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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homily for Sunday, 23 June 2019– The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Readings of the day: Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 110:1, 2, 3, 4; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; Luke 9:11b-17

This homily was given at the Hermance Family Chapel of St. Basil the Great at St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.

Have any of us ever received a gift from somebody, or has somebody ever done a good deed for us that we felt we could never possibly repay adequately?

This would happen regularly when I ministered in Colombia, among the poor of Cali and Santa Marta, where the Basilians have a parish and school and had a novitiate house. The people would be so grateful for any good deed or anything we could give them, and even simply for our presence as Basilians among them, that they would often say to us, to mean that they did not have anything to offer us in return for what we had given them, “Dios te pague” (“May God repay you”). More recently, Fr. Paul English, my brother Basilian and a graduate of St. John Fisher College (with whom some of us may be familiar), who knows several Colombian seminarians, both our own Basilian brothers and seminarians of dioceses in which he has served, has occasionally added humorously to his hello or goodbye greetings to these seminarians: “Dios te pegue” (“May God smack you”)!

Our reading this morning from the Book of Genesis places both the king of Salem, Melchizedek, and Abram (later Abraham) in a Dios te pague moment. In Genesis, just before the reading we hear today, four kings who were Abram’s enemies had been making war against kings who were Abram’s allies, including Melchizedek. Even Abram’s nephew, Lot, had been taken captive by one of the enemy kings. Abram pursues Lot’s captors until he is victorious in favor of Melchizedek and his other allied kings, ending the war and recovering Lot and the other captives. Interestingly, the name of Salem, Melchizedek’s kingdom, derives from the same Hebrew root as does shalom. Like many words in ancient languages, shalom, which is usually translated to English as “peace”—so we could think of Melchizedek as a figure representing peace who, in our first reading today, has in fact just won victory and peace, ending a disastrous war—has a greater range of meaning than we often realize. Shalom can mean peace, but also wholeness or completeness, harmony, or prosperity. It may also take on the meaning of a simpler greeting like hello or goodbye. If we were to translate shalom in this idiomatic greeting sense into Spanish, we might say, Dios te pague (“May God repay you”), although hopefully not, unless with good humor, Dios te pegue (“May God smack you”)!

Our reading today from Genesis places us on the scene of a meeting of two representatives of shalom, Melchizedek, king of Salem (or perhaps, appropriately, king of “shalom”), and Abram. This meeting between Melchizedek and Abram, after which Abram has returned goods and prisoners taken by their enemies in the war they have just won, is a shalom moment; a Dios te pague moment.

To thank Abram, what does Melchizedek offer him but simple bread and wine? Melchizedek realizes quickly that he is unable to offer Abram any appropriate gift for having saved his kingdom and his people from the enemy kings who had attacked him and taken his goods and people captive. So Melchizedek offers Abram simple bread and wine, accompanied by a blessing of these gifts. Melchizedek’s offering to Abram of bread and wine, with a blessing, may call to our minds what we do every time we celebrate Mass; every time we celebrate our Eucharist (a Greek-derived word that means “thanksgiving”), especially on this feast focusing on the gifts of the Eucharist, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.

Like Melchizedek, we offer bread and wine because we can offer no more. When we bring bread and wine to the altar during our Eucharist, we bless it. The priest blesses the bread and wine with a prayer that is often silent, especially at Sunday Mass, but a prayer that hearkens back to Jewish table blessing prayers: “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: Fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life… Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you: Fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink.”

And then, through our Eucharistic celebration, our offering of bread and wine to God because nothing we might offer to God measures up to God’s goodness to us, something altogether miraculous happens before our eyes: This blessed bread and wine, our all-too-little gift to God, becomes “for us the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” God chooses this simple bread and wine, “work of human hands,” as the sacramental means by which God offers himself, God’s Son, really, truly, and fully to us. This becomes our Dios te pague moment: “May God repay you.”

More than we could ever repay God, God “pays” us with his very self, really, truly, and fully, in our Eucharist, under the form of simple bread and wine. God’s Son Jesus Christ has been offering himself really, truly, and fully since the night he freely accepted being “handed over” in an act of betrayal by one of his own apostles; an act of denial by another; an act of fearful fleeing from Jesus’ passion and death by still others. On that night, Jesus offered us his very self really, truly, and fully: “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me… This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” This deepens our Dios te pague moment and projects it into our history, as it becomes our Church’s celebration “in remembrance” of Christ’s passion and death, until he returns at the end of time.

But this first Dios te pague moment in which Jesus hands himself to us; this Dios te pague moment now projected into our history as Church, did not happen without any previous sign to prepare us for the moment when Christ gave himself to us under the form of bread and wine. This preparatory sign of Christ’s real, true, and full self-offering to us first at the Last Supper is recounted to us in the Gospel we hear today from Luke.

Any sign, any miracle, properly-speaking, is not only a nature-defying action of God, but it involves our action. At the Last Supper, Jesus said to his Apostles as he handed himself over to them, to us, really, truly, and fully: “Do this in memory of me.” What, then, are we to do in memory of him? What could we do; what could we offer God that could measure up to God’s real, true, and full gift to us of his very self?

Nothing we could offer could ever measure up to God’s offering of God’s very self to us: This is precisely the point of the Last Supper. This is precisely the point of Jesus’ miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes of which we hear from Luke today. Still, Jesus says to the Twelve, who have asked him to “dismiss the crowd” following them to buy themselves some much-needed rest and quiet: “Give them some food yourselves.”

This, without a doubt, would have caught Jesus’ disciples off guard. They were unprepared to “give them some food” themselves, out of the little they had to offer; out of their own poverty. For the Twelve, this was not only their Dios te pague moment—“May God repay you”—but, with all the due gentleness and good humor of the Son of God, it was Jesus’ Apostles’ Dios te pegue moment: “May God smack you.”

“Give them some food yourselves.” In other words, Jesus says to us, offer what you are able out of your poverty, and I will multiply it beyond your wildest imagination. But I will wait to multiply your gift; I will wait to work a miracle until you are confronted with your poverty, your inadequacy in offering any gift that could possibly measure up to God’s real, true, and full offering of self. I will wait until you are confronted, “smacked,” with having to bless and offer simple bread and wine, or five loaves and two fish for five thousand people.

I will wait until your Dios te pague moment meets a Dios te pegue moment. Give one another and the world “some food yourselves.” “Do this in remembrance of me.” Offer this world shalom, and only then will I multiply your “work of human hands” beyond your wildest imagination.