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.

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!

Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday

Easter Vigil & Sunday
30 & 31 March 2024

   At Easter we return to our familiar singing of “alleluia”.  That word originates from the Hebrew and means “Praise the Lord” or “God be praised.”  One of the distinctive liturgical features of Lent is that the alleluia has been suppressed these past many weeks.  We are accustomed to the alleluia before the Gospel, but we use a different Gospel acclamation throughout Lent.  In some religious communities and in some parishes there is the practice as Lent gets started of marking that suppression of the alleluia by taking a banner that reads “Alleluia” and burying it in the ground.  So, when today “Alleluia” rings out again in our churches and from Christian mouths, there is supposed to be great joy in such a happy proclamation.  So, why would we be so joyful in that acclamation?  Why would that acclamation now return and what has prepared us to have joy as we again proclaim “alleluia”?

In part, it is because we have first observed Lent where we have been deprived of that familiar word of praise of the Lord.  But, of course, it is deeper because our observation of Lent is about more than just the absence of “alleluia”.  Rather, it is about walking the journey and the opportunity of that holy season to take note of what reduces our joy, what stifles or limits our joy.  What stifles our joy is sin, and/or being a glutton about good things in our life such that we give those things more focus than we dedicate to the spiritual life.  They become actual idols.  In Lent, we pass through the desert of recognizing sin and seeking to dismiss it from our lives in order that we live in greater freedom as God’s sons and daughters.  And as we grow in fidelity to that work of uprooting sin and growing in holiness by the fostering of virtue, well, then, we experience greater joy in Christ.

Yes, our Christian Lenten practice of the absence of that word alleluia is geared to making us now more fond of proclaiming “Praise the Lord”!  When something is missing, when I don’t get to experience it or enjoy it over an absence, I am enabled to be more aware of the blessing of that thing when I can experience it again.  Of course, we mean only good things here.  For, we ought not enjoy bad things or sins, and we ought not return to them once we get rid of them.  That’s why a true Lenten sacrifice, something you give up as part of your Lent, is about giving up a good, a legitimate thing that you are able to enjoy, but which you voluntarily relinquish.  You do this to make more time for God, to fill the absence (of that thing you have given up) with greater attention to prayer, discipline, and work on the virtues.

What has the absence of “alleluia” taught us such that we return to its use today?  By our working to uproot sin, by our willing sacrifice of good things in our life, by our struggles, by our weakness in our resolve, by having to recognize how inconsistent I can be at spiritual work and doing something for God, by all this we enter into a time of desert wandering.  We mark salvation history in our own living.  Like God’s people in Egypt we have to confront by the absence of our alleluia that we are very much trapped in sinful patterns and that our “egypts” – our sins – have quite a hold on us.  We are attached to slavery in Egypt and we need a savior.

If we have first done this self-reflective work in Lent.  If we have recognized the ways in which we need the Lord to save us, and if we take stock of just how desperate we are in our sinfulness, then we have noticed in the dryness of the missing “alleluia” that we have been given much by the Lord Jesus who has worked such marvels for us.  We likely do not take anywhere near enough stock that by our sins we deserve condemnation.  We are helpless and hopeless.  We would have no cause to dare think, much less say, Alleluia, were it not for the Lord!  That, friends, is what Christians actually believe about the seriousness of sin and the seriousness of the offer of salvation in God’s generous love.  In the dryness of Lent’s missing alleluia we have the opportunity to confront our Egypt and to learn to let it go.  We have the opportunity to pass through the desert, to follow – and yes, to wander (hopefully not for 40 years!) – where the Lord leads trusting that the slowness of our hoped-for growth in holiness is not due to anything lacking from Jesus, but from our own resolve.  And so, time and time again, we must be trained in the absence of our acclaiming “Praise the Lord” of just why we have such cause to praise him!  Missing the alleluia these many weeks, if we become convinced of our need for salvation, our need for Jesus, then our “Alleluia” returns now with deep joy!

In the absence of praise these long weeks, hopefully we return to that familiar acclamation with renewed gratitude for how salvation history has worked in us, how it is working, and how – by God’s continued generous love – it will continue to work into our future.  We praise the Lord now for God the Son has come to save us.  We praise the Lord now for God’s Kingdom has been inaugurated and we are called to inherit it.  We praise the Lord now because by baptism and faith and continued striving, salvation history is not only a story of the past but is very much here and now working in you and in me.  Our sins take us to the grave and eternal death.  But the Lord Jesus has gone there on our behalf.  The voracious appetite of death once greedily took his flesh.  But in so doing death got a surprise in that it swallowed up a power greater than itself: God almighty.  Jesus has tangled with death and left it ruined.  And by rising from the dead the Lord has opened the path for all who believe and who conform their lives to him.  Taking note of all of this divine work as a deeply personal history for me and for you, and not just a story from the past, we can say once again, “alleluia!”  Praise the Lord!

Audio: Holy Saturday At the Easter Vigil in the Holy Night of Easter

Audio: Holy Saturday At the Easter Vigil in the Holy Night of Easter

Homily for Holy Saturday At the Easter Vigil in the Holy Night of Easter by Fr. Stephen Hamilton.

Reading I Gn 1:1—2:2

Responsorial Psalm Ps 104:1-2, 5-6, 10, 12, 13-14, 24, 35

Reading II Gn 22:1-18

Responsorial Psalm Ps 16:5, 8, 9-10, 11

Reading III Ex 14:15—15:1

Responsorial Psalm Ex 15:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 17-18

Reading IV Is 54:5-14

Responsorial PsalmPs 30:2, 4, 5-6, 11-12, 13   

Reading VIs 55:1-11

Responsorial Psalm Is 12:2-3, 4, 5-6

Reading VI Bar 3:9-15, 32--4:4

Responsorial Psalm Ps 19:8, 9, 10, 11 

Reading VII Ez 36:16-17a, 18-28

Responsorial Psalm Ps 42:3, 5; 43:3, 4

Epistle Rom 6:3-11

Responsorial Psalm Ps 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23

Gospel Mark 16:1-7

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Holy Thursday

Holy Thursday 2024
28 March 2024

Ex. 12:1-8, 11-14; 1 Cor. 11:23-26; Jn. 13:1-15

  The season of Lent has now ended and the Sacred Pascal Triduum has begun with the start of this Mass.  The Gospel selection for this Holy Mass is taken from St. John’s unique account of the Last Supper, at which the Lord Jesus gives an extended Farewell Discourse.  Throughout that discourse it is clear that the apostles did not understand the full import of the Lord’s words, nor what he was doing.  We heard evidence of this in the passage where Jesus responds to Peter’s question by indicating “What I am doing you do not know now, but afterwards you will understand” (Jn. 13:7).  Later on in this passage we hear other words from Jesus, “Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward” (Jn. 13:36).  Still later in St. John’s final discourse, Thomas asks, “Lord, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” (Jn. 14:5).  A final example of the lack of understanding on that first Holy Thursday evening: Philip says to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and we shall be satisfied” (Jn. 14:8).  The Lord responds, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip?” (Jn. 14:9).  Yes, throughout the Farewell Discourse is a contrast between the misunderstanding of the disciples in that present moment and a future time when they will understand what Jesus is saying and doing.

 The twofold sacramental significance of the Last Supper is that the Lord was establishing the apostles as his first priests and, at the same time, entrusting to them the duty to guard the Holy Eucharist, and giving them the sacred power to make that gift present in his Church for future generations.  The Lord was giving this charge to apostles whom he knew to be misunderstanding the significance of what he was doing for them, in them, and through them for the whole Church and the salvation of the world.  Knowledge of their misunderstanding apparently did not phase the Lord, for it did not stop him from doing what we celebrate this evening.  The future understanding would come as a gift of the promised Holy Spirit, sent from God and taking up dwelling in His Church.  For me, looking back over 25 years of ordained priesthood, I can sort of chuckle about these misunderstandings in the Gospel.  I chuckle because I am really chuckling about my own misunderstandings about what the Lord was doing the day I was ordained and given a share in that apostolic charge to guard the Holy Eucharist and to make it for the Church.  To be clear, that comment is not a claim that I have reached a moment of utmost clarity about the Lord’s workings.  No.  Rather, it is simply a comparative observation that the priest today can notice how much was misunderstood by the priest 25 years ago.  And I assume I will be able to say that in 25 more years should God grant me those years.  Indeed, the Gospel plays out again… In time and with growth we come to understand more of what the Lord does for us and in us.  The Holy Spirit helps us marvel at those gifts and helps us have a deeper understanding of these mysteries.

 But to have our misunderstandings clarified and to appreciate what the Lord does for us we have to get to know him and we have to let him do his work in us.  That means we must use our freedom to cooperate with him, to make ourselves available to him, and to beg the Holy Spirit to enlighten our minds.  Peter hesitated about letting the Lord wash his feet, and even said, “You will never wash my feet.”  The Lord’s response taught Peter a distinction between bathing and washing (as we heard in the use of language in the passage).  We might consider that an image that serves as a distinction between baptism and confession.  For when Peter thought he might need more of himself bathed, Jesus said, “Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over.”  Bathing makes one clean.  An image of the bathing of baptism.  Yet, even the one who is clean needs his feet washed from the daily dust of life’s journey.  An image of the washing of confession.

 Let’s stick with that initial protest of Peter: “You will never wash my feet.”  Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”  In this spiritual interpretation of that exchange, we can understand that as the need to be washed in confession and restored there to our baptismal dignity.  Peter was apparently bathed.  He had no need to have more of himself bathed.  According to the Lord, he needed only his feet washed.  It is a model for us in our need to be healed, restored to baptismal dignity, and washed of the daily “dust”, the daily struggles, the daily sins.

 We the baptized have been bathed in the waters that make us clean all over.  Yet, like the apostles, we have misunderstandings.  We can suffer from hardened hearts.  We can refuse the Lord.  Our sins risk our inheritance with him.  As we pray this evening that the grace of the priesthood will be given to sons in your families, to sons of this parish, we know that our own misunderstandings cannot be relieved if we are not healed in confession.  We will be open to the Holy Spirit’s illumination to lift our misunderstandings and to heal our sins if we build our Eucharistic devotion, our devotion to this great gift given on this holy night.  Our resistance to prayer where that comes up in the busyness of our lives, resistance to uprooting sin, our resistance to coming to adoration in our chapel are ways we say to the Lord, “You will never wash my feet.”  We learn from the Gospel this evening, through the slowness and misunderstandings of those first priests, we learn of the ongoing need after being bathed in baptism, to encounter the Lord time and time again.  In the adoration of Holy Mass and worthy reception of Holy Communion, and in responding to the opportunity of adoration in our chapel, we go there to reveal our vulnerabilities and misunderstandings to the Lord.  He enlightens us and heals us.  He sends forth the Holy Spirit to transform us in any age and stage of our life.  By giving us his very self in the Holy Eucharist, through the hands of priests, the Lord holds out before us that inheritance that is the great hope of those who follow where he is going.

               

Third Sunday of Lent

Dominica III in Quadragesima B
3 March 2024

 We learn from our Lord in the Gospel about the dignity and value of the temple, the house of God.  It is sacred and holy, which refers to “being set apart”.  That which is not set apart, that which is common, that which is mixed with ordinary things is profane.  The temple, the house of God, is not to be profaned by making it just another place that is not set apart for God.  We learn that the profane is not to intrude into the sacred.

As we learn that the temple, the house of God’s dwelling, is set apart, we also learn something quite important, that the temple is not merely a place of stone.  It is, rather, the Body of Jesus.  And further, we learn from St. Paul elsewhere in the Scriptures that by faith and the consecration of baptism, Christians are removed from the merely profane and are set apart, made holy, made temples of the Holy Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 3:16-17; 12:27).  With a biblical outlook we are to have zeal for the Church, zeal for the temple of the Lord’s Body, and to have zeal for the temple that our bodies have become.  It doesn’t take any effort to let ourselves exist in the profane.  No, that happens daily and easily.  It takes effort to have zeal to recognize the holiness of the temple we have become and to live accordingly. Furthermore, it takes effort to transform the way we live in the profane so that something of the holy, something of God, is brought into our daily activities outside of these sacred walls.  After all, when we gather here and are nourished by God’s Word, and the grace of the Holy Eucharist, and fortified with common prayer, we are then sent out at the end of each Mass, sent out to be on mission in the world to make more disciples.

The first reading gave us the Scriptural listing of the Ten Commandments.  The Ten Commandments establish relationship with God.  They establish what it means to be set apart as belonging to God.  They are the markers of leaving aside the profane and being holy.  We should consider the setting of the first reading: It is the Exodus.  God’s people have been set free from slavery.  They are on their way to freedom and the Promised Land.  We are fairly familiar with the biblical story of God desiring to set His people free from Egypt.  But sometimes we don’t consider the finer point of what they were being set free for… When Moses told Pharaoh of God’s instruction to let His people go, Moses informed Pharaoh that they must be set free to go out to meet God in the desert to serve Him, which is biblical language for “to worship Him” (cf. Ex. 7:16; 8:1; 9:13), that was why, not only the Hebrew people, but all their flocks too, had to make the journey, so that they would have animals available for sacrifice in worship of God.  The story of the Exodus and being set free, is a story of being set free for that proper relationship with God that is marked by worship.  In the account of the Ten Commandments, the people are gathered at Mt. Sinai.  There they receive the Ten Commandments.  It’s worth reflection that in giving the Ten Commandments, God is doing something almost like giving building materials for building a temple, a place of worship.  Except, foreshadowing the lesson of the temple-in-the-flesh from today’s Gospel, God is not giving literal brick and mortar.  Rather, he is giving those structures that will set the people apart from the profane to be temples.  He is giving those structures that are “moral” brick and mortar, that establish proper relationship with Him and that make His people living temples.

Contrary to the structure created by the Commandments, there is an attitude in our time that proposes that freedom is radical autonomy, that freedom means there are no limitations on our desires and choices, no obligations to which we must be obedient.  This wrong idea can infect our attitude toward the Commandments and moral teaching, if we aren’t careful.  It’s a popular idea one encounters everywhere.  I was at a hearing recently at the Oklahoma State Department of Education and one citizen stood up to speak in public comments and said quite plainly that there is no such thing as objective good or evil, that there is no such thing as objective truth, or beauty, or goodness.  Such things are only individual opinions or personal tastes, the person said.  This false idea in our time is an extreme notion that rejects boundaries and limitations if they are not things we ourselves choose.  This attitude is present in the ideology of choice and the pro-abortion agenda that rationalizes the killing of unborn children.  This attitude is present in the lose sexual moralities (whether hetero or homo) proposing that the only consideration in sexual ethics is what makes the self feel good.  Despite the harm of sexual acting out before marriage, and sexual perversions, this wrong attitude says it is only a person’s intention that is the measure of morality.  That is, that all desires and actions are equal so long as the person doesn’t mean harm and, after all, the individual desires are how “love” is defined anymore.  It’s why we end up with senseless slogans like “love is love”.  To the modern mind infected by secularity, there are no boundaries.  And that’s just not reality.  And so, we end up with the rejection of observable physical reality, like the body and the binary reality of male and female.  Though less salacious, this attitude is frankly also present in the way the duty of Sunday worship can be dismissed and treated as if it is only a minor sin to skip the worship of God at Holy Mass.  The rejection of the obligation of proper worship is a rejection of the boundaries that God has placed on time, on our week, and it is a choice to remain profane and enslaved, by being apart from God, not fully alive as temples, as living stones.

The Lord demonstrated zeal for the temple.  He was clearly angry at what he saw going on in the temple, after all he took time to make a whip in order to drive out the moneychangers.  (That makes the Lord’s angry reaction a pre-meditated act, not an abrupt outburst.)  Some scholars suggest that he was mad that money changers were cheating people with bad exchange rates.  Others suggest that the Lord was mad that there were even moneychangers at all.  But the fact is that we don’t know that, the biblical text doesn’t say.  What we do know is what the text plainly says when Jesus turns over the tables.  He says “stop making my Father’s house a marketplace”.  Stop making it a place of trade.  What we know is that the Lord was angry that this activity was taking up space in the place that had been set aside to be holy.  It was profaning and taking up space that should have been kept apart so that people would have room to come inside the temple, to pray, and to worship.  The Lord was angry that something set apart to be sacred was being profaned.  And, we can’t forget the deeper and more important lesson for our life as consecrated, anointed disciples: the body has been made a temple and we can’t lack in our zeal to keep it holy and to avoid profaning it by being complacent about sin.

The Ten Commandments are like moral brick and mortar for our temples, the temples of our bodies.  The Ten Commandments are the boundaries that God gives so that we have proper relationship with Him and truly belong to Him.  The Ten Commandments are the foundation by which we, the baptized, truly become living stones in the temple of Jesus’ Body, of which he was speaking in the Gospel.  In this holy season we have a privileged opportunity to recognize just how run down by daily living we can become such that we lack zeal for the Father’s house.  We have the opportunity in Lent to correct course, to turn over the tables of complacency and to chase out the moneychangers of our busyness and work, and all the things that get more attention from us than we give to the good of our souls.  By the cleansing of confession, or by preparation for baptism for those in RCIA, we are given grace to become more truly what we were made to be: namely, living stones in the temple of God, members of the Body of Christ, and temples of the Holy Spirit.

First Sunday of Lent

Dominica I in Quadragesima B
18 February 2024

ACA Commitment Weekend

 The journey of Jesus into the desert always fills our hearts and minds with a vivid image to begin the Lenten season. Like our Lord, we journey with resolve to be strengthened, knowing we too will be tempted. No doubt, you have chosen something from which to fast during this season, some sacrifice, and you hope that your efforts will not only prepare you for a greater celebration of Easter, but that they will also make you a better husband or wife, a better father or mother, brother, sister, and friend. In short, you hope to be more united to Christ: to renew that Christian identity bestowed upon you at Baptism, and to be a better disciple.  We must constantly repent, renew, and be reformed.

Or, in the case of the catechumens in RCIA preparing for Baptism at the Easter Vigil, you prepare yourself to be baptized and confirmed: at once united to Christ and strengthened to be his witnesses in the world. Today, we celebrate and pray for all Catechumens and Candidates in RCIA preparing to receive these sacraments this Easter as they gather at the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine this afternoon to celebrate the Rite of Election that is, to be chosen for the Easter Sacraments by Archbishop Coakley.

Yes, we begin this season with all our fervor in participating in “the yearly observances of holy Lent,” as we prayed in the Collect at the start of Holy Mass, but a question must arise in our hearts.  That question is, “Am I being ‘driven by the Spirit?”

It’s a detail that is sometimes overlooked in the Gospel, but this year as we read the brief account given by St. Mark, there’s no opportunity for dramatic demonic dialogues to overshadow the surprising fact that Jesus does not simply choose to go to the desert. Rather, we are told, he is driven into the desert by the Holy Spirit! The Gospel said, “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, and he remained in the desert for forty days.” (Mk 1:12)

At the beginning of Lent, am I being “driven by the Spirit”, like Jesus was driven into the desert? Am I taking on Lenten observances inspired by the Holy Spirit?  Was the Holy Spirit part of how I came up with my serious Lenten observances and sacrifices?  In other words, did I even pray, “Lord, what do you want from me this Lent”?  Am I desiring what Jesus desired—to follow God’s will for my life, led by the Spirit—while I face the “wild beasts” and “temptations” that fill the desert of my life?

If we want to be driven by the Spirit, we must first desire to live in the Spirit. Life in the Spirit, referenced by St. Peter in the second reading, is life in the Risen Lord, the fulfillment of the sign of God’s eternal covenant with us, prefigured by the sign of the bow in the clouds which God gives to Noah.  The covenant with Noah is fulfilled in Jesus.  His flesh is put to death by being “drowned” we might say, immersed in the “flood” of bitter suffering and crucifixion for our salvation.  But, the wood of that Cross serves as we might also say, as the ark, the instrument through which his passage lands on “the shores” of the Resurrection. Never again, we heard in that first reading, will the Lord God permit a flood to destroy all mortal beings.  And so, passing safely through the threatening “waters” of the temptations of this life is now accomplished for believers in baptism.  As we heard in the second reading, “This prefigured baptism, which saves you now.”  To live in the Spirit, then, means to keep this covenant, and to follow God’s ways.

The covenant cannot be kept alone, however. We must live in the Spirit as the Body of Christ, the Church! The Church connects us to Christ because the Church is the Body of Christ, by which we are joined to Christ our Head, we the members.  The Church gives us the support we need to keep the covenant, and allows his Spirit to move in and through us. But the Church, the Body of Christ, cannot support those seeking to live in the Spirit if we don’t support the Church, if we aren’t living members of the same. We all must do our part to build up the Body of Christ, the Church, ministering to her as the angels ministered to Christ.

As we journey through this Lenten season, may the wilderness within us become a sacred space for transformation. Let the love of God guide us, the teachings of the Lord direct us, and the baptismal waters renew us.