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, 25 August 2019

Readings of the day: Isaiah 66:18-21; Psalm 117:1, 2; Hebrews 12:5-7, 11-13; Luke 13:22-30

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, and St. James Church, Vernon, BC, Canada.

Do many of us ever reflect on the phenomenal diversity in our world of religious faith; of the number of faiths in our world, each with a particular approach to encountering the divine through acts of worship and devotion, and also through acts of individual charity and social justice? Of the more than 7.5 billion people on Earth now, 2.4 billion are Christian, and 1.1 billion are Catholic. Even among these 2.4 billion Christians and 1.1 billion Catholics in our world, do we not see great diversity of religious practice, some of which is divisive, even a counter-witness to Jesus’ prayer in the Gospel that we might “all be one,” but much of which is legitimate and enriches our Christian faith and the world?

Our reading today from Isaiah and our Psalm particularly view this diversity of faith in a positive way, especially for the time of these Old Testament writers. Isaiah writes originally to encourage the people of Israel who are nearing the end of a lengthy exile in Babylon, a foreign nation that worshipped gods foreign to Israel and Israel’s God. I suppose Isaiah could have urged the people of Israel to close in on themselves and to develop a set of religious practices and worship of the God of Israel closed off to the rest of the world. But instead Isaiah prophecies that peoples and nations who do not even know the God of Israel, “the coastlands far away that have not heard of [God’s] fame or seen [God’s] glory,” will be drawn to the God of Israel by the descendants of Israel’s exiles to Babylon.

Isaiah does not say how these foreign nations will be drawn to the glory of the God of Israel, only that they will. This presumes that the people of Israel will become messengers, prophets after their prophetic leaders like Isaiah, of the glory and fame, and so right worship of the one God, the God of Israel. But how they will communicate this message and have all the nations accept the glory and right worship of one God remains a mystery as the book of Isaiah ends at the prophecy we hear today.

Our Psalm, even more than Isaiah, emphasizes that the worship of the one God of Israel is and will be for all nations and all peoples. Psalm 117, the shortest Psalm in our Bible, proclaims with pithy energy, “Praise the LORD, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love to us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever.” Again, though, our Psalm is not specific as to how all peoples and all nations are to praise and extol the LORD, or how they are to experience this “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” of God that the Psalmist proclaims to be so universal. After all, can religious experience ever be exactly uniform everywhere and at all times, even among people of the same faith, let alone among people of different faiths?

If we see our world today, would it not seem that prophecies like those of Isaiah and our Psalm are far from realized? Some experts on these questions estimate that there are about 4 200 recognized religions in the world today. It would seem, then, that we are far from all peoples acknowledging and worshipping one and the same God, much less the God of Israel; the God of “steadfast love” and “faithfulness” extolled by our Psalm.

Even among people of the same religious faith, there is sometimes great diversity in religious experience. There are not only differences in denominational traditions, as we see in Christianity among Eastern and Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants, but differences within each of those traditions: Differences in particular private devotions and forms of prayer; generational and ethnic differences from one worshipping community, parish, or diocese to another; differences in religious experience created by the increasing mobility of people and globalization nowadays, and so on.

All this diversity and difference can be wonderful, even enriching to a faith community or to the world, but can it not also be a challenge to us? Does this diversity not naturally lead us to ask: When is diversity legitimate or not? What are essential truths (or is there any single Truth) that allow for little or no leeway? Is there one or are there several true religious faiths? And, if there is only one true faith or a limited range of true religious practice, what about the salvation of people who do not belong to the one true faith, who choose not to believe the claims to truth of a particular faith, or have never experienced religious faith? Are people of no faith, by choice or not, saved?

The easy answer to these questions is that all this is a mystery. Whether our God, as we Christians believe God to be the God of all peoples and nations, will save only people of our Christian faith, of many, or all faiths, is beyond our capacity to answer. But simply to evade the question like this may not be helpful to us. In contrast to Isaiah and the Psalmist, whose tone toward the diversity of religious and experience of the peoples and nations around Israel is more accepting, even welcoming (although Isaiah and our Psalm still limit true praise; true worship to one God), in Luke’s Gospel we hear a more exclusive message from Jesus: There is a “narrow door” through which we are to “strive to enter” in order to be saved. The person who asks Jesus, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” seems to have understood Jesus’ teaching correctly: Indeed only a few will be saved. But what does Jesus actually mean by this pessimistic-sounding teaching we hear in today’s Gospel: “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able”?

We could go back to evading the question: If we cannot understand what Jesus was trying to teach, why bother continuing to discern what Jesus meant? Or we could try to place Jesus’ teaching about striving “to enter through the narrow door” in the context of the rest of our Gospel reading and of the other readings we hear today. At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus and his disciples are well into their long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. In Galilee, for the most part Jesus and his teaching and healing ministry had been well-received. In Jerusalem, he would enter the city through its narrow, crowded gates. Within days of being received into the city as a king, he would be expelled from the city and crucified outside its gates. A quick note about Jerusalem: I have been to Jerusalem, so I have experienced literally the narrowness of its gates; its doors. Probably, then, in today’s Gospel, Jesus is referring to his impending entrance into the literal city of Jerusalem of his time. More figuratively, to follow Jesus; to be a disciple of Jesus would have meant to follow him through the “narrow door” of the earthly Jerusalem, to the end of a journey that was to lead to death, for Jesus and for many of his earliest disciples. To enter the earthly Jerusalem through its “narrow door,” though, to accept humiliation and even death was and is the only way to resurrection; the only way to salvation; to eternal life.

So I do not think that, by inviting his disciples to “enter through the narrow door,” Jesus is or was excluding anybody who is not of a specific religious faith—who is not Christian, or who was not of Jesus’ own Jewish faith in his time—from the possibility of salvation. In fact, the rest of today’s Gospel reading gives us some needed context on Jesus’ meaning by, “Strive to enter through the narrow door.” Salvation will be denied to those who insist on being “first” at the expense of others they exclude out-of-hand: People who think differently from us; who are of a different religious faith than us; people who look different from us. In this way, people who insist that they can gain salvation on their own, on account of their own wealth or the right ideas or right religious faith and so forth, will be “last” while those dismissed as “last… will be first.”

“The narrow door” is impossible to enter for anybody who tries to enter alone. Salvation cannot be a solo effort. Rather, “the narrow door” will be easier to pass through for any and all who help others to pass through it. Salvation is and must be a communal, whole-Church, whole-world effort. Entrance through “the narrow door” of eternal life is for anybody who not only preaches truth or uses truth in a way that excludes other people who have not experienced the truths we preach, but who lives and gives her or his life in witness to this truth. If we believe in one true God, a God of “steadfast love… faithfulness”; justice and kindness, then these are the values we are to live out to inspire the peoples, nations, and faiths of the world in all their diversity. And we pray that God may ultimately reconcile all this, in a way that is mysterious to us now, into an eternal existence with God that will be open to all nations and all peoples.

Homily for Wednesday, 26 June 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 105:1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8-9; Matthew 7:15-20

Wednesday of the 12th week in Ordinary Time

Whenever I or my family would travel in the Rocky Mountain National Parks of my home province of Alberta, Jasper or Banff, I would get a chuckle out of one of the t-shirts in the gift shops in these parks. The t-shirt I enjoyed features a bear standing next to a sign, like the many real signs seen throughout these parks, that reads, “Do not feed the bears.” The bear on the t-shirt wears a hat with moose antlers, and carries a sign that says, “I am not a bear. Trust me.”

In Matthew’s Gospel, today we hear Jesus warn us to “beware of false prophets, who come to [us] in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves.” Do we not wish maybe that these “false prophets” would be easy to discern as if they wore “sheep’s clothing” but held up a sign that read, “I am not a wolf, trust me”? Unfortunately, when speaking of our faith, to differentiate “false prophets,” those who deceive and distract us from the true and right priorities of our faith, from those who speak and teach the truth, is occasionally not so easy.

To add to our challenge to discern real sheep from wolves “in sheep’s clothing,” or good trees bearing good fruit from rotten trees bearing rotten fruit, do Jesus’ pithy proverbs we hear today not sometimes work in different, even opposite ways? On the one hand, even among self-professed Christians there are people who do seek to seek to deceive and distract us from God and the true priorities and ethics of our faith. At the risk of judging them too harshly myself, I become especially irritated at people with authority who promote what I hear as a charade of the Christian faith that more closely resembles idolatry of wealth and prosperity, nationalism, militarism, or forms of xenophobia (a rejection of anybody who does not look, think, or behave “like us”), than anything Christ or his Apostles taught.

On the other hand, I encounter brother and sister Christians (and I have been guilty of this myself) who are at times too quick to seek errors in other Christians’ message or how their message is articulated and lived. Words like “heretic” have become the most recent curse words from ostensibly-Christian media outlets, especially but not only on the internet, against fellow believers who hold differing views or struggle more openly to understand or live by some of the Church’s teachings. Quick insults like this and the animosity that can exist today even among Christians create and aggravate divisions and breed still further animosity. Too-ready a search for wolves “in sheep’s clothing” risks misjudging as wolves our sisters and brothers who are in fact sheep, if black sheep, within our Church and even our social groups and families.

Please let me suggest these possible remedies to these problems, for me as much as for each of us: The next time somebody says something or acts in a way with which you disagree or that you think is wrong, make an intentional effort to discern (if not write down) something good or true in the other person’s message or action, even if the balance of this person’s message or action is still wrong or erroneous. This intentional seeking of the good in one another will help us to differentiate sheep from wolves, good trees and their fruit from bad, while maintaining the charity for one another, especially as Christians, which our Lord teaches us is the highest good of all.