Homily: 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B

Readings: Is 53:10-11; Ps 33; Heb 4:14-16; Mk 10:35-45

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One hot summer day in 1941, in the infamous death camp of Auschwitz in southern Poland, the Nazis sentenced 10 prisoners to die by starvation in retaliation for an escape. One of the ten had a wife and children, so a 47-year-old Polish, Franciscan priest offered himself in his place. The man's number was crossed off the list and the priest's inserted: number 16670.

That very day ten men entered the starvation bunker, just an underground pit -- no light, no air, no food, no clothing, nothing…nothing but the love of God radiating from one simple priest. Two weeks later they injected him with a fatal dose of carbolic acid, then incinerated his wasted body on the feast of the Assumption. Forty-two years ago, on October 10, 1982, Pope John Paul II celebrated the canonization of this man, St. Maximilian Kolbe.

Maximilian lived the Gospel to the fullest, conformed his will to God’s, regardless of consequences, and answered God’s call personally, without question. Only a few are called to give witness to God's love as martyrs, although their numbers have increased greatly in recent years. But the word “martyr” simply means witness, and we’re all called to witness, and sometimes to lead radically Christian lives in the circumstances in which God places us.

Sometimes the Gospel message almost knocks us flat with its firm but unmistakably clear demands.

Sometimes it shakes the very foundation of our world, turning our lives upside down.

Just consider the Zebedee boys, James and John, in today’s Gospel passage. Jesus had just told His Apostles, for the third time, about His passion, death, and resurrection. Their response? Silence. This just isn’t something they want to think about. So, instead of focusing on Jesus and what He has just told them, they change the subject, to their favorite subject: themselves. Don’t you just love how the two brothers approach Jesus?

“…we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”

But they don’t really ask, do they? No, then they give Our Lord an order, as if they’re in charge:

"Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left." 

They simply tell Jesus exactly what they want. Sadly, it reminds me of the way I sometimes pray. Do you ever do that, just give God orders? I not only tell Him what to do, but how to do it.

"Dear Lord, I’ve got this problem, and here’s how I want you to solve it…"

Like many of us, James and John don’t seem to be overflowing with humility, do they? Convinced they had earned it, they demanded prime seats, essentially telling Jesus:  Lord, seat us in glory right beside you. We’re your special ones, Jesus. These other guys…well, they’re okay, but they really don’t measure up, do they?

Like these two brothers, we too are often driven by pride, aren’t we? Even those seeking holiness can fall prey to a kind of spiritual greed. So, Jesus gives them the first of two lessons. Because they don’t know what they are asking, Jesus first tells them what their demand means.

They must first drink from the Lord’s chalice, and undergo His baptism of suffering, something that they had not yet understood or accepted. 

Ironically it was James, the elder son of Zebedee, who was the first of the apostolic martyrs. Perhaps he and his brother would have understood had they actually listened to Jesus and also pondered the words of Isaiah from our first reading. 

Yes, hundreds of years before the Incarnation, God reveals, through His prophet, what the Son of God made man must suffer to redeem the world of its sins. Just a moments ago we heard these prophetic words…

“…through his suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt he shall bear.”

But I suspect Isaiah’s Suffering Servant was far from the minds of James and John. They couldn’t imagine Jesus, in an act of divine humility, emptying Himself, suffering, and dying on a Cross, like a slave, before entering His Kingdom.

The other Apostles were no different. Upset with the brothers, they were really driven by the same motivations: Lord, we’re just as good as those two.

And with that, Jesus teaches calls them all together and teaches His second, more important, and more challenging lesson:

“…whoever wishes to be first among you will be the slave of all.”

Is there a more politically incorrect word today than slave? And yet, here’s Jesus, telling His Apostles, and telling us, to be like slaves. We are slaves, you know. That's why Christ can ransom us through His suffering. Someone truly free doesn’t need to be ransomed, but slaves do.

You see, like James, John, and the others, we too can become self-absorbed, something that will ultimately enslave us, enslave us to sin. Jesus is telling us to turn away from ourselves and turn to others. From a worldly perspective St. Maximilian was enslaved by the Nazis; and yet, in truth, his faith made him free, free to offer himself, Christ-like, and give his life to ransom the life of another.

The call Jesus extended to the Apostles, and its example manifested by St. Maximilian while surrounded by the evil of Auschwitz, is a call to love, a call of loving humility. It’s a message that the Apostles ultimately learned and lived, and one that we must learn as well.

My dad once told me, humility is the foundational virtue that supports all other virtues. Lacking humility, the value of any virtue is lessened. If, for example, a wealthy person gives generously to charity or the Church but is motivated solely by the public recognition he receives, the poor may certainly reap some benefit. But what about the giver's soul? 

And then Dad followed this thought with another: “Humility’s a very strange commodity, because once you know you have it, you just lost it.”

Yes, it's funny, but he was right. You don’t hear saints talking about their humility, because they know that true humility merely reflects reality, divine reality. God created each of us in a divine act of love; but created each no better than the other. Yes, we are all so very valuable, everyone from conception until natural death must be loved and protected. To grasp this perhaps every morning we should all read the final verses of chapter 25 of Matthew’s Gospel, the only place in Scripture where the last judgment is described in any detail.

“For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.”

Jesus is telling us how valuable we all are, that He became one of us, took on our human nature, so we should see Him, the divine, creative and incarnate Word of God, in everyone we encounter. God calls us to love Him and each other, and in return for our response, for our submission to His Will, He promises a treasure far greater than you and I can ever imagine.

Here I am, after 80 years of a life with very little suffering, it’s easy to consider opting for a finishing leisure and just sit back and enjoy the rest of my days. But then the Spirit calls to mind St. Maximilian, the Apostles, so many others, and especially the world-redeeming suffering of our Lord, Jesus Christ. And so we ask: What does God have in store for each of us? As He revealed in our reading from Hebrews, we can only…

“…confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and to find grace for timely help.”

Yes, we all plead for God’s timely help during these times of our lives, as we struggle to be seen worthy of the gift. 

But only arms that are empty of self can stretch out to receive that gift…just as St. Maximilian did when he held out his arm for that fatal injection. And just as Jesus did when He emptied Himself giving everything on the Cross.

"I am the way, the truth, and the life," Jesus tells us; therefore, nothing should take precedence over Christ in our lives, over His right to rule over our hearts. For that which we place first in our lives – when it is not God – becomes a prison. And that's the paradox: only as servants, as servants of God and each other, can we experience true freedom.

Homily, Monday 19th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Dt 10:12-22; • Ps 147 • Mt 17:22-27

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Because we have the gift of hindsight, thanks to the Gospel, you and I are often amazed at how clueless the apostles seem, as if somehow we would handle it all better.

Jesus spends so much time shaping their hearts, opening their eyes to the meaning of the Incarnation and the Cross, to the Paschal mystery, to the Passion, Death, and Resurrection that must occur. We see an example of that shaping in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew.

In the two chapters preceding today’s passage, Jesus on several occasions refers indirectly and directly to His death and resurrection. But this time, indeed, this time Jesus is blunt.

“The Son of Man is to be handed over to men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.”

Remember all the drama unleashed in Peter when Jesus first announced His passion. Compare that with the apostles’ reaction now. There’s no argument…no, Matthew simply tells us they’re “overwhelmed with grief.”

Jesus’ words were plain, their meaning clear. They now know better than to argue with Him. But still, they don’t understand. How can Jesus let this horror, this evil, happen? I suppose they’ve kind of turned the corner. Perhaps in their confusion and grief, they recognize the Pascal mystery is still beyond them. They certainly don’t understand the “why” of it all. That the Son of Man, the flower of humanity, will be betrayed by men underscores the tragic self-deceit that so often hides the truth from us.

Years ago, I’d been ordained less than a year, in another diocese, I was making hospital visits. Looking at the list of new arrivals, I noticed one man’s last name was Murphy, and thought, Well, this one has to be Catholic. As I entered his room I could see he was quite ill, so I asked if he’d like me to pray with him.

He responded with, “No. I’m a Muslim. Unlike you, I don’t pray to a dead God, one who was nailed to a cross. What kind of God would allow that?”

Talk about a surprise! I wasn’t sure what to say, so I guess I went on the attack:

“What kind of God? Only a God, whose love for you and for me is so great, He humbled Himself, became one of us, sacrificed His life to redeem us from our sinfulness. That’s why I worship a God who died, then rose from the dead to give us hope.”

I thought I had done so well, but in response he just told me to leave. “Go on, get out! I really don’t want to talk with you.”

I learned a lesson that day. The sick want and need to meet a God Who heals; they don’t need an intellectual or theological argument.

Yes, indeed, our God doesn’t come to us as some omniscient, omnipotent being…no, He comes to us as one of us, as a friend, as a loving brother, as a healer, a forgiver. But everyone’s not happy with this. Some actually hate how God approaches us in Jesus. Jesus, by showing us how we can be, lets us see how we really are. This presents us with two choices:

We can listen to Him, do the Father’s will, change, repent, and be conformed to Jesus’ goodness…or we can try to destroy that goodness, in a feeble attempt to suppress its judgment of our sinfulness.

But God simply overcomes all our foolishness. He allows Himself to fall into the abuse and violence of men’s hands so that, when they wound Him, they will be covered by the tide of His Precious Healing Blood flowing from Calvary, from this very altar, and from thousands like it. And His blood can absorb into its love the very worst of what we are capable.

Today we recall the memory of St. Maxmillian Mary Kolbe, priest and martyr, who gave his life in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. He followed Our Lord's example by sacrificing himself so another could live.

Victor Frankl, the Austrian Jewish psychotherapist who spent much of World War II as a prisoner in that same Auschwitz, wrote a remarkable book of his experiences called, Man's Search for Meaning. There Frankl describes how, amid unbelievable brutality and the most degrading conditions, he encountered so much remarkable faith and unselfish love. Again and again, he met people who achieved victory over the sinfulness surrounding them.

Out of this experience of suffering Frankl had a revelation. He wrote, “Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’”

Most of us, haven’t known such suffering or come face to face with the kind of evil that surrounded St. Maximilian and Victor Frankl, the kind that Jesus encountered on that first Good Friday…most of us in our sufferings only argue and fight with God.

Perhaps, like the Israelites, we should listen to Moses, who in our reading from Deuteronomy said:

“He is your praise; he is your God, who has done for you those great and awesome things…”

Yes, like the Apostles, we too can grasp the great and awesome things our God has done, that He has died for us. 

Yes, as a 20^th-century Jew reminds us:

“The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Homily: Tuesday, 19th Week in Ordinary Time

 Readings: Ez 2:8-3:4 • Psalm 119 • Matthew 18:1-5,12-14

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Jesus spent a lot of time shaping His disciples’ hearts, opening them to the Kingdom, to the Church they would soon be called on to lead. In today’s passage from Matthew, we see this shaping taking place.

The disciples ask Him a question: “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?” Jesus answers with a little “show and tell.” He calls a child to join them, instructing the disciples to be like this child, who acts in faith and humility.

“Do not despise one of these little ones…their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.” [Mt 18:10]

We all know how different, how wonderfully innocent, children are from adults. Over 45 years ago, when our eldest was just a little girl, we lived on campus at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis where I was teaching. One morning our two daughters were playing with a bunch of neighborhood children, when the youngest came running up to us crying.

When Diane asked her older sister what had happened, she said, “A boy pushed her, and she fell down.” Diane asked, “Which boy?”, and our six-year-old responded with, “The boy in the red shirt.” We looked out at the mob of children, and there was only one boy in a red shirt. He was also the only black child there, the son of a friend and neighbor, another Navy pilot.

Now, almost any adult would have responded differently, probably saying, “the black kid.” But not a child. You see, there’s no bigotry; to the child the only differences are the externals, the red shirts, all those things that really have nothing to do with who we are.

This reminded me of our saint today: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, perhaps better known as Edith Stein, a Jew who became an atheist, then a Catholic, and then a Carmelite nun. But her Jewish roots brought her to Auschwitz where she died a martyr 80 years ago today. She was certainly no child, but rather a brilliant philosopher who came to love the Lord. But Jesus, speaking of children and the Kingdom, brought her to mind.

You see, when I was a child of seven, we lived in Heidelberg Germany. On one of our vacation trips to Bavaria, our father took us to see Dachau, one of the Nazi death camps, this one near Munich.

You might think this would be too traumatic for a seven-year-old, but, no, it wasn’t, and my dad wanted us to see what people were capable of when they turned away from God.

I remember much of that day because it changed my life. For the first time, I saw a Godless world. I remember not understanding why anyone would do such things to others…all because I was a child, still innocent enough to disbelieve or excuse sin.

But for many, God’s love is so incomprehensible, they actually despise how God approaches us in Jesus. They hate it for the same reason Cain despised and killed his brother, Abel. The motive is clear: Jesus presents us with the reality of our better selves, but too often it’s the self we left behind when we grew up.

Like St. Teresa Benedicta, Jesus allows Himself to fall into the abuse and violence of men’s hands. But when they wound Jesus, they are covered by the tide of His Precious Blood flowing from Calvary, and from this very altar and thousands like it. For His blood has the power of absorbing into its love, and therefore neutralizing, the worst hatred of which we are capable.

Victor Frankl, the Austrian Jewish psychotherapist who spent much of World War II as a prisoner in Auschwitz, wrote a remarkable book of his experiences called, Man in Search of Meaning. In it he describes how in the midst of unbelievable brutality and the most degrading conditions he found so many examples of remarkable faith and unselfish love.

Again and again, he encountered people who had achieved victory over the sinfulness that surrounded them. And out of this experience of abject suffering Frankl had a revelation. He wrote,

“Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’”

The Apostles, with the help of the Holy Spirit, also came to understand what Jesus meant when He asked them to be childlike. Let’s learn from them and today turn to the Holy Spirit. Invite Him into our hearts, to shape us, to give us the joy that only the love of God can bring. For the Spirit waits patiently, always listening for our invitation, always responding to our prayer.

 

On Death Camps, Hope and Love

Last week, at his general audience at Castel Gandolfo, Pope Benedict focused on two 20th Century martyrs, St. Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein) and St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe, who both suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz, Poland. I was particularly struck by one the Holy Father's comments: "It would seem that their existence could be regarded as a defeat, but it is precisely in their martyrdom that the brilliance of Love shines which conquers the darkness of egoism and hatred. Attributed to St. Maximilian Kolbe are the following words which it is said he pronounced at the height of the Nazi persecution: 'Hatred is not a creative force: Love alone is.'"

His comments had special meaning to me because of an experience I had back in 1951, when I was just a lad of seven. My father, an Army Reserve officer, was recalled to active duty and sent to Germany. My mom, my older brother and I joined him soon afterwards in Heidelberg where we lived "on the economy" in a fourth-floor, walk-up, cold-water flat on a little street called Schlosserestrasse -- quite a change from our nice, suburban home in Larchmont, NY. It was an interesting experience. I attended school in a tiny one-room schoolhouse run by Frau Scharmer, a lovely young teacher. As I recall there were about a dozen students, and I was one of two Americans. The other was a girl of eight -- an older woman. I avoided her.

This was in 1951-52, so the war was by no means a distant memory. Germany, along with much of the rest of Europe, was still digging out from under the rubble and, with the help of the Marshall Plan, was rebuilding its devastated infrastructure and at the same time building a new nation.

My father, who believed that a person learned as well from experience as from formal education, took us on frequent short trips to help us experience the country and its people. On one trip to Munich, he decided we should visit Dachau, one of the notorious concentration camps where so many perished. Some might think it cruel and abusive to take young children to such a place with its crematoria and mass graves and bleak barracks, but believe me I have often thanked my dad for the experience. Although many of my childhood memories are vague and indistinct, I can recall those few hours at Dachau with remarkable clarity. And if I learned anything from that day in Dachau it was the same lesson stressed by Pope Benedict: that hatred only destroys, and that God's love is the only true creative force.

It seems odd to me that Auschwitz and Dachau and the Gulags and 911 and the myriad other examples of man's capacity for hatred and cruelty lead so many people to question the existence of a loving God. To me these are instead proofs of it. Left to our own devices we would have destroyed ourselves long ago. It is only through the love and mercy of God that we are able to survive and overcome the effects of original sin . And such martyrs as Teresa and Maximilian and the countless others who preceded and followed them are beacons of hope to the world, outward manifestations of God's love and its power to transform us all...if only we let it.

Storm update: It would seem that Fay has wimped out...thanks be to God. We will likely get lots of needed rainfall, accompanied perhaps by some moderate winds -- just enough bad weather to intensify the grandchildren's cabin fever, but mild enough to keep us all safe and sound. Life is good. Being is good.

Praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever...