Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXXI per Annum B
3 November 2024

 In the verses before today’s Gospel passage our Lord is in a series of debates with various groups of his time, and the debates are rather contentious.  Pharisees, Herodians, and Sadducees were debating with the Lord and they were seeking to entrap him.  The passage today picks up with a scribe, another group of people in Jesus’ time.  Scribes were biblical scholars of their day.  This scribe notices that Jesus is handling these disputes and answering the questions well.  And so, with a sincerity that the other groups could not muster, this scribe asks the Lord “Which is the first of all the commandments?”  In other words, which is the most important command in the law?

The reason this was a question and was an item of debate in Jesus’ time is due to the vastness of the Torah and its laws for how faithful Jews should live their status as God’s chosen people.  To help us understand the dilemma, consider that later scholars would enumerate some 613 laws.  That’s rather daunting, so finding out what is most important has some merit.  This is what the scribe asks.  It is a very important question.

The Lord’s answer is not surprising.  He quotes the prayer known in Hebrew as the Shema.  That title is taken from the first word of the prayer.  Shema in the Hebrew means “to hear”.  The shema is a prayer that calls Jews to listen and hear that they are to love God with all that they are and all that they have.  For a Jew, knowing the shema would be something equivalent to our knowing the words of the Lord’s Prayer from Scripture, or our knowing the Creed.  It was very familiar, a prayer used daily, and it was no surprise that the Lord highlighted it as his response for the first of all the commandments.  In fact, the words of the shema are found in the Book of Deuteronomy and we heard them in the first reading, “Hear, O Israel!  The Lord is our God, the Lord alone!  Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.”  By naming aspects of human being, like heart, soul, and strength, we should not take that to mean a division of human life carrying with it some erroneous idea that we should love God with only part of ourselves.  Rather, the divisions of human being are actually meant to communicate a totality for they represent the deepest unique aspects of what it means to be a human being, a rational creature with powers of mind, emotion, and physical strength.

But, as the Gospel relates, the Lord did not stop by quoting the shema.  He continued his response and, this part can be said to be more surprising.  Jesus went on to say that after love of God with all that one has, there is a second command that is related to the primacy of that first of all the commands.  And the second is, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  In establishing what you and I today call the Great Command (love of God and love of neighbor), the Lord was offering a synthesis of the many laws taught by the Jews.  The Lord is saying that all of them are oriented toward, and ultimately serve, the twofold command to love God first above all things, and to reflect God’s love for others by the love we have for our neighbor as ourself.

This is a lesson and a command that endures and that guides us today.  In fact, the scribe’s response to Jesus shows us still more.  The scribe notes that to observe this twofold command of love of God and love of neighbor is, he says, “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”  This claim caught my attention, because the Jewish ritual system of worship is based upon animal sacrifice.  Surely, a faithful, knowledgeable, and serious Jew – as a scribe would be – was not suggesting that temple sacrifice has no value, or that temple sacrifice should be abolished.  Certainly, not.  Rather, Jesus tells the scribe that his answer is good and that he is not far from the kingdom of God, because the scribe highlights what a Jew should understand about temple sacrifice.  The type of offering described here, is not the type of sacrifice by which the person takes or eats a part of the sacrifice, as in the case of the Passover lamb.  The whole burnt offering was the type of sacrifice by which the entire animal was sacrificed and burnt on the altar.  Jesus is pleased with the scribe’s knowledge because the scribe is bringing to the forefront an important lesson for a Jew, a lesson that remains for us too.  Namely, a whole burnt offering is supposed to symbolize to the Jew that his entire life and all that he has, all his heart, all his soul, and all his strength are the actual sacrifice that should be given to God.  The whole sacrificial animal is a substitute in the sacrificial system; but, the individual person of faith must strive to give all of himself in obedience and submission to God and His commands.  In this, such a faithful person is not making empty sacrifice and is not far from the kingdom of God.  In this, the sacrifice has meaning and is pleasing to God.

This critical lesson remains for us.  It remains for us because the challenge and pitfall in the life of faith is as common among Christians as it would have been among Jews.  That challenge and pitfall is as common now as it was in the Lord’s time.  And that challenge and pitfall is the tendency to follow God superficially, to do religious things on the surface, to be religious only here in the church walls, but to keep God and our relationship with Him rather distant and focused on the external matters that can be seen.  Meanwhile, inside we are not directing all that we are and all that we have to God.  The challenge and pitfall is the tendency to permit God only a limited place in our affairs, while keeping Him conveniently out of the affairs of our life that would require more sacrifice, more effort, more conversion.  We learn that our entire being must be oriented toward God and His ways.  It is not enough to give part of oneself or to give less than all to God.  Our offerings are acceptable and valuable when they reflect what is true about ourselves: that we are submitting ourselves to God and His commands.  All of ourselves.  Every aspect of our lives.  If we do not have that interior disposition, then our religious actions and sacrifices, our participation in our worship, like the Holy Mass, would be lacking and may risk being empty.  In the Holy Mass we follow a typical pattern: we listen to God’s Word in the Scriptures because, like a scalpel, it cuts through some of the deception and the delusions that we may have if our faith is kept superficial.  We move from God’s Word to the Word Made Flesh present on our altars and offered in sacrifice for us, because in that total gift of himself, the Lord models how our sacrifice must be.  What sense would it make, in other words, to participate in this sacrifice if I reject that call to give all of myself to God and to love others as I love myself?  What sense would it make to come to receive, to take Holy Communion, the Lord’s total gift of himself, and to say “amen,” to say, I believe but then not give all of myself to the Lord in return.  We are weak and sinful in this regard, in our resolve to avoid being superficial.  And so, thanks be to God, we can repent and be healed in confession.  Charity and service to others stretches us in our tendency to be superficial.  Ultimately, like that Jewish prayer the shema, we are to hear and to listen to the truth that God loves us completely and we are most fully alive and complete when we likewise love Him in return.  May we strive then to do away with being superficial in our religious life and practice so that we may be consoled by those hopeful words of Jesus: “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

All Edmond Parishes Eucharistic Procession

All Edmond Eucharistic Procession
Stephenson Park Temporary Altar
Sermon: Mark 15:16-20
27 October 2024

 This day – the Lord’s Day – is about Jesus Christ!  This incredible blessing uniting all Catholics from the three parishes in Edmond is about Jesus Christ!  He is the one God who made the universe, all it contains, and who made us, giving us life in His image and likeness.  He is the one God who had a plan to restore the original blessing that He generously bestowed, after man’s original sin brought about the fall.  He is the God who loves you, who loves each of us, such that He comes to save us from our inclination to sin, to save us from the personal sins for which we each bear guilt.  In His divine love, He comes in our very flesh to pay the price for the sin that risks our eternal separation from Him in the condemnation of Hell.  As He approached the horror of the Cross for our salvation, He promised, as the Scriptures record, that he would not leave us orphans (cf. Jn. 14:18).  As the apostles and the first Christians came to accept his promise that he is the bread of life, the bread come down from heaven (cf. Jn. 6), they came to accept that precisely in the Breaking of the Bread, precisely in the smallness of the Sacred Host, our Blessed Lord fulfills his promise to not abandon us and to remain with us to the end of the age (cf. Mt. 28:20).

 As Jesus said, so the Scriptures record, and so we believe these words of our Blessed Lord, “For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.  He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (Jn. 6:55-56).  In this we are filled with hope and we are not alone!  For most of us here we have come to participate today already making an act of faith that with us and before us in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is Jesus Christ our Savior, just as he said.  But no doubt, that are many doing their own things today, surprised to find themselves caught up with this procession of Catholics, and maybe having no idea what they are witnessing here.  To any other bystanders who are willing to listen: If you believe that Jesus is God and if you believe that the Bible is God’s Word to us then you are already on this procession with us, on this journey that is a call to deeper communion with the Lord in his Church, a journey that leads to salvation in Heaven.  Other bystanders may not yet be Christian or not even a believer, this gathering is a reminder that you are invited to join with us, men and women of good will, to consider the journey you are on, to consider where you are going, and to consider whether you are, and where you are, with God on that journey.  Today, we give witness that we believe that God is actually present with us, in the midst of this world He made to be good.  He is really here!

 Why would we believe such a thing?  Why believe that God is with us and has anything to do, or any care, for this world in which we find ourselves?  First of all, God is involved with this world because He has created it and it is destined to return to Him.  The great event of the Incarnation shows us the nearness of God to this world.  The Son of God so unites Himself to His creation, that He takes on human flesh and takes up residence in this realm, Jesus the Christ.  And, the Gospel gives us a further reason for God’s nearness to the world because it shows us an encounter between the divine and the profane in a civic setting.  In the Gospel, the Lord and the world meet.  In the passage we heard, Jesus is not in a religious setting or location.  He is in the praetorium, which is the headquarters of the Roman authorities, the location of Pilate and the cohort of soldiers who mock Jesus and lead him to death.  By this point in the passage, Pilate has already sentenced the Lord to death and he has been scourged.  He is beaten and bloodied.  For however the vicious Roman scourging may have made his humanity and identity as Jesus unrecognizable, all the more would such a horrendous sight make his identity as God unrecognizable, even unbelievable.  Yet, in that civic setting, in the midst of the profane, despite all protestations to the contrary, despite man’s inability to recognize or accept it… God Himself was present!  Though submitting Himself to the twisted ways of man, our Lord was fully in command of what he was doing as God to suffer and die for our salvation, the salvation of the world and the souls He had made.  And He was doing all this right in the midst of the world and in the midst of the seat of civic authority.

 We experience some of that here today.  Today, also in a civic setting God Himself is present despite any protestations to the contrary, despite man’s inability to recognize it.  God Himself is here asking us to carry Him, just as He has done in various moments of salvation history: whether in the ark of the covenant, whether as a newborn Infant in Mary’s arms, whether being lifted up on the Cross, whether in the smallness of the Sacred Host in the hands of a priest… God Himself is here and He is asking us to carry Him into all the places He intends to go… into our holy places and sanctuaries, into our souls by grace, and, yes, even into our profane spaces, into our civic spaces where so-called “ordinary life” should not be separated from the realities of the kingdom to come.  For the “real world” as we so often call it would be very unreal indeed if separated from its foundation and destiny in God who created it, who cares for it, and calls it back to Himself.  This procession can serve as a reminder that we are called to carry the Lord into all things.  We are called to carry him in faith and how we live that faith, such that we, members of the Body of Christ, give witness to others by our words and actions that Jesus is with us and that he is Lord!  We are called to carry Him about in our moral choices.  We are called to carry him in the words we speak by which we might evangelize others.  We are called to carry Him about in our service to the poor and those about whom the Lord said, “When you did these things to one of the least of my brothers and sisters, you did it to me” (Mt. 25:40).  We are called to carry Him about in how we organize this secular city of man, so that it more greatly reflects the order of the City of God.  We are in a moment now and through election day that gives us a privileged opportunity to exercise our moral duty to vote with our Catholic values in the hopes that we do our part to bring our city, state, and nation into greater conformity to the Kingdom of God.  The timing of this procession is a great witness and reminder that we should carry the Lord into our precints when we vote.  The Gospel passage today tells us in no uncertain terms that the Lord’s kingship belongs also in our civic spaces as he continues to accomplish his work of salvation in the souls of our time and place: the souls of the Pontius Pilates of our time, the souls of the soldiers of our time, the souls of religious authorities of our time, the souls of all the ordinary men and women, boys and girls, of every time and place.  As Catholics we believe that patriotism is a virtue.  Patriotism is a call to devotion and service to the land of our forefathers.  There is no patriotism greater than devotion first of all to the Father of all, the Father and Creator of this land.  As happened in the Gospel, when some meet the Lord in civic spaces the result may be an occasion for sarcasm, mockery, and rejection.  But we who are believers serve as signposts today, pointing our contemporaries to the real presence of God with us.  By prayer and fasting, which I beg of you to take up in these next days, we serve to pray for our nation in this electoral cycle, praying that good and godly candidates be chosen to lead us.  We serve both by the reverence of our bodies and the sincerity of words to truly mean that acclamation: Hail, King of the Jews!  Hail, Christ our King!  We commit ourselves today to carry our Lord into all the activities and places of our lives.  We give the Lord thanks for remaining with us.  And we ask that we may be more docile to his grace so that, unlike the mockery of the soldiers, we may truly reverence him as the king of every aspect of our lives, the king of our parishes, the king of our city, state and nation.

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXVII per Annum B
Gen. 2:18-24; Ps. 128; Heb. 2:9-11; Mk. 10:2-12 (shorter form)
6 October 2024

 The Pharisees test Jesus in the Gospel passage by asking about marriage and divorce.  The force of Jesus’ response remains powerful still today in an age marked by many challenges in relationships.  The Pharisees indicate that Moses permitted a “bill” of divorce.  Jesus responds to the Pharisees by himself quoting the Book of Genesis and taking them back to “the beginning.”  It’s like saying, see how far you have strayed… get back to God’s original idea and mind.

As difficult as this divine teaching from Jesus is for our ears in this age, it was likewise difficult for Jesus’ contemporaries in the Gospel scene.  They, like we, live in a culture where divorce is widely known and accepted.  There were different opinions about legitimate grounds for divorce in the Lord’s time, some more permissive, and some more restrictive, but the reason the Pharisees can even ask this question at all is because the legitimacy of divorce is assumed in Jewish society, since Moses had developed a policy for it.  It is probably very difficult for us to comprehend just how shocking Jesus’ answer was.  Moses is a revered authority in Judaism, but the Lord’s response reveals a flawed concession in Moses’ policy.  He tells the Pharisees that, yes, Moses allowed divorce, but he did so because of sin, the hardness of heart that kept God’s People from receiving the very Word of God.  And then, the next shocking move, by reinterpreting Scripture and, specifically the teaching from the Book of Genesis, Jesus says that divorce is not possible and that no human authority can separate what God has joined.  At the very same time, then, and this would shock them, Jesus is indicating that he and his teaching are of a higher authority than that of the revered Moses.  We get another glimpse of just how surprising this must all have been when the next verse tells us that the disciples wait until a bit later, in the privacy of a house, to circle back and ask Jesus again, as if to say, “Earlier, when you said divorce is not part of God’s design for marriage, did we hear you correctly?”  The Lord doubles down and says: The man who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and, the woman who divorces her husband and marries another commits adultery.

The same serious challenge confronts us as we hear this Gospel.  The larger question for us is whether we will listen to God’s Word and accept it as saving teaching to guide us, or whether we will listen more to the hardness of our hearts and our own struggles with sin, looking for concessions around divine teaching.  The context here in the Gospel is about marriage and divorce, but truthfully the implications are much broader.  Will we admit that divine teaching cannot be changed by us and that it makes demands upon us?  Even though our minds and our wills, darkened by the fall of original sin, struggle to grasp and to do what is good and right, will we admit that divine teaching is actually better for us and makes us more fulfilled, despite our challenges with obedience?

As the Lord referred to Genesis in his response about divorce, I also want to turn to that passage, which served as our first reading today.  I think refocusing on Genesis leaves us with the positive teaching that is the foundation of these difficult words in the Gospel.  What we learn in Genesis is that God Himself has designed the relationship of marriage.  By making us male and female, and establishing a unity among man and woman in marriage in the very act of creation, God has made marriage to serve as a sign of Himself and His own unity with and love for us, His creation.  Furthermore, in the New Covenant, endowed by the saving grace issuing forth from the Lord’s Cross and Resurrection, marriage stands as the covenantal sign of Christ and his Church.  Christian marriage is to be marked by the positive goods of unity, indissolubility, and openness to the blessing of children, by which marriage reflects the way God unites Himself to us (unity), the way God draws us to eternal life, never separating Himself from us (indissolubility), and the way God’s love issues forth for us in the new life of grace, especially eternal life in Heaven (fecundity).

This is the positive truth about marriage in our Catholic teaching.  This truth is actually better for us than what the world proposes.  This truth remains unchanged even when our sinfulness and doubts would have us believe things about marriage that are not consistent with God’s mind for marriage.  One final lesson from the Book of Genesis is instructive, I think, for understanding the type of sacrifice required of us to embrace even hard teachings, and this particular teaching on marriage.  When I consider how it is that the suitable partner, Eve, is made for Adam, it involves that well-known image and story of God casting Adam into sleep in order to take a rib from him and fashion the woman.  If we accept that divine teaching is better for us, even as it places demands upon us, then we can learn something from this act of creation that can inspire how we view marriage and, honestly, how we embrace any teaching of faith that strikes us as difficult.  What can we say that Adam learns when God finally makes Eve and he, Adam, first lays eyes upon her?  We can say Adam learns that he is no longer alone and his life has meaning and, in fact, is better when he makes sacrifice and gives of himself.  When he gives up his own flesh and blood, imaged in the rib, he awakes to that nuptial cry of the “finally!”, the cry of “This one, at last!” is the suitable partner.  It is precisely in laying down his life, precisely in giving of himself, even his very flesh and blood, that Adam finds meaning and purpose in his very being and in his living.  Yes, it requires sacrifice, but the nuptial cry of Adam, his “this one at last!”, anticipates the cry of Jesus from the Cross: “It is finished”; and, Adam’s gift of himself anticipates that difficult lesson that each disciple must accept: the way to follow the Lord, the way to be satisfied in this life, the way to lasting peace, the way to eternal life is by embracing God’s teaching, especially when difficult, and rejecting the worldly message that speaks to, and seems to make sense to, a darkened mind and a fallen world.  The lesson of Adam’s sacrifice and self-giving, whereby true meaning and life are found, remains for us, too, no matter how difficult it may be to accept God’s teachings, no matter how challenging it may be for us, no matter how our cultural forces may reject such teaching and make concessions due to hardness of heart.  Yes, we can admit this is difficult, it can bring suffering, it requires us to embrace the cross; but, in so doing we learn what Adam learned in his self-giving that resulted in Eve, and we learn to be like the Lord, the leader of our salvation who was made perfect through suffering (second reading).

Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXV per Annum B
22 September 2024

 For the second Sunday in a row we hear the Lord teaching and telling the disciples about the prediction of his passion.  This is the second of three passion predictions in St. Mark.  We see hear once again, as we did last Sunday, that the disciples don’t get it.  In fact, it is embarrassing that as the Lord predicts his passion they are busy predicting who might fill the leadership vacuum by arguing who is greatest among them.  In last Sunday’s passage, the Lord had to confront the tendency to think only as human beings do.  Trying to understand the plan of salvation with only human thinking simply will not work and will not result in appreciating the serious call that we must confront the tendency to think as human beings do and we must convert.  We must change.  Following the path of salvation means our sinful ways must be put to death in order that we can rise to a new life, a redeemed life.  Thinking as human beings do by rejecting suffering will meet the sharp rebuke we heard St. Peter receive last Sunday.  In this Sunday’s passage, the Lord confronts the tendency to reject humility, the tendency to think of oneself as greater, to exalt oneself.  This is precisely what was occupying the attention of the disciples as they walked along with Jesus.  These two Sunday passion predictions teach us that the Lord’s way – and therefore, our way to being saved – is through suffering and humility.

 The first reading reinforces the lesson of suffering.  This matches up with last Sunday’s first reading from the Prophet Isaiah.  Last Sunday’s first reading was taken from the section of Isaiah that references the chosen servant of the Lord who will undergo suffering and persecution.  In fact, that section of Isaiah is called the suffering servant section.  That theme continues in today’s first reading, the Book of Wisdom, where the wicked seek to test the just one by revilement, torture, and condemnation to a shameful death.  The second reading from St. James brings into particular focus the need to embrace humility as a virtue for godly life.  When we embrace suffering we do penance for our sins and we are transformed by an opportunity in faith to be like the Lord, the suffering servant.  In such conformity to the Lord we can grow in grace.  Humility is also a way in which we become like the Lord.  We are encouraged to humility when St James writes, “Where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every foul practice”.  This is the dangerous path the disciples were on even as they seemed so near to the path of the Lord.  They are silenced for shame when, inside the house in today’s gospel passage, Jesus asks them, “What were you arguing about on the way”?  The phrase “the way” became an early reference to Christians and the first roots of the Church.  When the gospel reveals “they had been discussing among themselves on the way who was the greatest” we can look back today and see an irony about the use of that term “the way”.  We learn that we are not members of “the way” if the way we are on is one that rejects humility and suffering.  For as the Lord must suffer in humility, we must also embrace the same path if we are truly united to Christ.

 The virtue of humility is a call to be grounded in the truth.  Authentic humility does not exalt oneself above what is true.  And, on the flip side, authentic humility does not pretend that one is lower than one is.  We all have gifts and talents that we are given to use for others, to build up others and to build up the Church.  We should not exalt ourselves above what is true; but we also should not deny our gifts or refuse to use them out of some false humility.  Rather, we are grounded in what is true.  We are grounded in the truth that we are not god, but His creatures.  We are grounded in reverencing God by using well the gifts we have been given.  If the gospel passage were written today, the disciples would have been arguing about who was the G.O.A.T. (the Greatest Of All Time).  So, the virtue of humility is something needed in our time too.  The image of a child, small, dependent, and without legal rights in the ancient world becomes a symbol of humility.  By humility we are drawn into the very inner life of God, the inner life of the Blessed Trinity.  Though absolute and almighty in power and authority, God pours Himself out in Trinitarian life, He pours Himself out in humility to create and to save us.  In suffering, God freely gives His entire being to pay the price for ours sins and to open before us the way to everlasting life.  We remain on that path when we maintain our unity with Christ our Head as members of His Body.  Where Christ, the humble and suffering servant has gone, we, too, are called to follow.

Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXIV per Annum B
15 September 2024

 The Gospel passage is St. Mark’s accounting of the first of three predictions of the Lord’s passion.  The Lord wants to know who people say he is.  We can learn a lesson from this passage that it is not sufficient to simply identify Jesus, or to know his Name, or to claim that he is the Christ.  In order to benefit from relationship with the Lord, a disciple must be able to not only identify Jesus and use his title “Christ”; the disciple must also accept the content of how Jesus will be the Christ.  The disciple must also be conformed to the same way of life.

 We learn that there is more than just being able to name Jesus, or call him one’s Lord and the Christ, from how Jesus teaches that he must suffer greatly, be rejected, be killed, and rise again.  That lesson is brought into sharper focus still when the Lord rebukes Peter for rejecting how he will be the Christ.  Peter’s refusal to accept how the Lord will be the Lord is met with those stinging words: “Get behind me, Satan.  You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”  Peter wants to tell the Lord how things should be and how to accomplish his mission.  We have to rebuke that same tendency in ourselves to think as human beings do when we seek to avoid struggle and suffering, meanwhile being very quick to satisfy our every desire with all the things of this life that feel good.  The Lord’s description that he must suffer, die, and rise tells us that the way of suffering is not just a circumstance of his life, it is not just something passive that happens to him.  Rather, he must suffer, die, and rise.  That tells us that this path of suffering is a necessity and the precise manner in which he will fulfill his mission.  And to be clear, the mission is not simply the suffering, but it is always connected to the resurrection.

 We learn still more in this passage.  Namely, we are taught that the disciple must imitate the Lord and must be conformed to his way of life.  That means that the way of suffering is not just a secondary, or a passive circumstance for us either.  We cannot call upon the Lord using his Name and acknowledging his title as “Christ” in any meaningful way if we do not also accept in our own lives that path of suffering leading to resurrection.  It must be a way of life for us too.  That way of suffering is not to be viewed as some fatalistic nihilism where we think of ourselves as worthless.  No, we are beloved children of God.  We must rather grow in trust in God and recognize that, in a fallen nature, we can easily feed every whim and desire we have, we can keep the body feeling satisfied, while being far less dedicated to putting our own sin to death.  In falling to that easy tendency to have everything this life can offer, we end up on the mistaken path of saving our life here, only to lose it in the life to come.  But in conforming ourselves to the suffering Lord as a path we, too, must follow, we are able to lose the temporary values of this life and be saved for the life to come.  In this insistence of Jesus we learn that there are two meanings of “life”.  We see this in other passages of the gospels too.  There is natural life in this earthly realm.  But there is also supernatural life in the world to come.  We are mistaken and lost if we seek only to feed our natural life here and now.  The necessary path to the supernatural life of salvation is to imitate Jesus in his suffering, death, and resurrection.

 Our lives here, then, should be marked by penance and mortifications that help us train ourselves in trust of God and in disciplining the ways we seek to be full of passing goods in this life.  A disciple is not on the path of the Lord if he fills up every natural desire and meanwhile makes his life seem “spiritual” by using Jesus’ Name or calling him the Christ.  What we say with our lips needs to be backed up with its full meaning.  The Lord teaches us today how he will be the Christ and therefore how we must be Christians.  The attempt to have it another way is asking for the same type of rebuke Peter received.  We must avoid the trap of thinking only as human beings do.

 The way of a disciple is not a passive thing by which we simply use the title Christian.  Jesus says, “Whoever wishes to come after me”.  That term “wishes” indicates an active desire to live a saved life.  Being passive as a Christian or wearing the title Christian like a label does not work.  We likewise must train ourselves through the difficulties of life (and we can admit how difficult this work is) to grow in trust of the Lord whatever may come, whatever the struggles and sufferings, whatever the crosses are.  When we practice penance and mortifications – and not only in the season of Lent to be clear! – we are being conformed to the Lord.  When we repent of our sins and the ways we give so much attention to our natural life, to the detriment of supernatural life, we are embracing the cross.  What our lips speak about Jesus being the Lord and master of our life must be backed up by action.  That’s perhaps why the Church chooses the second reading for today from St. James, who writes: “faith of itself, if it does not have works, is dead”.  What our lips speak about Jesus must be backed up by how we commit to Sunday worship.  That we say that Jesus is the Christ is backed up by how we use our treasures and give sacrificially to others.  It is backed up by how we vote our values so that the world is ordered in greater conformity to God’s kingdom.  We profess that Jesus is the Christ, and we truly mean it, when we deal a lethal blow to our sins, and live our vocations in a way pleasing to God.  What we say on our lips is backed up when we stop wasting so much time with frivolity in entertainment and social media, while claiming we don’t have enough time for prayer or the life of the soul.  We are taught that “to think as God does” means that the Son of Man must suffer and then rise again.  Whoever wishes to come after him… must do the same.

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Assumption of the BVM
15 August 2024

Anytime we honor the Blessed Virgin Mary, as we do today in her assumption, the honor is closely tied to the ark of the covenant.  Mary, in fact, is called the New Ark or the Ark of the New Covenant in theological writings and among spiritual authors.  This connection to the ark is no surprise since the Scriptures make this connection.  We saw it in the first reading from the Book of Revelation.  There we have St. John’s vision of the heavens opened up and he sees the ark in the temple.  And immediately, in the next verses it goes on to make the connection, saying a “great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun”.  We see that image of the woman as an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  How do you think the Jews thought of the ark of the Old Covenant?  Let’s consider some things the Scriptures tell us about that ark.  Only the Old Covenant Levitical priests could carry it.  No one else could touch it, under pain of being struck dead (as happened in some passages).  The ark was carried in procession as God’s people journeyed through life in their wanderings toward the Promised Land.  It accompanied them in battle as they faced hostile forces from other peoples.  The ark was the privileged meeting place of God with them.  But, the ark was not God Himself.  It was a powerful sign that God was near and in the midst of His people.  The ark contained signs of God’s presence, but no one thought the receptacle, the box itself, was somehow God.  Now, I want to ask, doesn’t all that sound like utmost respect and honor for the ark?  Do you think anyone among the Jews would have discounted the importance of the ark?  Or do you think anyone would have claimed that honoring the ark might confuse people into thinking the ark itself was God?  No.  And it’s the same with Mary, the ark of the New Covenant.

In addition to my work as a priest, I have other interests and things I am involved in outside of parish work.  Not all of those things are necessarily religious in nature.  Recently I was speaking to the organizer of one group I work with.  It’s not a religious group, but is involved in things in the public square.  The organizer is a sincere bible-believing Protestant.  He said to me, “You do good work for us… with or without the Rosary”.  Now, he wasn’t trying to be disrespectful and I didn’t take it that way.  His comment wasn’t the strongest of criticisms, but it did demonstrate a misunderstanding.  I said to him in response, “Oh, I assure you, any good you think I do is most definitely with the Rosary and with devotion to Mary, the mother of our Savior”.  I share this with you to say, don’t let anyone confuse you into thinking that Marian devotion, or things like the Rosary or litanies or processions, or things we use as part of our devotion to Mary are somehow inappropriate.  Don’t let anyone get away with claiming that honoring her is contrary to Scripture.  No, like the ark of the Old Covenant, she accompanies us on procession in the journey of this life.  She accompanies us as we face difficulties and struggles and must battle against sin to grow in holiness.  She reminds us powerfully that God is near.  How could she do anything other?  It was in her that God came to dwell and from her that He took human flesh in order to unite Himself to us.  And like the ark of old, in all of this honor and devotion, we do not somehow think that she is God.

But we honor Mary for far more important reasons.  Mary is more than just a receptacle, a “container”, where God came to dwell.  We honor her and are devoted to her because she is the premier disciple.  We are devoted to her because her entire life was marked by the mystery of salvation in Jesus Christ.  And we are called to allow the paschal mystery of Jesus, his suffering, death, and resurrection, to mark our lives too.  We see something of this in the second reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians.  St. Paul writes, “Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep…. For just as in Adam all die, so too in Christ shall all be brought to life, but each one in proper order: Christ the firstfruits; then, at his coming, those who belong to Christ”.  St. Paul teaches us that we bear the mark of Adam in the natural order, meaning that our nature is fallen and we experience disorder, dissolution, and death.  But by spiritual adoption from God, we bear the mark of life in Christ, in the spiritual order.  If we follow this life in Christ as his disciples, we follow that proper order so that we are brought to life.  After Christ, we celebrate that Mary’s entire life was marked by the mystery of salvation.  We celebrate that she followed her son into heavenly life.  And for this reason, she is the model and the sign to us of God’s nearness and our part in being raised to life in Christ.  We honor Mary and celebrate her because through her we have the powerful reminder that God is near and acting in our midst.  Therefore, our hope and encouragement is that our life too can be marked by the same reward of Heaven!

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XIX per Annum B
11 August 2024

 We are currently in a tour through the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, known as the Bread of Life discourse.  This chapter is a prime location of Jesus’ teaching about the Holy Eucharist, that ordinary bread and wine become his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.  So important is this element of our faith, that it can be said, we are not truly catholic if we do not accept that the bread and wine consecrated at Holy Mass in the Catholic Church are the Lord’s true Body and Blood.  Notice that I did not say: we are not truly catholic if we do not understand how bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Jesus.  No, not understanding is one thing, and it can be improved and perfected.  But not accepting, refusing to accept, makes one not catholic.  Our affirmation of the clear scriptural teaching about bread and wine becoming the true and real Body and Blood of Jesus is something that requires from us an act of faith; faith that Jesus is God and he does what he says.

In this third Sunday installment from John chapter 6, we are getting to the threshold of Jesus’ teaching that his Body and Blood are food for disciples, and that he will give us this food in the Holy Eucharist.  But before we hear that next weekend, the Lord focuses attention on the manna, this bread from heaven, that the Jewish ancestors had received in the desert wanderings.  The Lord is using the manna to reveal two mysteries: the mystery of his divinity and, then, the mystery of the Holy Eucharist.  This weekend I want to focus our attention on only the first mystery, what precedes the teaching on the Holy Eucharist, namely the divinity of Jesus and the pre-requisite that we accept that Jesus is God.

In the Gospel selection today, the Lord uses the manna as a metaphor, as a sign which serves to communicate that he has come down from heaven.  In other words, the foundational lesson before we hear the Lord teach forcefully about the Holy Eucharist, is that just like the manna came down from heaven and was divine in origin, likewise Jesus is divine in origin.  He is the Bread of Life come down from heaven.  This is an important revelation that Jesus is claiming to be God.  And this revelation demands belief.  In fact, to first believe and express faith in the divinity of Jesus, makes it much easier to accept the next step – namely, that he gives himself as food and makes bread and wine become his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.  Thus, we can see how important it is that we consider the implications that Jesus is God.  This cannot be only something we say, as words on the lips.  It needs to be something that changes the way we live and the way we prioritize things in life.  Jesus is God.  He has come into our midst in the world.  He loves us.  He saves us.  And He does not abandon us.  He remains with us by the Holy Spirit dwelling within us in the Church.  And a particular gift of His presence is that the Holy Eucharist is his very self.  The manna came down from heaven.  Jesus teaches that he is the true manna.  He has come down from heaven, meaning he is God incarnate.  If we can accept that Jesus is God, how could we fail to accept that he makes bread and wine into his very self?

This teaching in John 6 sort of takes us all back to simpler days in second grade when a young catholic prepares to receive Holy Communion for the first time.  Ask a Catholic in second grade what the Holy Eucharist is and he will say, “It is Jesus”.  Ask the child how that can be, and he might say, “I don’t know.  But Jesus is God and He said so.  He makes it happen.”  And you know what?  That is true, and that is enough to have sufficient catholic faith in the Holy Eucharist!  Now, as we grow we want to have our understanding grow too.  I am not saying our childhood, or teenage, or young adult faith should not grow.  I am not saying we should stay with that second-grade proclamation.  No, we should seek to understand more as we age.  But the bottom line is that Jesus is God and if we believe that, then what he says about his flesh being true food in the Holy Eucharist is easier to accept in fidelity to what he clearly teaches in John 6 (which we will hear next weekend).

The first mystery that is revealed by referencing the manna from the Old Testament is that Jesus is asking his listeners to believe that he is God.  He is asking for faith from them and from us who hear his words today.  The response of the listeners in the Gospel passage reveals that they understand what Jesus is demanding of them.  Several times we hear that his listeners are murmuring about this and casting doubt amongst themselves.  The whole context here is instructive.  What was the chief struggle for God’s people as they wandered the desert for 40 years?  The struggle was to believe in the one true God and that God was with them as they suffered in the harsh atmosphere of the desert.  The struggle was to believe that God had not abandoned them, but that He cared for them, and was providing for them.  In the desert they murmured.  They complained.  And they doubted.  This is similar to what is going on in the gospel.  In today’s passage, we have still more evidence of the refusal to believe in the way the Jews react to Jesus’ claim that he has come down from heaven.  They say, “Is this not… the son of Joseph?  Do we not know his father and mother?  Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

 I want to challenge us to confront our own murmurings, by which I mean, the ways we do not accept that Jesus is God, or doubt that he is near and working among us.  I want to focus on two ways we might struggle with murmurings.  The first is easy to name, it is the murmuring that rejects wholesale that Jesus is God.  It is a murmuring of apostasy or atheism, the refusal to believe that Jesus is God.  I doubt such murmuring marks many of us here.  But if that type of murmuring does mark you, then you want to confess it and act against it by seeking to build your faith, praying that God give you the gift of faith, and seeking friendship among believers, which can serve to encourage your faith.  The second form of murmuring, can be harder to define, and it may well be something we believers need to confront.  To identify this type of murmuring, this limiting of Jesus, we might ask ourselves, does our stated faith that Jesus is God matter to us?  Do we let that faith make demands on our life?  Is that stated faith visible in how we live, in how we prioritize our life, and the things we do each day?  This way of confronting murmuring is the call to move from faith on the lips only, to a faith that rests our security, our present life, and future life on the truth that Jesus is God and He is with us.  This second type of murmuring can mark even us.  Is God a priority in my life?  I might never dream of skipping Sunday Mass, but Monday through Friday… is there much evidence that God is a priority?  Do I seek to grow in awareness of the presence of God by daily prayer, frequent confession, and worthy reception of Holy Communion as often as possible?  Or do I let the day get away from me, with barely a moment given to pray?  Do I come to God only when I think I need something, or when I want something?  Do I treat God as a type of vending machine?  I come on my terms and expect Him to pump out what I want when I give Him the slightest attention.  Is my vision about life in this world, a godly vision?  Do I see my life and the world around me as created to be good and profoundly loved by God?  Is there anything I owe God with the gift of my life?   And will I give it?  Unknowingly, have the struggles in my life, my “desert wanderings”, caused me to live as a Christian in such a way that I am really murmuring against the Lord, doubting his ability as God?  When we confront our murmuring, and seek to reject it, it makes living the faith a more vibrant thing.  It makes coming to the sacraments something more rich.  It makes it easier to give time to God in prayer.  It makes sacrificial giving of my resources easier too.  It makes it possible to respond to my vocation, believing that God will give me what I need to accomplish it.  Rejecting our murmuring so that we grow in faith, makes us more receptive to all the blessings God wants to give us, but which our lack of faith can stifle.  Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.”  In other words, for us to believe in God it is necessary that we let Him pour out His grace upon us.  So, will we do the things that can help faith and strengthen it?  Or will we do the bare minimum in our murmuring?  Before we get to belief in the Holy Eucharist, we need to first work on the lesson of today’s Gospel passage: the call to believe that Jesus is God.  As we have these privileged weeks to reflect on our Catholic faith in the Holy Eucharist, I want to encourage you to acknowledge wherever you are in your faith and to consider what murmurings can tend to creep in.  Especially as regards growing in proper Eucharistic faith, I want to encourage you to come before the Lord in our chapel for adoration.  Even if you don’t think you have enough Catholic faith in the Holy Eucharist, the place to start is to acknowledge Jesus as God.  Come to be in the godly place of our chapel and ask the Lord to reveal Himself to you so that you know him to be God, and so that your faith in the Holy Eucharist can grow.  Prepare yourself in advance for Holy Mass, reading the Sunday readings and naming what specific intentions or prayers you have for each Mass, things and needs you want to lift up at Mass when the priest lifts up the offerings at the altar.  These practices can help to prepare each of us for stronger faith and for what the Lord said in the midst of the murmuring in the Gospel, “It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God.”

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XVI per Annum B
21 July 2024

 We have a rather brief Gospel passage today that draws upon prophecy from the Old Testament.  The first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah gives us some insight into the background of the Gospel passage.  The prophet Jeremiah speaks of wicked and sinful shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock.  The sinfulness of their religious authorities, leads God’s people into idolatry and dissolves their proper identity.  Ten of the twelve tribes of God’s people settle in the north and these ten tribes come to be called Israel.  The remaining two tribes in the south come to be called Judah.  Israel, the ten tribes in the north, pay the price for their idolatry when they are invaded by Assyria and taken away into exile.  From there, they are scattered among the Gentile nations in the region, mixed in with other peoples, such that they are lost, their proper bloodline cannot be identified.  Using the image from Jeremiah, the sheep have been scattered and driven away and bad shepherds have contributed to this.  Jeremiah goes on to prophecy about God’s solution.  God Himself will gather the remnant of the flock and he will appoint new shepherds over the people.  This is to take place in the time of the Messiah, for Jeremiah says the promise that God Himself will do this will take place when a shoot is raised up from David.  And then both Judah and Israel will be saved and will dwell in security.

In the Gospel we are in the time of the Messiah.  Jesus is identified with the promise of a righteous shoot from David.  Jesus is the priest, the prophet, and the king whose throne will last forever.  He is also the shepherd who will fulfill what Jeremiah said.  Jesus, the Good Shepherd, associates other shepherds with his work.  He establishes a hierarchy in his kingdom.  In the Gospel, we see that the Lord has sent the apostles out to begin their work as shepherds.  In the Gospel passage they return to report to the Lord all that has taken place.  And people are responding with great enthusiasm.  In fact, the response to the proclamation of the Gospel is so great and exhausting that the apostles don’t even have time to eat and need to pull away to rest.  The vast crowds pressing around Jesus and around the apostles call to mind the image hanging in the air from Jeremiah and other prophets regarding God’s people who had been scattered by past exile.  The remnant sheep are indeed being gathered from distant places and brought to graze in good pasture where none shall be missing.  The sheep are being gathered by Jesus himself, but also by other shepherds the Lord chooses to associate with this work.

When Jesus saw the vast crowd responding to this work his heart was moved with pity.  What he does next, how he responds to this movement of pity is telling.  The Gospel says that the Lord began to teach them many things.  The Lord recognized that a deeper hunger and longing was drawing the crowds to respond.  The people are leaving their homes and their work to come and hear the good news because they ultimately hunger for more than physical food.  They hunger to know God, to know God’s love and to have salvation.  They hunger to know truth.

I want to make two applications from this brief gospel passage.  The Lord looks upon us with pity and compassion too.  The spirit of the world, the spirit of this age, is marked by confusion about truth.  In this sense, Pontius Pilate can serve as an example of the spirit of the world in his interrogation of Jesus before the crucifixion, when Pilate asks, “What is truth?”  Just as there is the story of the Good News, the world also has its own secular narrative.  Our modern means of communication help that narrative to be spread far and wide such that vast crowds accept the secular message.  To the degree that the world’s narrative is lacking truth, or even downright false, souls in our age can be scattered in exile like sheep without a shepherd.  But the Lord, the Good Shepherd, has pity on us.  And so, he desires to teach us.  He has established his Church and associated other shepherds with him so that we may be taught.

Thus, the first application of this Gospel is, we ourselves must be interested in being taught, so that we are fed with truth that comes from the Lord and is communicated in every age through his Church.  We let the Lord teach us when we listen to his Church and study saving doctrine.  We also let the Lord teach us when we take responsibility to study the Scriptures and the faith.  We don’t have to become scholars or academics, but we should put forth some effort to be informed of sacred teaching and truth.  To not study and know the teachings of Jesus will result in feeding on half-truths and lies, which leads to being shepherded more by the spirt of the world than by Jesus.

The second application is, we ourselves need to be willing to speak the truth to others.  In this way, we are like the apostles who are sent out to other sheep.  We have received saving teaching not only for ourselves, but to share.  We need to respond with pity and compassion to people’s deeper hunger by speaking the truth.  We should instruct our children properly and we should be willing to speak to others in our places of work, in social gatherings, in politics, and in encounters during our ordinary day.  This is not always easy, but it is our duty.  Our sharing of sacred teaching, of truth, may be rejected, but that does not absolve us from sharing first of all our living relationship with Jesus and the teaching that goes hand-in-hand with responding to the narrative of the Gospel.

We first need to have a living relationship with Jesus.  And we must be interested both in knowing the truth and in sharing it with others so that the vast crowds of our day, like sheep without a shepherd, may experience the love of God and be saved.

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XIV per Annum B
7 July 2024

  Last weekend we had the great joy of celebrating the ordination and First Solemn Mass of Fr. Stephen Jones, a son of this parish.  He came home from seminary to his native place and gathered here with family and friends from his hometown…. And I’m just grateful that his First Mass wasn’t this weekend because this Gospel passage might have made things a bit awkward.  Jesus came to his native place.  The people took offense at him.  And he could not do many mighty works there.  We were privileged to see the signs of God’s work in a new priest, the third son of our parish ordained to the priesthood since 2017.  Thanks be to God and thank you for supporting Fr. Jones as he has prepared for this day!

 The selection of the first reading foreshadows and sets the theme of Jesus being rejected as a prophet.  In the first reading, Ezekiel is given the vocation to be a prophet.  He has the unenviable task of being sent to a people who will reject him and his message: “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, rebels who have rebelled against me”.  Ezekiel was a priest in the Jerusalem temple and it was a time of great hardness of heart and grave sin, even among the priests of the temple.  Ezekiel had to be a prophet to these rebels warning of the coming destruction of the temple.  In this, we can understand a foreshadowing of the Lord.  He will come and he will be rejected by his own native place and by the religious leaders and authorities in Jerusalem, the same place that hears the warning from Ezekiel.

In the chapters leading up to Mark 6 Jesus has been on a steady march performing mighty signs and speaking words of wisdom.  It comes to a depressing halt in Mark 6 in today’s passage.  The power that disease, demons, and death could not stop, now is stopped by what we learn is a stronger obstacle: unbelief, lack of faith.  The Gospel passage tells us that Jesus’ hometown lacked faith and therefore “he was not able to perform any mighty deed there”.  “He was amazed at their lack of faith”.

We learn that faith is a critical doorway, an entry point for Jesus’ operation, his working within souls.  We know from other Gospel episodes involving miraculous healings that it seems the person’s faith was a critical factor in the miracle.  A sick person comes to the Lord, or a person comes to the Lord because of a dead loved one, and in several episodes Jesus performs the miracle but highlights “your faith has saved you”.

We should think carefully about this lesson.  Jesus is God.  God is all powerful.  The lesson we learn in this Gospel passage tells us something about the mysterious relationship, almost like a recipe, of the power of God to give grace and the necessary part the recipient plays in whether the gift of grace is received or not, or to what degree it is received.  We clearly do not understand the passage to mean that Jesus was unable to do a miracle or to do what he wanted.  He is God and he has the capacity, the ability to do all the things he did in other places before arriving home at Nazareth.  His inability to perform mighty deeds there is a reflection on the limitations placed by the lack of faith among those who gathered around him.  It is not a reflection on any supposed lack of ability on Jesus’ part.

Our faith and receptivity to Jesus’ action in our lives is a significant factor in whether he can work among us.  The disposition of the person the Lord encounters is a critical determining factor for the outcome of Jesus’ presence and action.  Now, none of us should leave here today wracked with shame or imagining that we are to blame when some miracle we wanted didn’t take place.  God always maintains sovereignty and the wisdom to give what is needed, no matter what we might wish He would do.  However, we should leave here today aware of the important relationship we are part of when it comes to whether we let God’s action have greater influence and outcomes in our life.  We need to train ourselves in trust of Jesus such that we seek to maintain a proper disposition and receptivity to God’s action.  Our faith and openness to God sets the stage for Him to do whatever He wills to do with us and in us.  I hope it doesn’t seem trite, but I think there is a helpful image to capture this mysterious relationship between God’s almighty power and our faith.  It’s an image that perhaps helps us understand the variables that seem to be present from disciple to disciple.  I don’t have props, so you’ll have to imagine a pitcher of water being poured constantly.  The pitcher is God and the water is an image of how He constantly gives forth His grace in generosity.  Now, imagine a cup, which represents the person.  When the cup is turned upright, it is in the best position to catch all that is being poured out.  But if you gradually start to turn the cup upside down it is less and less open to catch the water.  And, when upside down, the failure of the cup to have water is not at all because the pitcher has failed to pour forth.  That can serve to help us think about what variables we present to God who we trust generously gives His grace.  Are we like a cup turned upright?  In our lukewarmness and distraction with material things, do we start to turn ourselves away from Him as we perhaps let up on our prayer routine?  When we grow cold and distant or when there is grave sin, we have turned ourselves away from that posture that permits us the greatest openness to God’s life, love, and power.

 This Gospel invites us to recognize the important two-way relationship of the Lord’s grace and our receptivity that permits his action in us and among us.  We cannot so easily and frequently go to Nazareth, but in the Church we can go regularly to Jesus’ hometown, so to speak.  We come here to Holy Mass and we can accept the invitation to commit to time in the Lord’s “hometown” in our chapel where he waits to be adored.  There we come to look upon the ordinary-appearing Host, just like those in Nazareth looked upon the ordinary-appearing man whom they knew as a carpenter and the son of Mary.  At the same time, let’s not forget to let the Lord into our “hometown” too, figuratively, that is, into all the facts and the truth of our lives.  We should open ourselves to him in honest prayer, placing before him, and exposing to him all that seems right and all that seems wrong in us.  We do not keep from him the all-too-ordinary things of our lives, because we do not want to turn our cup upside down.  Rather, we open ourselves to him to await whatever he wants to do in us.

Corpus Christi

Sollemnitas Corpus Christi
2 June 2024

 I want to tie Corpus Christi with a simple lesson from the Garden of Eden.  God made man in His image and likeness.  Male and female He created them.  There is in this a sign of origin and ownership.  God does not treat man like an object, but there is an ownership in the sense that God is sovereign over His creation.  Man’s identity and meaning are found in this relationship to God.  Man is a physical being in that he is made from the dust of the earth and made with a body.  Yet, man is also a spiritual being in that the breath of life from God is breathed into man’s bodily nature.  There is within man a living principle that makes him different from mere dust.  Something about man is alive and makes him different than mere material creation.

 The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, the story of the Fall, is a story that, among other lessons, tells us that by pride and disobedience man attempts to do something with his body and with his being that is contrary to God’s plan and God’s sovereignty.  In eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Book of Genesis tells us that man was seeking to be like God.  In other words, man was seeking to not be subject to a higher authority over himself.  He was seeking to be that higher authority.  Man was seeking to claim ownership over his own being, over his body, and over the meaning of his existence, in a way contrary to God and contrary to the truth and order of creation.

The distance that sin creates between God and mankind must be healed so that we can be saved.  But, God does not abandon us in this sorry position of sin.  Just as God had provided all good things in the Garden and established man to walk with Him in harmony, God comes close, gives us those gifts needed to re-establish harmony, and does not leave us orphans.  His presence remains with us.  This presence of God with us is an extension of the fact that God has taken on human flesh that belongs to him.  He takes on this flesh in the incarnation to show us how to live in this body as stewards.  He takes on flesh in order to lay it down in humility, and in contrast to the pride and disobedience that is at the root of man’s destruction.

Pride and disobedience are raging still in our time, such that the month we have now begun (so-called “Pride” month) will be marked by blasphemous displays of grasping and replacing God’s authority with that of man alone.  It is the same pattern of arrogance that we see in the Garden when mankind grasped for those things that were forbidden in order to claim for himself a sovereignty and a control over creation and over himself.  This month stands as the microcosm of how serious Christians feel under daily assault year-round in a society that has adopted secular progressivism and atheism as its religion.  But just as in the Garden when God did not abandon Adam and Eve in their sin, we likewise do not give up hope and compassion for those who are deep in the many serious sins that come from pride and disobedience.  We know that at least some of these are people in our own families, among our friends and loved ones.  We ourselves are sinners.  But the Gospel is Good News!  We have something good to offer the world: we have the message of the Gospel by which we hear of our dignity in God’s image and likeness, and we have the hope of true human flourishing that can come about by conversion and the rejection of the anti-Christian notion that we are only slaves of our desires and feelings.  We are not defined by our feelings and desires.  No, we are defined by our belonging to God.  When we learn to live in accord with God’s ways we find the antidote to the destruction caused by pride and disobedience.

In the complicated landscape of our time, marked by so many struggles and sins that can ensnare us and our friends, we observe today that God has not abandoned us.  He has not left us orphans.  He is truly present with us.  In fact, he teaches us and reminds us that our whole being belongs to Him.  He makes Himself present to us in sacramental form by those words of humility, sacrifice, and obedience when he says: This is my Body.  In the course of the Eucharistic Procession for Corpus Christi we carry and walk with this presence of God, presenting to the world outside these walls the One who calls all men to strop grasping for a sinful authority that misuses the body and leaves us separated from God, but rather to take on the true Christian spirit that recognizes our defects and sins and calls out to God to strengthen us in the battle of conversion.  We ourselves need this grace, and we are called to be witnesses of this grace so that others may come to insert themselves in the drama of salvation and leave behind the false gospel of secular progressivism and atheism.

As we worship God who lowers Himself to be present in the humility of the Sacred Host and the Chalice, may we be nourished by this same presence so that we have the courage, compassion, and conviction to call to others to stop grasping in pride for distortions of human nature.  Mankind is in a particularly strong and raging battle these days over the meaning of the body due to a radical autonomy that seeks to replace God.  Today we renew our faith that the “This is my Body” spoken by Jesus and spoken still through his priests, makes him truly present, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, in the Holy Eucharist.  May our reverence for this Real Presence, our devotion to Holy Mass, our commitment to time in our Adoration Chapel, and our presentation of this gift to the world (through devotions like the Eucharistic Procession) bring about conversion to the goodness of God who has sovereignty over us and who does not abandon us in the darkness of pride and disobedience.

Solemnity of Pentecost

Dominica Pentecostes
19 May 2024

 The Church concludes the Holy Season of Easter today with this great solemnity of Pentecost.  Pentecost is the celebration of that day when, after having prayed for Christ’s promised gift, the Holy Spirit descended upon the early Church, with His gifts and power being poured out upon the Apostles and disciples.  Pentecost being the birth of the Church, the Church being vivified by the Holy Spirit, is such a beautiful feast that it was a natural choice when I was choosing the date to observe with you my 25th anniversary of ordination to the priesthood.

The Church sort of “hangs out” at John’s Gospel chapter 20 at both the beginning and the end of the Easter Season.  The earlier part of John 20 is the Gospel for Easter Sunday.  One week later, on the Second Sunday of Easter, we hear from later verses of John 20.  And today for the Mass of Pentecost Sunday, we hear almost the same Gospel as from the Second Sunday of Easter, John 20.  So, what might John chapter 20 do for us in communicating what the power of the gifts of the Holy Spirit does for the disciple?  From the Easter Sunday Gospel (John 20), we heard, “On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark”.  Upon noticing that the stone was rolled back from the tomb, and noting that the Lord’s body was missing, she ran.  We might reasonably conclude there was at least some fear in her reaction and her pace to get away from the empty tomb in the darkness of early morning and back to the apostles with the news.  In the later section of John 20, which we hear today, it is later on the day of the Resurrection, and we hear, “On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews.”  Again, John chapter 20 notes darkness, for it is evening, and it clearly mentions this time the fear that captivated the apostles and disciples.

I think the prominence of John 20 as Easter starts and again today at Pentecost, the conclusion of the Easter Season, makes us consider the prominence of darkness and fear in the lives of disciples.  Taking note of this darkness and fear on Pentecost, then, we have a cause for gratitude to God in that the gift of the Holy Spirit helps us confront how darkness and fear limit our vocation as disciples.  Perhaps we can admit that much of our lives can be marked by darkness and fear of various kinds and to various degrees.  Darkness is not only the literal dark of early morning or night, it can refer to a lack of illumination, a lack of inspiration that can overtake us in the life of faith.  Fear is not only that which might be a cause of serious risk to us, it can refer to a lack of hope, to being locked in our own “upper rooms” whereby we fail in trust of the power of the Lord, we are lacking in trust in his peace, lacking trust that he does commission us, and that he brings about life in us through the Holy Spirit, giving us the gifts we need to do what he asks.

But the Holy Spirit, promised and given to the Church, and to individual disciples is not a spirit of darkness and fear.  It is a spirit of glorification.  John chapter 7 is a passage where the Lord mentioned living water flowing from within believers.  John 7 clarifies that the Lord was speaking with that image of the Holy Spirit, and John 7 goes on to add, “There was, of course, no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (Jn. 7:39).  The Holy Spirit then is a spirit of glory, because It follows after the glorification of the Lord and brings the presence of the glorified Lord.  Time and time again in the life of discipleship we have to acknowledge that we are engaged in a battle as we seek to leave sin behind, to proclaim the joy of God’s Kingdom, and to advance by holiness toward that Kingdom in eternity.  Time and time again, we must learn and train ourselves to act contrary to the tendency to stay in darkness and fear.  For a disciple who seeks to live in accordance with the promised gifts of the Holy Spirit, received by us, we must reject the attitude of defeat that would keep us from fulfilling our mission as witnesses in this world.  We must reject the messages that come from darkness and fear that tell us to keep our gifts hidden under a bushel basket, locked in our upper room.  In contrast to darkness and fear, we are given light and peace by the risen Lord, gifts we are to share freely, for we are called to be the light of the world and the city set on a hill that cannot be hidden (cf. Mt. 5:14).  The spirit of the world will not welcome this from us, these gifts of light and peace and faith, as we see almost every time a prominent and serious Christian opens his mouth in public, but, like it or not, it is the gift we are charged by the Lord to give to the world.

I can think of so many times in my 25 years of priestly ministry where darkness and fear had their way.  At this point in life, I think I have enough evidence to suggest that disciples should probably expect to never be done learning the lesson of battling darkness and fear.  When I was first ordained, I had no idea how many things over these 25 years the Lord and his Holy Spirit would make possible, things I could not imagine due to darkness and fear.  When confronted with new challenges or new opportunities requiring much effort, I can think of many times when my first reaction was like the frightened apostles.  The message I might hear is that I can’t do it or I don’t have enough of what it takes to accomplish some work of the Lord.  I could never have known 25 years ago the many ways I would be pulled out of darkness or out of my own locked upper room, often kicking and screaming, to do what I did not think possible.  It’s a lesson I must still learn and put into practice.  The truth is, for us disciples, we can tend to focus on the work we think we are doing for the Lord, such that we lose sight that it is the Lord of the work who has primacy.  The error we make is to first think of our own strength, our own ideas, our own abilities.  But beyond our own strength, we have been given the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit is not in the game of limiting what God desires!

The Holy Spirit is given to us to confront the darkness and fear in our age of history.  I want to conclude by highlighting only three things the world needs from us disciples to confront the darkness and fear of our age.  We are given  after all the Spirit of glory.  First, to counter the spirit of darkness that is corrupting marriage and family life, the world needs disciples like you to show a consistent sacrificial love, the stability of commitment even and especially when things are tough, and the blessing of human life, made in God’s image and likeness, which echoes the goodness of God’s choice to take on our flesh in the Incarnation.  Second, to counter the spirit of darkness that is corrupting fatherhood and leadership, the world needs disciples in the priesthood who will teach the truth without cowardice and who will be sources of stability for the flock by standing resolute against the storms of secularity, and who will remind us of the primacy of God, by leading us in worship that places all of our focus on God and what He is owed.  Thirdly, to counter the spirit of darkness that is seen by so many divisions and polarity in society, the world needs the Church to be an authentic community fostering charity and unity in community life that mirrors the life of the Blessed Trinity. By doing these things and doing them together and according to our own proper vocations we honor the order of the world God has made and we present to the world the health of the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.  An attractive healthiness that draws others into the community.  We have been given a spirit of glory.  May we seek to promote the health and the mission of the Church by letting the Holy Spirit lead us out of darkness and fear.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Dominica in Pasqua VI
5 May 2024

 My Kindergarten teacher, Sister Mary Samuel, taught my class the Rosary.  When we small kids naturally started putting the rosary over our heads, Sister told us gently: “Now children, we don’t treat it like jewelry, or something just to wear.  We treat it respectfully as something we use for prayer.”  After Sister’s example and lesson, it was a man whose dedication to Mary and the Rosary most stands out to me and has impacted me greatly.  That man was my maternal grandfather, Jack Ryan.  At the end of his life, in and out of consciousness, he would become agitated when he could no longer keep a grip on his Rosary.  My family discovered that if they taped the Rosary to his hand he would remain more calm.  Not discounting the great example of so many faithful women, for me the Rosary has always been a masculine form of prayer and a manly thing to do, thanks to my grandpa.

The month of May is typically devoted to Mary, to motherhood, and to Marian devotions.  As we are in May and have the May Crowing today, I want to promote the Rosary as a prayer for each of you to foster in your personal spiritual practice, to promote it as a prayer that should have a place in your home life (and which I especially encourage you men to lead), and I want to encourage you to join in praying the Rosary before Masses and to also get involved by helping to lead it.

The Holy Rosary gradually took form in the second millennium of Christianity.  It has nourished countless saints and has been encouraged by the Church’s teaching authority.  While we consider it a Marian prayer, it is really focused on Christ and should be understood as a summary of the Gospels.  I can’t do justice to the Rosary’s development in a homily, but a few highlights stand out.  The practice of keeping count of prayers, which also has a place in Eastern religions, can be seen in the very disciplined life of desert monasticism in the 2nd-4th centuries, where little rocks or sticks would be used to keep track of one’s completed prayers throughout the day.  In the 6th century and beyond, as Western monasticism in the style of St. Benedict grew, monks would pray all 150 psalms from the Bible over the course of a week.  But some monks had to be involved in the realities of manual labor to keep a monastery running, chores, building, farming, livestock, harvest, and repairs.  Monks who couldn’t be in the church praying with the other monks would replace a psalm by praying an Our Father.  The monks doing labor, and eventually lay faithful too, wanted to participate in the prayer of monks at the church, and so this practice of replacing the psalms with other prayers came to develop more and more.  In the 12th century and beyond an incarnational spirituality was on the rise, with greater meditation on the wonder of God’s taking on human flesh.  Devotions to Jesus (God incarnate) and Mary (who gave God His flesh) were increasing, as an expression of this incarnational focus.  This is the same time that sees the development of one familiar example of incarnational spirituality: the invention of Nativity Scene by St. Francis of Assisi.  And at this same time, St. Dominic enters the history.  The traditional customary story is that Mary appeared to St. Dominic and gave him the Rosary, asking him to use it and to promote it.  We can’t certify that story, but we do know that St. Dominic preached about the use of the Rosary, and it continued to develop and to take shape as we know it today.  The Rosary is both vocal prayer (meaning, the repeated scripted prayers) and mental prayer (meaning, meditation on the mysteries).  You aren’t really praying the Rosary if you aren’t contemplating the mysteries.

St. Dominic used the Rosary as a spiritual weapon against one of the most distorting and pernicious heresies of all time, called the Albigensian heresy.  That heresy rejected the notion that God could have become human because it viewed humanity as evil, as a corrupted thing of this world, the domain of an evil god who controls the world and this life.  At that time, the world was latching onto the heretical notion that material things and flesh are only evil, that we are only spiritual beings trapped in a body, and our real salvation is escaping this body, discarding it and being free of it.  Meanwhile, the Church was holding onto the goodness of creation, made in God’s image and likeness – fallen and marked by sin, yes – but destined for resurrection in a glorified flesh and made for eternal union with God in Heaven.  No wonder an incarnational spirituality was on the rise as a response to such a heresy on the rise.

Heresies that hold distorted notions of the material world and the dignity of human flesh are the final point I want to make in my promotion of the Rosary today.  We sometimes uncritically think about history and we think that we live in such a developed time, and the ancient and medieval peoples were kind of quaint little figures with their bands of heretics running about and misleading peasant souls; so uninformed were they back then, not like us.  That is a grave mistake for us to think.  The Albigensian heresy, that the Rosary was such an effective weapon against, was itself a reworked version of an earlier heresy that took its own stab at denouncing the material world as ruled by an evil god and that claimed that matter and flesh are evil.  That same root heresy hasn’t gone away, even if individual proponents of it (like the Albigensians) have been eradicated.  Viewing human dignity, human flesh, and the material world as not worthy of God, as evil things that God would not associate with, as depraved and therefore only worth tossing away is a heresy that still exists.  This should sound suspiciously familiar to our ears.  Yes, the same heresy exists in our time, just taking on a different form, but promoting the same pernicious and distorted lie that leads people down a path of impoverished living, lack of authentic human fulfillment, and ultimately sin that runs the risk of eternal damnation.

In short, our time too suffers under movements and ideas that have a very low view of human dignity.  Moderns might not call human flesh “evil” or claim that it is the domain of an evil god.  That all sounds far too religious and antiquated.  We’ve gotten rid of all that.  Moderns are more sophisticated than all that.  The truth is, moderns just do the same things under a different guise.  In place of calling flesh “evil”, the modern version of the heresy views it as “meaningless”.  It does not see human flesh as having its innate dignity created by God and thereby being a privileged expression of spiritual reality.  But the authentic faith holds that the soul is not just something trapped in an evil body with the only solution being escape and leaving the body behind.  Rather, the human soul properly dwells united to human flesh, whereby the body expresses the spiritual reality of the soul.  For moderns who often uncritically adopt the same reworked heresy in the various ideologies of our time, human flesh does not have its own innate dignity and meaning.  It is rather, meaningless and therefore it is subject to whatever an individual possessing it may wish to do with it and to it.  Sure, we don’t have odd sounding words like Albigensians, but our version of the heresy goes by lingo that sounds so reasonable, words like “choice” (as in: My body, my choice).  Our version of the heresy goes by words like “trans” and “non-binary”, meaning that there is no stable meaning to the body.  It’s whatever the person wants it to be.  Or our version of the heresy, focuses on only one aspect of flesh, like the meaning of sexual love.  It makes that meaningless in and of itself, by promoting a self-fulfillment in whatever sexual expression the individual desires.  Alleged sexual “freedom” in promiscuity, in forms of entertainment and media, and in an ever-expanding LGBTQ trajectory is this heresy’s “gospel”.  “Love is love”, after all, right?  The lie of this heresy is that there is no defined meaning or purpose for sexual love.  It’s up to the individual and it’s all equal and of equal value for society.  In other words, this heresy would say there is nothing uniquely meaningful about God’s design of the complementarity of the sexes, about heterosexual love, nor its contribution to the stability and good of society.  That’s heresy.  It needs an authentic response from us who are believers.  In needs a response in our words, but also in our actions, the way we live in the flesh.  We need a weapon to carry with us into the battle where we in our time, like St. Dominic in his, are supposed to be witnesses to the truth, to the goodness of God, and to His love that calls us – body and soul – into resurrected life.  The Rosary is our weapon too.  And we need to use it.  Pray it daily.  Teach it to your children.  Do it as a family.  If you have 20 minutes in the car then you have time for a Rosary.  That could be daily since we all spend so much time in the car, right?  But pray it in more serene settings too.  Come early to pray it in public before Mass.  Praying it in families or in groups in the church carries an indulgence with it.  We celebrate in faith the Resurrection of Jesus in the flesh and the hope that gives us to have a restored body united to our soul in Heaven.  May the intercession of Mary and our devotion to the Rosary help us to hold the true faith: namely, that God has chosen to grant us contact with his divinity precisely through His incarnate bodily reality, thus making the physicality of our world not evil or meaningless, but a sacramental reality that helps us touch the divine even here and now in our daily living.

Audio: Sixth Sunday of Easter

Jesus washing his apostles feet, c 1870, Library of Congress catalog

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter by Fr. Stephen Hamilton.

Reading 1 Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48

Responsorial Psalm Ps 98:1, 2-3, 3-4

Reading 2 1 Jn 4:7-10

Alleluia Jn 14:23

Gospel Jn 15:9-17

Fourth Sunday of Easter

Dominica in Pasqua IV
21 April 2024

 The Gospel passage for this Sunday is familiar.  We hear the Lord declare that he is the Good Shepherd.  It is a tender image.  The Lord Jesus is not simply claiming to be a good shepherd in a superficial way, as if to use the image only to put a nice sentiment in the minds of disciples.  He is also making a contrast between himself and those who are bad shepherds, what the text refers to as a “hired man” and other translations call a “hireling” and even a “mercenary”.  There is an Old Testament precedent for this image of the good shepherd.  It is the strong rebuke of the shepherds of Israel, meaning the religious leaders, who have God’s Word launched against them by the Prophet Ezekiel, in Ezekiel chapter 34.

Ezekiel delivered these words of God because he was told to prophesy against the shepherds of Israel and what they had done to the sheep: “Woe to the shepherds of Israel who have been pasturing themselves!... You have fed off their milk, worn their wool, and slaughtered the fatlings, but the sheep you have not pastured.”  And further, Ezekiel says, “As I live, says the Lord God, because my sheep have been given over to pillage, and because my sheep have become food for every wild beast, for lack of a shepherd; because my shepherds did not look after my sheep, but pastured themselves…. I swear I am coming against these shepherds.  I will claim my sheep from them and put a stop to their shepherding…. I will save my sheep… I myself will pasture my sheep” (Ez. 34:1-16).  The Lord is more indirect in his words in the Gospel than was the prophet, but the tender image he uses of the good shepherd has behind it this very forceful language about the seriousness of shepherding God’s people rightly toward the sheepfold and the pasture of eternity.  It has behind it a serious indictment for shepherds who take up the responsiblity of shepherding, but use it as an opportunity to pasture themselves, that is, to make shepherding about caring for themselves and what they can gain.

With that Old Testament prophecy as a backdrop, let’s consider again the Gospel passage.  In this section of St. John’s Gospel, Jesus is in Jerusalem and the temple area.  He is in the place of religious significance for Jewish faith, the place of encounter with God in the temple, the place where the religious authorities operate in a most important way.  And in fact, I think we get a richer sense of the Good Shepherd imagery by noticing that just verses before today’s passage, backing up into the prior chapter, in John 9, we have an entire chapter where the Pharisees are exposed for opposing the miraculous healings worked by Jesus, where they appear to be like clowns running a kangaroo court as they investigate the healing of the man born blind.  You should check it out and read John 9 today to see what immediately precedes the Lord’s declaration that he is the Good Shepherd.  As the Pharisees refuse to accept that Jesus healed the man born blind and they even refuse to believe that the man born blind was indeed blind, they reject that Jesus is the one sent from God, despite the fact of his doing the works of God.  At the conclusion of John 9, Jesus says, “ ‘I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.’  Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not also blind, are we?’  Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains’.”  Did you catch what happened there and what was being revealed about the Pharisees, the religious leaders, the shepherds of Israel?  The Pharisees themselves sure caught it!  “You’re not saying we’re blind, are you?”  While they might see with the eye, the Lord is calling them spiritually blind.  Because they refuse to acknowledge their blindness they are caught in sin.  They are shepherds who are being rebuked.  And so, in this context and atmosphere, the Lord reveals that he is the Good Shepherd.  It is he who fulfills the words from Ezekiel.  He is God coming to claim His own sheep and to take them away from the bad shepherds who are only taking care of themselves.  In their own blindness and sin, the Pharisees are leaving the sheep neglected, scattered, and even subject to the pillage of wolves, meaning the destruction of the evil one, Satan.

Next in this passage, the Lord says, “I know mine and mine know me.”  These words here and other Gospel words about the one good shepherd, and the one entrance to the sheepfold, and the one gate by which the sheep go in and out, have a strong resonance with later words of the Lord: “I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6).  St. Peter, in the first reading, likewise speaking to the Jerusalem elders and leaders, the same ones indicted by Jesus in the Gospel, seems to be saying something similar: “There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved” (Acts 4:12).  The Good Shepherd says, “I know mine and mine know me.”  Surely, we can understand that the Good Shepherd’s knowing us the sheep, his relationship with us, his knowledge about us is complete, and firm, and strong, and lasting.  He is God and there is nothing lacking in his knowledge.  “I know mine.”  But what about the last part of that claim, “and mine know me”?  For that claim to be true, that requires something of us the sheep.  How do we remain firm in our knowing of Jesus, our Good Shepherd?  I suggest that a cornerstone for our knowledge of the Good Shepherd and for our advancing toward the pasturing that leads to eternal life is whether we accept and truly embrace that Jesus is the only way to salvation.  There is no other name, no other person, no other figure, no other power, no other claim, no other system of belief, no other system of worship, no other movement, no other thing that will save us!  If we don’t accept that and live by that, then we are not knowing the Good Shepherd for who he is for us.  And if we do not know him, then we are weakened in identifying his voice and in following him.  We gradually seek pasture elsewhere and we listen to other voices that are not his.  And that will not lead us to eternal life and salvation in the pastures of heaven.  In an age like ours that treats everything as equal and equivalent, an age that emphasizes “my own personal truth”, an age that parrots “tolerance” and “coexisting”, an age that promotes what is really a secular progressive religion that promises the “salvation” of a man-made utopia here on earth, in this atmosphere we can fall prey to the wolves that weaken our confidence and faith in Jesus as the Good Shepherd and the only way to salvation.  The only way to salvation is the Good News that God Himself desires us to be shepherded rightly into good pastures, and He Himself has come as the Good Shepherd to save us.  The Lord has to have that kind of primacy and priority in our lives.  He knows us.  But for us to know him, we need to place all our confidence and faith in him.  We need to identify and remove from ourselves other persons, ideas, or things that we might follow ahead of the Lord.  We should examine our conscience for those things we make explicitly more important than the Good Shepherd and his guidance.  But we also need to search ourselves and to be honest about naming those things that, perhaps unintentionally or accidentally, we give more allegiance to than we do to the Lord.   We have the opportunity to repent and to know our shepherd more deeply by listening to his voice and entrusting ourselves to the One who knows us intimately.  Our Good Shepherd makes the astounding claim of calling us into a relationship with him that mirrors the relationship of the very Blessed Trinity.  What he says should fill us with joy: “I know mine and mine know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father”.

Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday)

Dominica in Pasqua II
Divine Mercy Sunday
7 April 2024

 In my homily for the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday I suggested that our “Alleluia” returns in this season and is joyful precisely because, if we have used Lent well, when the “alleluia” is suppressed, then we have confronted the reality of our own sins and the sinfulness in mankind’s history.  This admission of our guilt can serve to make us more aware of what God has done for us in saving us.  And thus, it makes us more grateful and joyful in signing out “Alleluia” in this season of the resurrection.  Praise the Lord for his salvation in Jesus Christ!

At the root of mankind’s state and status is a pride that grasps for more and grasps to touch and to possess the place that properly belongs to God.  This is the lesson of Adam and Eve and their disobedience in grasping for the fruit of the tree that the serpent told them would make them like God (Gen. 3:5).  They desired the place and the knowledge and the power of the Godhead, and so they took the fruit of that tree and brought condemnation upon themselves and upon all of us who inherit that fallen nature, which is still inclined to sinfulness and unholy desires.

By Original Sin and our own personal sins we deserve condemnation.  We actually acknowledge that at the start of each Holy Mass when we call to mind our sins and ask God’s mercy, before we ascend the mountain, so to speak, of worship at Holy Mass.  When we call to mind our sins we are not merely calling to mind “struggles” or “mistakes” or “weaknesses” or some such vague language.  No, we are calling to mind our sinful choices and our guilt.  We are calling to mind that we deserve condemnation.  We call to mind everything that reflects sin in our lives.  Each one of us says, “I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done (the evil I have done) and in what I have failed to do (the good I have failed to do), through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”.

Yes, as we recall God’s mercy we have many reasons to be thankful and to be filled with joy as we say alleluia, because we are aware of those sins from which we have been saved.  The apostles and disciples, the first Christians, faced condemnation for their own sins and they faced a world locked in death, when they experienced the Good News of the empty tomb and the resurrection of Jesus.  They knew the Lord’s resurrection to be a great victory of joy and hope.  And they knew they were called to live that victory.  Thus, the second reading had St. John proclaiming that belief when it said, “the victory that conquers the world is our faith”.  The disciples went out into the midst of a world whose mentality and vision was still very much locked in human power and the hopelessness of condemnation.  As the first reading showed, the disciples went out into that world and they lived differently.  They had different teachings.  They had different practices.  They were of one heart and mind, and with power they bore witness to the resurrection.

Do you acknowledge the drama of salvation and God’s generous mercy in your life?  Are you aware of sin in your life such that you can live the joy of Christ’s victory for you?  Are you ready to be like the first disciples and to go into the midst of the world and live differently?  Do you know it to be your mission, too, to bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus and to proclaim that the victory that conquers the world is our faith?  We are supposed to render that kind of evangelical service to the world.  For though we have been redeemed by the death and resurrection of Jesus, the world is still ensnared by that mentality and vision of grasping and possessing the place, and the knowledge, and the power that belongs properly to God.  In so doing, those who adopt a worldly way of thinking and acting dismiss the free gift of salvation from God, so busy are they grasping things for themselves and by their own power.

Yes, the world is ensnared by the mentality and vision of its own false god.  Do you ever consider why so many of the gravest evils of human history, so many of the gravest sins, involve human flesh, both how it is made and its very existence?  It’s because sins against human life, sins against its dignity, and sins against how human flesh is made strikes at the very image of God, who has made human beings male and female and has made us in His image and likeness.  Murder, adultery, pornography, sexual immorality of all kinds, abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, transgender ideology… all these ensnare our world and our contemporaries and they create an atmosphere that threatens to ensnare us.  These sins are like a retelling of the Garden of Eden with the serpent enticing mankind against God, against His very image and likeness.  These sins keep the world and the worldly from acknowledging the victory of our faith.  These things keep souls locked in condemnation and need our witness and our joyful “alleluia”.  We are to be so grateful ourselves for the gift of God’s mercy that we are ready to live differently in the midst of the world, and to be like those first Christians who proclaimed in word and action the victory of the resurrection of Jesus Christ!