Homily for Sunday, 13 February 2022– Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 17:5-8; Psalm 1:1-2, 3, 4, 6; 1 Corinthians 15:12, 16-20; Luke 6:17, 20-26

The message of our Gospel today is, I think (or maybe I hope) a familiar one to us: The beatitudes. Jesus pronounces certain groups of people “blessed”: The poor; those who “are hungry now”; those “who weep now”; those who are hated, excluded, reviled, defamed “on account of the Son of Man”; because of their belief in Jesus and imitation of how he lived.

But our Gospel message today might be just different enough from the beatitudes we are familiar with, so as to be, to say the least, a sharp challenge for us to hear and put into practice. We hear today Luke’s version of the beatitudes: Four blessings, toward the poor; the hungry; those who weep; those who are hated and excluded “on account of the Son of Man,” and four corresponding woes, toward those who are rich; those who are full; whose hunger has been satisfied; toward those who laugh; and toward those of whom “all speak well.”

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke each include versions of the beatitudes. Matthew’s beatitudes are often numbered as eight, without any corresponding woes, unlike Luke. Bible experts say that Matthew’s beatitudes may have been intended primarily to encourage an audience of Jews—Jesus’ own people—who had come to believe in Jesus as God; as the Messiah. If we are trying to encourage people, reminding them of the woes they will experience if they behave badly does not often work. God looks with special blessing upon the poor; those who mourn; those who are hated for the sake of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah and living as he has lived. And, Matthew says, if we are not poor, or mourning, or hated, all is not lost. The key is to attune ourselves to the experience and concerns of the less-advantaged, the poor, the mourning, those who are mistreated for their belief in and emulation of our Lord: To be as they are “in spirit” if we cannot be so in our actual experience. This is called solidarity with the poor, those who mourn, the mistreated and rejected.

I think we are much more familiar with Matthew’s version of the beatitudes than Luke’s version we hear today. Matthew’s beatitudes are far more frequently commented than Luke’s. We hear many more church hymns, at least in my experience, based on Matthew’s than Luke’s beatitudes. Besides, I cannot imagine the St. Louis Jesuits singing, “Cursed are your rich, for the kingdom shall not be theirs”… It simply does not have the same ring to it as, “Blessed be your poor”… Maybe we could compose a church hymn with Luke’s woes, in some dreadful minor key… On second thought, this is probably not a good idea. I would not want us all to get up and walk out of Mass!

Whatever the reason(s), Luke’s beatitudes and accompanying woes are much more direct and immediately challenging than Matthew’s. Matthew has Jesus proclaim the beatitudes at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount. Again, I think we are maybe more familiar with this setting of the beatitudes, thanks to religious art and music. Matthew presents Jesus as the great teacher; the one to fulfill and uphold the authority of the Law of Moses and the prophets, but who exceeds even Moses and the prophets in authority. In Matthew, Jesus goes up a mountain with his disciples, but preaches his Sermon on the Mount toward the crowds below. We might imagine a kind of natural amphitheatre created by the hilly landscape of Galilee, where Jesus gave his Sermon on the Mount. I can attest to this: As a teacher, I want people to be able to hear me well. The hills surrounding where the crowds gathered to hear Jesus would have helped Jesus’ voice to carry more powerfully.

But Luke sets Jesus’ Sermon differently than Matthew. In Luke, it is not an extended discourse but a brief collection of sayings. Luke begins with the crowds, but has Jesus direct his preaching toward a smaller group of his disciples, already more committed to him and his message than the crowds would have been. Luke features not the Sermon on the Mount but the Sermon on the Plain: Jesus stands on his disciples’ level; on our level.

There is something to be said here for what it means to be a disciple of Jesus, for the disciples in Jesus’ time, in our Gospel, and for us. In Jesus’ time and place, a person who was wealthy enough could (usually for a handsome fee) study under a mentor or master teacher. The student, or disciple, of the teacher was expected to learn enough from the teacher’s instruction to be able to put it into practice. But the disciple was not usually expected to become the teacher; the teacher was one-of-a kind, irreplaceable.

Yet discipleship of Jesus worked a bit differently than discipleship of just any expert teacher in most or all of the ancient world. A person became (and becomes) a disciple of Jesus, not by that person’s choice of a master teacher or by paying a fee, but by Jesus’ choice. Jesus would take the initiative to call people to be his disciples. And Jesus’ disciples—we as Jesus’ disciples—are expected in some way to imitate the teacher, Jesus, so well as to be able to be his presence to our world forever, until he returns in glory.

So how are we to imitate the teacher, Jesus, so well that we almost become the teacher? Clearly, Jesus mission to his disciples, to us, to imitate his example and to become like him is urgent as Luke puts it in his Gospel. There are not only blessings in store for Jesus’ disciples if we should be successful in being like him, but there are woes or curses toward those who should fail. And the mission Jesus gives us to imitate him—to be the teacher’s presence in our world; a presence of justice, kindness, compassion—and the consequences of living this mission well or not are immediate: “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh… Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”

Now, please let me be clear that Jesus does not say that to be wealthy is a sin, or that, if we are not hungry or miserable then, woe to us, we must be doing something wrong. But Jesus is saying, I think, that if we have wealth that we could use to alleviate the suffering of others who struggle to make ends meet; if we have the resources to help ensure that nobody has need of basic necessities of life—food, water, shelter; if we have the gift of joy or laughter that could brighten the experience of somebody who is sad or despairing, then use these gifts for the benefit of the less well-off… now! The call is urgent; this is how we imitate Jesus Christ, the teacher. This is how we become like him, now, in our present world; our present experience; our present relationships.

But when our concern for worldly priorities becomes an obstacle to the mission of justice, kindness, and compassion to which Jesus calls us, then the woes apply. When our concern for ourselves and our own individual well-being inhibits us from striving for the common good, Jesus challenges us: “Woe to you who are rich… Woe to you who are full now… Woe to you who are laughing now… Woe to you when all speak well of you.”

Jesus’ message is without doubt challenging, especially in our culture that prioritizes (as it should, but perhaps even frequently does to excess, over the common good and social justice) values like wealth, individual comfort and freedom, everybody speaking well of us.

Luke’s beatitudes hearken to a longstanding biblical motif of blessings and curses (or blessings and woes). We hear this not only in Luke’s Gospel today but from the prophet Jeremiah, although Jeremiah lists the curses or woes first, and then the blessings. But Jeremiah’s core message is similar to Luke’s today: On the one hand, “cursed are those who trust in mere mortals”; in passing things like wealth, comfort, and individual freedom at the expense of common, social well-being, and ultimately at the expense of trusting God above all else. On the other hand, “blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD.”

Our Psalm today, the first of the biblical Psalms, carries on this message of Jeremiah and Luke: “Blessed is the [one] who does not follow the advice of the wicked… but whose delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law meditates day and night.”

My hope, sisters and brothers, is that this message of the word of God has not lost its edge; its ability to be somewhat discomforting and controversial in our time, as it was in the times of Jeremiah, of the Psalmist, of Luke the Gospel writer, of Jesus. How do we “delight” in the law of the LORD? How do we put it into practice, for the common good and salvation of everybody, now? How do we become like the teacher; the Christ?

I return to a word I used just a few minutes ago: Solidarity. When we enter into solidarity; into something of a relationship of care and of justice for the least of our sisters and brothers, so that all are blessed by the bounty of the Lord together, we will have imitated the teacher. We imitate a teacher, Jesus, who died and rose again to save us. His death was utter failure; utter woe to the world’s eyes, yet Jesus overcame this, so that we may follow Christ into the resurrection from the dead, as St. Paul says today, “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

Jesus gave us his Sermon on the Plain. He stood on our level, so that we could be raised one day to his in heaven. But he stood on the level ground with us, his disciples, so that we could begin to imitate him now; to be blessed now in our care, our compassion, our kindness especially for the least among us; so that we could be like the teacher who stands with us on the level ground.

Homily for Sunday, 30 January 2022– Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; Psalm 71:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 15-17; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

One of my brother Basilian priests has said that, when we hear readings as we do today in which we hear a short verse or two, and then the reading skips over a section before continuing on, it is sometimes a good idea to pay attention to the part that is skipped over.

So what gets skipped over in our readings today? From the Book of Jeremiah we hear God’s call of Jeremiah to serve as God’s prophet. Luke’s Gospel also features a prophetic call story, that of Jesus, beginning his public ministry in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth.

The Book of Jeremiah begins with God’s call to the prophet, lines from our Scriptures than which few are more beautiful: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” For me, God’s opening revelation to Jeremiah, the beginning of God’s call to Jeremiah to be his prophet, is always a beautiful reminder that, whatever I had planned for my life; however we have discerned how God is calling us to live and serve God in our lives, God had a plan, for me and for each one of us, before we were even conceived!

But what if we do not want to do or be exactly who God is calling us to be? What if the vocation to which God is calling us is, say, one that will put our life in danger? Such is the case with Jeremiah. As soon as Jeremiah hears the call of God to be a prophet to God’s people, he senses the real danger to his life, and immediately tries to refuse God’s call.

And this is the part of God’s call to Jeremiah that our reading skips over today. Jeremiah protests: “I do not know how to speak. I am too young.” God, do you not know that every prophet before me has been a laughingstock in Israel; that some have even been killed? Yet Jeremiah’s protests are to no avail. God has his heart set on Jeremiah as God’s prophet, and even promises to protect Jeremiah against the worst the people would do to him. “They will fight against you,” God reassures Jeremiah, “but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you… to deliver you.”

I will admit that the part our Gospel reading from Luke skips over today is not really skipped over. We heard last Sunday what today’s Gospel reading does not repeat: The mission statement of Jesus’ public ministry, in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth. Jesus is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Our Gospel reading picks up again today where Jesus rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says to everybody gathered in the synagogue, with all eyes in the assembly “fixed on him”: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I find it consoling to be reminded that Jesus’ public ministry started well that day in his hometown. In that synagogue of Nazareth, Luke says, “all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Even the assembly’s identification of Jesus as “Joseph’s son” is spun positively in Luke’s Gospel, whereas in the other Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and John), when the people who hear Jesus ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”, they mean it in an insulting way. And, I do not know how all of us feel but, when Jesus’ audience belittles him by asking, “Is this not Joseph’s son”; the son of the carpenter, I begin to feel just a little indignant, wanting to defend not only Jesus but Joseph, the humble, righteous man whom God chose to mentor Jesus like a father in this world.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’ public ministry begins well, even in the eyes of the people of his hometown. This is in marked contrast to Jeremiah, or in fact most if not all the prophets: Their ministry is poorly-received by the people from the start. It is no wonder that Jeremiah, from the beginning of the biblical book in his name, wanted to get out of being a prophet to Judah as God had called him from before he was even conceived in the womb.

But the good will of the people toward Jesus would not last. We know this from what we hear in Luke’s Gospel today. And we know this from the fact that, even though Jesus escapes the murderous rage of the mob who wants to “hurl [Jesus] off the cliff” at the end of today’s Gospel reading, his destiny—the focal point of our Gospels—is to be tortured and crucified; to die for us in this exceedingly cruel way.

It is unclear from Luke’s account what the people in the assembly that day in Nazareth wanted to hear from Jesus. But maybe they wanted to hear a message that would support elements of tribalism and sectarianism in their social and religious attitudes. Maybe they were unaware, until those tribalistic and sectarian attitudes were kindled into open fury at Jesus’ message in their synagogue, of the extent to which those attitudes had affected them and become engrained in them.

We, sisters and brothers, are not exempt, either, from the kind of insular tribalism and sectarianism—a “silo mentality”—that nearly led to Jesus being killed on the very first day of his public ministry, in his own hometown. It was the movement and the mentality among Jesus’ own people that cried out, “We are God’s chosen people,” over and against the people of other nations and faiths: The Phoenician people, represented in Jesus’ commentary in today’s Gospel by the widow of Zarephath, to whom Elijah was sent in a time of famine in 1 Kings; the Syrians, represented by the Syrian king’s general, Naaman, who is afflicted with leprosy but healed by Elijah’s prophetic successor, Elisha. “We are God’s chosen people,” the people in the synagogue of Nazareth protested. “God’s promise of salvation; God’s covenant; God’s presence would never be with other people as it is for us”! Why should we be concerned for the other; for people not of our nation? It was Israel first, after all. And so their rage was kindled against Jesus.

But how often do we hear or observe the same silo mentality at work today? How often do we hear cries of “our country first”; our tribe first; our religious creed first; our social “in” group first; and ultimately me first? Why should I be concerned about the other person, especially the poor or otherwise excluded person? Why should I be concerned (some say today) about protecting public health, out of love of neighbour, in the face of the public health crisis our world continues to face, and that disproportionately affects the already-disadvantaged? Jesus’ counter-message to this entitled and selfish insularity is as challenging and as controversial today as when he preached it in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth. It is challenging and controversial to many of our sister and brother Christians of our time.

Jesus’ message is challenging and controversial still, first because it did not begin with Jesus and, second, because his message is not some superficial all-inclusiveness, but an inclusiveness that is preferential toward the people whom this world’s elites exclude in the name of nation first; the well-to-do of society first; the advantaged first; me first. Jesus’ vision of the reign of God on earth—think of this when we pray, as part of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”—is one that is preferentially inclusive of the poor, the disadvantaged, the outsider, the poor first. Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God is one preferentially inclusive of those whom the entitled and advantaged exclude: Not one Israelite, but the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian!

This vision of God’s reign on earth was the vision of God’s prophets: Isaiah, whose scroll Jesus reads and interprets in the synagogue of Nazareth; Jeremiah, whom we hear first from the word of God this morning. Isaiah’s message was preferentially inclusive: All the nations would know and be invited to witness the glory of God that had saved Israel time and again. Jeremiah’s message was preferentially inclusive: Israel’s slavishness to the temple of Jerusalem would mean nothing if its people did not open their hearts to practice justice preferentially toward the least well-off: The poor, the foreigner, the widow, the orphan.

So, indeed, may we pay attention to the parts our readings at Mass skip over. But, also, may we pay attention to those parts God is urging us not to skip over: The parts of the word of God that trouble us; that are controversial to us; that challenge us or our societies in fairly well-off countries like our own to open our hearts to the least-advantaged among us first.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” This is God’s vision of justice; God’s vision of the reign of God on earth for which we pray. It is a vision that calls us beyond ourselves; beyond our social circles; often beyond our comfort, to be “good news to the poor.” It is a vision we are invited not to skip over; a vision to ensure that God’s word of our Scriptures continues to be “fulfilled in [our] hearing.”

Homily for Sunday, 2 January 2022– The Epiphany of the Lord

Readings of the day: Isaiah 60:1-6; Psalm 72:1-2, 7-8, 10-11, 12-13; Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6; Matthew 2:1-12

This is maybe no more than simple coincidence, but it seems to me that, over the last few years, at around this time of year, space exploration has been in the news. Three years ago, on January 1, 2019, the New Horizons space probe made a fly-by of a small, snowman-shaped object in the Kuiper Belt, outside the orbit of Neptune. This object was eventually named Arrokoth after the word for “cloud” in the Powhatan language once spoken by the Indigenous people of the area around Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, where Arrokoth was discovered. Arrokoth became the farthest object from Earth ever visited by a spacecraft.

And then, just a few days ago, on Christmas Day 2021, we may have heard news of the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope from the Guiana Space Centre in Kourou, French Guiana. The James Webb Space Telescope will be able to observe deeper into space and farther into the infrared light spectrum (invisible to the human eye) than the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which discovered Arrokoth.

I think we can say that there is a natural human fascination with what is beyond our Earth: The heavens; the stars; the universe’s age and continuous expansion; or even whether there is intelligent life beyond Earth. And our fascination with this beyond pre-dates even the first, most rudimentary scientific instruments to aid our space observation, never mind Hubble or the James Webb telescopes. Our fascination with the beyond dates back to ancient times.

Our Gospel account of the Epiphany of our Lord Jesus and the main figures in this event is familiar to us. Matthew’s Gospel presents us with magi or “wise men from the East” who were drawn to Bethlehem by a star to pay homage to the newborn Messiah, Jesus. We know little about these “wise men from the East,” from Matthew or any other source, besides the gifts they brought to honour Jesus, and that they returned from honouring Jesus “to their own country by another road” to avoid the ill-intentioned Herod. The meaning of the gifts of the magi has been the focus of theological reflection: Gold is most often the gift for somebody royal, so the magi reveal the newborn Jesus as somehow a king. Frankincense is associated with prayer—incense, with its pleasing smell, rises to heaven; to God—so the magi reveal this child as somehow God. And myrrh is a burial spice, so the magi reveal Jesus as one who, although he is God and a king, has submitted himself to every aspect of our humanity, including our experiences of suffering and death.

I use the word “reveal”—by their gifts the magi reveal the newborn Jesus to our world as a king, as God, and as the one who will die to save us—because this is what our celebration today is about: Epiphany is a Greek word that means “making known” or “revelation.”

This Epiphany; this revelation of our God born into our world as fully human is to all peoples and nations. This Epiphany we celebrate is truly universal. But it begins with these “wise men from the East.” Who were these “wise men from the East”? Were they, as some have speculated, Zoroastrian astrologers from Persia who drew spiritual meaning from the movements of the stars? Were there three wise men—something about which Matthew’s Gospel is not clear; Matthew only says that they brought three gifts? All of this is hard to say.

We know about these “wise men from the East,” though, that something—a star—drew their attention toward the west. We know that the Epiphany of our Lord to all peoples; all nations; to the universe God created began with a very simple, yet profound act: These “wise men from the East” looked up. They looked up at the heavens with some kind of awe. And their awe, whether at the beauty of the heavens or the unusual appearance of that star to the west, led them to set off from their homeland. Their awe led them to set off toward a land that may well have been unknown to them.

The awe of these “wise men from the East”; their simple act of looking up, led them to discern that some event had taken place that had changed the world. Somehow, in the course of their journey, they discerned that a child had been born, one who was being called “king of the Jews.” Who had told them this, somewhere between their homeland and Jerusalem? And why were the magi interested in a Jewish baby, since they were probably not Jews? How did they know what gifts to bring the newborn Jesus, or the meaning of these gifts? Again, all this is hard to say.

But, most vital to the encounter the magi would have with the Christ child; most vital to the revelation of Jesus of Nazareth to the whole created universe as fully God and fully human (fully inscribed in God’s creation; his divinity clothed in created matter), is the starting point of this Epiphany encounter: The magi looked up with awe.

When was the last time we looked up; when we looked beyond ourselves with simple, profound awe? Maybe I have an advantage (at least I think I do, and I thank God for this) over many people, with some background in biology and a lively interest in the sciences; in any case my interest in science and what this means for us as people of faith leads me to look up and outward with awe almost constantly. God has created for us truly a beautiful world; a beautiful universe. And I am in awe, constantly, that our God (at least the God in whom I believe and I think our Catholic Church believes, most fundamentally) would create for us a world at the same time intelligible to our human senses and minds, but that would push us to want to discover more of what we still do not know.

In our time, we have sophisticated scientific instruments, like infrared telescopes, to help in our discovery of what we still do not know about our universe. We have the gift of hindsight: Of past events; past scientific observations affirmed as fact (or nearly) by repeatedly producing the same results. We have the gift of hindsight that the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ in Bethlehem is now over two thousand years past. Even Matthew’s Gospel today interprets the events of the Lord’s Epiphany based on hindsight. Matthew interprets these events based on Israel’s prophets who lived before him: “For so it has been written by the Prophet [in this case Micah]: ‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means the least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

We can be fairly sure that Israel’s prophets themselves relied on hindsight; on previous experience of Israel’s relationship with God. Micah’s prophecy that Matthew’s Gospel interprets in light of the Epiphany of our Lord (again, I think we can be sure) did not originally foresee God entering our world as a human baby in Bethlehem a few centuries after the prophet’s lifetime. Micah, like all Israel’s prophets, was interpreting events of his present in light of Israel’s past relationship with God. Even Isaiah, in the reading we hear today, interprets his and Israel’s present in light of God’s past relationship with God’s people. Israel of Biblical times was almost persistently in turmoil; in exile; under occupation. The prophets strove to remind Israel that they had (perhaps miraculously) survived as God’s people; as a nation to that point in history, and that whatever affliction they were facing would pass, if they trusted in God. This is why Isaiah is able to remind his people in past tense, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you”!

Once again, St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, had and used his gift of hindsight. “The mystery” of God made human, St. Paul says, “was made known to me by revelation.” St. Paul is able to interpret, from this past revelation—a past Epiphany—that God was in the process of revealing something new; something still more universal: “The Gentiles have become fellow heirs, members of the same body” of Christ, through God becoming human in the person of Jesus.

St. Paul, like Isaiah, Micah, and all Israel’s prophets; like Matthew and all the Gospels, invite us to make use of our gift of hindsight. It, too, is from God: The gift of discerning the hand of God in past events and applying this discernment to our present. But this hindsight; this discernment must lead us to something more. If it does not, our hindsight can be misused. Hindsight alone can close us in on ourselves. Hindsight alone can lead us to dwell on our experiences of evil; our experiences of suffering; our experiences that can lead us to doubt God’s hand in the creation and sustenance of our universe; our world and all things; all life in it. With hindsight alone, we could never set out, as the “wise men from the East” did, to encounter God’s Epiphanies that change our world; that are saving and will save our world.

What must act along with hindsight? In a word, awe: This must act along with the gift of hindsight. With awe, then, may we look up and out beyond ourselves. May we bring not perhaps the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to greet our newborn God, King, and Saviour; but may we simply and profoundly bring our gifts of awe and thanksgiving to God for God’s creation and sustenance of creation; of us. As the magi did, we lay before our God revealed to our universe as one like us our gifts of awe and thanksgiving. And we return from this encounter with our God in human flesh—this universal Epiphany we celebrate today—with overwhelming joy.

Homily for Saturday, 1 January 2022– The Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God

Readings of the day: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

Does anybody here besides me find how we, the Church, present and venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary to be, in a word, ambiguous? We celebrate the Blessed Virgin Mary, today especially, as Mother of God.

We believe, going back to the Council of Ephesus of 431, that Mary is the Mother of the Christ, or Christ-bearer, but that she is more than this. To call Mary the Christ-bearer was fine, Ephesus said. But if she were only Christ-bearer, this could lead to confusion among the faithful (and even bishops and other authority figures in the Church) that somehow the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, can be divine and human, but never at the same time. To avoid any confusion, the bishops of the Council of Ephesus emphasized the divine nature of the Christ (without, let us be clear, ever forgetting his human nature, distinct but never separate from his divine nature). Ephesus first called Mary not only Christ-bearer but God-bearer or Mother of God.

We believe Mary to have been preserved by God from sin, from the very moment of her conception in the womb of St. Anne. We believe that, at the end of Mary’s earthly life, God took her, body and soul together, into heaven; that neither Mary’s soul nor her body ever knew decay. We believe that Mary was ever-virgin, before and after the birth of Jesus.

We venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary as the model or ideal image of the Church. And we are right to believe and venerate all these aspects of Mary. Yet, in a way, does our celebration; our veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all these events and aspects unique to Mary not make Mary so different from us, or so much greater than any of us, so that imitating her in our lives becomes unrealistic?

None of us were conceived immaculately, without sin from the very moment of our conception. None of us have given birth and raised a child who is actually God. None of us, at least before the return of Jesus Christ in glory at the end of time, will be assumed, body and soul, into heaven.

This is the ambiguity about our celebration and veneration of Mary of which I speak. So, if we cannot imitate the Blessed Virgin Mary (at least not immediately) in many of the ways in which we celebrate her—immaculately conceived; the Mother of God, the bearer of God in the flesh into our world; assumed body and soul into heaven—how can we imitate Mary? How can we follow Mary’s example, so that we become, as well as possible, the Church of which Mary is the ideal image or model?

Our readings today give us clues as to how we can imitate Mary, Mother of God and Mother and model of the Church, and how we can imitate Jesus, even though, of course, none of us is God. Today St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians reminds us of who we are in relationship to Jesus by reminding us of Jesus’ (and so our) relationship with Mary. “When the fullness of time had come,” St. Paul says to the Galatians, “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.”

Unless any of us were born into this world by some other miraculous way, I am sure that all of us, like Jesus, were “born of a woman.” All of us, like Jesus, or Mary, or any person who has ever lived, have been born of a human mother. This common (we can say, biological) feature to all of us is so important to our Church, insofar as our relationship with Mary and with Jesus, that Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, begins its final chapter, on “The Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, in the Mystery of Christ and the Church,” with the words we hear today from the Letter to the Galatians.

Jesus was “born of a woman.” So was each of us. This is our starting point, sisters and brothers, when we consider our relationship with Jesus through Mary, Mother of God; when we consider our identity as Church, in relationship with Mary, Mother of the Church. “Wishing in his supreme goodness and wisdom to effect the redemption of the world, ‘when the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman… that we might receive the adoption of sons and daughters,” this final chapter of Lumen Gentium begins.

We, who have each been born of a woman, have been redeemed precisely by God’s choice to enter this world as one like us, born of a woman; born of the most blessed among women, Mary, Mother of God. So when we honour the dignity of women (beginning with, but not only, our mothers)—in our homes, in our public places, in our workplaces, in our Church—in all our actions and our words, we honour the way in which God has chosen to save us: By being born into this world by a woman, Mary, Mother of God. When we speak and act so that women, our sisters in God’s creation, are spared any form of violence especially on account of gender; when we speak and act in ways that value and revere women as true subjects of God’s beautiful creation, and not mere objects for economic or other selfish, loveless gain, we honour the way in which God has chosen to save us.

In his homily two years ago today, on this Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, Pope Francis reminded us of the essential role of Mary for our salvation, and connected this with the honour and respect due women today, honour and respect too often denied our sisters in the image of Mary of Nazareth. Pope Francis says, strikingly, “From [Mary], a woman, salvation came forth and thus there is no salvation without a woman… Humanity’s salvation came forth from the body of a woman: We can understand our degree of humanity by how we treat a woman’s body. How often are women’s bodies sacrificed on the profane altars of advertising, of profiteering, of pornography, exploited like a canvas to be used? Yet women’s bodies must be freed from consumerism; they must be respected and honoured.”

The more we respect and honour women in our lives and in our world, the more we draw close to Mary, Mother of God through whom our salvation entered our world. The more we respect and honour women, the better we are, as individuals and as a Church.

How else might we honour, respect, and revere women? How else, by honouring, respecting, revering women, might we glorify God by being more like Mary, our mother; Mother of God; Mother and model of the Church? We might honour women, and so honour Mary and, ultimately, give glory to God, by actively striving for peace. Women in our world are disproportionately poor; disproportionately among the people subject to unpaid, unrecognized, if not slave labour; disproportionately affected by war and violence; overrepresented (along with children) among those who flee their homes and countries because of violence.

Yet today the Book of Numbers gives us an ancient blessing. It is God’s blessing through Moses. It is God’s blessing to “the children of Israel”; to us as God’s children, born of and saved through a woman: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.”

Today we, the Church, also mark the World Day of Peace. And, when we think of progress toward greater peace in our world, we might think first of working to end war and violence on this greater scale. But we hear in Numbers this prayer for peace. Have we ever prayed this for our mothers; for our fathers; for the members of our families and households, for peace in our homes and among our loved ones? Have we ever prayed this prayer for somebody we have difficulty loving as God loves us, especially if this person is a member of our family or somebody close to us: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace”?

This prayer, my sisters and brothers, is one way in which we might honour God; our God who chose Mary to be Mother of God; Mother of our salvation; Mother of the Prince of Peace, our Lord Jesus Christ. Mary’s eyes were the first to gaze upon the infant Saviour of the world. Mary’s arms were the first to cradle the Son of God. Mary’s body gave birth and nourished the Christ child. Mary’s heart, as Luke’s Gospel reminds us beautifully today, was the first to treasure and ponder what all this would mean for the world: That God had chosen her, the Virgin daughter of Nazareth, daughter of God, to bring our salvation into this world; to raise him alongside faithful St. Joseph; to be with him as he served, healed, preached, suffered, died, rose and ascended to heaven; to be taken, body and soul, to God’s and her Son’s side in heaven when her earthly life was ended.

On this day, like Mary we, too, might let our hearts treasure and ponder. We might pray and act for the Lord’s peace in our world, in our country, in our families and households. In this we honour one another, each born of a woman; we honour, venerate, imitate, and celebrate Mary, Mother of God, Mother and model of our Church; our mother; the mother of the Salvation of the world.

Homily for Friday, 24 December 2021– The Nativity of the Lord, Mass at Night

Readings of the day: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 96:1-2, 2-3, 11-12, 13; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:10-14

At the end of 1932, Dr. Akiva Posner was the rabbi of a community of about 500 Jews in the town of Kiel, Germany. He returned home quickly to his wife Rachel and three young children, in time for sunset on the first day of Hanukkah, also the beginning of the Sabbath, to light the first of eight candles on the menorah on the window sill of the family’s apartment.

In Judaism, Hanukkah and its menorah have long been a symbol of resistance to oppression. The celebration of Hanukkah dates back to the revolt led by Judas Maccabeus (or Judah Maccabee) against the brutal occupying power in Israel, the Greeks under Antiochus IV “Epiphanes,” about 160 years before the birth of Jesus. Antiochus’ self-proclamation as “Epiphanes” was revealing enough as to who he thought he was: “Epiphanes” means “One who is made known”; Antiochus proclaimed himself to be a god. And he made the Temple of Jerusalem, Judaism’s most sacred site, into a place of worship of the Greek pagan gods.

In our Bible, in the Books of the Maccabees, we have the account of the Maccabean defeat of the Greeks, and the rededication of the Temple for worship of the one God of Israel. The Greeks had destroyed the vessels in the Temple that held fresh olive oil to keep the menorah lit for all eight days of the celebration of the rededication of the Temple. But the menorah’s central light, the shammash or “attendant” from which all the other lights are lit, stayed burning the whole time with the little oil the Maccabees had left.

Before her husband, Rabbi Akiva, returned home for the first sundown of Hanukkah, 1932, to light the family menorah, Rachel Posner took a striking, famous photo of the menorah against the window. Across the street from the Posners’ home in Kiel was a newly-dedicated Nazi Party headquarters in Kiel, with its stark brick exterior hung with swastika flags.

 

On the back of her photo of the menorah against this backdrop of evil and repression, Rachel Posner wrote:

“Juda verrecke.”

Die Fahne spricht;

“Juda lebt ewig.”

Erwidert das Licht.

“Death to Judah.”

So the flag says;

“Judah will live forever.”

So the light answers.

For our Jewish sisters and brothers, Hanukkah, which is usually at around the same time of year as our celebrations of Advent and the Nativity of our Lord Jesus, is the commemoration par excellence of the light and of life answering darkness and death. Hanukkah is also called Chag HaUrim in Hebrew, the Festival of Lights.

“So the light answers.” The light has answered the darkness, chaos, and death from the very first moment of creation, when God’s Spirit breathed over the face of the deep; the primordial chaos: “Let there be light.” And so the light answered. And so the light has answered many times in Israel’s history as God’s people. We hear today from the prophet Isaiah an affirmation of the light’s answer, God’s answer to darkness, chaos, and death. “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness—on them light has shone,” Isaiah says.

I find it a bit unusual that this prophecy from Isaiah is in the past tense. Isaiah proclaims that the people have already “seen a great light”; the light has already shone. I think we could pardon the people of Israel of Isaiah’s time if many (or most) of them were not able to accept and believe the message Isaiah proclaimed to them. In Isaiah’s time, Israel (and Judah, the southern part of Israel that includes Jerusalem and its temple) was surrounded by much more powerful empires: The Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Babylonians. And the Assyrians had invaded Israel from the north and progressed as far as the gates of Jerusalem. Israel’s and Judah’s kings were weak leaders in Isaiah’s time, trusting more in their treaties with other nations to keep these more powerful nations from invading Israel than they trusted in God. Judah, including Jerusalem, was extremely poor during this time. Yet it is at that time in Israel’s history when the prophet Isaiah exclaims, in past tense, that “the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light”; that “on them light has shone.”

The light has answered the darkness, chaos, and death, Isaiah proclaims. This despite the observable fact that “death to Judah” and to Israel seemed to be around every turn. But “so the light answers.” Enough people were persuaded by Isaiah to trust that God’s light had never been extinguished over Israel; that Israel’s God was and would forever be Emmanuel (another of Isaiah’s prophecies), “God-with-us.”

But to continue to trust in God, in God’s light proclaimed by prophets like Isaiah, would be far from easy for the people of Israel. Their nation would be invaded and occupied by the more powerful nations around it, one after another. The people of Israel would be exiled to Babylon, and return to their homeland only to find their temple destroyed; their society and their religious traditions in need of rebuilding. There would be the later invasion and occupation by the Greeks, a rising world power just before the time of Jesus, and then the Romans.

All the while the dominant message seemed to be, “Death to Judah.” Death to Israel. Why persist in building and trying to rebuild a nation? Why persist in believing that God and God’s prophets would save the nation, Israel, from occupation, ruin, chaos, and death?

Amid what seems like the dominant message—gloom, darkness, chaos, occupation, death—once again the light has answered, we believe and celebrate today, in the birth of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Luke’s Gospel begins tonight by mentioning the people who held political power in Israel of Jesus’ time: Caesar Augustus and Quirinius, “governor of Syria.” They were the occupying power; a Roman power that ruled by conquest, brutality, might-makes-right. Their power spelled “death to Judah”; death to Israel as a nation of God-with-us.

But it is into this world at that time and in that place, Roman-occupied Israel, that God chose to enter our human existence, through the Virgin Mary, under the saintly care of Mary and Joseph, into a manger in tiny Bethlehem, of all places. “So the light answers.” The light—God’s answer to the seemingly-prevalent darkness, chaos, and death—would first be revealed to humble shepherds “living in the fields.” These shepherds, who would be greeted by the “Angel of the Lord” with “good news of great joy for all the people” were, if we can imagine, even farther on the outskirts; the periphery of society than Bethlehem was on the periphery of Judah; of Israel.

There, to shepherds tending their fields, the light has answered first. In Bethlehem, “a child”—God’s own Son—“has been born to us.” This light; this good news of God who has become human, like us in all things but sin, is now entrusted to all of us. God’s luminous answer to darkness, chaos, and death—light, order, life, salvation—is, as Luke says to us tonight, “good news of great joy for all the people.”

What will we do to ensure this “good news of great joy” reaches “all the people”; that it reaches a world continually and desperately in need of God’s light, God’s joy that the birth of God’s Son brings? The Letter to Titus says to us tonight that this “good news of great joy” we receive and celebrate tonight changes our relationship with the world. “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all,” the Letter to Titus says. The same letter urges us “to renounce impiety and worldly passions… to live lives that are self-controlled, upright and godly.”

In short, the Letter to Titus invites us to live as a people who has received that “great light” that prophets proclaimed from long ago. The Letter to Titus invites us to live as the people who has received the greatest gift—salvation in and through God’s taking flesh in the person of Jesus Christ—that we could possibly receive, because we have received the greatest gift possible.

So the light has answered. And so, through us, God’s light continues to answer in our world. It may seem sometimes that darkness, chaos, and death have the upper hand in our world. It is even worse when events seem out of our control: A new and more contagious variant of a virus that has raged around our world for two years now, for instance. Our response to this; our response to acts of violence and injustice that still afflict our world; our response to attitudes and structures of sin latent in our very social fabric must be to proclaim and to live by the light we know we have been given and entrusted with.

There are and will be, in a figurative sense, many flags (although few as blatantly ugly as the swastikas hung across the street from the Posners’ apartment in Kiel in 1932); many signs in our world that will cry out: Darkness, chaos, death. Against this backdrop, we celebrate here tonight the birth of our Lord. We renew our commitment to carry in faith this light to our world by our celebration here tonight; by our acts of kindness; our acts of concern especially for the least well off; our acts of concern for the common good of all people, even over our good as individuals.

Against a backdrop that too often cries out, “darkness, chaos, death,” we celebrate and re-commit to live, beginning anew here and now, by the supreme and saving gift we have received by the birth of a Saviour, the Lion of Judah; the Lamb of God who would give his life to “take away the sins of the world.”

“Death to Judah.” So the flag says; “Judah will live forever.”

We as God’s people will live forever. The birth of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, has made it so.

And so the light answers.

Homily for Sunday, 19 December 2020– Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year C

Readings of the day: Micah 5: 1-4a; Psalm 80: 2-3, 15-16, 18-19; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-45

The “rags-to-riches” motif is one of the more common ones in storytelling, because it resonates, does it not, with our heartfelt human inclination to encourage the heroic underdog to overcome the odds against her or him. In reality, these kinds of scenarios may be less common than we would like them to be: So many poor, maligned, marginalized people remain poor, maligned, and marginalized in our world. But occasionally some people overcome all odds against them, or at least they become the heroes of their stories or of pivotal moments in the greater history of our world or a society, or they keep other people from suffering the same marginalization as they have.

From the word of God, we hear today from the prophet Micah. Maybe the most memorable verse from Micah, at least for me, is his admonition about what the LORD requires of his people: “To do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.” I especially love this verse from Micah because it does not only exhort the people of Israel (and us) to act with justice, kindness, and humility. The Hebrew words Micah uses, which are notoriously difficult to translate but that we hear in English as justice, kindness (or mercy), and walking humbly, apply attributes of God to the people: Do justice, because God is just; love kindness, because God is kind and merciful; and, maybe most strikingly, “walk humbly with your God,” who walks humbly with us.

This verse, Micah 6:8, portrays God himself, and God’s prophet Micah, as by nature just, kind, merciful, and humble. And Micah is known as just that: A just, kind, merciful and, above all, humble prophet. Micah lived and preached at the same time in Israel’s history as much more famous prophets than he: Amos, Hosea, and Isaiah. These other prophets were from Jerusalem (in Isaiah’s case) or small towns. Micah, though, was from the countryside, between the downslope of the Judean mountains away from Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea coast. Other prophets preached to kings; Micah was the prophet of the common people.

And the part of the Book of Micah we hear today, Biblical experts say, may not have been his but an interpolation or insertion of a text from another, even more anonymous prophet. How is that for a humble situation, that of the prophet Micah? And his message today is one of the humble becoming great. Not from big, showy Jerusalem, with its mountains and its temple, but from little Bethlehem, the “house of bread” in Judah, the economic “have not” region of Israel in Micah’s time, would arise a great king in David’s line: “One who is to rule Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.”

We Christians have traditionally understood this prophecy of a great ruler in David’s line from little Bethlehem in light of the earthly life of Jesus Christ. And that is fine. Our Gospels often connect Jesus with the Davidic line of kings of Israel. But Micah looks back into Israel’s history in order to look forward, too. Micah’s references to David today are clear: David was a native of Bethlehem. He was a humble, obscure shepherd before slaying the giant Goliath and inheriting the throne of Israel. The ruler of Micah’s prophecy, like King David, will be a shepherd from Bethlehem. And, Micah says, while the king of whom he prophesies rules, he will return to be on a level ground with the common people; he will rule precisely by shepherding: “And he shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God.”

The Psalmist carries on Micah’s shepherd-king contrast: “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth.” Here God himself is depicted as a shepherd and, at the same time, a heavenly and mighty ruler. God is mighty in his humility, and humble in his might. If we are to be anything like God, we are called, as Micah once said, to “walk humbly with [our] God,” because our mighty God walks humbly with us.

Our mighty God was born, humbly, to us in Bethlehem yet again, in the person of Jesus. This Jesus, shepherd-ruler of the universe, was born into a stable; a manger where animals eat, in Bethlehem, as a vulnerable human baby. We are less than one week from celebrating the birth of this shepherd-king who has saved this universe, sisters and brothers, by choosing to walk humbly with us and inviting us to walk humbly, justly, kindly with him and among one another.

If God’s humility is shown to us in the Nativity of Jesus, it is shown that much more in Jesus’ giving of his life for us on the cross. When I was in my first parish as a priest, St. Kateri Tekakwitha in Rochester, New York, one of my favourite liturgical elements during this time of Advent and Christmas was the conclusion of the Prayer of the Faithful (or General Intercessions), which reminded us how “the wood of the cradle” was fundamentally connected to “the wood of the cross.” May we always remember this connection, sisters and brothers.

The letter to the Hebrews today reminds us, in a way, of this same connection of the wood of the cradle and the wood of the cross; of Bethlehem to Calvary. Hebrews draws on the Psalms and prophetic writings, especially those of Isaiah, and places them on the tongue of Jesus: “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me… See, God, I have come to do your will.”

I admit that Hebrews’ reflection on sacrifice is challenging to me personally: Not only that Jesus made the ultimate, saving sacrifice of himself on the cross, but that doing God’s will, in an ambiguous sense in our reading, somehow replaces or “abolishes” the need and the value of religious acts of sacrifice. Even our Eucharistic celebration is often called “the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” I do not think, then, that Hebrews is saying that what we celebrate here is worthless. By no means! But any religious ritual, including our Eucharist, can only have meaning if it is God’s will for us. And Jesus, at his Last Supper, commanded his disciples, “Take and eat… Take this cup and drink from it… Do this in memory of me.” This is how we know that our Eucharist is God’s will for us. In our Eucharist, we celebrate a historical action by Jesus, his sacrifice of himself through his passion and death on the cross, that is finished and past. We make it perpetually real and present through our memorial of Jesus’ passion and death, Jesus’ once-forever sacrifice, but that sacrifice can never be replicated or outdone.

This is the surpassing humility of God that we remember and celebrate here: “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired… See, God, I have come to do your will… Do this in memory of me.” It is the surpassing humility of God that impelled the preaching of Micah about a shepherd-king to arise from little, insignificant Bethlehem; a shepherd-king who would save Israel; humankind; the entire created universe. It is the surpassing humility of God that impelled the song of the Psalmist that called upon the LORD: “Stir up your might, and come to save us.”

And it was the surpassing humility of God, whom the Virgin Mary carried within her in human form, as she “went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country” to visit and care for Elizabeth, also pregnant, with John the Baptist. Luke’s Gospel gives us many sublimely beautiful words and images today. Luke gives us Elizabeth’s greeting, on which part of our “Hail, Mary” is based: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Elizabeth is described as “filled with the Holy Spirit,” as Mary was from the moment she conceived Jesus at the Annunciation. John leaps with joy in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary greets them.

But maybe the most moving moment of today’s Gospel for me is in Elizabeth’s question to Mary: “And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me”? Elizabeth was not lacking in humility, by any means. But this event, the Visitation and these last days of preparation for the Nativity of the Lord, are greater than Elizabeth. These events are greater than us. They are greater than a simple lowliness-to-riches scenario. We could ask the same question as Elizabeth does: “Why has this happened to us, that our Lord has chosen to be born as one of us, to come to us through the Virgin Mary, through a humble manger in Bethlehem”?

This event is all about God’s humility: That not only would God send his Son into our world in this way to save us, but that now God regards us, little and insignificant though we are (if we think about it), as fit to do his will: To feed his flock (that is, one another); to act with justice and kind mercy; to “walk humbly with our God,” if only because God has chosen to walk humbly as one of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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