Homily: Tuesday within the Octave of Easter

Readings: Acts 2:36-41; Ps 33; Jn 20:11-18

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Our Gospel passage from John is among my favorites, but today it has risen to a new level of importance for me. Let's just revisit it.

Overwhelmed by grief, Mary Magdalene made her way to the tomb. And we understand it, for she had lost her Jesus, He who had saved her. In a very real sense, Jesus, who had expelled her demons, had brought her back to life, raising her to new life. But now He was dead.

She couldn’t deny it. She had seen Him breathe His last. She’d followed as they carried His lifeless body to the tomb. Yes, indeed, her Jesus was dead. She had come there that morning to anoint His body, something she couldn’t do on the Passover Sabbath. But now in the early morning of the third day, she found the tomb empty. Adding to her grief, then, was confusion. Who could have taken Him? It was all too much for her, and she wept, seeing but not yet understanding.

Don’t you just love Mary Magdalene? It’s hard not to. She’s just so very human. She proves that as God leads us to holiness, He doesn’t let holiness overwhelm our humanity. How easy it is for Mary, and for you and me, to miss the Lord when our focus is elsewhere. Yes, Mary is looking for a dead Jesus, not a risen, living Jesus. We witness this even in her dialog with the angels. Did she recognize the angels in the tomb as angels? I don’t think so. She knew only that neither one was Jesus. 

Sitting there in the tomb of the risen Jesus, probably with smiles on their faces, they asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” What a question! Who are these men? “Someone’s taken my Lord. Where have they put Him?” So, she turned around, and there was Jesus, right in front of her. But she thought He was the gardener. 

I’ve always liked that. After all, God’s relationship with humanity began in a garden, a garden He created for our first parents. Yes, our God has always been a kind of gardener, providing us with everything we need for eternal life. Mary, then, wasn’t far off, was she? For what is a gardener, but one devoted to bringing forth new life from the ground.

And yet, to mistake the risen Jesus for a gardener? He must have looked so very ordinary in His humanity, and yet so very different that she could not recognize Him. Jesus, the Gardener, repeated the angels' question, didn’t He? “Woman, why are you weeping?” and followed it with another “Whom are you looking for?” Still clueless, Mary almost accused the would-be gardener of taking Jesus.

But it took only one word from our Lord. He called her by name, and at once she recognized him. I suspect that with this very personal revelation of the Resurrection, Mary instantly understood it all, as if the pieces of a puzzle suddenly flew together, forming a perfect. clear picture. She now grasped it all -- everything He had done, every look, every Word, every gesture -- and she knew the truth: Jesus lives! And like Peter, she now knew that He is "the Christ, the Son of the Living God" [Mt 16:16]. And it is to Peter and the brothers that she would take this wondrous news. She had seen the Lord!

And that’s all well and good, but how about us? We, too, believe it, but do we really live it?

I was writing this homily on Good Friday morning because I knew I‘d have a busy weekend, with little time for homily writing. But I put it aside, half-written, to get ready for the 3 pm service. Later, as I drove to church, I went through the Lynnhaven gate and turned onto Rainey Trail. That's when I saw him.

He was young, in his 20s. He had a scraggly beard and wore perhaps the shabbiest clothes I’d ever seen in The Villages. Filthy sweatpants with big holes in them, a well-stained, torn sweatshirt, sneakers falling apart. He was a mess. And he had just fallen down on the other side of Rainey Trail - half in the street and half on the grass. 

I stopped the car, lowered the window, and asked if he were OK. He just said, “No. I hurt. Can you take me to the store up on 301?” 

So, I called him over. He got to his feet, limped across the road, and climbed into the passenger seat. He smelled about the way he looked, but it wasn’t that bad. I’ve smelled worse.

I asked him his name and he responded with all three: first, middle, and last.

I asked if wanted me to call 911 or drive him to the fire station. “They can help you there.”

"No," he said, "just take me to the store."

"Are you sure?" 

"Yes, that's all I want."

So, I drove off to the convenience store-gas station, only a mile away.

"Are you from the area," I asked.

"Yes."

"Do you have family here?"

Again, "Yes."

Not sure what to say, I just told him, "Today's Good Friday, you know." He said nothing. And so, I added, “It’s a special day. Reminds us of how much God loves us.” 

He just said, “That’s good.”

I asked if he needed a few bucks. No response. Then I realized I had no cash on me, only a debit card. So, I told him. He didn’t seem to mind.

By now we were at the convenience store. As I pulled into a parking place, I just said, “Call your family."  

"OK.” With that he got out of the car, said, “Thanks,” and limped into the store.

Minutes later, as I pulled into the church's parking lot, Mary and the Gardener forced their way into my thoughts. I don't believe in coincidence, never have. God works in our lives in the simplest and the most marvelous ways. And so, I was led to wonder: 

With whom did I just spend those few minutes? 

That's when I recalled Jesus’ words: 

“Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” [Mt 25:20]

And it hit me...hard. I hadn't done very much, had I?

Brothers and sisters, it's not enough just to know about Jesus,

We have to know Him, know Him personally.

We have to meet Him, to meet Him and see Him in everyone we encounter.

And then we have to love Him.

Bible Study Reflection #21: Do Angels Laugh?

 “For he will give his angels charge of you to guard you in all your ways” [Ps 91:11]

I’ll begin with a story, a true story about an event that happened almost 40 years ago.

For 25 years Diane and I and our four children lived on Cape Cod in a large 200-year-old house. Late one December 23^rd an ember made its way through a crack in the masonry of our old fieldstone fireplace and set the wooden wall between garage and family room on fire. Fortunately, the smoke alarm awakened Diane (who then shook me awake) and we were able get all the children outside. Well, almost all the children.

Diane sent the youngest, our two boys, along with the dog, out the main front door. Our younger daughter, Siobhan, was on a sleep-over at a friend’s house, but Erin, our eldest, was asleep in her room at the other end of the house. Diane awakened her and told her to go downstairs and out the other front door. (It was a rambling old house with four stairways, two front entrances, and another four or five outside doorways.) I had been in the kitchen calling the fire department when Diane found me. The two us then joined the boys who were trying to stay warm in our car parked in the driveway.

Moments later Erin arrived and asked if one of us had laughed at her when she almost fell off the porch. Of course, none of us had laughed because we were already outside. No one else was in the house.

We were having work done on that old porch and the steps had been removed, the reason why Erin almost fell. The outside door was also being worked on, and to keep it closed that evening we had put a screwdriver through the bolt lock at the top of the door. Suddenly recalling the screwdriver wedged tightly in the bolt, we asked Erin, who was about 12, how she had opened the door since she probably couldn’t reach the screwdriver. She knew nothing about a screwdriver and said the door opened easily. But forgetting that the steps were gone she almost fell off the porch. That’s when someone behind her laughed aloud. The next day I found the screwdriver in the center of a coffee table about 10 feet from the door.

Oh, yes, a fire engine happened to be just two blocks away on a false alarm at a local B&B and arrived at our home within minutes. We lost the garage – an old, dirt-floor one-car affair built back in the 1920s that we used for storage – but they saved our wonderful old home. We had a thankful, if a bit smokey, Christmas.

Do angels laugh? Oh, yes, they certainly do. And why not? After all, they spend eternity looking after the most laughable of all God’s creatures. I suspect the work of guarding and guiding us yields many laughable moments, which they occasional share with those they protect. Erin grew up, earned undergraduate and graduate degrees, taught Navajo children at a New Mexico mission school, taught inner-city children in San Bernardino, then married and now has five children of her own. She was protected for a reason.

Do you believe in angels? I hope so because they are marvelous creatures. But far too many Christians never even think of them. Some years ago, I attended a seminar conducted by a highly respected scriptural scholar. It soon became apparent he didn’t accept the miraculous, the existence of angels, or any manifestation of the supernatural found in Sacred Scripture. He attributed all of these scriptural references to over-zealous piety among Jews and early Christians. Exasperated, I finally raised my hand and asked him what he did believe in?

“Do you believe in the Trinity, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, in the Resurrection, in Christ’s Eucharistic Presence?”

He laughed and replied, “Of course.” And then proceeded to cast doubt on each. In humility, and infected perhaps with a touch of cowardice, I just shut up. But how sad for him, that the object of his life’s work had become essentially meaningless. After all, if he rejects so much of Sacred Scripture, believing it to be false, in what part of Scripture can he believe? Where does he draw the line between that which he accepts and rejects?

As for me? I’ve witnessed hundreds of miracles in the lives of so many people, including my own, that I am certain of the miraculous. And angels? Well, I’ve had encounters that remove all doubts.

But like our scholar, so many today, even many who claim to be believers, seem to think that God doesn’t (or can’t) act in the world. That a Christian could believe this is strange indeed, since the Incarnation, a central belief of Christianity, is God’s ultimate act. Through the Incarnation God enters the world in the person of Jesus Christ, the Lord of History, the Creative Word of God.

Sacred Scripture also shows that God uses others to carry out His eternal plan. Not surprisingly, when God calls on men and women, their sinfulness often gets in the way and He must exercise His power to ensure His will is fulfilled. But when God calls on His angels, it is God Himself who acts, for no creatures are more faithful doers of God’s Word than the angels.

Sacred Scripture is filled with angels. We even find them in Genesis doing God’s just work at the very beginning of human existence.

“The Lord God therefore banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken. He expelled the man, stationing the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword east of the garden of Eden, to guard the way to the tree of life” [Gn 3:23-24].

And they appear as well in Exodus when God assigns an angel to protect His Chosen People and guide them to the Promised Land:

See, I am sending an angel before you, to guard you on the way and bring you to the place I have prepared. Be attentive to him and obey him. Do not rebel against him, for he will not forgive your sin. My authority is within him. If you obey him and carry out all I tell you, I will be an enemy to your enemies and a foe to your foes. [Ex 23:20-22].

When God says, “My authority is within him,” He means exactly that: all that the angel does, he does in God’s holy Name. God extends His complete trust to His angels, even allowing them to wield divine power. We encounter this angelic protection manifested again and again throughout the Old and the New Testaments.  

Perhaps my favorite angel passage in the Gospels is in Matthew where we find the disciples, once again displaying their pride, asking Jesus,

"Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?" [Mt 18:1]

But Our Lord, knowing their hearts, again calls them to deep humility, to kenosis – the emptying of self that Paul described to the Philippians [Phil 2:6-8]. Just as the divine Jesus humbled Himself through the Incarnation and His passion and death, so too must His disciples, and that's you and me, be childlike in our humility. We must empty ourselves of ourselves.

To emphasize this, Jesus calls a child to Him, just as He had once called His disciples, one after another, thus reminding them that it is God who acts, God who calls, while we either respond in humility or turn away in pride.

Now what had that small child done to humble himself? Nothing that we know of. Jesus is not talking about actions here; rather he's describing an attitude of being. Unlike the disciples, the child is aware of and content with his lowliness. He is "poor in spirit" as in the first Beatitude [Mt 5:3].

We encounter perfect humility, this attitude of being, manifested by Our Blessed Mother when she proclaims,

"My sould magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has regarded the low estate of His handmaiden" [Lk 1:46-48].

Indeed, the entire Magnificat [Lk 1:46-55] is a hymn of personal humility in the presence of God's greatness – a good reason for its daily recitation in the Evening Prayer of the Church’s Liturgy of the Hours. Yes, lowliness, emptiness, hunger – these all allow God to raise up, to fill, to extend mercy, to make the last first, to place us at the center of His divine life.

Returning to Matthew’s Gospel, we hear Jesus declaring something truly remarkable about the child He has called to Himself. He reveals that these little ones have angels assigned to them by God Himself:

"See that you do not despise one of thesel little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father" [Mt 18:10].

We are struck by the wonder of it all: Angelic beings, those closest to God Himself, who stand in His presence, are those whom God has appointed to serve His little ones. His children – and these, brothers and sisters, include you and me. For as St. John reminds us

"See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God" [1 Jn 3:1].

But to be a child of God is not to be childish. Not at all. No, God calls us to be child-like. To love Him as a child loves its parent, to trust in Him as a child trusts, to realize He wants only the good for us. In humility, then, the childlike experiences a radical freedom, seeing himself completely dependent on God.

That which is scorned on earth, the humility of the childlike, is raised up to the very highest level of being. We find a reference to guardian angels early in the Old Testament, when Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh, the two sons of Joseph

"The angel who has delivered me from all harm, bless these boys that in them my name be recalled, and the names of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac, and they may become teeming multitudes upon the earth!" [Gn 48:16]

Do you see how greatly God esteems and honors the angel He has chosen to guard and lead you? Pray to your angel, asking that you remain always open to his guidance. Turn to him in prayer, plead for his protection and intercession, for this constant companion forever beholds the face of the Father. Can you imagine a better guardian and friend?

I think some people don’t realize how loving and kind their angels are, and how helpful they want to be. God didn’t assign them as guardians and tell them to do nothing. Our angels have been assigned to guard us from that which defies God’s will for us. Their guardianship, their protection, can be both spiritual and physical, and is much like a call from God Himself in that it seeks a response from us.

But angels do more than guard and guide us. They are also God’s messengers, revealing His Word to chosen men and women. We are perhaps most familiar with the archangel Gabriel, who foretold the birth of John the Baptist to his father Zechariah and later announced the Incarnation to the young Virgin Mary [Lk 1]. Similar events are described in the Old Testament. Perhaps my favorite is the angelic visitation to Manoah and his wife when the birth of Samson is foretold. Conversing with the angel, Manoah asks,

"What is your name, that we may honor you when your words come true?" The angel of the Lord asnwered him: "Why do you ask my name? It is wondrous" [Jgs 13:17-18].

In other words, even the true names of the angels are beyond human comprehension, beyond the limitations of human language. While many Christians give their guardians human names for the convenience of prayerful interaction, they should realize that God alone names each of these remarkable creatures. We will learn and come to appreciate these wondrous names when we join the angels in God’s presence.

Yes, the angels are carriers of love and messengers of God’s holy will. They protect us, lead us, guide us, and reveal God’s will for us. They encourage us to accept the gifts God offers us, and rejoice when we do

"In just the same way, I tell you, there will be rejoicing among the angels of God over one sinner who repents" [Lk 15:10].

Finally, a remarkable truth about our relationship with the angels. Tradition and Scripture hold that Lucifer led some of the angels to reject not just God’s creation of man but the revelation that God Himself would take on human nature. The angels, then, would adore the Son who, through the Incarnation, became one of these lowly creatures. This was too much for a proud creature like Lucifer who would not serve the Person of the Son in His human nature. The angelic choirs who chose God over pride accepted that Jesus Christ, the Son, is far greater than any angel:

"He took His seat at the right hand of the Majesty on high, as far superior to the angels as the name He has inherited is more excellent than theirs...Let all the angels of God worship Him [Heb 1:3,6].

This first chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews concludes with a verse that defines the human-angelic relationship

"Are they not all ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" [Heb 1:14].

What a revelation! The angels are called not only to serve God, but also to serve you and me, “those who are to inherit salvation.” This is another amazing result of the Incarnation. Because the Son becomes man, humanity is exalted, raised up, called to inherit salvation, and to be served by choirs of angels. It’s enough to make an angel laugh joyfully.

 

The Invisible World

St. Michael atop Castel Sant'angelo in Rome

I'm always a bit shocked when I encounter a Christian or a Jew who does not accept the existence of angels and demons. Given the number of times this happens, I suppose I should be used to it by now. Although I have no polling data or other hard, empirical evidence, my personal experience tells me this disbelief in the spiritual world has grown in recent years. I suppose we might expect this as our world becomes increasingly materialistic and discounts the existence of anything that cannot be perceived through the five senses.

About a dozen years ago, when I was working for a Catholic college in New England, I had an interesting lunchtime conversation with a man who taught at a prestigious prep school. As our our conversation drifted from one interesting subject to another, we found ourselves talking about scary movies (I'm a fan.) when one of us brought up The Exorcist, the 1973 film about a demonic possession in Washington, D.C. We agreed it was truly a scary movie, and then he said, "Of course, nothing like that could ever happen because demons don't exist."

This surprised me because earlier in our conversation he had made it clear that he was a believing Christian. And so I asked him, "You really don't believe in demons? What about angels?"

"No," he said, "I really don't believe in them either. I can't accept the existence of thinking, sentient beings who lack brains, the physical equipment necessary for consciousness. The idea that there are all these immaterial creatures out there in their own immaterial universe...well, that just seems a bit absurd to me."

It was the kind of comment I would have expected from an atheist or agnostic, but not from a Christian. My only response was to ask him, "Do you believe in God?"

"Yes," he said, "of course."

"Well, then, I suggest you just think about that for a while." With that our waiter handed me the check and our conversation came to an end.

Even very smart people can be led astray by the constant roar of the world's voices, and my luncheon companion was indeed very smart. He held two master's degrees, one in chemistry and another in mathematics, and taught both subjects at that upscale prep school. But like so many smart people he had come to accept man as the measure of all things. He even measured God according to human standards, and in doing so placed all sorts of limitations on God's creative power. I thought it particularly interesting that he didn't recognize the contradiction in denying God, a pure spirit, the ability to create other spirits. Maybe he thought of God as some giant material being, a kind of enormous Atlas, who bore the universe on his shoulders. I don't know because we never got around to his theology.

Of course, both angels and demons are mentioned frequently in Scripture, and we Christians should not simply dismiss these occurrences as psychological constructs devised by those lacking the scientific knowledge needed to explain phenomena they can't understand. In essence this was how belief in the spirit world was "explained" to me not long ago by a respected theologian. When I asked how he explained the Gospels' (and Jesus') frequent references to both angels and demons, he said that Jesus, being a Jew, would of course believe what most Jews believe, including the existence of angels and demons. When I suggested that in his divine nature Jesus would surely know whether or not such beings existed, he chuckled and said, "Well, yeah, except Jesus didn't know he was God, at least not until the Resurrection."

Wow! So many theologians just love to pick and choose what they want to believe, and what they want us to believe, all in complete contradiction to the magisterial teaching of the Church, teaching held consistently for 2,000 years. Fortunately, there are folks out there teaching the truth and making it available to us non-theologians in language we can understand.

One recent example is the newly published book by Anthony Destefano, The Invisible World, in which the author takes us on a marvelous journey through the world of angels and demons. Mr. Destefano, the author of several other books for both children and adults, provides a clear and well-written introduction to this invisible world of spirits, all firmly grounded in Church teaching. By increasing our understanding of the spirit world, the "Invisible World" as Destefano calls it, we can better understand this journey of ours through our material world, a journey that leads to our ultimate heavenly destination. This book, along with his previous book, A Travel Guide to Heaven, aim at showing us that reality includes much more than our material world.

Discussing how reality is misconceived by so many, Destefano says,

"We live in a very secular age which actually began over two centuries ago. We have what I call the 'superstition of materialism,' where we tend to think that everything in life - our ideas, our philosophies, our religions, our accomplishments; all the notions that we have of honor, love mercy and hope; all our art and our music; all the deepest mysteries of science and faith - that all this is simply the result of random dance of molecules in our brain. This is the disease of the age."    

I can promise you will enjoy this book.