Homily for Thursday, 28 July 2022– Ferial

Readings of the day: Jeremiah 18:1-6; Psalm 146:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6ab; Matthew 13:47-53

We hear two distinct messages from Matthew’s Gospel today. First, Jesus offers us one of his many similes of the kingdom of heaven that are very typical of the Gospel of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is like”… Second, Jesus extols the ideal scribe (maybe the ideal faith leader?) as “the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is old and what is new.”

Today, Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven to a net, thrown in the sea, in which many “fish of every kind” are caught. Once the net is ashore, the fish are sorted into good and bad; the bad are thrown out. The comparison to heaven—in fact, to the final judgment at the end of time—is simple: Angels will, at the end of time, “separate the evil from the righteous”; the righteous will enter heaven, while the evil will be cast into a place (or state) of eternal punishment, “the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Matthew will take up this image of strict separation of the good from the bad in the end times toward the end of his Gospel, just before the Passion of Jesus, when Jesus gives an extended discourse of the sheep and the goats. In that discourse, in Matthew 25, we hear more about what kinds of actions or inaction will result in us finding ourselves either among the sheep, those who will enter the kingdom of heaven, or the goats, those who will be excluded from heaven and punished eternally.

In Matthew 25, whether we inherit the kingdom of heaven hinges mainly on our attention to social justice, to care for our sisters and brothers most in need: The hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the imprisoned, and so on. This is a good reminder to us in our quite individualistic cultures in well-off countries (mostly) in the global north that our Gospel understands what we might experience at the end of time—our Church once spoke more often about death, judgment, heaven and hell, the “last things”—less in terms of reward or punishment for individual righteousness or evil (although we are still, individually, morally accountable to God and one another) and more in terms of a social or common good.

Among the biblical Gospels, Matthew is maybe the most sensitive to the corporate, social, common, communal good. We are not saved or condemned eternally alone, but together, depending on our society’s attention to the common good of one another, care for all of creation.

I have had this thought many times as Pope Francis continues what he has called his penitential pilgrimage to Canada, to further reconciliation with our Indigenous peoples against whom our Church participated in horrific, intergenerationally traumatizing abuses; cultural assimilation and colonialism, especially through the residential school system. From his first public address of this pilgrimage, just south of here in Maskwacis, a former residential school site, Pope Francis has begged forgiveness for the wrongs of Catholics and other Christians in the name of our faith and in collaboration with Canada’s governments against our Indigenous people.

There have been calls for Pope Francis to acknowledge not only the wrongs of many Christian individuals against our Indigenous people, but the evils perpetrated against them as corporate, institutionalized, social sin of the Catholic Church. We may be inclined to dismiss these calls as unnecessary, the special interest of “the media” often looking for a counter-narrative (in this case to the acknowledgement of the pope’s sincerity). But, considering today’s Gospel, I suggest that these calls include a valid and important reminder for us: Just as we are not saved or condemned alone, reconciliation and forgiveness are not individual pursuits but those of the whole Church. Matthew the Gospel writer had a keen sense of this whole-Church, whole-community dimension of sin and grace, judgment, accountability, forgiveness and reconciliation.

To forget this is to forget the value of Jesus’ second point in today’s Gospel reading. To forget this is to continue to devalue the treasures, new and old, that Indigenous cultures can offer that enrich our Church, that remind us of our social, communal, familial roots that ultimately draw us back to God, the common Creator of us all. It is easy for many (even, maybe especially, in the leadership of the Church) to fall back on blaming “media” contrarianism for speaking messages we do not want to hear. It is easy to fall back on forms of clericalism, slavishness to existing power structures—all forms of perpetuation of colonialist, nationalist, individualist attitudes that continue to create victims, have-nots, and to commodify human lives.

Instead, today’s Gospel invites us to reflect and act on the communal, social dimensions of sin and evil, but also grace and reconciliation. Our Gospel invites us to be like the ideal scribe, who brings out of our treasure the best of who we are, in a gift exchange with other peoples and cultures who also bring us their treasures, their memories, their recognition of God’s gifts—lands, ancestors, communities—both old and new.

Homily for Sunday, 26 June 2022– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Readings of the day: 1 Kings 19:16b, 19-21; Psalm 16:1-2, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11; 1 Galatians 5:1, 13-18; Luke 9:51-62

Who would follow somebody so demanding as Jesus; who would dare be the disciple of somebody who asks for our focus to be exclusively on following him? This is the question one of my favourite columnists reflecting on the word of God on Sundays lately, Sr. Mary McGlone of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, outside of St. Louis, asks in her reflection this week for the National Catholic Reporter.

She asks the question this way: “Who in their right mind would take up with an unarmed, violence-avoiding preacher headed to the big city to face jealous, powerful foes who would stop at nothing to get rid of him”? Sr. McGlone proposes two images of people of our own time who boldly, resolutely, visibly chose non-violence in response to violence, war, evil. The first image Sr. McGlone proposes is the “tank man” of the Tiananmen Square protests of June 5, 1989, who stood unarmed before a line of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square in Beijing the day after the Chinese government had violently cleared the square of protesters. The second image she reflects on is of Ukrainians during the still-ongoing war there handing cell phones to Russian soldiers so they can call their mothers.

Who in their right mind would go, unarmed, to look death in the face: Before a line of tanks; before the guns of the invading enemy? But this is precisely how Jesus asks us to follow him. And these acts of non-violence have disarmed and will disarm, at least momentarily, a world still beset by violence and threats to the dignity of human life across its span, from conception to death.

Yet we hear from Luke’s Gospel today how the discipleship Jesus asks of us was difficult for his first disciples. Today’s Gospel begins as “the days [draw] near for [Jesus] to be taken up,” when he sets “his face to go to Jerusalem.” Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, where he will die, rise, and ascend to heaven, is the single longest continuous section of Luke. It takes up more than one-third of Luke’s Gospel.

The words Luke uses in this short introduction to today’s Gospel reading are rich in subtle but important details. The word in Luke’s Greek we hear translated as to be “taken up” is an unmistakeable reference to the cross of Jesus. This same Greek word can also mean ascension to heaven. So the connection of this one word to Elijah, of whom we hear today in our reading from 1 Kings calling Elisha to succeed him, is a little less intentional on Luke’s part than its connection to the crucifixion and death of Jesus, but it is still fairly obvious. Before he is taken up to heaven on a chariot of fire (in 2 Kings), Elijah chooses Elisha to succeed him (in 1 Kings). And before Jesus is “taken up” on a cross outside Jerusalem, he likewise chooses disciples who will succeed him.

But do Jesus’ disciples understand what Jesus will ask of them as he sets “his face to go to Jerusalem”? They are decidedly not prepared for what Jesus will ask of them as disciples. From this point our Gospel reading today can be broken into two main parts. The first part focuses on people who are already Jesus’ disciples, in particular James and John. The second part of today’s Gospel focuses on people who want to, or whom Jesus calls, to be his future disciples.

By this point in Luke’s Gospel, James and John have been following Jesus as his disciples for some time. But they are about to experience something new, a bit of a dark turn in their story; their relationship with Jesus. Jesus sets “his face to go to Jerusalem,” where he will be “taken up” to die a horrific death. Surely James, John, and Jesus’ other disciples knew the risk Jesus was taking by so decisively setting out for Jerusalem. As Sr. Mary McGlone says, Jesus, the “unarmed, violence-avoiding preacher,” was “headed to the big city to face jealous, powerful foes who would stop at nothing to get rid of him.”

Worse yet, Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem from Galilee had to pass through Samaria. And we know that the Samaritans, especially in Luke’s Gospel, are synonymous with “most hated enemies,” especially if one were a Jew in Jesus’ times. Going back to Old Testament times, the Samaritans had intermarried with the pagan Assyrians who invaded Israel. So devout Jews hated their half-pagan, half-Jewish neighbours of Samaria. And, to add insult to injury, as Jesus and his disciples pass through this enemy territory, they are (not surprisingly) denied hospitality by the Samaritans. James and John ask Jesus if he wants them “to command fire to come down from heaven and consume” the Samaritans. Jesus immediately rebukes his somewhat overzealous disciples. Jesus’ way, our way to salvation, will be the way of non-violence. It will be, paradoxically in his disciples’ eyes, the way of submitting to inhospitality, to violence, and ultimately to death on a cross outside Jerusalem. It will be a way that I would not be surprised if James, John, and Jesus’ other disciples to this point thought was completely senseless; if, in his disciples’ eyes, Jesus was out of his mind.

Yet the story continues after Jesus and his disciples pass through Samaria. Somebody on the road, a would-be disciple, calls out to Jesus, “I will follow you wherever you go.” At face value, this offer by a would-be disciple to follow Jesus wherever he goes seems like one he could not refuse, right? But Jesus’ reply to this first prospective disciple seems strange at first hearing: Jesus does not accept this disciple, but does not really refuse him, either. Jesus only reminds him of the single-minded focus following him demands. That focus cannot be on worldly comforts or even necessities. Discipleship of Jesus is total dependence on God for our needs, until death, with the hope of eternal life.

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head”: This little, bizarre proverb reminds me of when I first became a Basilian; when I took first vows, and then final vows; when I was ordained. At each point in my Basilian journey, I have said to Jesus through my brother Basilians (sometimes in writing, as our Rule and Church law demand), “I will follow you wherever you go.” And, if I may say so, this is easier said than done. It is easier said than done when, sealed by the Spirit at confirmation, we say “Amen”; we choose for ourselves to be disciples of Jesus. Although I was too young to remember my own baptism, I am sure it was a case of eager discipleship, but easier-said-than-done in reality, when my parents and godparents—our parents and godparents—replied to the question from the priest or deacon, “Do you clearly understand what you are undertaking”: “Yes.” It is easier said than done when we promise, those of us who are married in the Church, “to be faithful… in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health.” It is easier said than done when we say, “Amen,” when we receive communion.

“I will follow you wherever you go,” we say to Jesus at each of these points in our lives. Fairly often, I hear, even from family, relatives, and close friends: “You have given up so much to be a priest: Being married, raising a family, and so on.” And I usually respond, “Maybe, but I have gained so much more than I have given up.” And, besides this, I am far, in my own estimation, from depending totally on God even for necessities, let alone comforts. This again reminds me of Fr. Joe Trovato, whom I mentioned in my homily a week ago. Our parish at the time, St. Kateri in Rochester, would have delicious and filling fish and chips meals prepared by the Boy Scouts on Fridays during Lent. At table, Fr. Joe would invariably look at me, with his hint of a smile, and say gently, “You know, we are not suffering”! We really are not sacrificing anything, for Lent or otherwise.

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus says to the first prospective disciple on his way to Jerusalem. And he is not done yet. Jesus meets two other would-be disciples in our Gospel today. But instead of them asking to follow him, Jesus takes the initiative with the other two: “Follow me.” Each time, though, these two would-be disciples have other priorities: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father… Let me first say farewell to those at my home.”

These two disciples’ priorities are legitimate, we must admit. To bury one’s dead relatives was the supreme act of honour to another person. To greet one’s family when entering or leaving home was close behind burying the dead as a supreme act of honour and mercy in Jewish culture of Jesus’ time. These are still considered corporal works of mercy in our Church today. And it was what we hear in our reading today that Elijah allowed Elisha to do before he accepted to follow Elijah and succeed him. So it is strange to us that Jesus would refuse these would-be disciples’ requests to bury their dead or to bid farewell “to those at [their] home.”

What, then, does our Gospel today say about discipleship, following Jesus? Discipleship of Jesus, sisters and brothers, does not tolerate violence in word or action. Discipleship of Jesus includes everybody; excludes nobody, even (and maybe especially) our enemies, from God’s grace. Discipleship of Jesus demands single-minded focus: Dependence on God for our needs in this life, if we are to set our faces in the direction Jesus travels; toward Jerusalem, toward the cross, with the hope of eternal life.

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.”