Homily for Sunday, 1 August 2021– Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15, 31a; Psalm 78:3-4, 23-24, 13-14, 25, 54; Ephesians 4:20-24; John 6:24-35

Many of us may know of the Canadian children’s author Robert Munsch. He is known for his many heartwarming if zany, and vividly illustrated stories for children, but that also appeal to adults.

Today’s readings, especially from Exodus and John’s Gospel, center on food—Exodus’ manna in the desert; Jesus’ Bread of Life Discourse that follows the multiplication of the loaves and fish in John’s Gospel. In both Exodus and John, the people who are fed are unsatisfied and complain about the food.

The Robert Munsch story that comes to my mind is called Something Good. In Something Good, a father takes his young children grocery shopping. His daughter, Tyya, complains that, whenever her dad takes her grocery shopping, he never buys her any good food, like ice cream, cookies, chocolate bars, or ginger ale. Instead, Tyya’s father only ever buys food like bread, eggs, milk, cheese, and (ugh!) spinach—“nothing any good”!

Has this ever been our experience, especially those of us who are or have been parents of young children, when we take the kids grocery shopping? And, kids, I hope you do not quite behave like Tyya in Something Good when you are with your parents at the grocery store, and that you eat the bread, eggs, milk, cheese, and even spinach your parents buy to feed you! Anyway, in Something Good, when Tyya’s father is not watching, she gets her own shopping cart and fills it with all the “good” junk food she wants, much to her dad’s dismay. While Tyya’s father is returning all the one hundred boxes of ice cream and other goodies with which Tyya has filled her cart, Tyya is in fact very well-behaved: Just as her father tells her, she does not move or make any sound while he returns all the junk food to the shelves. Tyya is so well-behaved and still that she is mistaken for a doll, placed on a shelf with a price tag on her nose, $29.95, and even nearly bought for this bargain price by a few would-be shoppers. Finally, while Tyya’s father, Tyya, and her brother and sister are all arguing with the cashier—“This is my own kid. I don’t have to pay for my own kid”!— Tyya says to her dad, “Don’t you think I’m worth twenty nine dollars and ninety-five cents”? Tyya’s father pays the cashier, gives Tyya “a big kiss… and a big hug,” at which point Tyya says, “Daddy, you finally bought something good after all.”

Now, unfortunately, neither the people of Israel in Exodus or in John’s Gospel were as well-behaved or as endearing as Tyya in Robert Munsch’s book. In fact, many passages in our Bible and a few places in Israel (Meribah and Massah, for example) are named for the habit the people under Moses and Aaron had of complaining constantly, testing not only Moses and Aaron but God. We could say that the people of Israel in the Bible are consistently among the world’s biggest complainers.

In the Book of Exodus today, they are like little children trailing behind their father in the grocery store, while he buys bread, eggs, milk, cheese, and (ugh!) spinach… —“nothing any good”! No, worse yet, while they are in the depths of hunger, walking through a hot, dry desert, God gives them manna to satisfy their hunger. But how do the people of Israel receive this frost-like substance God gives them to eat? They look at it sideways and wrinkle their noses at it as if it were (ugh!) spinach or something; “nothing any good,” anyway. They ask (we can imagine, grumbling), “What is it”?

I find it amusing that, in Hebrew and related languages from the ancient Middle East, “manna” or “man” is a question word (an interrogative pronoun), so the Israelites’ question about what the flaky, frosty substance was that coated the ground in the desert becomes the name of this substance: “Man(na) (What is it)”? Manna!

But, by the time of Jesus and our Gospels, several generations later in Israel, the people of Israel do not seem to have progressed much beyond their old habit of complaining constantly. Jesus has just multiplied the few loaves and fish by thousands, so that everybody had more than enough to eat, and still the people clamour and complain; still they ask Jesus for a sign so that they may believe in him. How exasperating! The crowds in Jesus’ time, like the Israelites led by Moses and Aaron, are like little Tyya in the grocery store in Robert Munsch’s story: They keep asking for “something good,” not realizing that the something good, earthly sustenance, which points to something even better, eternal life, has already been offered to them. Maybe if Jesus had multiplied the ice cream, cookies, chocolate bars, or ginger ale, instead of loaves of bread and fish, the crowds would have gotten the point. On second thought, somehow I doubt this.

The point I suggest Jesus makes through the multiplication of the loaves and his Bread of Life Discourse that follows in John’s Gospel and that we will hear over the next few Sundays, is that the sign itself does not matter so much as how we receive it and what we do with it. The same is true of any of Jesus’ signs in the Gospels, or any of the signs of God’s presence among God’s people (like the manna in the desert) in the Old Testament: How we receive and what we do with these signs matters.

What do I mean by this? Jesus does not ask the crowds to arrive at a pithy, maybe philosophical name or formulation of Church teaching that would describe the essential meaning of the sign: Real Presence or transubstantiation, for example, however true and right (if mystifying) those terms are. Jesus does not ask us, first and foremost, to connect his multiplication of the loaves and fish and Bread of Life Discourse to our Eucharist (although certainly that connection can be and has been made, rightly so). No, Jesus asks only one thing of us in today’s Gospel from John: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

To believe in Jesus, the one whom God has sent, means to trust completely that Jesus has our best interest at heart. Jesus desires one thing for us: Eternal life. And to trust completely in Jesus and his one desire of eternal life for us is to allow our hearts; our minds, whenever we experience a sign in nature, in this earthly life, of God’s presence and goodness, to connect that sign to God’s ultimate desire for us to have that same experience on an infinite level. That is eternal life. But I think, maybe, to ask of us to trust Jesus completely, without reservation, in this way, is to ask something very difficult of ourselves. This level of trust in anybody is difficult, simply because nobody on Earth; nobody we know; no leader within the Church; certainly not I can possibly command the completeness of trust that Jesus can and does ask of us. There are some people who come close to the kind of authority and command of our trust that Jesus is able to ask of us. Those people are the saints who walk among us. And, thank God, there has never been an age when we have been without a saint who has walked this earth with us and then interceded for us from heaven with God.

Who, then, might our role models be in receiving Jesus’ signs as a call to trust completely in God and God’s call to eternal life? Do we remember the boy in last Sunday’s Gospel, the one who gave the few loaves and fish to Jesus, who then multiplied those loaves and fish to feed the thousands? That little boy in John’s Gospel is our example of complete trust in God and in Jesus, whom God has sent. The boy does not complain that he only has a few loaves and fish to offer. He simply, humbly gives what he has to Jesus. And Jesus multiplies what he gives him into a sign of what heaven will be: A banquet beyond our wildest imagination, where everybody is fed, with abundant leftovers.

If we still have difficulty trusting in God and in Jesus, whom God has sent, in a world that gives us not a few sad countersigns to heaven; signs that instead point to the scandal of human sin, I invite us to familiarize ourselves with the example of at least one of the many saints who have trusted in God in the way Jesus asks us; have recognized signs of the greatness of heaven in nature—God’s creation—sometimes amid great adversity. I think of the cry of St. Augustine of Hippo to God: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” From the last century or so, we have the simple prayer of St. Faustina Kowalska: “Jesus, I trust in you.” Or there is the profound prayer of total trust in God of Blessed Charles de Foucauld, founder of the Little Brothers of Jesus, hermit, evangelist to the Touareg people, martyr of the desert of Tamanrasset, Algeria: “Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.”

In these prayers of saints, there is no complaint. There is no turning up our noses at the nourishment God offers us or asking, “What is it”? There is no seeking something good, or better than what God has already offered us. There is only complete trust that God will take what we offer back to God of his goodness, and multiply it so that the saving food God gives us will last forever.

Homily for Sunday, 11 July 2021– Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

We might find it curious that, in the Bible, nobody God calls to be a prophet wants to be a prophet. Why is this? There are several reasons why the Biblical prophets do not tend to want to be prophets. Some of them are all too aware of their own inadequacy, moral or otherwise, for the task. I think of Isaiah, who pleads with God, to no avail, to choose a better prophet than him, “a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips,” or Elijah, who hides from God in a cave to avoid being sent out as a prophet: “Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”

Other prophets in the Bible have other reasons for being reluctant to accept God’s call to prophesy. Prophets during the time of Israel’s kings in the Old Testament tended not to have good reputations, or they were not widely accepted by the people who were meant to receive their messages. Many kings of the time hired “professional” prophets, who usually told the kings what they wanted to hear. Some prophets of Israel’s royal court were not simply flatterers to the king in this way, but these court prophets who challenged the king (much less got away with it with their lives or reputations intact) were few.

Enter Amos, whose call to be a prophet we hear about today. Amos is no professional prophet of any royal court. He is a humble “herdsman, a dresser of sycamore trees.” In fact, Amos is not even from the Kingdom of Israel, but from Judah. Now, this becomes a bit confusing: After the death of King Solomon, son of King David, Israel split into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah, centered around Jerusalem, in the south. Judah often claimed to have held onto belief in only the one God, whereas Israel and its kings believed in or worshipped many gods. This led to Israel and Judah resenting each other, so we can understand a bit better why “Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” orders Amos to return to Judah and “never again prophesy at Bethel.”

The setting of Bethel for Amos’ call as a prophet is appropriate; it is also a bit ironic. Bethel literally means “house of El” or “house of God” (El is a Hebrew name for God). It was near the border between Israel and Judah. Bethel is where the Book of Genesis says Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending on a ladder between heaven and earth took place. Yet because Bethel is situated where it is—not as far away as Jerusalem, for people who lived in the northern Kingdom of Israel—Jeroboam, the first king of Israel as a kingdom separate from Judah, built golden calves, one at Bethel, so that the people of Israel did not have to travel all the way to the temple of Jerusalem to worship. Does this story of a golden calf sound familiar? The presence of a golden calf in Bethel led the people of Israel to worship it, an idol, instead of the one God of Israel, just as the golden calf in Exodus had led the people of Israel into idolatry back then. Bethel, the “house of God,” had become a house of idol worship; a house of a false god.

God sends Amos to Bethel to preach against this worship of false gods, and all the unfaithfulness and injustices that went along with it. And, we can imagine, Amos and his message were not well-received by the king of Israel, the officials of his court, or most of the people of Israel. It would be as if a foreign leader or influential person were to travel to another country today and criticize the leaders and people of that country on their own soil. This is usually not received well, even if the criticism is justified.

“Amaziah, the priest of Bethel,” essentially tells Amos to go home to Judah and spare Israel and its king the criticism Amos directs against them. This would be well and good if Amos were one of those professional royal court prophets kings of that time were used to. But Amos’ prophetic mission is not his own; it is from God. Amos never wanted to be a prophet, but God had called him from tending his flock and sycamore trees to prophesy in Israel.

In Mark’s Gospel today, we meet more people—Jesus’ twelve apostles—who never wanted to be prophets and probably could not have dreamed of the mission with which Jesus would entrust them. Yet Jesus does just that: He entrusts his apostles with a prophetic mission; a difficult mission at that. They are to travel light, so to speak, with only a staff. (This would be a good skill for me to practice, as a priest of a religious order who has traveled and served in many places.) Jesus’ apostles are to be totally reliant on God and the hospitality of the people they meet. Should the people in any place “refuse to hear” the Twelve, they are to leave, shaking the dust off their feet “as a testimony against them.”

Jesus’ instructions to the Twelve highlight the difficulty of their journey and the message they are to preach. It is a message of repentance, after all. And maybe Jesus’ instruction to his apostles to shake the dust from their feet should some people not receive their message well especially calls to mind the difficulty of the apostles’ journey and message. Nowadays, like many good Biblical sayings, though, “shake the dust from your feet” has become a convenient, catchy phrase: Do not let a disagreement, or somebody’s ill reception of a message we want to communicate, bother us; simply move on. But, whenever I hear this Gospel, with this instruction of Jesus to his apostles, I try to understand it as a challenge to listen more attentively, especially as a priest and especially to people who disagree or are not receptive, for whatever reason, to my idea or message. I think a key prophetic skill for today might be to develop this reflex to listen; not to misunderstand “shake the dust from your feet” as an excuse not to listen to those with whom we differ (or even find disagreeable).

Another key characteristic of a prophet, if we look at Jesus’ Apostles, or Amos in the Old Testament, is that a true prophet recognizes that prophecy is a gift and a commissioning from God. Amos was not a professional prophet of a royal court, somebody who wanted to be a prophet. In fact, God called him to prophesy on foreign soil to a king and people who were not receptive to his message. The same was true of Jesus’ Apostles, in many ways. To what extent is the same true of us?

This may sound far-fetched to many people (maybe less so within this group), but God calls each of us, in virtue of our baptism, to be prophetic. In baptism, each and every one of us is anointed, as Christ himself was, “Priest, Prophet, and King.” This does not necessarily mean that we will accomplish great feats of faith, or be great and powerful communicators or educators of our faith, although some of us will be or are already.

Ultimately, a prophet by definition is one who speaks for God. Our speaking (or acting, or listening) in the place of God, impelled by the call of God, may lead us to communicate a message that is unpopular, in a place or time where we will be dismissed as strange or even ridiculed. This was Amos’ reality, as he preached faithfulness to one God to the unreceptive ears of Israel’s king and his court. Our prophetic baptismal calling may be more like that of Jesus’ first apostles, whom Jesus sent forth to preach repentance (similarly to how Amos was sent forth but, in the apostles’ case, they worked more as a team or in small groups than the more solitary prophets of the Old Testament, like Amos, did), but also to console and to heal the sick. More often, we will live out our prophetic mission in unassuming ways, making God known and heard through small everyday acts of kindness and mercy.

There are perhaps countless ways to live our prophetic calling from God, but each of us holds in common a baptismal calling to act, speak, listen—to do all we do—in a way that makes God most present in our world. And, as the letter to the Ephesians reminds us, we did not choose this prophetic calling from God, but God has chosen us for a purpose. God has chosen us “in Christ,” not only in baptism but “before the foundation of the world.” This is remarkable language from Ephesians!

In whatever particular way we live our prophetic calling from God, we can be assured, Ephesians says, that we have been blessed “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” We are called, yet also equipped with every blessing, to be God’s prophets in our time: To be God’s ears that listen, God’s mouth that speaks, God’s hands that work; that heal; that console, God’s feet that carry us to each encounter with God’s people, while we trust fully in God’s strength and blessings to see our prophetic journey through.

Homily for Tuesday, 6 July 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: Genesis 32:23-33; Psalm 17:1b, 2-3, 6-7ab, 8b, 15; Matthew 9:32-38

Tuesday of the 14th week in Ordinary Time

Whenever I hear today’s Gospel reading, I am saddened somewhat by Matthew’s description of the crowds following Jesus about from village to village while he healed their “every disease and every sickness” as “like sheep without a shepherd.”

The question I ask myself when I hear this—the crowds were “like sheep without a shepherd”—is how Jesus responds to this situation of the crowds. One word stands out for me in this respect: Jesus responds to the situation of the crowds—lost, scattered, “harassed and helpless,” with their diseases and sicknesses in need of healing, their being like “like sheep without a shepherd”—with compassion. Jesus, Matthew says, “had compassion for them.”

True compassion is difficult. At least as Jesus, or Matthew, understand it, compassion is a full-person, body-and-soul experience. The word Matthew uses to describe Jesus compassion toward the crowds is rather graphic: Here, Jesus is (figuratively, we might hope) moved to his inmost depths for the people following him.

The other day, I was reading one of my favourite Catholic blogs, called “Where Peter Is.” This blog reported on a letter Pope Francis handwrote to Jesuit Fr. James Martin both to congratulate Fr. Martin’s nephew on his confirmation and to thank Fr. Martin for his ministry (which is controversial among many people) with LGBTQ+ Catholics. Pope Francis writes in his letter to Fr. Martin, “The Father’s ‘style’ has three features: Closeness, compassion, and tenderness.”

The “Where Peter Is” article points out that emphasis on compassion, connected to pastoral closeness and tenderness, is nothing new for Pope Francis. Compassion is a major focus of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, which the “Where Peter Is” article calls “the programmatic text of [Francis’] pontificate.”

Evangelii Gaudium often connects compassion to attentive listening to the faithful in their concrete life situations. Listening with compassion, Pope Francis says in Evangelii Gaudium, helps us to hear “the outcry of the poor” and suffering. When sin is present, compassionate listening can help us “to correct others and to help them to grow on the basis of a recognition of the objective evil of their actions… but without making judgments about their responsibility and culpability.” Pope Francis goes so far as to say that “only thorough such respectful and compassionate listening can we enter on the paths of true growth and awaken a yearning for the Christian ideal: The desire to respond fully to God’s love and to bring to fruition what he has sown in our lives.”

I wonder if this may make compassion, together with attentive listening, closeness and tenderness, to seem easier than these are. I have experienced, as I am sure is true of anybody who is engaged in any pastoral ministry, that compassion, listening, closeness, and tenderness take constant practice. Compassion, the ability to be moved to our depths, so to speak, by another’s need, is a self-emptying experience. But I think its faithful and constant practice will help us to respond to all kinds of situations in which the faithful find themselves “like sheep without a shepherd,” whether it is in ministry to the poor, to the LGBTQ+ community (as in Fr. Martin’s ministry) or, for instance, the long process of compassion, penance, and reconciliation in light of our Church’s participation in the Indian Residential Schools in Canada.

May our ministry, our encounter with the People of God in their joys and also their needs and perhaps suffering, be a ministry of growth in compassion, in listening, closeness and tenderness in a way in which we empty ourselves; in ways in which we emulate Jesus who had compassion for the crowds who followed him.

Homily for Sunday, 27 June 2021– Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Readings of the day: Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24; Psalm 30:2, 4, 5-6, 11, 12, 13; 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15; Mark 5:21-23

This homily was given at St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, and St. Alphonsus Parish, Edmonton, AB.

This week, I just finished teaching a Spring Term (May and June) Introduction to Catholicism course through St. Joseph’s College at the University of Alberta. The last lecture of the course was based on a topic the students proposed, which was meant to apply in a more focused way a theme we had discussed earlier in the course. The topic the students chose for the final lecture of this Spring Term centered on Catholic theology, ritual, and pastoral and ethical issues around death and dying.

How is that for a morbid way to end a course term? (I kid, but only to a point). I find it fortuitous that the last lecture of our course is so coherent with our readings for today. “God did not make death,” our reading the Book of Wisdom begins today. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus performs two interwoven miracles; the beginning and end of the Gospel reading we hear proclaimed focus on Jesus’ raising of the twelve-year-old daughter of a synagogue official, Jairus, who “is at the point of death” as today’s Gospel opens.

Also fortuitously, as we hear from the Book of Wisdom, “God did not make death,” from Mark’s Gospel Jesus’ raising of Jairus’ daughter, and in our Psalm response a hymn of thanksgiving for God’s victory over death—“I will extol you, Lord, for you have raised me up”—today [yesterday] we mark the first anniversary of the death of my grandmother, Barbara Schmidt. [We offer today’s Mass in her memory.] At Grandma’s funeral, and every funeral I attend, I am especially drawn to the beginning of what is called the prayer of commendation. At the end of a funeral Mass, we commend or leave our loved one who has died to the mercy of God. The priest prays: “Into your hands, Father of mercies, we commend our sister (or brother) in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she (he) may rise with him on the last day.”

I will admit that, at Grandma’s funeral Mass, since I was the presiding priest, it was especially difficult for me to pray those words: Sure and certain hope. Now, I consider myself immensely blessed, particularly as the priest in the family, to have ministered to Grandma as I did, especially in her last years. She was a person of tremendous and holy Christian hope; a hope that showed itself throughout her life through acts of outstanding generosity. Grandma was generous with every gift she had; with her time; with any wealth, even though for most of her life she could hardly have been considered wealthy. She became a widow at a young age, and raised five children on her own after Grandpa died, while also caring for her father until his death. Grandma embodied during her life what the prayer of commendation during a funeral Mass expresses, “Sure and certain hope” in our God who saves and raises us even from death.

Still, if I am honest with myself—and maybe many if not all of us will be able to relate—I consider myself a person of hope; of faith in a merciful and saving God. But am I a person of sure and certain hope? Sometimes I am not so sure my hope and my faith are that strong. In those moments, sure and certain hope becomes more of a prayer for God to fill in what I lack than a statement of something I have. This was certainly true at Grandma’s funeral, as I prayed those words, “in the sure and certain hope that, together with all who have died in Christ, she may rise with him on the last day.” This was true as I looked out upon family and a few of Grandma’s closest friends; as we remembered and prayed for Grandma in the midst of a COVID pandemic that also has made sure and certain hope difficult to come by for so many people.

Sometimes are we not (as I know I am) more like Jairus, who pleads desperately for Jesus to heal his sick daughter in today’s Gospel; Jairus who, after Mark purposefully has members of Jairus’ household tell Jesus that Jairus’ daughter has died, needs Jesus to remind him, “Do not fear, only believe”? I wonder what Jairus thought when Jesus spoke these words to him: “Do not fear, only believe.”

We know that the crowds at Jairus’ house “make a commotion and weep”; that they laugh at Jesus when Jesus says that “the child is not dead but sleeping.” We know that Jesus allows “no one to follow him,” but only the girl’s “mother and father and those who were with” Jesus; that Jesus puts everybody else outside the house. But Mark says little about Jairus until after Jesus raises his daughter. After Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter, Mark says that Jairus and all who witnessed Jesus’ miracle “were overcome with amazement,” that Jesus orders them not to make known his raising of Jairus’ daughter to anybody, and to give the girl “something to eat.”

Contrast this with the explicit faith of the woman, midway through today’s Gospel reading, who touches Jesus’ clothes and is healed of twelve years of hemorrhaging that no physician could treat, but only made worse. “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your disease,” Jesus says to the woman. This woman’s faith and hope that Jesus could heal her, if she only touched his clothing, is more obviously “sure and certain” than that of Jairus in today’s Gospel. Her faith is at least extremely bold.

Many Biblical experts have commented on how this woman’s flow of blood over twelve years would not only have been a physical health problem, but it would have put her in a state of ritual impurity. She would have been considered an outcast in Israel’s society of the time, so clearly, she has nothing to lose by desperately reaching for Jesus’ clothing so that he might heal her. But one commentator I read, more than pointing to the ritual impurity and social ostracism the woman’s hemorrhaging would have brought her, focuses on Jesus first address to her, as “Daughter.”

In Israel in Jesus’ time and well before then, “daughter” not only represented one person but was a metaphor for all of the people of Israel, especially the poor, sinners or, for whatever reason, outcast or exiled. Many times, the Old Testament prophets address Israel’s people as “daughter Jerusalem” or “daughter Zion” when they want to console and strengthen the people, or call them back from exile to their homeland. On the one hand, the woman with the hemorrhage in today’s Gospel could represent the people of Israel as a whole, especially the majority who were poor and many who were outcast, but who still lived with bold hope and faith that God would intervene in their favour. On the other hand, the synagogue official Jairus represents Israel’s elites, who needed to be challenged in a different way than the poor and outcast to live lives of bold hope and faith that were shown by acts of justice, mercy, and generosity.

Jesus’ last command to Jairus and his household is to give his daughter “something to eat.” I wonder if Jairus, in a way, represents us, to the extent that we have something to offer from what God has given us, especially to anybody who is poor, sick, outcast, or even “at the point of death.” The miracle is by God’s grace: “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your disease”; “Talitha cum… Little girl, get up”! But God entrusts us to receive God’s grace with hope and faith, as well as we are able, and then to communicate that saving grace to the world as generously as we have received it. “Give her”—give this world—“something to eat,” something that will nourish, sustain, and save!

“Sure and certain hope,” boldness in faith, are processes more than they are a destination. Each in their own way, the woman with the hemorrhage who touched Jesus’ clothes, Jairus who pleaded (with some boldness in his own right) for Jesus to heal his daughter, and each of us have the faith and hope in us that we need to receive God’s grace and to nourish the world with it. We may not (or maybe only rarely) feel that our faith; our hope in God is anything close to “sure and certain.”

In this case, “sure and certain hope” becomes not a statement about where we are, but our prayer for the process; our pilgrimage of faith: “God, make our faith; our hope in you ever more ‘sure and certain.’ Help us to overcome all fear and unbelief, to be generous with any gifts and blessings we have received. Give us the boldness of the woman who touched your clothes and was healed. Like Jairus, may we be sent forth to nourish a world you will to be raised up and saved. You did not make death, but have ‘made us for incorruption’; for eternal life. May we live to praise and ‘extol you, Lord, for you have raised [us] up.’”

Homily for Tuesday, 8 June 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 1:18-22; Psalm 119:129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135; Matthew 5:13-16

Tuesday of the 10th week in Ordinary Time

Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium devotes an entire chapter—a short chapter of only four articles, but still a full chapter—to what it calls “the universal call to holiness.”

And, although today’s Gospel never uses the term “universal call to holiness,” I think Matthew communicates a similar idea to “the universal call to holiness” through Jesus’ comparatively pithy metaphors of salt and light. Holiness, and every Christian’s call to holiness, is twofold: First, God calls each of us to strive for personal holiness. Second, as we strive for and attain personal holiness, God calls us to encourage one another toward the same holiness.

So what does this have to do with salt and light? Salt preserves and adds flavour to food. If we are “salt of the earth,” somehow we are preserving and building up one another in ways of holiness and our imitation of Christ as the ultimate example to us of personal holiness. Salt not only adds its own flavour to food, but it can also draw out flavours that are naturally in the food already. So it is when we recognize particular traits of holiness, or talent especially for service to others’ well-being, and encourage other people—encourage ourselves, as members of a local religious community—to exercise those traits or talents.

Light may correspond more closely to our own striving for personal holiness. Jesus says, “You are the light of the world… Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” If we are to be salt, that is, if we are to recognize and encourage others to draw out their gifts, talents, traits of particular, holiness, then we first are invited to be light, that is, to recognize and exercise our own gifts God has given us as a way to holiness.

To be “light of the world”; to display our light “on the lampstand” is not to be boastful of our own holiness or strengths. After all, our holiness; our talents; our particular gifts and strengths are from God. In a homily for Epiphany a few years ago, Pope Francis began with a reference to St. Ambrose of Milan’s Hexameron, or commentary on Genesis’ six days of creation. St. Ambrose compares us, the Church, to the moon. Our light is not our own, but we reflect the light of God as the moon reflects the sun’s light. But neither is the moon “ashamed” to be merely the reflector of sunlight; the light of the sun gives the moon its particular beauty, which every other object and living being observes. Besides, we would blind ourselves if we were to look directly at the sun. Likewise, when we perceive the beauty of God, we are usually perceiving it as reflected through something or somebody. Our holiness depends on how good we are as “reflectors” of God.

Lumen Gentium 41 invites us as Christians to “walk unhesitatingly according to [our] own personal gifts and duties in the path of the living faith, which arouses hope and works though charity.” In other words, be salt that preserves others and draws out of others particular gifts of holiness from God. At the same time, be light; be “reflectors” of God’s light, not so much that others will say “look at us,” but “look at God” because of the beauty of God that is evident in the holiness of God’s faithful.

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

Readings of the day: Exodus 24:3-8; Psalm 116:12-13, 15-16, 17-18; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

Near the beginning of Pope Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) are words that stand out to me both for their truth and their beauty. In Deus Caritas Est, not speaking of the Eucharist directly (considering we celebrate today the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ) but of the very essence of what it is to be a Christian, Pope Benedict says: “To be Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”

My sisters and brothers of the Church, Christ’s Body now on Earth: The very essence of our Christian faith, and the Eucharist within it, as Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium says, as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life,” is first and foremost about “the encounter with an event, a person.” Our Christian faith; our celebration of Eucharist is about our personal encounter with Jesus Christ perpetuated in our history and life and faith experiences.

I will grant that this Solemnity we celebrate of the Body and Blood of Christ is multi-dimensional; so much so that it defies being reduced to a collection of ideas, concepts, or titles. We call this celebration the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi. We speak of the Eucharist as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life.” We speak of it as the Real Presence; the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. We speak of the Eucharistic celebration as a sacrament; a sign that is what it is, something we perceive with our human senses, but that points to a reality beyond itself, the real, true, bodily presence of Jesus Christ. In this way, French philosopher Paul Ricœur would speak of Eucharist and other sacraments as having a “surplus of meaning”; a meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses.

We speak of Eucharist as “the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” And our readings today certainly focus heavily on the dimension of sacrifice. Mark’s Gospel speaks of Jesus’ re-focusing of the Jewish commemoration of the Passover, when God spared the people of Israel from death and allowed their escape from slavery in Egypt, as long as they marked their doorposts with lambs’ blood as God commanded them. In the Book of Exodus today, we hear how Israel’s first Passover became a ritual memorial: An altar dedicated with lambs’ blood, animals sacrificed as burnt offerings to God. These sacrifices take on meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses: They point to a covenant; a promise by God that Israel would always be God’s people, and a response by the people of Israel to be “obedient” and faithful to God.

The Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples re-focuses; re-configures the Passover sacrifice in memory of the Exodus. Instead of repeating animal sacrifices each year in memory of the Passover, Jesus becomes the once-and-forever sacrifice for us. Jesus becomes the focus of our Passover; our only way to “pass over” to eternal life. No other sacrifice—not of animals, not of ourselves in heroic acts of faith—is capable of making eternal life possible for us. And although this sacrifice, like that of the Passover during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, is repeated ritually through our celebration of Eucharist—the Mass—it is one and the same sacrifice, that of Jesus through his Passion and death, that is projected through our history as Church. The Letter to the Hebrews emphasizes this once-and-forever nature of Jesus’ sacrifice of self. No longer is “the blood of goats and calves,” offered to God an infinite number of times, necessary; Jesus offers his own Body and Blood to us, for our salvation, once, forever.

This all becomes very complicated; mysterious, even: How the sacrifice of Jesus for us from the Last Supper through his death on the cross is both once-and-forever, and ritually celebrated by our Church as our Eucharist; how Jesus offers us his Body and Blood and, at the same time, how we, the Church, are rightly called the “Body of Christ.” I invite us to pause for a moment on this dimension of sacrifice in our Eucharist. Clearly, sacrifice is central to our Eucharist: We commemorate Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his Passion and death, and at the same time Jesus makes his sacrifice not simply a past event, but one with real meaning for our present time.

But without present “encounter with… a person,” sacrifice remains only a finished past event. If our Eucharist is anything less or other than the high point of a continuous encounter with Jesus Christ that spans our whole lives, then it is only sacrifice, a one-and-done past event, with no present meaning. So how is our Eucharist the high point, “fount and apex” of our lifelong encounter with God in the person of Jesus Christ? Our Eucharist is not only the (usually) small wafer of bread and maybe sip of wine we may receive in communion at Mass, which we believe have become by that point in the Mass the Body and Blood of Christ. Our Eucharist is not only the “essential” words, spoken by the priest during the Eucharistic Prayer and which Jesus spoke at the Last Supper (and we hear today in Mark’s Gospel), when somehow ordinary bread and wine becomes Christ’s Body and Blood.

The effects of our Eucharist extend beyond this celebration; beyond the church buildings in which we celebrate it; beyond (for now) our computer screens onto which our Eucharistic celebration is live-streamed. The Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, Thomas Collins, when he was Archbishop of Edmonton, would make a strong case that we live our identity as a Eucharistic people not only when we are together at Mass, but, for the most part, during the rest of the week when we are not at Mass. It is no accident, Cardinal Collins would say, that the last line of the Mass is a command to us to “go”: “Go in peace”; “Go… glorify God by your lives”! Cardinal Collins would humorously paraphrase the Latin of this line, “Ite, Missa est,” as “Get out of here; now you have work to do”!

My sisters and brothers, fellow Eucharistic people in Christ, our work, announced by “Ite, missa est” is, at its heart, to be the means by which everybody we encounter in our lives in some way encounters Christ, real and present. But how are we to be the means by which the world encounters Christ, real and present, by our every action; our every word? Surely we are weak sinners, and cannot be expected to configure ourselves perfectly to Christ at all times; to be the means at every moment by which everybody we meet encounters Christ through us, right?

We might think of plenty of instances in our history; in our Church when the encounter with Christians has been one with human sin, even to the point where sin has become embedded in social structures and attitudes. The imperialism and racism against this country’s Aboriginal peoples that drove its residential school system, with Church and state complicity, is an especially horrific example of this. So it is true; we are weak sinners. This is all the more reason for us to turn to our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist, that first and foremost point of encounter between God and us. Our graced encounter with Jesus Christ in this celebration can then strengthen us for our encounters with one another: For encounters that express sorrow and resolve to repent for when we have wronged other people as individuals, as a society, as a Church; encounters that increase our awareness, without defensiveness, of ways in which we benefit from socially-embedded patterns of sin; encounters that bring healing and reconciliation.

Most of the time, we will be (and have been) the means of encounter between Christ and everybody around us in the simplest of ways. We frequently do not and will not realize that we are bearing Christ’s real presence to our world through each simple smile or act of kindness. We know well that sometimes to be the means by which the world encounters Christ will be more difficult: Listen attentively, especially to people who differ from us, even if we may determine their views to be wrong; or to people who challenge biases we may not be aware we have; or to people who are suffering in any way. Prayerfully think of somebody we need to forgive (even if that person has never asked our forgiveness), and then begin the process, again prayerfully, of forgiving that person. Live purposefully with joy and thanksgiving toward God and anybody who has been good to us. After all, “Eucharist” (from sas eucharistō, “thank you” in Greek) is originally another word for “thanksgiving.”

St. Augustine of Hippo famously said of us as Eucharistic people, “You are what you receive.” So may we be, to the world, what we receive and celebrate: The Real Presence of Christ we now bear to our world for eternal life; the point of personal encounter between Christ and everybody we meet. Now, may I say, we have work to do…

Homily for Sunday, 18 April 2021– Third Sunday of Easter, Year B

Readings of the day: Acts 3:13-15, 17-19; Psalm 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9; 1 John 2:1-5a; Luke 24:35-48

“Peace be with you,” alleluia!

How many of us have noticed that today, for the second Sunday Gospel reading in a row, Jesus’ first words to his disciples when he stands among them after he rises from the dead are, “Peace be with you”? Jesus’ greeting has become very familiar to us. And I imagine that Jesus’ greeting to his first disciples quickly became very familiar to them, too, after his resurrection. After all, both Luke’s and John’s Gospels, from which we have heard this Sunday and last, feature the risen Jesus greeting his disciples in this way. In fact, in John’s Gospel (think back to last Sunday), the risen Jesus greets his disciples not only once but three times—first to his disciples, except for Thomas, on the evening of the day he rose; a second time immediately after that, when Jesus also breathes the Holy Spirit on his disciples; and then a third time with Thomas present: “Peace be with you.”

Luke has Jesus greet his disciples only once, in Emmaus, “Peace be with you.” But it is effective. I imagine that, at this point, although Luke says that Jesus’ disciples were still “startled and terrified,” they began to think, “This is bizarre, even terrifying, but we have heard this greeting sometime, someplace before.”

And we hear from Luke today the second major part of the Easter story that, in Luke, begins with Jesus among only two of his disciples on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. By the beginning of today’s Gospel, these two disciples have already met up with and “told the eleven [apostles] and their companions what had happened on the road to Emmaus, and how Jesus had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

My sisters and brothers in the risen Christ, Jesus is still making himself known by this same simple action; this same simple greeting as he did those first times to his first disciples: He “had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” He made himself known to them by greeting them, “Peace be with you.”

There is a reason why, since Vatican II, the sign of peace has been included as part of what we call the Communion Rite at Mass, which extends from the Our Father until we receive communion. To greet one another in the risen Jesus’ words, “Peace be with you,” is essential in order to recognize Jesus “in the breaking of the bread.” When we greet one another at Mass, “Peace be with you,” we recognize the Christ really and truly present in one another, in the Church. We need to recognize the Christ really and truly present in one another, in the Church, before we are able to recognize and worship him as really and truly present in the Eucharistic bread and wine that become his Body and Blood.

“Peace be with you” and “the breaking of the bread” are inseparable. But is the sign of peace, where it has been in the Order of Mass for over fifty years now, not still a bit startling? Most if not all of us have, I suppose, gotten used to the sign of peace where it is now in the Mass. Certainly it is not terrifying as Jesus’ disciples found it when Jesus greeted them, “Peace be with you,” that first time in Emmaus. And maybe we have gotten used to our “text of peace” during our Masses streamed over Zoom for the last year or so, even if it still commands our attention in (I still find) a bit of a jarring way when we exchange peace through Zoom’s chat function: Make sure we exchange a sign of peace with panelists and participants, and so on…

During Vatican II, where the sign of peace was to be placed within the Mass, and whether everybody in the assembly or only clergy during a Solemn Mass (as had been before Vatican II) would exchange peace ritually, were hotly-debated among the bishops at the Council. The English former Master of the Dominican order, Fr. Timothy Radcliffe, tells one of my favourite stories about the sign of peace when it was inserted back into the Mass just after the Our Father after Vatican II. Two French Dominicans Fr. Radcliffe visited at that time, Frs. Yves Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, both important figures at Vatican II, had very different approaches to the sign of peace although both lived in the same house in Paris. Congar’s sign of peace “was a grave and formal gesture, whereas Chenu affectionately punched and hugged… and pulled one’s hair”!

“Peace be with you”: We hear the same oh-so-familiar greeting; it is the same Christ really and truly present in one another as in the “grave and formal” Congar, the excitable Chenu, or the terrified disciples who had just witnessed Jesus’ death on a cross and “thought they were seeing a ghost.” It is the same Christ who makes himself known “in the breaking of the bread” and who opens our “minds to understand the Scriptures”: That death no longer has power over the risen Christ, or over us; that we are invited to proclaim the “repentance and forgiveness of sins” that Jesus’ resurrection has made possible, “to all nations.”

This seems to be a daunting task, does it not? How are we to proclaim this “repentance and forgiveness of sins… to all nations” in Jesus’ name? Well, we could begin with a familiar greeting, one that captured its hearers’ attention when Jesus said it, and still does whenever we say it and live it: “Peace be with you”; shalom!

The familiar peace Jesus offers us stirs the world to attention because it does not and cannot come from this world. Jesus’ shalom captures our attention, but it also consoles, reconciles, empowers each and every one of us not only to speak this greeting to one another, but to live it: To seek to console, to reconcile, to empower and so to point out God’s work to still more people in our world and to point one another to God, our only everlasting peace and salvation.

In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Peter gives us an example of how to proclaim and live the risen Christ’s shalom. Yet, I will admit, I find the way in which Peter addresses the people “at the temple gate” in Jerusalem a bit troubling at first hearing. His preaching sounds at first to be heavy on the fire and brimstone, speaking to the people about “Jesus, whom you handed over and rejected in the presence of Pilate… You killed the author of life, whom God raised from the dead,” Peter rails. This is not a homily I think I would be capable of giving!

But, if anybody knew their need for Jesus’ shalom—“Peace be with you”—it was Peter. It was Peter who stood before the temple gate, a redeemed sinner, witnessing to his reconciliation and peace with God made possible only by Jesus’ death and resurrection and that is now available to all of us, redeemed sinners whom we are. “Repent therefore, and turn to God”; turn toward the one who greets us, “peace be with you”… “so that your sins may be wiped out.” How remarkable is Peter’s message from the temple gate?

And the first Letter of John proclaims the same message, the same greeting at its heart, in a slightly different way than Peter. Jesus Christ is “our advocate with the Father… the atoning sacrifice for our sins” and the sins “of the whole world.”

Jesus Christ, crucified at the hands of sinners,

Jesus Christ, “our advocate with the Father” and the redemption of sinners,

Jesus Christ, our reconciliation with God,

Jesus Christ, who calls us to proclaim his peace to all peoples and nations,

Jesus Christ, really and truly present in all the Scriptures, in the Eucharist, and in each of us and our signs of peace,

Jesus Christ, of the familiar greeting that stirs the world to attention; that forgives; that quells fears and doubts; that saves,

Jesus Christ, risen from the dead,

Jesus Christ, our shalom.

“Peace be with you.”