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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homily for Tuesday, 3 August 2021– Ferial

Readings of the day: Numbers 12:1-13; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 6cd-7, 12-13; Matthew 14:22-36

Tuesday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

“You of little faith”… Whenever I hear this Gospel account of Jesus walking on water, Peter taking up Jesus’ invitation to walk toward him on the water and then becoming frightened and sinking before Jesus reaches out to save him, I have a lot of empathy toward Peter and Jesus’ other disciples.

Much of my empathy toward Jesus’ disciples here derives from my having stood on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and seen a fascinating (and possibly frightening, if one were ever caught out on the water when it happened) phenomenon about this body of water. The Sea of Galilee is not especially large. But, because of how it forms a basin surrounded by hills and how this orients the wind over the Sea of Galilee, the water can go from perfectly calm to white-capped or even choppier waves in little time and with seemingly harmless winds.

Much of my empathy toward Jesus’ disciples here derives from my having stood on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and seen a fascinating (and possibly frightening, if one were ever caught out on the water when it happened) phenomenon about this body of water. The Sea of Galilee is not especially large. But, because of how it forms a basin surrounded by hills and how this orients the wind over the Sea of Galilee, the water can go from perfectly calm to white-capped or even choppier waves in little time and with seemingly harmless winds.

And I am sure it is not every day that one witnesses a person walking on water, even if that person is the Son of God! So in many ways I empathize with Peter’s and the other disciples’ reaction to Jesus walking on water, when the wind had already been “against them.”

Peter and the other disciples endear themselves to me by how bold they in fact are when they witness Jesus walking on water. I do not think I would have asked Jesus, as Peter does, to command me to walk toward him on the water, even if I knew it was Jesus, the Son of God.

Jesus seemingly chides Peter, “You of little faith, why did you doubt”? But I interpret this less as Jesus scolding Peter than motivating him to see just how significant the “little faith” he has is. Peter’s “little faith” enables him to ask Jesus to command him to walk toward him on the water. Although Peter takes his focus away from the Lord and begins to sink, the fact that Peter has already willed himself to get to this point is significant.

We can think of other moments in the Gospels—the parables of the mustard seed and of the small measure of leaven come to mind—when Jesus points out how significant even a small amount of faith can be, because Jesus will take our small contributions and multiply them: Quell our fears, motivate us to see the best in ourselves. In today’s Gospel is not so much a moment when Peter is scolded as a “you can do this… See what you did there?” moment.

And I pray that Jesus will motivate me in the same way as he once did his disciples on the sea, when I need to be motivated or to exercise a quality in myself that I may not value as I should. I pray that I will be able to perceive the best in other people—confrères, family members, friends, the People of God who are the Church—to be able to encourage them, people of (a) “little faith” as we all are, so that the “little faith” we contribute will enable us to act with great boldness, great courage, great loving kindness in the Lord’s name.

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.’”