by the stronger nations around it, and its people exiled to Babylon.

Just before the prophecy we hear today from Isaiah, the prophet warns Israel of the consequences of its sin—idolatry and social injustice—in stark terms. Yet, even in that first chapter of Isaiah, there is hope for Israel. Isaiah gives Israel the opportunity to “set things right… Though your sins may be like scarlet, they may become white as snow.”

And then the prophecy we hear today, from Chapter 2 of Isaiah, is decidedly hopeful. Especially considering the depth of Israel’s sin, it is remarkable that Isaiah prophecies that sin, the invasion and destruction of Israel, Jerusalem and its temple, the succession of bad kings, the Babylonian Exile would not be the end of Israel as a nation. Israel would not only recover from all this, but Jerusalem would “be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.” The temple of Jerusalem would be rebuilt, even more magnificent than before. There would be peace, right worship of the one God of Israel, and special care for the poor and disadvantaged, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner.

In contrast to Isaiah 2—and similar to Isaiah 1—Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew today strikes a much starker, foreboding tone. Jesus speaks to his disciples—and to us—about the end of time, his return, “the coming of the Son of Man” to judge the world. Jesus compares the events of the end of time with those of Noah’s time, when God sent a flood to wipe out the entire human race except for Noah and his family, so great was human wickedness on the earth.

A frequent theme in our Gospel reading today is the unknown. Jesus says about the people of Noah’s time that “they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away.” Likewise, Jesus says of his return at the end of time: “You do not know on what day your Lord is coming.”

I am not sure that to say to somebody—to us—that we cannot know, cannot prepare for a future event is all that reassuring. Imagine if your instructor in a course here at the university, instead of presenting clearly when each assignment was due and when exams were, said in the syllabus, “You do not [and cannot] know on what day your exam will be held. Too bad.” I am sure that would do wonders for students’ already-heightened anxiety. Thankfully we, your instructors, do not do this! There is reason to be hopeful, both about our studies and about the end of time!

But then imagine the anxiety of Jesus’ disciples when he said to them that they could “not know on what day” he would return, what day would be the end of time. Thankfully, Jesus gives us a way in which we can be prepared for his return, even if we cannot know its precise day. He says to his disciples, “Keep awake, therefore,” and, “You must also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”

How do we maintain hope, especially in this Advent time of hopeful waiting for our Lord’s return, and not allow anxiety to get the better of us? Jesus says, very simply, “Keep awake… be ready.” Isaiah’s message is similar to Jesus’ message, many hundreds of years before Jesus. How were the people of Isaiah’s time to “keep awake” and “be ready”? Isaiah says that they were to do so by acting with justice, especially toward the poor, the disadvantaged. The people to whom Isaiah prophesied were to “keep awake” and “be ready” by worshiping only the one God of Israel, our God, and not the gods of other nations. They were to “keep awake” and “be ready” by not making military and political alliances with one great nation surrounding Israel in an effort to avoid invasion by another.

“Keep awake… be ready”: In his letter to the Romans that we hear today, St. Paul is as insistent as Jesus is in our Gospel about the nearness of Jesus’ return in glory: “Now is the moment for you to wake from sleep… The night is far gone; the day is near.” St. Paul uses powerful imagery of putting “on the armour of light” and living “honourably as in the day.”

Sisters and brothers, for us not to be overtaken by anxiety at these words and images of St. Paul, of Jesus, of Isaiah, but to understand and live this message as hopeful, we must “keep awake” and “be ready.” The word of God today and through this time of Advent invites us today to hope in the return of our Lord at the end of time in a way that spurs us into action. Hope is not and cannot be a passive virtue. Hope must lead us to act concretely for justice, for peace in our world beginning in our own hearts, our households, our workplaces, our places of leisure, our Church. As we pray in our Psalm today, hope must lead us to seek the good of “the house of the Lord our God.” Sisters and brothers, we are a living “house of the Lord our God.” Let us pray with growing urgency for one another, then, “‘Peace be within you.’ For the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good.”

To seek one another’s good is to seek the salvation of one another by the end of time, but it is also to ensure that essential needs of our brothers and sisters are met now. If we are the living, active, hopeful “house of the Lord our God,” then the poorest and least advantaged of our world, of the people we ourselves encounter day to day, must be the cornerstone of the house of God that we are.

At Mass we pray, in the prayer Jesus taught us, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is the ultimate Advent prayer of hope. But it presupposes action on our part to build the reign of justice, peace, salvation that God wills for us, “on earth as it is in heaven.” We offer one another a sign of peace. As we do that, at every Mass, could we not pray quietly the words of the Psalmist for the person we are greeting with peace: For your sake, “for the sake of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good”?

This is how we “keep [actively] awake.” This is how we nourish the hope that dawns anew in us in this time of Advent. Our worship connects with our seeking one another’s good, one another’s salvation ultimately. Isaiah speaks of this essential connection between right worship and right practice of justice, peace, loving kindness. St. Paul speaks in contrasts: Putting “on the armour of light” instead of darkness, acting as people “of the day” and not of night, passive and anxious.

It is no accident, elsewhere in St. Paul’s writings, that hope is the middle virtue, the hinge point, of the three so-called “theological virtues,” faith, hope, and love. Active hope arises from our faith and it naturally leads us to love God, our neighbour, and ourselves. “The greatest of these is love,” yes, but hope is the virtue of keeping awake so that we may love.

My sisters and brothers, as we begin this time of Advent, I pray, “Peace be with you… Peace be within you.” May we act with justice, act and live with kindness. May we be a people of hope: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” May we be a people that seeks one another’s good, a people who keeps awake and is actively ready for the return of the Lord, our salvation and our peace.

Homily for Sunday, 28 February 2021– Second Sunday in Lent, Year B

Readings of the day: Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18; Psalm 116:10, 15, 16-17, 18-19; Romans 8:31b-34; Mark 9:2-10

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

How many of us are giving up something or have ever given up something for Lent? Might this be a strange question to ask, especially in our present situation? After all, we are still in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic that keeps us and many people from being able to worship in person and receive communion. We have given up a lot, and not only in terms of worship and the sacraments, over almost a year since the first COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns began.

Yet, when we speak of giving up something, especially during Lent, do we not usually refer to giving up what may be comfortable or good for us, but that we do not really need? I, for one, have never been very good at giving something up for Lent. I usually try to think of a very small comfort to give up; even better if this is something I am able to give up beyond Lent. One year, when I was a novice, in the beginner stages of religious community life in preparation to take first vows, I decided to give up not coffee altogether—if I were to give up coffee altogether, I think I would be lethargic or miserable, or both, in the morning—but simply to give up the sizable amount of sugar I used to put into my morning coffee. That Easter Sunday, I put sugar in my coffee as I had until Lent that year, and it made my coffee far too sweet. I have never gone back to putting sugar in my coffee since then. Great, then, I thought, I would need to think of something else to give up for Lent after that!

Those of us who have given up something for Lent or are doing so this year: What kinds of things to we give up? Are they food and drink-related comforts: Junk food, alcoholic beverages, chocolate, or coffee (or simply the sugar in our coffee, maybe)…? Have any of us given up social media, like Facebook or Twitter, as I know some of my friends do during Lent? How about taking this time of Lent to master our habits: Quitting smoking, minding our language, and so on? How many of us have heard or seen Pope Francis’ list of things from which to fast and on which to feast during Lent? Pope Francis’ list is a few years old, and has been made into a convenient image on social media: Fast from or give up hurting words, anger, pessimism, worries, complaints, bitterness, selfishness, and grudges, says Pope Francis, so that we may “feast on” kind words, gratitude, patience, hope, trust in God, simplicity, prayer, compassion, and reconciliation. Finally, Pope Francis says, “Fast from words and be silent so we can listen.” Hmm… There’s another thing—wordiness—from which I know I could fast in order to listen and appreciate silence better!

Do we begin to understand, through all this, that there are many things we could fast from or give up during Lent? But what if we simply acknowledged that God is already way ahead of us in terms of giving something up? And the something, or better yet somebody, God has given up is not only a worldly comfort or something good that God did not really need. No, God gave up—for us!—his only Son so that we might have eternal life. God gave up, for us, something not only comforting yet unnecessary, but God gave up what is essential to himself. And this whole season of Lent focuses us toward our celebration of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday; our celebration in a few weeks from now of God having given up his only Son for our salvation.

God’s sacrifice of self for us; God’s having given up his Son so that we might have eternal life, which we celebrate not only through Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday, but every time we assemble for Mass, is foretold in Jesus’ transfiguration. Mark, whose account of Jesus’ transfiguration we hear today, clearly connects this event to the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Is there not an almost overwhelming amount of detail in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration? There are many points on which we could focus in this transfiguration event: Jesus, for instance, does not take with him all his disciples or even the Twelve apostles, but only (presumably) his most trusted three apostles, Peter, James, and John, to witness the transfiguration. Moses and Elijah, usually interpreted as the presence of the Law and the prophets of Jewish tradition, speak with Jesus. We have what many Biblical scholars have commented as a full making known of the one God in three distinct persons of the Trinity: Jesus, present in human form, also the divine Son of God; the Father, especially represented by the voice from heaven, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”; and the Holy Spirit, most often connected with the cloud that overshadows the transfiguration scene.

We have Mark’s peculiar emphasis (more than Matthew or Luke, who also each feature an account of Jesus’ transfiguration) on Jesus’ order to Peter, James, and John, “to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.” Mark, though, is pithier than the other Gospels about the fear Peter, James, and John felt during the transfiguration and Jesus’ foretelling of his own suffering, death, and resurrection. Yet all the accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration in our Biblical Gospels share the all-but-speechless Peter’s exclamation, “It is good for us to be here.” Peter then suggests, in all Gospel accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration, that they build three tents. This could be a hearkening back to the Ark of the Covenant tradition of the earliest tribes of Israel in the Old Testament. These ancient people of Israel were mobile, and carried the Ark of the Covenant, the tabernacle in which God was said to dwell among his people on earth, within a series of tents.

But allow me to suggest that the main focus of Mark’s Gospel especially, amid all Mark’s spectacular detail of the transfiguration, is on the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. When we think of the transfiguration, Mark wants us to connect with Jesus’ sacrifice, his willing giving up of self to death on a cross, so that we might have eternal life. Jesus, through Mark, wants us to contemplate prayerfully the events of his transfiguration in light of his resurrection from the dead. We have the gift of hindsight: Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is a completed past event. From Peter’s, James’, and John’s standpoint in time, Jesus’ resurrection was still yet to take place, so the apostles could do no better than to be (understandably) perplexed and afraid.

But even with our gift of hindsight, is not only the transfiguration but the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus it foretells not so extraordinarily rare that, in a way, it should not only have struck fear in Peter, James, and John, but in us? The transfiguration points ahead to Jesus’ giving up of self on a cross for our salvation. There is only one other figure in the Bible (and the only one who is not God)—Abraham—who is willing to give up his only son, in this case Isaac, simply because God calls him to do so.

Like Mark’s Gospel account of Jesus transfiguration, Genesis’ account of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac is so detailed as to be troubling; as to raise more questions in us than it answers: Why would God test Abraham? Is God really that mean that he would play Abraham like that, expecting him to sacrifice Isaac only to stop him at the last moment? Here, although I think we are right to focus always on God in any Biblical event, I think Genesis invites us to focus on Abraham’s response to God; on his complete willingness to do as God asks of him, even to sacrifice his only, long-promised son, Isaac. Abraham’s willingness to give up his only son is presented as a prefiguring of God’s own complete willingness to give his only Son, Jesus Christ, up to death so that we might have eternal life.

What, then, do Abraham’s willingness to give up Isaac to death, and the transfiguration, which foretells God’s giving his Son Jesus up to death for our salvation, mean for us in terms of how we live here and now? For me, how well we answer this question for ourselves amounts to how we answer a few questions related to this first one: If we make some kind of Lenten sacrifice, say giving up something for Lent, does what we have given up make us more mindful of God’s sacrifice of his only Son for us on the cross; the only sacrifice capable of gaining us eternal life? Do our sacrifices make us more mindful of God always with and for us, as St. Paul asks today in his letter to the Romans: “If God is for us, who is against us”? Do we sacrifice willingly, as God does and has for us, and without boasting or appearing gloomy, or sacrificing something because we feel we have to do so? Does our sacrifice change us; transfigure us to be more like our selfless; self-sacrificing God? If we can answer “yes” to these questions, I think we are on the right track, this Lent and in our lives of faith overall.

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.