Homily: Wednesday, 12th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Gen 15:1-12,17-18; Ps 105; Mt 7:15-20

A few years ago, a prison administrator told me about an inmate who had been incarcerated for nearly 40 years. He had been through many parole hearings but had always been refused parole. And then, quite suddenly, the parole board gave him his freedom. But on the morning of his release, when they went to his cell, he acted as if it were no different from any other day. In fact, he acted as if he didn’t intend to leave, and resisted doing so for almost an hour.

“Don’t you understand?” they asked him, “You’re a free man.” But he just stared at the door to his cell as if he couldn’t figure out why it was open. Finally he said quietly, “One of the guys said I didn’t have to leave if I didn’t want to.” One of the guys…there are false prophets everywhere, aren’t there?

And for many of us, just like that inmate, life’s routines become life itself. We are so caught up in the routine of our lives that we miss the truly important. He’d been imprisoned so long that the routine had become his life. He no longer even thought of freedom, of our human vocation to be free men and women. So caught up in that routine, he’d long ago lost sight of everything else. Of course, the ultimate vocation for all of humanity is salvation, eternal life, the reason we were created in the first place.

In the Gospel passage we just heard from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns us about false prophets, telling us we can recognize them by their fruits. How easy it is just to listen to the words of the false prophet, all the while ignoring what those words yield. Yes, false prophets abound, but fortunately we have the example of others, of those who yield good fruit.

St. Thomas More

Today we are triply blessed, a saintly triple-header in which we celebrate the feasts of three saintly men whose lives bore especially good fruit. Two of them – St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher – were executed by King Henry VIII with weeks of each other because they refused to accept the king’s temporal authority over Christ’s universal Church. I can think of no saints more relevant to our own times. Indeed, Pope John Paul II named Thomas More the patron saint of political leaders.

A modern politician would do well to emulate these two 16th-century martyrs, for each was both wise and virtuous. In wisdom each applied his intelligence toward the accomplishment of what was good, and in virtue each habitually chose the good, regardless of the consequences. This, of course, demands courage, the sort of personal courage rare among politicians of any time and place, but increasingly rare today.

Pilate: "What is truth?"

How sad that we live in a world where true wisdom and true virtue are more often ridiculed than praised. For too many, cleverness has supplanted wisdom and pragmatism has replaced virtue, and the intoxicating and corrupting influence of power becomes oh so apparent. Too many see no difference between good and bad fruit because they no longer recognize virtue, they no longer discriminate between good and evil. Relativism has replaced truth, and like Pontius Pilate they can look into the eyes of their God and sneer, “What is truth?” [Jn 18:38] Poor Pilate, the first-century relativist, never suspected (or did he?) that he was standing in the presence of Truth Himself: "I am the Way and the Truth and the Life" [Jn 14:6]

Like Pilate, some trees are deceivingly and splendidly arrayed, but have no fruit…while others bear only bad fruit, because they have chosen their own will over God’s will. Thomas More and John Fisher chose wisely and virtuously; and willingly gave their lives as a consequence.

St. Paulinus, Bishop of Nola

The other saint whose feast day we celebrate today is St. Paulinus, a fourth-century bishop who had a deep love for the  poor, whom he took pains to feed during the difficult times in which he lived. I’ve always had a particular fondness for him and consider him the patron of soup kitchens, for his love for the poor yielded bushels and bushels of good fruit.

These, brothers and sisters, are the true prophets, the ones we should emulate. All too often we listen to the others, the ones who speak well but yield nothing.

Let me conclude by quoting the patron of our parish, St. Vincent de Paul, who while preaching to his community warned them not to become those wolves in sheep‘s clothing that Jesus warned us about. In St. Vincent’s words…

“They pride themselves on their inflated imaginations. They are satisfied with the sweet exchanges they have with God in prayer; they even talk about it like angels. But when they come away is there any question of working for God, of suffering, practicing mortification, teaching the poor, searching for the lost sheep, being pleased when they lack something, accepting sickness or some other misfortune?”

How did St. John put it? “Let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth.”

Brothers and sisters, we should not let others deceive us with their empty words and false speech; nor should we deceive ourselves. Our task is really quite simple and consists only in doing the Father’s will.