Homily for Sunday, 7 November 2021– Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 17:10-16; Psalm 146:7, 8-9, 9-10; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

In the language of the Bible, there are few people depicted as poor and downtrodden as widows. From many different texts of the Old Testament, we have the oft-repeated triplet, “the widow, the orphan and the stranger (or resident alien),” which stands for the lowest of the low classes in the society of Israel of the time. We hear the widow-orphan-stranger motif in our Psalm today: “The LORD loves the righteous, and watches over the strangers. The LORD upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”

Girls and women through Biblical times had few rights independently of their fathers and then their husbands, and children had few rights independently of their parents. So a child whose parents had died, or a woman who had lost her husband, would be extremely poor and excluded from the power structures of those ancient societies.

Can we not think of many examples when Jesus preferentially calls upon children, women, and sometimes widows; when he makes these underprivileged people the centre of the event? We hear a clear example of Jesus doing this in today’s Gospel, the story of the so-called “widow’s mite.” In fact, both Mark’s Gospel and our reading from 1 Kings today centre on the heroic widow figure. (And if we are thinking that the term “heroic widow” is self-contradictory, an oxymoron even to our ears today, that is because it is. Our Bible offers us this jarring image of the widow, the lowest of the low classes, who becomes the heroine; the main driver or protagonist of the event).

When I think of the widow’s mite, I think of one of my favourite paintings, one by the French painter James Tissot, called “The Widow’s Mite” or “Le denier de la veuve.” Tissot is known for his set of 365 distinctive watercolour (or gouache) paintings, which he painted late in his life and many of which are scenes from the Bible. But much of his earlier work is of well-dressed, wealthy, attractive women in the rich neighbourhood of Paris where Tissot lived. And then, one day, James Tissot visited Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris to paint a portrait of a choir singer. There, he experienced a vision of Jesus tending to the very poorest people, and soon he returned to a devout practice of his Catholic faith.

It strikes me (whether this is intentional on Tissot’s part or coincidence, I am not sure) how similar the temple treasury area in Tissot’s “The Widow’s Mite” looks to the limestone façades of Saint-Sulpice and many other churches in Paris. I lived within a fifteen-minute walk of Saint-Sulpice for five years in Paris. And the scene of people milling about the temple treasury in “The Widow’s Mite” reminds me of a frequent scene around the entrances to Saint-Sulpice and other churches in Paris: Well-dressed elites, but the (still) many poor people the elites have been almost conditioned to ignore.

But there is one person noticeably not shown in Tissot’s painting, “The Widow’s Mite.” That person is Jesus. Tissot is also famous for at least two (that I can think of) of his later watercolours that are from Jesus’ perspective. One is Tissot’s “Crucifixion, Seen from the Cross,” which is from the crucified Jesus’ view, looking down upon the crowds—closest to him, his mother, the women who served Jesus during his ministry, and the beloved disciple—at the foot of the cross. And the second of these paintings is “The Widow’s Mite.”

Midway through today’s Gospel reading, Mark says, fairly innocuously, that “Jesus sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.” Tissot’s unseen Jesus paints the watercolour for us: A crowd of men in fine robes, the scribes Jesus has just criticized for their boastfulness, even in prayer, as “they devour widows’ houses.” This crowd is wealthy, proud, and self-serving. And in their midst is a poor widow, facing Jesus; facing the artist; facing us. Her eyes are downcast in a shamed gaze. She is carrying a small child, at least in Tissot’s painting. And the wealthy men continue to socialize; continue to boast of their wealth and status. One reaches for a horn, one of seven next to the temple treasury box that the wealthy would blow to announce that they had made a substantial donation. All these men ignore the poor widow, whom Tissot depicts as she walks away, after having dropped her “two small copper coins” in the treasury box. All ignore her, except the unseen but ever-present Jesus.

Jesus notices the poor widow. And he takes this opportunity to teach his disciples: Pay attention to the widow. Do not, in your pride, in your wealth, in any spirit of self-absorption that can even affect our prayer, ignore this widow and what she has just done! “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says to his disciples, “This poor widow has put in more than all of those who are contributing to the treasury.”

There is profound meaning in just these few words of our Lord. And, of course, we would be right in observing a recurring pattern of this kind of event—of encounter with the poor; the widow; the orphan; the stranger, resulting in a teaching moment—in our Bible. For good reason, our Church has us hear the Gospel account of the widow’s mite alongside our reading today from 1 Kings about the encounter between Elijah and a widow with a young son at Zerephath.

Understandably, the widow of Zerephath is focused on conserving what little food she has so she and her son will not starve. Yet, just then, Elijah asks this woman to be boldly generous—Elijah asks the widow, not the other way around, for “a little cake”! And somehow (1 Kings does not say why) the widow at Zerephath trusts Elijah. Maybe Elijah simply had that great a reputation as a prophet. Anyway, Elijah’s prophecy comes true: The jar of meal and the jug of oil last until the LORD sends rain to relieve the terrible famine in the land, which was disproportionately affecting the poorest people.

I think it is reasonable for us, when we hear about the widow at Zerephath in 1 Kings; the widow at the temple treasury in Mark’s Gospel, to focus on how each widow is exceedingly generous with very little, or on the trust each widow shows in God, directly or through a prophet like Elijah. But in each event, with each widow, there is more depth of meaning than generosity or trust. And, please allow me to say, the added depth of meaning has nothing to do with each widow’s starting lack of food or money. The focus, in either event, is not primarily on either widow but on the abundance of God.

The widow at Zerephath obeys Elijah and makes him “a little cake” from her meal and oil, and then she and her son receive more food by the word and hand of the LORD than they needed to survive until the rain ended Israel’s crop failure and famine. The widow at the temple treasury quite possibly gives the second greatest gift anybody gives in our Gospels. What do I mean by this?

It is helpful, I think, to place the event of the widow at the temple treasury and her “mite”—her two small copper coins—in its broader context within Mark’s Gospel. We are drawing toward the end of the Church’s liturgical year. By the way, Advent is only three weeks away; the beginning of a new Church year (just saying!). We have followed Mark’s Gospel roughly in order this year on Sundays. After this account of the widow’s mite, Mark includes only one more short chapter before Jesus enters Jerusalem, and his Passion and death take place. At the point where we hear from Mark today, the Pharisees and the scribes, the religious elites of Israel, are murderously angry with Jesus. Jesus continues to criticize them for their blindness to their worst sin, and they are on the cusp of having Jesus killed.

Jesus’ death on a cross is the first and most generous gift that anybody gives in our Gospels; in the whole of the Bible and of human history. In the immediate foreshadow of Jesus’ gift of his very life for our salvation is the gift of the widow and her two small copper coins, “everything she had” out of her poverty. A more historically distant sign, but still a sign, of God’s supreme generosity that culminates in Jesus’ gift of eternal life by his death on a cross is the gift of food of the widow at Zerephath to Elijah.

On the cross, God gave us in Christ “everything [he] had to live on” so that we might live forever. God invites us not to ignore this, but to imitate it by giving generously according to our means, as a sign that we, like the hidden but ever-present Jesus in the Gospel scene, the artist of our creation and our salvation, have taken notice.

Homily for Friday, 17 September 2021– Memorial of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess, and St. Robert Bellarmine, Bishop, Doctors of the Church

Readings of the day: 1 Timothy 6:2c-12; Psalm 49:6-7, 8-10, 17-18, 19-20; Luke 8:1-3

Friday of the Twenty-fourth week in Ordinary Time

Today’s Gospel reading from Luke is a noticeably brief transitional passage between lengthier and more detailed episodes in Jesus’ Galilean ministry. It is preceded by the meal scene at the home of Simon the Pharisee, the woman who washes and anoints Jesus’ feet, and Jesus’ parable of the two debtors, which we heard in yesterday’s Gospel reading. Today’s passage is followed in Luke by the parable of the sower.

For its brevity, though, today’s Gospel reading says a lot to us about the diversity yet unity of the earliest Church, the first disciples of Jesus, across longstanding social and religious distinctions. Of course, Luke says, “the twelve were with Jesus”; the twelve Apostles are reminiscent of the twelve Old Testament tribes united as one nation of Israel. But then Luke, alone among the four Gospels, includes today’s detail about various women who followed Jesus: “Mary Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many [unnamed] others.”

What is a common trait among these diverse women and earliest disciples of Jesus? Luke says that they “provided for Jesus and the twelve out of their resources.” This is to say that, out of their diversity of resources—not only monetary but the particular gifts each brought to the community of disciples of Jesus—they worked to ensure the unity of these disciples in Christ. I think we can presume that the twelve; the women; all these earliest disciples of Jesus were diverse, if we only consider their personal backgrounds and material wealth, let alone other points of diversity. With her connections to the royal court of Herod, Joanna may have had some wealth. Mary Magdalene is often portrayed as wealthy. The Gospel says little about Susanna besides her name, and less still about several unnamed disciples of Jesus at the time.

We may know that, in terms of the Church’s liturgy, for weekday Masses in Ordinary Time the central theme of the first reading does not purposely fit together with that of the Gospel. Yet (please allow me to break this mostly unwritten rule of preaching here) I cannot help but see a point in common between the women in Luke’s Gospel who provide for Jesus and the twelve “out of their resources” and the caution to Timothy in our first reading today that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.”

Money and other forms of material wealth are not in themselves evil, as long as they are used most justly, to ensure that nobody lacks at least the necessities of life. It is the individualistic “love of money”; the love of and selfish focus to excess on one’s individual rights when this negates the basic rights of others and the common good, that is evil. The author of 1 Timothy essentially urges Timothy and his Christian community (and us) to live their discipleship and dispense their gifts and wealth in the way the women in our Gospel do: With ultimate care for our unity in Christ, in imitation of him.

It is also appropriate today (I am not sure this happens on any other day of the year) that we celebrate the memory of two saintly Doctors of the Church, Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine, on the same day. To be a Doctor of the Church is to be a saint recognized, as only thirty-six people in the Church’s history have, for outstanding teaching of our faith. But Hildegard, Benedictine abbess and mystic of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the 1100s, and Robert, Jesuit entrusted with doctrinal interpretation and implementation of the Council of Trent in the 1500s and early 1600s, could not have been more different.

Perhaps our celebration of Sts. Hildegard of Bingen and Robert Bellarmine is yet another invitation to us to provide out of our diverse sets of resources and gifts for the common good and salvation of all.

Homily for Thursday, 16 September 2021‒ Memorial of St. Cornelius, Pope, and St. Cyprian, Bishop, Martyrs

Readings of the day: 1 Timothy 4:12-16; Psalm 111:7-8, 9, 10; Luke 7:36-50

Thursday of the 24th week in Ordinary Time

Meals can be great occasions to unite people. But have some of us not experienced how meals can be occasions, sadly, for the creation or deepening of divisions among friends and acquaintances, households and families? The conflict over a contentious political or moral issue at a meal for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other holidays is even somewhat stereotyped.

Fr. Eugene LaVerdière, a priest and Biblical scholar of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, wrote a book in the mid-1990s entitled Dining in the Kingdom of God. This book comments on the many meal scenes of Luke’s Gospel. Fr. Laverdière considers the meal scene we hear in today’s Gospel to be the centrepiece of a lengthy section of Luke (chapters 6 to 8) that extends from Jesus’ naming of his twelve Apostles to his healings of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage. In this section of Luke, Jesus emphasizes unity that transcends many social and religious distinctions: Gender, social and religious status, ritual cleanliness, sinners versus the less sinful (since nobody, except for Jesus and Mary, is sinless), and so forth.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus finds himself at dinner at the home of Simon the Pharisee. A woman enters Simon’s house, bathes Jesus’ “feet with her tears and [dries] them with her hair,” and anoints his feet with oil. Immediately, Simon questions this woman’s presence in his house: If Jesus were a true prophet, he would know “that she is a sinner.” This draws from Jesus the parable of the two debtors, with the essential point that the greater debt or sin a person has to be forgiven, the more love with which that person will respond to having been forgiven.

The meal scene in Luke’s Gospel today is lengthy and detailed. We might focus, rightly, on the extravagance of the probably expensive oil with which the woman anoints Jesus; the drama of her washing Jesus’ feet with her profuse tears and drying them with her hair, as a sign of the main point of Jesus’ parable that follows: The woman’s sin is great, and so is her love poured out for Jesus upon forgiving her.

But Eugene LaVerdière says that this meal scene, placed within a longer section of Luke on Jesus’ call of his Apostles and early Galilean ministry, centres, in a word, on unity. Jesus chooses twelve Apostles to recall the twelve tribes of the one nation of Israel in the Old Testament. Meals in Jesus’ time, LaVerdière says, were ideally a sign of unity across tribal and social or religious status boundaries; the unity of the nation of Israel.

Other commentators on today’s Gospel meal scene invite us to pay attention not only to the fact that a woman interrupts Jesus’ meal with Simon in this way and that the woman is a serious sinner, or that she takes the place of a servant or slave by washing and anointing Jesus’ feet. This is despite her obvious wealth, since she could afford expensive ointment.

On top of all this, the woman would have had to enter the dining room along its edge to anoint Jesus’ feet as she does. This is because, at meals like this in Israel at Jesus’ time, the meal guests would usually recline, with their heads toward the table at the centre of the room and their feet toward the outer walls. This woman—because she is a woman and a serious sinner, but also literally, physically—enters and anoints Jesus’ feet from the periphery of the room. When Simon the Pharisee attempts to ostracize her further, to push her farther to the (more figurative) periphery on account of her sin, Jesus corrects him with a parable. And then he restores the woman to unity, social and religious: “Your faith has saved you, go in peace.”

The well-being of the ancient nation of Israel depended on this kind of unity. The well-being of our social units, households, and families depends on the unity to which Jesus calls us today. And our salvation depends on this same unity.

Homily for Sunday, 12 September 2021– Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Isaiah 50:5-9a; Psalm 116:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 8-9; James 2:14-18; Mark 8:27-35

One of the great advantages of living in a religious community of priests, as I do with my brother Basilians Frs. Jim, Dave, and Glenn here in Edmonton, is the depth and diversity of conversation we get into among us. I pray this is also true in our families and households. But recently, just as classes were starting here at St. Joseph’s College and the University of Alberta, Fr. Jim (a philosopher) and I (a theologian) were having our usual deep conversation over breakfast. Fr. Jim asked me an interesting and important question: As a Christian, an academic theologian and instructor at our College, what sets Christianity apart? Why am I a Christian and not of any other noble faith in our world, or of no faith? And what gives me the passion to teach, preach, and study our faith as I do?

I found that, even for somebody who has had as much time to think about these questions as I have, to answer Fr. Jim’s question was difficult. After a long pause, and a short walk over to the coffee pot to fill my mug with the coffee that, for me, is essential to be able to answer such questions early in the day, I blurted out the best answer my insufficiently-caffeinated brain could come up with: The Incarnation. That God, in Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity who takes on our human nature, shares fully in all our experiences that make us human, including suffering and death, is to me what distinguishes Christianity from any other faith. The Incarnation, first and foremost, gives me the passion to preach, teach, and study our Christian, Catholic faith as I do.

As I reflect on my answer to Fr. Jim that morning, I do not want to put myself on the level of St. Peter in his answer to Jesus’ question in today’s Gospel: “Who do you say that I am”? But I think there are similarities between my answer and Peter’s answer to Jesus in our Gospel. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all include substantially this same event of Peter’s identification of Jesus as the Son of God, “the Christ.” The Gospels differ in some details, though. Only Matthew has Jesus emphasize to Peter how right his answer is, but that he could not possibly have answered so correctly had this not been revealed to him by God “the Father in heaven.” In Luke and Mark, Peter seems to identify Jesus much more fortuitously—“flying by the seat of his pants,” or maybe his tunic, so to speak. Of course, God’s grace in revealing to Peter Jesus’ identity as the Christ is implied by its context in Luke and Mark, if it is not as explicit as in Matthew.

But however Peter is able to answer Jesus’ answer about his identity correctly, amid all kinds of competing options—“John the Baptist… Elijah, and still others, one of the prophets”—with God’s grace (undeniably), before or after his morning coffee, Peter, thanks be to God, gets his answer right. For Peter as for me, the Incarnation is central to who Jesus is. In Jesus, the Son of God, already fully possessing the same eternal divine nature as the Father and the Spirit, has become fully human, fully one of us, and shares in every feature that makes us human, except sin. He takes on human flesh and blood, is born of a human mother, grows up a human child cared for by human parents, breathes, eats, sleeps, prays, serves, heals, teaches… dies a horrific, torturous death, rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven…

Wait, did we just go off script? Even if Jesus is human, he is also God. God cannot suffer and die, right? A significant part of me wants to leap to Peter’s defense when Jesus scolds him so harshly: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are thinking not as God does, but as humans do.”

Truly, though, I think part of me is so eager to defend poor Peter because I am so much like him. We are all so much like him. We would not be here, and we would not profess in our Creed all that we do about God who, in the Second Person of the Trinity, as Jesus, the Christ, became fully human if the Incarnation were not, as it was for Peter; as it is for me and for all of us, so essential to our faith. But, alas, like Peter, I tend; we all tend to think “not as God does, but as humans do.” This is not a criticism against us. If it were, I should be foremost in being criticized, because I have that much more responsibility, as a priest who studies and teaches theology, to understand and teach our faith accurately. We cannot help thinking “not as God does, but as humans do.” Our only experience is that of being human. We are not and cannot be God. We need God’s grace to reveal God’s self to us, Father, Son, and Spirit, so that we can think as God does and seek God in all things, all our thoughts, all our experiences, in our natural world and in heaven.

We are all so much like Peter. We are all here because we have all or will all, at some point, answer correctly; profess our faith correctly, as Peter did: “You are the Christ”…“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.”

Yet we are all so much like Peter. We all constantly need God’s grace to accept and enact the most difficult thing we say we believe: That Jesus, the Christ, suffered, died (or is even able to suffer and die), rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. We, like Peter, need God’s grace to put Satan behind us; Satan who would never allow us to make the profession of faith we do in a God who can and does take our human nature, including our suffering and death, only to transform it into resurrection and ascension to eternal life.

If the Incarnation is truly, as we profess that it is, essential to our Christian faith, then we must be very much like Peter. We must be very much like the “suffering servant” whose hymn we hear today through the prophet Isaiah. Today’s reading from Isaiah is the third of four “servant hymns” in Isaiah. It is the lament of somebody who is suffering horribly for relief from that suffering, but it is also a hymn of hope; of trust in God. This hymn anticipates God’s final vindication of the suffering servant, but also places that vindication in the present tense: “The LORD God helps me… I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near.”

In our Church’s tradition, Isaiah’s servant hymns have long been connected to the passion and death of Jesus Christ. We hear the four servant hymns in order from the Book of Isaiah during Holy Week, just before Easter, each year. But who are Isaiah’s servants, really? (Isaiah was written centuries before Jesus’ time, so I think it is fair to say that Isaiah could not have been referring directly to a future coming of Jesus. Prophets do not foretell the future; they point out God’s action on our behalf in the present). Are the servants of Isaiah the prophet himself, suffering the reproach of Israel’s people, who were not open to his prophecy? Are they other prophets who spoke for God in Israel’s history? Do they stand for the entire people of Israel? Are they meant to remind us of ourselves as a people of God?

I ask this last question especially because, if we ourselves have not suffered, I think most if not all of us know somebody or know of somebody who has. How many of us have known somebody who has suffered greatly, yet has maintained faith and trust in God, that their suffering or even death will not have the final word? And, if we are not the person suffering in this way, yet continuing to believe and hope, how often do we tend to be drawn to those people; to the strength of God working through them?

This, I think, is at the heart of St. James’ bold claim that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” If our faith is true; if the Incarnation is the centre of our faith as we say it is, then our faith will necessarily lend itself to solidarity with others, especially those who suffer in any way. This is so because our solidarity with those who suffer is in imitation of Jesus Christ who, in an unprecedented way in history—in a way no other world religion claims its founder did—entered into full solidarity with us by becoming human like us. In this way, Jesus is Isaiah’s servant, projected into our human history, but so are we.

In this way the Incarnation becomes enacted in our own lives. Jesus continues to take flesh and blood, die, rise, and ascend to heaven in us, insofar as we enter into solidarity with the suffering servants of our time; as we pray and act preferentially for their well-being. This allows us then to sing together the servant’s hymn of lament, but also of hope and trust in God, that eternal life and not suffering or death will have the final word.

Homily for Thursday, 9 September 2021– Ferial

 Readings of the day: Colossians 3:12-17; Psalm 150:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6; Luke 6:27-38

Thursday of the 23rd week in Ordinary Time

Optional Memorial of St. Peter Claver, Priest

What clothing do we keep in our Christian wardrobe, so to speak? I have to admit, and I wonder if I speak for many of us: I am a little more concerned these days about what I wear now that we have returned to our work and study places in public after many months of working from home and online due to the COVID pandemic.

Speaking of our worship, I have served as a priest in enough places among the poor to know to be very careful about how to approach the subject of appropriate clothing for Mass; for our worship spaces. I am sure we have heard the term “Sunday best” to describe proper, dignified Church attire. In places I have served, because of poverty or other reasons, people have arrived at churches in shabby clothing. These people are always a reminder to me not to do or say anything, especially as a minister of the Church, that would marginalize them further. Neither I nor any of us know what is in a person’s heart, based on their clothing no less.

Today, the letter to the Colossians also invites us to put on a kind of clothing that is more important than our physical clothing. Colossians reminds us of the appropriate clothing of the heart: “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion and kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.” And again: “Above all, clothe yourselves with love.”

Love is not measured in percentages of cotton, wool, polyester, nylon, or other materials we might wear. And, in Luke’s Gospel today, Jesus raises the command to love to a new and radical level: “I say to you that listen, ‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.’”

Here, Jesus is not asking us (figuratively) to wear our best clothing, the clothing of love including for our enemies, only on Sundays, or when we are at Mass, or when we feel like it. No, we are to put on this best clothing all the time, even when this clothing might be less comfortable than the clothing of bitterness, rudeness, or impatience that we (yours truly included) may be tempted to put on occasionally when people behave in less-than-loving ways toward us.

I pray sincerely that none of us have or will have enemies; people who challenge us profoundly to love them as God loves them (and us). I pray that none of us will ever be an enemy to anybody else; that, as Colossians says, “the peace of Christ [will] rule in [our] hearts,” and especially at the heart of our presence, our ministry, our study, and our worship here at St. Joseph’s College. But we know as Christians that, to the extent we live our faith in the public square, even humbly and quietly, we may not have enemies, but we will have people who misunderstand us or outright reject at least what they perceive to be important tenets of our faith that they cannot accept.

Our encounters with these people, our encounters with the poor or otherwise marginalized will be opportunities to put on our best clothing, that of love: The invisible clothing that few may perceive immediately that we are wearing, but the clothing that makes us who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ in our world.

Homily for Sunday, 29 August 2021– Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 4:1-2, 6-8; Psalm 15:2-3, 3-4, 4-5; James 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27; Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

Perhaps not many topics in the Bible are as contentious as the Law. In what ways is the Law—and in the Bible we specifically mean the Law of Moses; the religious Law—a good thing or a benefit, and in what ways can the Law hold us back from the most right and just practice of our religious faith?

This tension about the Law is woven through each of our readings today. In Deuteronomy, Moses presents the religious Law as a gift from God, as a good in itself. Observance of the Law, while neither adding or taking anything away from the commands of God to Israel, would be Israel’s way of showing its greatness and its wisdom as a nation. Observance of the Law would be a sign of Israel’s closeness to God: “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people,” other nations would say of Israel.

In Moses’ time, we know that the people of Israel were in the process of returning from Egypt to their homeland, promised them by God. Imagine ancient Israel, a people small in number, prosperity, and military might compared to powerful nations that surrounded it. Israel could not compete with these other nations insofar as these worldly signs of national power. The source of Israel’s power and greatness was not itself, but God and God’s Law, given through Moses.

These other nations around Israel believed in and worshipped all kinds of gods, but Israel would stand out for its belief and worship of only one God. This was not only because the God of Israel would uphold Israel militarily and economically against Israel’s much more powerful neighbours—although we hear often in our Bible when God does just that for Israel—but because the God of Israel desired to enter into a relationship of love with Israel. The God of Israel cared for Israel in a way that the gods of other nations did not for those other nations. This was to be the core identity of the people of Israel, and Israel’s obedience to the Law of God given through Moses would be a sign that Israel acknowledged and desired this personal, loving, caring relationship with its God as much as God desired a personal, loving, caring relationship with Israel.

But from time to time the people and the nation of Israel would forget that their religious Law was meant as a gift and a sign of the mutual relationship of love between Israel and God. The people; the leaders of Israel would use the Law to reinforce their own power and status instead of to show the goodness and love of God on Israel’s behalf to the world.

This manipulation of the religious Law by Israel’s elites, the Pharisees and the scribes in Jesus’ time, is the focus of Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees and the scribes in today’s Gospel. “Hypocrites,” Jesus calls the Pharisees and scribes, remembering a similar scathing criticism of Israel’s elites by the prophet Isaiah: “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

Where are the hearts of Israel’s elites, the Pharisees and scribes, while they profess adherence to the Law of Moses, down to the finest details like the ritual washing of hands, vessels, and food? The hearts of these elites of Israel are not focused on God as the source of all that is good: Of the Law itself; of any prosperity and religious or social status they may have, and so on. The hearts of the Pharisees and scribes are focused on preserving their own power and status, against those they see as not as obedient to the letter of the Law, like Jesus and his disciples. The “look at me” attitude of the Pharisees and scribes toward the law is incompatible with looking toward God as the source of all goodness. This is why Jesus scolds them the way he does.

And who stands to lose the most when elites, whether social or religious, manipulate what is good as the Pharisees and scribes do in today’s Gospel? Inevitably those with the least power, the least status, the least wealth stand to lose the most when what is good is manipulated in this way. The Letter of James, from which we have just heard, is emphatic on this point: What is essential to true and right practice of our religious faith, “religion that is pure and undefiled before God”? James says that the care for the least well-off and most vulnerable, “care for orphans and widows in their distress,” is of the utmost priority. Here, James’ attention to social justice, especially to the benefit of “the least of [our] sisters and brothers,” is continuous with long-standing Biblical tradition. I think of Jesus’ own teaching: “Whatsoever you do to the least of these”… I think of the prophet Micah: God asks of us only that we “do justice, love goodness, and walk humbly with [our] God.”

And the Psalm we hear today is very much in line with this radical call through our Scriptures to social justice that does not reinforce human power or status but shows forth the goodness and glory of God. Our Psalm today offers us a long litany of the people God praises; the people who will gain eternal life, a dwelling in God’s tent: The one who “walks blamelessly” and rightly; who “speaks the truth from [the] heart; who “does no evil to a friend”; who does not take up “a reproach against a neighbour” or “a bribe against the innocent”; “whoever stands by their oath even to their hurt” (now that is radical!)…

This constant call to justice in a way that especially benefits the least of our sisters and brothers is so radical, even and maybe especially today, though, that might we be tempted to hear the Word of God today and think, “That is easier said than done”? The temptation, and frequent succumbing to the temptation, to seek our own power, status, wealth, self-sufficiency in a way that fails at least to appreciate God as the source of what is good, and deprives the most vulnerable and disadvantaged of these “goods,” is age-old. This is not a problem limited to the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ time, to the people of Israel of Moses’ time, to James’ time or the Psalmist’s time. No, the temptation to manipulate what God gives us—religious and civil laws, even just ones; material wealth; individual freedom and autonomy; authority; education—for our own gain at the expense of those less-advantaged is just as present in our time as in Biblical times.

But what could remedy this problem? Our readings today give us a hint toward the remedy to this problem; this temptation from human weakness and sin to manipulate the good God gives us for our own gain at the expense of others. God’s Law, from the time it was given to the people of Israel through Moses, was meant so that Israel could point to the goodness and love of God and its relationship of love with God, not to Israel’s self for its own sake. The many laws and rituals the Pharisees and scribes urged the Jewish people of Jesus’ time to follow to the letter were again designed to strengthen the relationship of the people who piously observed these laws with God. The same is true of the gift of the Word of God itself: St. James stresses that the Word of God necessarily directs us to care for one another, especially the less-advantaged.

If we care for the less-advantaged, James says, we become “doers of the Word, and not merely hearers.” We point one another not to our own power or status—not toward “me” or “us” for our own sake—but toward God who, regardless of our power, wealth, status, or authority in this world, calls not only each of us as individuals, but all of us as one People of God, to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 15 August 2021– Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Readings of the day: Revelation 11:19a, 12:1-6a,10ab; Psalm 45:10, 11, 12, 16; 1 Corinthians 15:20-27; Luke 1:39-56

A priest who is a theology professor at a university began his reflection on today’s Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary with a story from one of his classes. He asked his students if anybody could explain the Assumption of Mary. One student answered, “Yeah, that is when the Church teaches that we assume that Mary is in heaven”!

I have never had a student answer me this, or anything similar, about the Assumption of Mary in any of my classes at St. Joseph’s College. I suppose that if a student were to answer in this way, I would quickly but gently correct the student.

Today we celebrate our belief as Catholics that, at the end of her earthly life, Mary, Mother of God; Mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, was taken by God (what we mean by “assumed”) body and soul into heaven, so no trace of her earthly existence was left on earth. This is about as simple and brief a definition of the Assumption of Mary as I think we can give.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was defined only in 1950 by Pope Pius XII as an essential point of our Catholic belief, that is, a dogma. But this does not mean that our belief that Mary was taken (assumed) body and soul into heaven does not go back much farther than the last seventy-one years. In fact our belief in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is among our Church’s most ancient beliefs, dating back to at least the third century after the earthly life of Jesus.

Until the early 300s after the time of Jesus, every so often the Roman Empire endured periods of political and social instability. In response to that instability, Roman emperors tended to persecute Christians and other minority peoples within the Empire—anybody who did not worship the Roman gods. These persecutions produced martyrs in the Church, people who died to uphold their Christian faith. Until the 300s, almost all saints—people the Church proclaims as in heaven—were martyrs. Only after persecution and death for one’s faith became rare in the Roman Empire, which by then had accepted Christianity and then made it the official religion of the Empire, did the Church consider other ways than dying for one’s faith—living an exceptionally holy life—as a sign that a person was in heaven; was a saint. During this time, a tradition started in the Church of collecting any physical remains (relics) of martyrs and storing them in a visible place (catacombs) for veneration by the faithful. These Roman Martyrs were especially celebrated on the anniversaries of their deaths, their “birthday,” the day on which God took them into heaven.

But how does the veneration of saints and their relics relate to the Assumption of Mary? At about the same time as the veneration of martyrs was beginning, the Church was becoming increasingly aware that, while we have from our beginning placed Mary first and most important among the saints, no relics; no physical reminders of her earthly existence have ever been found. By this time, a tomb at the foot of the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem was already being celebrated as the place where Mary was laid at the end of her earthly life. Let us remember that our Church has never taught, one way or the other, whether Mary died; only that her body never decayed before God assumed her into heaven. In fact our Eastern Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers focus today’s celebration more on Mary’s Dormition, or “falling asleep” at the end of her life on earth; we Roman Catholics focus more on God having taken her into heaven. We celebrate (rightly) two aspects of the same event.

And the great celebration of Mary’s “birthday” into heaven has been on this day, August 15, since the Church’s earliest centuries. But this tomb at the Mount of Olives was empty: No body. Coincidentally, it is near another empty tomb that many Christians consider to have been the tomb of Jesus between his death and resurrection. Based on the empty tomb the Church reasoned that God must have taken Mary’s whole being (what we mean by “body and soul”) to heaven, leaving no trace; no relic of her on earth. There is even a Biblical tradition in the Jewish as well as Christian faiths of God taking especially holy people into heaven, body and soul together: Enoch in Genesis and Elijah in 2 Kings, for instance.

Today’s celebration of Mary’s “birthday,” her Assumption body and soul, into heaven has a long and beautiful history, certainly longer than the dogmatic definition of the Assumption of Mary in 1950! Yet, please allow me to say something maybe a bit controversial here: That maybe the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is not a celebration about Mary, first and foremost, but about God and God’s Son our Lord, Jesus Christ, and about us.

What do I mean by this? Our reading today from the Book of Revelation is full of fantastic imagery that I will not dare to unpack in all its detail and symbolism. We are on scene of a great cosmic battle between a “great red dragon” with “seven heads and ten horns” with a diadem on each of its heads—I envision one ugly beast, I think we can say who stands for everything that is evil—and a woman, “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet,” crowned with “twelve stars,” in the midst of childbirth. Only since the Middle Ages has any frequent connection been made between this woman and Mary. A far more ancient tradition in the Church is to understand this woman as a metaphor for the whole Church; all of us in our resistance toward sin and evil, which will last until the end of time.

Yet to identify the woman of Revelation as Mary is not wrong, per se, because Mary stands for all of us, the Church, and our ultimate hope as a community of faith: Eternal life; heaven. This is to say that we hope (otherwise I do not think we would be here or profess faith in “the life of the world to come” in our Creed) to reach the same destination; the same end as Mary did by her glorious Assumption. We hope, at the end of our earthly lives, to be taken, as Mary was, not only soul but body, too, into heaven. After all, in our Creed, we profess our faith in the resurrection of the body.

Mary’s Assumption into heaven is not hers alone. It is a sign and a mystery of our collective hope as Church to be taken up into heaven, body and soul, at the end of our earthly lives; at the end of time. St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians makes this “order of things” clear today: First, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Because of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven, Mary; all the saints; all of us are called through the same process and the same end: Death, resurrection, ascension to heaven, body and soul. And only because of Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension is any of this possible for us, and was any of this possible for Mary.

Today especially we greet Mary with great joy as Elizabeth did in Luke’s Gospel: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”! Yet I think it is important that, immediately after this joyful greeting by Elizabeth, Mary praises not herself but the Lord in the beautiful words of the prayer we know as the Magnificat: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.” But, once again, the Magnificat is not Mary’s prayer alone. It is part of a long, and very Biblical, tradition of especially women praising God for God’s saving presence among his people. We have Deborah in the Book of Judges and Moses’ sister Miriam during the Exodus as some examples of Old Testament women who praise God for God’s presence and offer of salvation to a whole people in this way. Hannah’s prayer when she conceives Samuel is almost verbatim Mary’s Magnificat in Luke.

And now the Magnificat is our prayer. We, not as disconnected individuals but as a community; a communion of faith, offer this prayer of joyful praise to God that Mary did. Yet by this prayer we acknowledge and assent to God’s way of saving us: The weak are strengthened; the proud humbled and scattered. The powerful are brought low; the lowly raised up. The hungry are filled; the rich “sent… away empty.” In God’s mercy, heaven is seen as our worldly concepts of power and worth quite literally overturned. Mary is our first model of this overturning: The insignificant young Jewish woman of a tiny village, Nazareth, who becomes the Mother of our Lord and Saviour and is taken up into heaven this day. This is only so that we will follow Mary and the saints to our “birthday” into eternal life, where there is no excess wealth or food at the expense of those who have too little; no pride at the expense of the humble; no “me” disconnected from or at the expense of “us.” If we follow Mary’s example, we will gain heaven together as Church, God’s people, a communion of faith, body and soul.