Salt and Light

5th Sunday, A

“You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.”

Thus the Lord Jesus – after the Beatitudes, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount – describes to us, his disciples, our identity and our task in this world.

Let’s take the light first.

Citizens of the Kingdom

(4th Sunday in Ordinary Time, A, updated and revised from the homily I gave eighteen years ago on this day!)

Last Sunday we heard the beginning and core message of Jesus’ preaching: “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” The Kingdom of God, which is the destiny of all creation, us included, and is mysteriously present among us even now, is the heart of the Gospel.

Today, in Matthew’s Beatitudes, we hear a description of the citizens of this Kingdom.

First of all, the citizens of the Kingdom of God are “blessed.” The word in the original Greek here is makarios, and it’s just as easily translated as “happy.” My dictionary defined makarios as “blessed, happy, or fortunate.” That’s the first thing to know about being a Christian, a citizen of the kingdom of God: we are blessed, happy, and fortunate for the call we have received to Holy Communion with God in Christ. And that’s why the primary attitude of the Christian is always gratitude. As our own Blessed Solanus Casey put it, “gratitude is the first sign of a thinking, rational creature.”

The Divine Gardener

 III Lent, C

One of the key words of Pope Francis’s pontificate, of which we just celebrated the twelfth anniversary, is accompaniment. In his vision, this is the work of the Church and her sacred ministers, to accompany the People of the God and the grace at work in them.

As a priest, this makes sense to me. Jesus is the Shepherd, not me. The Holy Spirit is the Teacher, not me. My job is to help people recognize, discern, and embrace what the Blessed Trinity is up to in their lives. That’s pastoral accompaniment.

However, though it is the duty of the Church and her sacred ministers to accompany the People of God, all this in service to how God himself accompanies us. We see this divine accompaniment in our readings today.

Ascension

Ascension of the Lord, B

Happy feast day, brothers and sisters. Happy solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord. Pope St. Leo the Great describes our joy when he says that "we are commemorating that day on which our poor human nature was carried up, in Christ, above all the hosts of heaven, above all the ranks of angels, beyond the highest heavenly powers to the very throne of God the Father."

Yes, Jesus Christ has taken on our humanity, and, in his Ascension, has brought it into the presence of God the Father in heaven. This means that, in our communion with the Body of Christ here at the Eucharist, we are already seated in heaven and, in some sense, our ultimate destiny is already accomplished. We can now rejoice because our own bodily death, when it comes, will mean nothing more than a continuation of the communion with Christ that we celebrate here at Holy Mass.

The Holy Family

 (This is an update of a homily I gave on this feast day to a group of sisters from the USA during a pilgrimage they made to Rome.)

The good news of Christmas continues to unfold; the mystery of the incarnation continues to reveal itself. Today we are given to contemplate Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, as a member of a family – the Holy Family – together with Mary and Joseph.

The Woman At The Well

 III Lent, A

It’s plain enough that the readings today invite us to reflect on the symbol of water. In the first reading Moses gives water from the rock to God’s people in the desert – and as St. Paul says, the rock was Christ. (1 Cor 10:4) In the gospel Jesus leads the Samaritan woman through a process of enlightenment so that she might discover in herself the living water that becomes in us, as Jesus says, a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

It is very fitting that we reflect on this living water because the purpose of this season of Lent is the Church’s accompaniment of those who are preparing for baptism at Easter. And we too, who are already baptized, are preparing ourselves for the renewal of the grace of our baptismal promises.

In order to appreciate well the depth and beauty of this gospel that we have today, that of the Samaritan woman, there are certain things to note.

But I Say To You

6th Sunday, A

Well. We have a lot of stuff in the gospel today. It’s a collection of the moral teachings of Jesus that makes up part of the Sermon on the Mount in the gospel of St. Matthew.

I don’t think it would be possible to say something about all of it adequately, but perhaps we can find a thread that unites all these sayings of Jesus.

Let’s begin with the refrain with which Jesus introduces these teachings: “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors … but I say to you.”

The Servant Master

 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C

“Be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.” (Luke 12:36-37a)

First of all, what’s the wedding? Who’s getting married? Well, it’s the marriage of heaven and earth, of humanity and God that Jesus Christ accomplishes in his life, death, and resurrection. So now, having accomplished and consummated this marriage of heaven of earth, of humanity with God, the Divine Master, Jesus, returns home.

Riches

18th Sunday, C

“Thus will it be for all who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich in what matters to God” (Luke 12:21) warns Jesus in the gospel today.

So how do we get or make sure we are rich in what matters to God? Well, I think the first step is to recognize that we already are! After all, as St. Paul puts it, Jesus Christ “for your sake became poor although he was rich, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” (2 Corinthians 8:9)

How are we already rich in what matters to God? In many ways, of course, but I’ll note just two big ones.

Welcoming Grace

(16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

The short passage from the Gospel of Luke that we have today, that of Martha, stressed out with much serving, and her sister Mary, listening quietly to the Lord, has a long history of comment and interpretation...

However, for a summer Sunday, perhaps just a few little points are good enough … and the Church, as a tender mother, helps us in this, giving us a key to interpretation in the first reading, that of welcome and hospitality.

(As we know, for the Sundays in Ordinary Time, the first reading and the gospel go together, while the second reading has its own cycle.)

A Few Cents

(32nd Sunday, B)

In the readings today we meet two widows, both poor and yet both very blessed. The widow of Zarephath trusts in the prophet Elijah and comes to be supported miraculously. The widow in the gospel, who donates a few cents to the Temple, is praised by the Lord himself, who says that “she put in more than all the other contributors.”

Marriage

 (27th Sunday, B)

I’m a little hesitant to try to preach on marriage, given especially that I have no experience of it. In fact, I don’t even know very many married people on a personal level, except for my parents—whom I got to know pretty well because I first met them when I was very young.

Nevertheless, I’ve given homilies at plenty of weddings, especially early on in my priesthood, and therefore have reflected some on this great Sacrament. So, I’ll give it a shot, and you, especially you married folks, can feel free to take what I say with as many grains of salt as you see fit.

Thinking As Human Beings Do

 24th Sunday, B

Today we have St. Mark’s account of Peter’s great confession of faith, the definitive answer to the question Jesus puts to all his followers, 

“Who do you say that I am?”

Peter, first among the Apostles, answers with the confession that includes within it the whole of our Catholic faith,

“You are the Christ.”

But then, as we heard, something goes wrong. Once Peter makes this glorious statement, Jesus begins to explain to him what being the Christ will mean, and Peter has a hard time accepting it.

Assumption

The dogma of the Assumption of Mary was defined by Pope Venerable Pius XII on November 1, 1950 with the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus. Deus, meaning God, of course, and munificentissimus, meaning most munificent. Generous, bountiful. We don’t use the word munificent much, though thanks to Disney we know maleficent. But this world could use less maleficence and more munificence, am I right?

And as we shall see, this great feast recalls and celebrates God’s bountiful generosity towards us, his human creature.

The dogma of the Assumption teaches “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”

Mary’s Assumption at the end of her earthly life goes together with the mystery of its very beginning, that of the Immaculate Conception. Just as in her Immaculate Conception Mary was preserved, from the first moment of her conception, from Original Sin, so at the end of her life it is fitting that she be preserved by the same special privilege from the death and bodily decay which is one of the lingering effects of the same sin. So, at the end of her earthly life, Mary did not die in the same way we will, but was assumed into heaven, body and soul.

This can seem like something very marvelous, and indeed it is, but it is the destiny for which we hope as well; as we say in the Apostle’s Creed, we believe in the ‘resurrection of the body.’ We Christians believe that at the time of the General Judgment our souls will be reunited with our bodies, transformed into what St. Paul calls the ‘glorified body.’

And just as the body of the Risen Lord after his Resurrection is the same body that was Jesus of Nazareth in his earthly life, though glorified and possessing certain new, spiritual characteristics – appearing in locked rooms for example – so our soul will be reunited with our body at the end of time, the same body which is ours in this life but also new and glorified.

Now we admit that we don’t know exactly how all of this will work; it is a matter of our faith, of the faith of the Church.

And so our faith is also our hope. That as the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed into the glory of heaven, body and soul, so one day we will find ourselves in the eternal, happy rest of beholding God in our body, glorified in the Christ who has saved us and through his Resurrection opened for us the path to this most blessed destiny. May our hope for heaven, for the full vision of the bountiful generosity of God, be our strength and our joy as we continue on the pilgrimage of this life.

Seeds of the Kingdom

11th Sunday, B

Today Jesus offers us two parables to help us understand what the Kingdom of God is like. To help us get into them, I thought it might be helpful to review what is meant by the Kingdom of God:

“The Kingdom of God is [Jesus’] presence among human beings calling them to a new way of life as individuals and as a community. This is a kingdom of salvation from sin and a sharing in divine life. It is the Good News that results in love, justice, and mercy for the whole world. The Kingdom is realized partially on earth and permanently in heaven. We enter this kingdom through faith in Christ, baptismal initiation into the Church, and life in communion with all her members.” (United States Catholic Catechism for Adults, 80)

The parables today offer us the image of the seed to help us understand how this Kingdom of God grows and develops. The seed is the presence of Jesus or in other words, grace. The good soil in which the seed is planted is ourselves as human beings, unique and unrepeatable creations of God. The seed of grace is planted in our inner selves—our heart, soul, and mind—beginning at our baptism, and from that point on it grows (if we allow it).

The Answer to Prayer

(17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C; Last Mass at Sacred Heart)

In the gospel today we hear some of Jesus’ teaching on prayer. ‘Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.’ Even more, by sheer persistence, Jesus says, we will receive a favorable answer to our prayer.

To hear this can be a little jarring; it can be an occasion of a ‘cognitive dissonance.’ Often it doesn’t seem like we get what we pray for simply by our trust in God and our faithful persistence in prayer. Look at poor Abraham; after all of his haggling for the city of Sodom, we know what happened to them. In the end only Lot and his two daughters survived that mess, if you don’t count Mrs. Lot who turned into a pillar of salt during the escape. Even more, if you keep reading in Genesis you will observe that Lot’s daughters weren’t exactly the most wholesome and righteous girls that ever lived.

So how are we to take what Jesus says, when he assures us that our prayers are answered, and that we will receive what we want from God, who is even more attentive than human parents who know well how to give good gifts to their children? I think we receive an answer when we read carefully.

Jesus says, “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” There it is. The Holy Spirit is the gift we receive from our trust and persistence in prayer, not anything else that we might think we need or want.

The Holy Spirit Whom we receive in prayer is the same Spirit Who stretches the divine life of the Blessed Trinity into the world to conceive Our Lord through the consent of our Blessed Mother. He is the same Spirit who gives birth to the Church when He comes to rest on the apostles gathered in prayer on Pentecost. Both of these mysteries are present when each of us receives the gift of the Holy Spirit through prayer. Just as with Mary, the Spirit desires to conceive the Word of God in us, that we may bear his presence to the world and the Word may become flesh through our words and actions. By our common prayer here in the liturgy, we are transformed anew into the Body of Christ, ready to be sent into the world as God’s own reconciliation, forgiveness, and sacrifice for the life of the world.

This gift of the Holy Spirit, given to all who ask with faith and persistence, is the perfect answer to prayer because it draws us into the infinite creativity, delight, and joy of the Blessed Trinity himself. This is the heart of the Christian mystery; that we might come to share, through the Holy Spirit, the same intimacy of Jesus’ relationship to the Father. In this sense, all of our prayers are answered because we receive the gift that is infinitely satisfying and delightful, God himself.

This is not an easy gift, however. To be conceived as the Body of Christ in the world also means accepting the Cross. To consent to become the Body of Christ here at Mass is also to consent to the Cross that the Body of Christ carries. The Cross is God’s answer to the suffering we have brought upon this world with our sins: not to magically fix the world, but to show us a way through its suffering to new life. Taking up our Cross means refusing to pass evil on, rejecting revenge and refusing to participate in this world’s cycles of violence. Jesus’ life and death assure us that those who accept the Cross in this way participate in God’s work of renovating the world through the divine life poured out into our humanity in Christ. The mystery of this renovation of our humanity is what we call the Resurrection.

Let us surrender today to the gift which God is (literally) dying to give us, the Holy Spirit. By this Gift we are drawn into the divine life of the Blessed Trinity, and are made sharers in the salvation that Jesus Christ has accomplished for the world.

Christian Freedom

(13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

“For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery,” writes St. Paul in the second reading today. The spiritual freedom we have in Christ is worth our reflection from time to time. On the one hand, freedom is one of the great gifts that we have in Christ, and one of the most important ways we recover—in Christ—the image and likeness of God in which we were created, and thus find our happiness and fulfillment. God, after all, is infinitely free, and by being free ourselves we imitate Him and share in His freedom. That’s why human beings always strive for freedom and why it makes us happy, because our hearts and minds are always reaching out for the ultimate, divine Love and Freedom of God. On the other hand, we always have to be on guard against the shallow and erroneous understandings of freedom that come from the world and from that mystery of human selfishness and frustration that Paul calls “the flesh.”

Some people think freedom is just being able to do whatever we please. Thomas Merton has a great line on this: “The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, 27) Evil and sin make us unhappy by definition. So when I sin by deliberately choosing the bad, thereby making myself miserable—as well as all those who, by their immense charity, put up with me—I am exercising my unfreedom and my slavery to sin. The metaphor of exercise is pertinent, too, because our choices develop our habits and our habits determine what sort of person we become, whether better or worse each day. This is why it’s hard for the wisdom of this world to accept that real freedom is the ability to choose the good, not the false liberty of being able to do whatever we think we want.

This is also why, as St. Paul points out, spiritual freedom and love of neighbor go together. Forgetting about all of the nonsense fed to us by romantic comedies and the like, love is simply to desire the best for another, and to organize our behavior out of that desire. Love means making our life into a right effort for the good and flourishing of the people and earth around us. So, by loving our neighbor, we are seeking the good, and by learning to seek the good consistently we become free and happy. All of this we do in Christ; in fact, this is the very renovation of our humanity that we know as Christ’s Resurrection.

Recognizing the Christ

(12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, C)

In the gospel today we have Luke’s account of St. Peter’s great confession. When asked who he says Jesus is, he responds, “the Christ of God.” This confession is the heart of our faith. For each of us, our Christianity begins when we admit, come to believe, and are willing to say publicly that Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew of the first century, is the anointed Christ, Savior, and Messiah of God. For most of us, this confession was made on our behalf when we were baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ as infants. Those of us who were baptized as adults made our own confession of faith.

Nevertheless, however we came to be baptized, our confession of faith in Jesus as the Christ is not a ‘one time’ thing. This realization, this spiritual knowledge which is at the heart of God’s purpose as Creator, lives in us each day and should animate every thought and action of the Christian soul.

So how do we obtain, or how do we receive this knowledge that Jesus is the Christ, and with such certainty that we become willing to proclaim our faith publicly and begin to base our whole lives upon it? For this we turn to today’s first reading from the prophet Zechariah.

The prophet writes that God will pour out on his people “a spirit of grace and petition, and they will look on him whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him as one mourns for an only son.” These two go together; in fact, it is through looking on him whom we have pierced—that is to say the contemplation of Christ crucified—that we come to notice, appreciate, and perceive the Spirit of God poured out upon us, his people. This is because it is precisely the Passion that accomplishes the handing over of the Holy Spirit to us, which is God’s way of making a home in our hearts and lives. Recall the moment of Jesus’ death in St. John’s Gospel: “And bowing his head, he handed over the Spirit.”

Here we have the dynamic process of faith and prayer which is the heart and the basis of Christianity. By our contemplation of Christ crucified, we become aware of the Holy Spirit we have received through the sacrifice of his Passion. In turn, the Spirit enables us to recognize Jesus as the Christ of God. As this confession of faith wells up in our hearts and minds, we are pushed further into the contemplation of Christ crucified. Prayer and faith live in a mutually growing process and the result is that we become better Christians each day.

This contemplation is what we are about here at Mass, for holy Mass is Jesus’ extension of the sacrifice of his Passion through time such that we can share and receive his broken Body into our lives. Our Holy Communion, then, is the perfect contemplation of Christ crucified because in it we receive his Body into our bodies. It is by our Communion, then, that we also receive the Spirit that recognizes Him Whom we have received.

We come here to Sunday Mass in order to become Christians, to make again the confession of faith that the Spirit prays within us. We become the Body of Christ we receive, and so inherit the saving mission of Jesus. In this we ourselves are called to be the fulfillment of the last part of Zechariah’s prophecy we hear today; to become, as Church, a “fountain to purify from sin and uncleanness.” The Church is called to be the sign for the world of God’s salvation, and the source of the baptism that can save the world from its selfishness and misery. Let us recognize Jesus as the Christ, accept the mission God wills to embed within us by Holy Communion, and become this baptism for the world.

Corpus (et Sanguis) Christi

(Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, C)

Today we celebrate the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, a day set apart to reflect upon and celebrate in a special way the Most Blessed Sacrament we receive here at Mass, and which we adore here in this church, and in all the tabernacles throughout the world.

The Catechism reminds us that it is incomplete to say that the Church celebrates the Eucharist; it is the Eucharist that makes the Church. (§1396) Here, at this moment and in this place, by his own sacrifice extended into our lives, Christ makes us into his Body, the Church.

Our birth as the Church of Jesus Christ begins at the Last Supper. In First Corinthians, one of the earliest books of the New Testament, St. Paul reports on this tradition. At the Last Supper, on the night he was betrayed, Jesus blessed and broke bread, and gave it to his disciples, saying, “This is my body that is for you.” He then took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” By identifying that broken bread and that shared cup with his own body, soon to be broken on the Cross, and his own Blood, soon to be shed in his Passion, Jesus perpetuates through time the offering of his own one sacrifice. This is a tremendous gift for us; because Jesus has extended his one, perfect sacrifice to us in the Mass, we have an opportunity to share in it. We come here to offer our own sacrifice of praise, to offer our own joys and troubles on this altar, that we may be transformed into the Body of Christ in the world. This is what conscious and active participation in the Mass means: to come and offer ourselves as a spiritual sacrifice and consent to our own transformation in Christ.

At the Last Supper the apostles are given the gift and the command to continue to offer bread and wine—now identified with the Body and Blood of Christ. By the prayer and laying on of hands in ordination, the apostles handed over to their successors the office and power to offer this true memorial of Jesus’ sacrificial Passion. Thus, the Eucharist—the great ‘Thanksgiving’—has come down to us in the priesthood of our bishops, which they have also shared with their helper priests in the Order of Presbyter.

We see a picture of this process of Sacred Tradition in the gospel today: faced with the apostles’ anxiety for the hungry crowd, Jesus instructs the Twelve to “give them some food yourselves.” Jesus blesses and breaks the loaves, gives them to the Twelve, who in turn feed five thousand people. This is an image of Sacred Tradition; Jesus offers himself as the broken bread entrusted to the Twelve, the bread of life which multiplies in the hands of bishops and priests down through the ages until this very morning, when the holy Eucharist is celebrated all over the world.

Today, as every Sunday, we celebrate all these great mysteries. We give thanks to Jesus for giving us this memorial of his suffering and death. By his institution of the Eucharist, Jesus provides us with a way to join our own sacrifice to his here at Mass. By receiving his Body and Blood into our bodies and our lives, we become what we receive, and are built into the Church. In turn we are called to imitate the sacrifice we receive, to let our hearts be broken at the suffering of others, and to pour ourselves out for their salvation.

The Most Holy Trinity

(Trinity Sunday, C)

Trinity Sunday is absolutely one of my favorite days to be a priest. Why? Because I don't have to listen to any Trinity Sunday homilies! In the fifteen Trinity Sundays from my baptism to my ordination, I heard a good homily pretty rarely.

It usually goes like this: 'O.k., it's Trinity Sunday. God is a Trinity. He's three, he's one, you can't really understand it, but that's how it is. Please stand for the Creed.' Maybe if you're lucky you at least get the amusement of some limping analogies, or the excitement of a little heresy, usually modalism or Arianism.

I always wanted to stand up and say no! Let us not pass over the central mystery of the Christian faith with mystifying arithmetic or the dullness of obnubilating analogies!

Here's the thing: We can have an understanding of the Blessed Trinity. Not a comprehension, mind you, but some understanding. This is so for two reasons. First, that we are made in the image and likeness of God, and second, God reveals himself as Trinity in the Scriptures.

Let’s start with ourselves. If we are created in the image and likeness of God, and this is what is distinctive about us human beings among all God’s creatures, and if God is a Trinity, then we are created in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity. Therefore, if we look at ourselves when we are most happy and most the creatures God made us to be, we should see in ourselves some vestige or reflection of the Blessed Trinity. And when are we happier than we are in love? Indeed, love makes us happy because God himself is Love, and our experiences of love are a taste of divine joy. But there is no such thing as a love that doesn’t love someone; love is always specific—we fall in love with this particular person, or place, or ideal. So for God to be Love itself, God must be at once Lover and Beloved. Indeed, this is what we are talking about when we reflect on the Blessed Trinity. From all eternity, the overflowing Love we call God self-expresses into a perfect and complete reflection of Himself. God is Lover and Beloved, Father and Son, Source and Eternal Word, or, as we hear in the first reading today, Lady Wisdom at play with the Creator at the beginning of time.

There you have it. God is not some static ‘supreme being’ sitting on a throne somewhere far away. God is a super-creative set of loving dynamisms. Lover, Beloved, and the Love they share, Father and Son with the Holy Spirit, this is who God is. But here’s the really good news: because God is a set of loving dynamics, “persons,” as we say in theology, it means that God is a reality that can be stepped into.

In fact, this is what we celebrate by our Christianity. In Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit has stretched the love of God the Father and God the Son into the world, that we might have the opportunity to be included in this original Love. This is what we mean in the Creed when we say that Jesus, the Word made flesh, was conceived ‘by the power of the Holy Spirit.’ The Spirit—the Love between Father and Son—has made a home for that love in our humanity through the mystery of the Incarnation. In Jesus, our humanity has the opportunity to be caught up into the eternally creative, utterly delightful, and perfectly happy divine Activity we call the Blessed Trinity. As St. Paul writes in the second reading today, Jesus is our “access” to the grace of God.

This is the joy of the Holy Communion we receive here at Holy Mass—we receive the sacrificed Body of Christ into our bodies, and so are caught up by the Spirit into the love of God the Father and God the Son. We begin to live in God. This is the good news Jesus announces in the gospel today: The Spirit will guide us “to all truth.” This Truth is God himself, the Blessed Trinity himself, in whose image we are created, and whose divine life is our destiny in heaven. As we are caught up anew into the Blessed Trinity through our Holy Communion today, let us give thanks for the chance to begin to live the life of heaven while we are still on the pilgrimage of this life.