Homily for Sunday, 19 June 2022– The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

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

The Body and Blood of Christ, the Eucharist, the Mass: This reality we celebrate now has many names and many dimensions. And the readings we hear proclaimed from the word of God today, and the prayers of today’s Mass, each highlight particular dimensions of this celebration more than others.

The beauty, variety, and complexity of Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi, reminds me of the many different celebrations of this day I have experienced. Maybe some of us have participated in outdoor processions through the streets with the Blessed Sacrament. I have experienced this less here than in Colombia, where Corpus Christi processions are often quite elaborate.

Of course, Corpus Christi reminds me of first communions at which I have presided as a priest—the first one being the first communion of my godparents’ grandson, during my very first Mass as a priest. But I am especially remembering lately my many conversations at table with a brother Basilian priest I lived with in Rochester, New York, when I was just ordained, whom I especially loved and who was especially beloved of the whole Basilian community and people with whom he ministered. Fr. Joseph Trovato went to be with our Lord a couple of years ago. Quite often, though, when conversations with Fr. Joe would turn toward the Mass, the Eucharist, he would say, with his characteristic gentle voice, that the dimension of the Eucharist he found most difficult to live was that of sacrifice.

I was always somewhat surprised to hear Fr. Joe say this. When I think of priesthood (and not only the ordained priesthood but our common priesthood as baptized Christians), I think of one of my favourite prayers, St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Suscipe: “Take, Lord (Suscipe, Domine), all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will; all that I have and possess. You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it. All is yours; dispose of it wholly according to your will. Give me your love and your grace, for this is enough for me.”

Another thing that would surprise me about Fr. Joe, when I would bring up Ignatius’ Suscipe, is how he would look me directly in the eye and, with all the sternness he could muster (which was not much), say to me, “I do not like that prayer.” When I would ask him why, he would say, “Because I find it such a difficult prayer to live out.” I think that, if Fr. Joe found Ignatius’ Suscipe difficult to live out, the rest of us are in big trouble! Instead of the Suscipe, Fr. Joe’s favourite prayer or saying was from St. Francis de Sales: “There is nothing so strong as gentleness, and nothing so gentle as real strength.”

There have been few people, let alone few priests, who have lived the sacrifice demanded of Ignatius’ Suscipe—the total surrender to God of liberty, memory, understanding, our “entire will” to our Lord who has “given all to” us—as well as Fr. Joe Trovato. He certainly lived the radical (and, dare I say, more than humble, but self-sacrificial) gentleness to which St. Francis de Sales’ saying invites us.

The self-sacrificial gentleness of Ignatius’ Suscipe, of St. Francis de Sales, or of Fr. Joe Trovato is a Eucharistic self-sacrificial gentleness. It is a gentleness and a self-sacrifice to which the Lord in his grace invites us. There are many moments in our Mass, every time we celebrate it, when we remember Jesus’ sacrifice of his entire being, his having “given all to” us, for our salvation.

Maybe the most important moment during our Eucharistic celebration when we remember Jesus’ self-sacrifice for us is when we pray the same words Jesus did at the Last Supper, on the night before he gave himself up to death for us: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body, which will be given up for you… Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my blood.”

The earliest disciples of Jesus remembered Jesus’ sacrifice, his giving of his body and blood for us, at the Last Supper and on the cross, in Jesus’ own words. “This is my Body that is for you… This cup is the new covenant in my Blood. Do this… in remembrance of me.” St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which we hear today, is an early witness to this way in which Jesus’ first disciples remembered his sacrifice for us and its meaning for our salvation.

The Eucharistic dimension of sacrifice is closely connected to its dimension of memorial: Of memory not of artifacts in museums, but memory that projects Jesus’ giving of self to us into our history, so that it becomes always and everywhere present. And it becomes a self-sacrifice we can and are called to imitate: “Do this in memory of me… You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it.”

But how, through remembrance of Jesus, our greatest act of self-sacrifice, or otherwise, could we ever return such a sublime gift as Jesus has given to us: His Body and Blood; his life, on the cross? At Mass, in our Eucharistic prayers, we use a lot of language of sacrifice and of returning to God some element of God’s sacrifice of himself in Jesus for us. During our table conversations, Fr. Joe often liked to point out this language of sacrifice in our Eucharistic prayers that, like Ignatius’ Suscipe (so he would say) he had difficulty living out, much less understanding. Sometimes our Eucharistic language of sacrifice can be bold. We pray, for instance: “May this sacrifice of our reconciliation… advance the peace and salvation of all the world.” We still await with Christian hope, sisters and brothers, the fulfillment of this “peace and salvation” for which we pray every time we celebrate our Eucharist.

Sometimes our language of sacrifice in our Eucharistic prayers can be difficult to understand: “Look, we pray, upon the oblation of your Church.” What is an oblation? It is another word for sacrifice; for offering back to God what God has given us in this very celebration: The sacramental yet very real presence of the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so, we pray, “We offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice… May [Christ] make of us an eternal offering to you, so that we may obtain an inheritance with your elect.”

But can we ever offer God back what he has offered us; what God continues to offer us through our Eucharist: His very self, for our salvation? Can we ever match the sacrifice of self that Jesus offered for us on the cross? Without God’s grace, the short answer to these questions would be no. I have no doubt that Fr. Joe Trovato was on to something when he would say he had difficulty living out the meaning of the Lord’s sacrifice for us; the meaning of St. Ignatius’ Suscipe: “You have given all to me. To you, O Lord, I return it.”

I will go a step beyond Fr. Joe here: Without God’s grace, to remember and to live in imitation of Jesus’ sacrifice for us is impossible. Yet, should we ever despair of God’s grace, we need only to remember the abundance of that grace of which Jesus’ greatest miracles were a sign. We hear from Luke’s Gospel today how Jesus multiplied the “five loaves and two fish,” so that there was enough to feed “about five thousand men,” and women and children in addition to them, with food still left over.

In this way, God will multiply even our smallest efforts at imitating God’s self-gift to us in our lives. God will multiply even our smallest efforts at kindness; at the kind of hospitality and blessing Melchizedek, the priest-king, shows Abram, and Abram returns to Melchizedek, in our reading from Genesis today.

God’s abundant grace will multiply our “I find this difficult to live out” into more than enough to nourish the world. In God’s grace, all the dimensions of this great celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ come together: Sacrifice, memorial, hospitality. God’s grace enables us to celebrate here now, and then to bring God’s real, nourishing presence to our world by all we say and do. God’s grace “is enough for us,” so that all we have received, we now return; we now give to a world hungering and thirsting for peace and salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 5 June 2022– Pentecost

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

John’s Gospel is peculiar in many ways, not least of which is John’s account of Pentecost, Jesus breathing the Holy Spirit on his disciples, which we hear today.

Remember that, one week ago, for our celebration of Jesus’ ascension to heaven, we heard Luke’s version of these events. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus asks his disciples to remain in Jerusalem until he ascends to heaven, and then he sends the Holy Spirit upon them: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ appearances after his resurrection and his gift of the Holy Spirit to his disciples happen all at once. We hear today how, on the very day Jesus rises from the dead, he stands among his disciples in a house where they had gathered, behind locked doors “for fear of the” Jewish leaders who had handed Jesus over to the Romans to die. Jesus appears in his disciples’ space, despite the locked doors, and greets them, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And Jesus sends his disciples, as John makes a point of saying, with the gift of the Holy Spirit that he had promised them during his ministry and at the Last Supper: “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

So, which is it? Did Pentecost—Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit upon his disciples; the birth of the Church—happen after or before Jesus’ ascension? Or did Pentecost happen more than once?

The renowned Sulpician Bible scholar Fr. Raymond Brown caused no small controversy at the time when he wrote that Christians should consider that Pentecost has happened not only once; not twice, before and after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, but many times. And the Holy Spirit still descends upon and inspires our Church to action, to mission today. We have all experienced Pentecost-like moments, sisters and brothers, many times in our own lives. I am not only speaking of our celebration of Pentecost once a year, fifty days after Easter, but much more often than that. And, most of the time, we are not even aware when we are experiencing an encounter with the Holy Spirit; a Pentecost-like moment.

The first Pentecost-like moment in each of our lives as Christians is at baptism. Now, at baptism if, as most of us are, we have been baptized as infants, we will not have been aware that we have just encountered the Holy Spirit. But our parents and godparents will have been aware of this Pentecost-like moment. They will have spoken for us at our baptism, when they respond, “It is,” to the question of the priest or deacon just before the baptism: “Is it your will that [this child] should be baptized in the faith of the Church, which we have all professed with you”? At the anointing with chrism after baptism, the Rite of Baptism clearly speaks of the effects of this sacrament: “The God of power and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has freed you from sin, given you a new birth by water and the Holy Spirit, and welcomed you into his holy people.” The moment of our baptism is our first encounter with the Holy Spirit as members of “God’s holy people,” the Church. It is our first Pentecost-like moment.

In baptism we (or our parents and godparents for us) make our first profession of faith, one St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians says today is only possible by the grace of the Holy Spirit: “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” And St. Paul connects the moment of our baptism back to those first Pentecost moments Jesus’ apostles experienced, in the locked room when Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit upon them; in Acts when tongues “as of fire” descended upon them. St. Paul says, “For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body… and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

In confirmation we are again anointed with the chrism oil we received at baptism: “Be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.” If, for most of us, our parents and godparents witnessed for us and assented to the work of the Holy Spirit in us from the moment of our baptism, in confirmation we have the chance to assent; to agree to, witness and consciously receive the Holy Spirit for ourselves. For us, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians, the singular “gift of the Holy Spirit” becomes a remarkable diversity of gifts that spur us on to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ by all we say and do. In confirmation, this vast array of gifts of the Holy Spirit is summed up in a formula of seven: “The spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence… the spirit of wonder and awe in [God’s] presence.”

We may sum up the gifts of the Holy Spirit in this kind of list of seven but, as St. Paul knew and we know, the Holy Spirit’s gifts to us are unlimited by any of our human categories or language. Still, all these gifts of the Holy Spirit, without number, is meant to serve one purpose in us; in the Church. St. Paul says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” And our ultimate good, sisters and brothers—the good God desires for all of us together—is eternal life.

Each of our Church’s sacramental rituals include a moment when we call upon the Holy Spirit and his gifts without number to direct us toward this “common good” and ultimately toward eternal life with God. I will not analyze each time in our sacramental rites when we call upon the Holy Spirit. This would take me far too much time, and I would be keeping us from (eventually) leaving here to proclaim the Gospel to the world with the gifts the Spirit has given us. And I do not wish to do this.

But I want to draw our attention simply to the Mass, since we are in the midst of it now. Most of us, if we are paying attention, know the first major moment at which we call upon the Holy Spirit during the Eucharistic Prayer at Mass: The priest extends his hands over the bread and wine and prays that the Holy Spirit transform this bread and wine into “the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Yet I often wonder if even the most faithful, attentive Catholics at Mass realize that there is a second moment during the Eucharistic Prayer when we call upon the Holy Spirit. There is no change in the position of the priest’s hands, or much of anything, to indicate when this happens, except that the priest prays that the Holy Spirit might descend not upon the bread and wine a second time, but upon us. We pray that the Holy Spirit might transform us to “become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

“Just as the body is one and has many members,” St. Paul says, “all the members of the body, though many, are one body.” We pray, every time we celebrate our Eucharist, that the Holy Spirit might transform us to make this unity in multiplicity of gifts and members of the Church a reality.

I find it astounding, every time I hear our reading today from Acts, that “every nation under heaven,” people speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own languages, were “all drawn together in one place.” All witnessed together, in unity yet phenomenal diversity, that first Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended like wind and in tongues of fire on Jesus’ first apostles.

They—Jesus’ first apostles; the vast multitude of people, each speaking and hearing the Gospel in their own language—are a lot like us: Gathered together in one place before God; gathered to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit without number but all oriented toward “the common good” and toward our eternal life with God. That, if anything, is amazing. Only the Holy Spirit of God can do this. Only the Holy Spirit can gather us together “in one place” to hear the Gospel; gather us together to be transformed, more and more, into “one body, one spirit in Christ”; gather us together where we may receive the strength and inspiration to proclaim the Good News and communicate the Spirit of God to our world.

This is our Pentecost: Not only a one or two-time communication of the Spirit to Jesus’ first apostles, but a Pentecost moment projected into our history and our memory as a people of God. We celebrate here and now an ongoing Pentecost; our encounter now and forever with the Holy Spirit that draws us all “together in one place”; that orients us toward the common good and that will bring us to eternal life.

Homily for Sunday, 8 May 2022– Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C (Good Shepherd Sunday)

Readings of the day: Acts 13:14, 43-52; Psalm 100:1-2, 3, 5; Revelation 7:9, 14b-17; John 10:27-30

Appropriately, on this Good Shepherd Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Easter, our readings present us with all kinds of images and metaphors of shepherds and shepherding; of lambs and sheep. And, every fourth Sunday of Easter, especially if I am in an urban area with few if any sheep or shepherds (like Edmonton), I think how amazing it is that this image of shepherding; of sheep is still one of the most pervasive images we have of Jesus. This is true even of people who have little or no experience of sheep or shepherding.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We have art and icons that depict Jesus slinging a lamb over his shoulders, carrying it to safety. Today we hear the end of Jesus’ Good Shepherd Discourse from John’s Gospel. Jesus makes bold claims to be no ordinary shepherd. While the best of shepherds, we could presume, would protect their sheep from predators and other threats to their life and well-being in this life, only Jesus can claim that he, the Good Shepherd, guarantees his sheep “eternal life”: “They will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

If we continue in John’s Gospel just past the end of today’s reading, John says that the Jewish leaders who listened to Jesus became infuriated with him: They “took up stones again to stone him.” Going back to the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament, stoning was the penalty prescribed for blasphemy; for claiming to be God.

Today Jesus clearly claims to be one and the same with the one God of Israel: “The Father and I are one.” To address God in this way, let alone claim to be God, was preposterous and a great evil in Israel of Jesus’ time. Such a claim would violate the great commandment-prayer of Deuteronomy: “Hear, O Israel, the LORD is God; the LORD is one.” If the LORD is one, Jesus, this man of Nazareth, could not possibly be the LORD, God of Israel, so the Jewish leaders thought, in a way reasonably.

Put another way, as I remember Dr. Denis Lamoureux, Science and Religion professor here at St. Joseph’s College, saying, Jesus’ claim to oneness with the one God of Israel would have left the people hearing Jesus with three ways to interpret his claim: First, that Jesus is out of his mind; second, that he is a liar; and third, that he is in fact God.

We know the answer as to which of these three options is true. Or at least we presume and believe it, or else we would not be here: Jesus is God. But we (I think we need to understand) have the gift of hindsight that the people who first heard Jesus claim, “The Father and I are one,” did not have.

Even before Jesus got to this decisive line, “The Father and I are one,” his use of shepherding metaphors were clear references to the depiction of the God of Israel as a shepherd in the Old Testament. We can think of one of the most memorable Psalms of trust and consolation, Psalm 23: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.” The prophet Isaiah also depicts the God of Israel; our God as a shepherd: “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” And we know that when the St. Louis Jesuits write a hymn after a Bible passage, it is a memorable passage: “Like a shepherd he feeds his flock, and gathers the lambs in his arms; holding them carefully close to his heart, leading them home.”

There are other people in the Bible who are shepherds. We might think of Moses, “tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law” before he climbed Mount Horeb and encountered God in the burning bush. And King David is first introduced as a shepherd in 2 Samuel. But these great biblical shepherd figures are really stand-ins for the God of Israel. David was the shepherd-king after the LORD’s own heart. God worked through Moses to shepherd the people of Israel back to their homeland from slavery in Egypt.

The main point in all this, though, is that, when Jesus applies the image of the Good Shepherd to himself, it is no accident. Already, well before Jesus explicitly identifies himself as one with God the Father, he has claimed to be one with Israel’s God by invoking these Old Testament images of God the shepherd.

These are images that carry over into the New Testament. One of the most frequent ways of depicting God; depicting Jesus in the New Testament is that of the shepherd. We hear this today from the Book of Revelation, but with a counter-intuitive twist. In John of Patmos’ vision of the “great multitude” of the saved—the “great multitude” of those who had given their lives for our faith—the Lamb seated on the heavenly throne is also the shepherd. This lamb, also the chief shepherd, Jesus Christ, “will guide” these martyrs for our faith, all who are saved, “to springs of the water of life, [where] God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

The image of the sacrificial lamb who becomes the chief shepherd, and who leads the saved to springs of living water, also recalls several Old Testament depictions of lambs and shepherding, and other images of agriculture; growth and giving of life. If we were at the Easter Vigil, the mother-of-all-church-celebrations that begins this fifty-day celebration from Easter to Pentecost, we would have heard (not really a shepherding metaphor, but) the majestic song from the prophet Isaiah to which we respond, “With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation.” Psalm 23 refers to the LORD as shepherd leading the Psalmist “beside still waters.” Our Psalm today speaks of us as God’s “people, the sheep of his flock.”

In the familiar story of the first Passover, the people of Israel are prepared to escape slavery in Egypt, shepherded by Moses and Aaron. The LORD tells the people of Israel to slaughter a lamb per household and eat it hurriedly. The people of Israel are also to put blood from their lamb on the doorposts and lintels of their houses. The LORD will pass through Egypt and “strike down every firstborn” of Egyptian households but leave the firstborn of any house showing lamb’s blood at its entrance.

These images that compare God; compare Jesus to a lamb, a shepherd, or both at the same time continue in history through the prayer of the Church; our liturgical prayer as a community of faith and individual prayer. Our prefaces that introduce our Eucharistic Prayer during Eastertime are especially rich in these images of the Lord as a lamb. The preface we will pray today says that Christ “never ceases to offer himself for us, but defends us and ever pleads our cause before [God]: He is the sacrificial Victim who dies no more, the Lamb, once slain, who lives forever.” In our prayer after communion, we will pray, “Look upon your flock, kind Shepherd, and be pleased to settle in eternal pastures the sheep you have redeemed by the Precious Blood of your Son.” And, of course, just before we receive communion (and at the beginning of Mass, during the Gloria), we pray together, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us… Lamb of God… Grant us peace.”

So we remain familiar with these images and metaphors of lambs, sheep, and shepherding to describe the Lord and his relationship with us, down to the present day. And it does not matter whether we have ever (or often) seen a real shepherd or sheep.

We understand, we believe, and we celebrate, sisters and brothers: Jesus Christ is both lamb and shepherd. He is the Passover lamb sacrificed once for all, “who dies no more.” Yet he is the shepherd who “leads us by still waters” to nourishment, peace, protection from evil, and to eternal life. He is not out of his mind, or a blasphemer, or a liar. He is God; the Good Shepherd-“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” In him and only in him, the Good Shepherd, do we find salvation.

Homily for Sunday, 17 April 2022– The Resurrection of the Lord, Mass of Easter Sunday

Readings of the day: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

The Motherhouse Chapel of the Vincentian order, the Congregation of the Mission, in Paris includes a Latin inscription along the arch above the tabernacle and high altar: Pertransiit benefaciendo, “He went about doing good.” This inscription is surrounded by illustrations of Vincentians doing works of goodness and charity, especially among the poor, for which the order is so famous.

When I lived in Paris, my apartment was across a courtyard from the Vincentian Motherhouse. So this inscription in the Motherhouse chapel, Pertransiit Benefaciendo, “He went about doing good,” resonates especially with me. It is taken from the reading we hear this Easter morning from the Acts of the Apostles. In our reading, St. Peter describes Jesus’ ministry in this way as he preaches in the house of Cornelius, a Roman centurion who would become an early Gentile disciple of Jesus Christ. “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power,” Peter proclaims; “he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”

The earliest Church, in the years right after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, and God’s sending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, had a problem. I would describe it as a good problem to have. The problem is that—if we follow the Acts of the Apostles’ account of events—on the one hand, the Church was expanding; people were being baptized, both Jews and Gentiles like Cornelius, exceptionally quickly and in great numbers. Acts gives us a sense of an early Christian Church blessed with great fervor; great piety; people dedicated to going about “and doing good,” following Jesus’ own example. Acts says that, in these earliest Christian communities, “nobody had need”; the wealthiest gave of their excess to support the least well-off. All was well. This was, without doubt, the work of the Holy Spirit, as Acts so often emphasizes. Peter says of Jesus in Cornelius’ house that he was “anointed… with the Holy Spirit and with power.” Truly, this could have been a description not only of Jesus, but of any Christian disciple; any of us. Each of us, sisters and brothers, have been “anointed… with the Holy Spirit and with power” from the moment of our baptism. We have been anointed, after Jesus himself, to go out and do good.

On the other hand—and the earliest Christian disciples would have been acutely aware of this, especially as the Church expanded rapidly beyond the Jewish world and into the Gentile world, its cultures and customs—nobody directly witnessed Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. The Church had a problem.

The person closest to witnessing Jesus’ resurrection from the dead directly is Mary Magdalene, in John’s Gospel from which we hear on this Easter morning. But when Mary Magdalene arrives at Jesus’ tomb, the resurrection has already taken place, only Mary does not know this yet. The stone at the tomb’s entrance has been rolled away. John very deliberately says that Mary arrives at Jesus’ tomb “while it was still dark.” Mary Magdalene does not (yet) encounter the risen Christ. Instead, her first encounter is with darkness; confusion; emptiness. Mary Magdalene presumes the worst when she returns to tell Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

The beloved disciple and Simon Peter “set out” to the tomb to investigate. But, like Mary Magdalene, they, too, encounter darkness; confusion; emptiness; no body, much less that of the risen Lord. John says of the beloved disciple and Simon Peter: “As yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

The beloved disciple and Simon Peter return “to their homes.” But, to her great credit, Mary Magdalene remains on scene. She remains to grapple with the darkness; the confusion; the empty tomb. Mary Magdalene is often called “the apostle to the apostles,” because she is the one who returns to the (male) apostles to announce to them that Jesus is indeed truly risen. Yet, in John’s Gospel, she does not return to the eleven remaining apostles until the very end of this episode; this encounter with the empty tomb. She remains there for some time to grapple with; to ponder in the darkness; the confusion; the emptiness. It is there, where Mary Magdalene is before the empty tomb; where Mary Magdalene at first mistakes the risen Jesus for a gardener (a subtle reference to God the creator-gardener of Genesis’ Eden; Jesus has been “with God”—he is God—from before “the beginning” of creation), where the Church is born.

Only then is Mary Magdalene ready for the great revelation: The gardener is the risen Lord; her and our Rabbouni; her and our Teacher. But now Mary must not remain there; she must not grasp onto Jesus as she has until now tried to grasp onto the mystery of the empty tomb. Otherwise there would be no Church. Our Easter story would have ended there, in the darkness; the confusion; the emptiness. “Do not hold onto me,” Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “but go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Only then is Mary Magdalene ready to return to Jesus’ disciples and announce to them, “I have seen the Lord.” And only then (thankfully because, again, had it been otherwise, there would be no Church) are Jesus’ disciples ready to believe Mary’s witness: She has seen the risen Lord!

That they believe her is remarkable, because there was no body in that tomb when Mary Magdalene, and then the beloved disciple and Simon Peter, first saw it on the morning of the third day after Jesus’ death. So the Church still has a problem. It is a problem with which Peter grapples as he preaches to the household of Cornelius, sometime after Jesus’ resurrection and to a pagan, Gentile household at that.

All Peter is able to say in Acts about the first witnesses to the risen Christ concerns later events. Nobody saw Jesus rise from the dead. But, Peter insists, “God raised him on the third day.” And God “allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses”: To Mary Magdalene; to Jesus’ apostles; then maybe to a slightly larger group of Jesus’ disciples… To a rational, critical mind, and especially to Gentiles a step further removed from Jesus than his inner circles of disciples, Peter’s testimony to the appearances of the risen Christ to a limited group of witnesses must have seemed absurd. If Jesus is truly risen, why did he only appear to this select group of witnesses? Why did he send Mary Magdalene to tell his disciples that he had risen? How did such conviction that Jesus was truly risen and had commissioned them beyond an inner circle to communicate this news to all the world emerge from darkness; confusion; one woman peering into an empty tomb?

The conviction in the resurrection of the Lord and his mission to us must have emerged and spread from the Holy Spirit’s continued action through these first disciples. It is the only possible explanation. This conviction in God’s mission must have spread through the Church, all the way through history to us, so that we Christians (not perfectly, because we are sinners, but somehow still intelligibly and convincingly to the world) have continued to act as Christ did.

Jesus “went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him,” Peter proclaims on this Easter morning. Pertransiit benefaciendo: Peter was describing Jesus, his life and ministry; his death and resurrection, to a Gentile household of a Roman centurion, Cornelius. But Peter could just as well be describing us. Peter could just as well be describing the commissioning of every Christian from the moment of our baptism.

Sisters and brothers, from the moment we are baptized, the Holy Spirit of our risen Lord impels us to go about “doing good.” Our Easter story begins, as we have heard, in the darkness and confusion before an empty tomb. But it cannot remain there beyond a short time: “Do not hold onto me, but go to my brothers [and sisters] and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.’”

“Do not hold onto me,” but go forth “doing good,” Jesus invites us. The risen Jesus lives in us. His Spirit is poured out on our world every time we do good; every time act with kindness and mercy; every time we care for the sick; the poor; the disadvantaged; every time we simply listen for the presence of the risen Lord and his Spirit in one another; every time we heal divisions and reject any form of violence. When we go about doing good, the Church is reborn, time and again, in our longing world.

So may our Easter proclamation be active in our going “about doing good.” Christ is risen; he is truly risen! Alleluia!

Homily for Friday, 15 April 2022– Friday of the Passion of the Lord (Good Friday)

Readings of the day: Isaiah 52:15-53:12; Psalm 31:6, 12-13, 15-16, 17, 25; Hebrews 4:14-16, 5:7-9; John 18:1-19:42

St. Paul begins his first letter to the Corinthians in an unexpected way. He proclaims Jesus Christ as God, not because of Jesus’ great miracles or signs of his divinity. No, St. Paul’s starting point in 1 Corinthians—the focus of his claim that Jesus Christ is God, and that in fact no earthly or heavenly power has any power; any wisdom of its own, but owes all power and all wisdom to Jesus Christ; to our one God—is the cross. “We proclaim Christ crucified,” St. Paul says, “to those who are called… the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Today we focus, as St. Paul once did from the beginning of his first letter to the Corinthians, on the cross. We, too, today, “proclaim Christ crucified.” We have before us (and will process up to adore it in a few moments) a cross: A brutally simple symbol of death. In Jesus’ time, in lands like Palestine that were occupied by the Romans, the public display of crucified criminals, if they were not Roman citizens, was somewhat common. It was a humiliating, painful way to die; a terrifying public display of Roman state power.

“We proclaim Christ crucified”; we proclaim Jesus Christ who, by his cross, disempowered Imperial Rome; disempowered the religious leaders of his own people who had him put to death; disempowered the cross as a sign of visible humiliation and death; transformed the cross into the ultimate sign of life.

In John’s Gospel account of Jesus’ passion, which we hear today, Jesus is in charge from start to finish. Jesus is the source and focus of power; all other powers are emptied of their power. We begin in a garden “across the Kidron valley” from Jerusalem. John does not name this garden, as the other Gospels do. Instead, John’s setting of the garden, “across the Kidron valley,” calls to mind the powers of evil ambition who tried to kill King David and take over Israel’s throne. David flees his own son, Absalom, across the same Kidron valley. Absalom is killed in battle; David’s kingship survives. Jesus, Son of David and Son of God, will be all the more victorious.

Jesus does not so much flee the people who arrest him, led by Judas, the apostle-turned-traitor, but he meets this mob and willingly reveals himself to them—twice—in the garden across the Kidron valley: “I am he.” The mob that has come to arrest Jesus has no power over him. Here I think we can empathize with Peter as he lashes out with his sword and cuts off the ear of the high priest’s slave, Malchus: Mindless, panic-driven violence. But Jesus heals Malchus’ ear; violence is emptied of its power.

Jesus is bound and taken to the high priests, Annas and Caiaphas. Inside, where Jesus is on trial before the high priest, he testifies to the openness of his teaching, “in synagogues and in the temple… I have said nothing in secret.” Outside, Peter just as openly fulfills Jesus’ prediction that he would deny Jesus three times before the cock crowed. But neither the sham trial inside the high priests’ quarters, nor Peter’s denials outside, in the high priest’s courtyard, of ever having known Jesus, will have any power over Jesus.

Even Pilate knows this truth. Pilate asks, “What is truth”? The truths before Pilate at Jesus’ Roman trial are many: Jesus has done no wrong. Pilate can “find no case against him.” Jesus is truly a king, but one whose royal power is not from this world, because it created and sustains this world. Caesar, Pilate’s king, and Pilate himself, are powerless before the God-ruler of the universe: “You would have no power over me unless it has been given you from above.”

But Jesus submits to these earthly powers to transform them; to transform the death they will inflict (and still inflict) into eternal life. The crucified Jesus disempowers and transforms the powers of this world from the cross by giving his mother into the care of his “beloved disciple.” Jesus entrusts his Church, beginning with his mother, to us, beloved disciples, sisters and brothers, even though we are also weak sinners. The crucified Jesus disempowers and transforms even our sin, so that we are no less than redeemed, beloved disciples, all of us.

And, finally, Jesus gives up his spirit. Jesus’ victory over death itself “is finished.” He has been in charge, from start to finish. Yet even after death, Jesus’ transformation and overcoming of the powers of this world, even death itself, continue to be revealed. Nicodemus, who had met Jesus by night, now joins Joseph of Arimathea in asking Pilate for and laying Jesus’ body in the tomb. Nicodemus, in a way he was not previously able to grasp, is “born again” along with Joseph into the light of this victory that only has the appearance of death; failure; darkness. By Jesus’ death we, too, like Joseph and Nicodemus, are “born again”; redeemed; saved. Death no longer has power, over Jesus or over us.

And so “we proclaim Christ crucified.”

“We worship you, O Christ, and we praise you, because by your cross you have redeemed the world.”

Homily for Sunday, 27 February 2022– Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: Sirach 27:4-7; Psalm 92:2-3, 14-15, 15-16; 1 Corinthians 15:54-58; Luke 6:39-45

Teaching two Bible courses as I am this semester here at St. Joseph’s College, I am realizing something more constantly and profoundly, but that I have known for as long as I can remember. I realize how much I appreciate the Bible not only as sacred, divinely-inspired text, but as works of literature. I appreciate the different literary genres and devices in the text: Works of poetry, prose or narrative; apocalyptic literature with its often fearsome and graphic symbolism; the use of irony, metaphor, and even hyperbole.

Yes, hyperbole: The writers of the Bible were not beyond using creative, literary exaggeration to make a point. Could we say that Jesus was not beyond hyperbole, either? We hear an example of it in today’s Gospel, from Luke. Jesus asks why his disciples who have a log in their eye do not notice the log in their eye, but readily notice “the speck in [their] neighbour’s eye.” Of course, Jesus means this, quite on purpose, to evoke the most ridiculous of images in his hearers’ minds: Somebody staggering about with a massive beam in their eye. First of all, by what kind of horrendous accident would somebody have taken a log beam through the eye? (I do not even want to think about this). Second, that person needs to be admitted to emergency immediately! Third, even the person hapless enough to have been stuck with a mere speck in the eye could experience a lot of pain.

Clearly, Jesus is exaggerating the size contrast between the speck and the log to make a point. And most if not all of us understand the point he is making: Sin can inhibit not so much our literal eyesight but the insight of our consciences into our own sinfulness and weakness, so that we become much less capable of discerning our own faults than we are at pointing out the faults of other people, even when they are less significant than our own.

I notice this as a university instructor and academic: I am much better at correcting even the fine details of somebody else’s writing than I am at correcting my own. I think to myself that, all those times in school when teachers would insist that we have somebody proofread our work for us, even if we thought we were good writers: My teachers were not kidding! When I write, I appreciate somebody who is adept at spotting all the specks (and the occasional log) in my written work. At the same time, I do not think most or any of us really appreciate the “speck-spotters” we encounter outside of maybe the academic setting; people who criticize others for every little fault, who are almost certainly not without fault themselves. But do we realize readily when we become the pedantic “speck-spotters”?

With the log and speck in the eye scenario, Jesus uses analogy and hyperbole to make a point that is very relatable to our everyday lives; to our experience as Jesus’ disciples. And Jesus introduces the log-and-speck saying with another parable, which also includes an element of hyperbole. He asks, “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into the pit? Like the log-and-speck analogy, the proverb of the blind person guiding another blind person plants a ridiculous image in our minds. “Can a blind person guide a blind person”? Jesus’ question is purposely designed to draw from us a decisive answer: “No, of course not”!

That is, we lean decisively toward answering “no” to whether a blind person can guide a blind person, until we change our perspective on this little hyperbolic proverb; until we think about it from the perspective of a blind person. Mary McGlone, a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet in St. Louis who writes for the National Catholic Reporter in the U.S., asks whether another blind person might, in some situations, in fact be the best possible guide or teacher for a blind person. Somebody who is blind, says Sr. Mary McGlone, may in fact “be the best teacher of the blind”; the one who best understands “the challenges blind people have to overcome… A sighted teacher might talk about a white cane; the non-sighted teacher realizes that the learner [if the learner has never been able to see] has no concept of whiteness” or colour.

Today’s Gospel parables (or, really, proverbs that use hyperbole for effect), part of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, are all about changing our perspective. They are a good preparation for Lent, which, by the way, begins this upcoming Wednesday, Ash Wednesday. In Lent, we speak of changing our perspective; changing our minds (which is the literal meaning of the Greek word metanoia that our Gospels use for “repentance”). And today’s Gospel reading gives us an opportunity, sisters and brothers, to practice this change of perspective; this change of mind and heart; this repentance to believe in and live the Good News that is essential to Christian discipleship.

Jesus invites us to change our perspective; our minds and our hearts; to repent. Even if we have not sinned (at least since our last confession); even if we are not blind: Think the word of God; interpret it; live it from the perspective of the blind person; from the perspective of the sinner. This is the only way to be a true, authentic disciple of Jesus and not a hypocrite.

Incidentally, the word “hypocrite,” one of Jesus’ most frequent reproofs in the Gospels, evokes somebody playing a part, pretending to be somebody or something that person is not; literally-speaking, one under a mask, as an actor in theatre in Jesus’ time. A hypocrite is somebody consumed by playing a part that is not them; that is not authentic. A hypocrite plays the part of one without sin; pretends that he or she is not a sinner. A hypocrite is unable (or unwilling) to interpret; to live; to be a disciple of Jesus and a person of God from the perspective of the blind; the weak; the sinner. A hypocrite becomes unwilling to change one’s perspective, one’s heart and mind, in the way Jesus asks of us.

Hypocrisy, if we think about it in this way, is a serious sin, if only because Jesus himself, although he never sinned, is the model for us of shifting perspective. Jesus became human, one like us in all things but sin. In so doing, Jesus saw the world from our perspective, the point of view of us sinners; the blind; the weak; the perspective ultimately of looking upon us and the world from the cross. Jesus is the model for us of metanoia, even though he never committed any sin.

And we celebrate this every time we gather to celebrate the Eucharist. Every Mass, we begin our Eucharistic celebration by changing our perspective. We begin every Mass not by looking for the specks in the eyes of our neighbour while ignoring any potential logs in ours, but by praying, “I confess to almighty God… Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We pray for God’s mercy even if we are guilty of no sin, even if we have just been to confession minutes before Mass.

Why? We begin our Eucharistic celebration this way because none of this is about our sin. None of this is about us at all. All of it is about God, in Jesus Christ, having chosen freely to live from our perspective, that of our human nature weakened; blinded by sin, so that we might change our perspective to be more like that of God. That perspective of God is not one that seeks the faults of others to condemn them, but one that has mercy on our faults and seeks what is good in us, so that we might be saved.

Maybe paradoxically, we change our perspective to be more from God’s point of view of loving mercy toward us by changing our perspective to empathize more with one another and our weaknesses; our blindness; our susceptibility to sin. Sometimes the best teacher of the blind is another blind person! But how do we do this? In one word: Listen.

The Book of Sirach, from which we hear today, invites us to listen before we speak. To speak without listening first; without searching, as well as we are able, for good will in the other person first, is to reveal too soon where we lack wisdom. It is to reveal our faults; our sins. It is to reveal our uncanny ability to correct the work of others much better than we are able to correct our own. It is to reveal the ridiculousness of the logs in our own eyes while we spot the specks in the eyes of our sisters and brothers. It is to reveal our hypocrisy.

Instead, the word of God urges us—starting with me, first and foremost—to listen, to empathize, to discern good will in our sister; our brother, to change our minds and hearts (to repent!) before trying to change another person. This is authentic faith. This is wisdom. This is the way of the Good News of Jesus Christ that we celebrate and try to live, here and now.

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.