Homily: Wednesday, 2nd Week of Lent

Readings: Jer 18:18-20; Ps 31; Mt 20:17-28
-----------------------------------

Generals, politicians, business leaders, and yes, even cardinals and bishops…sometimes the great among us make the headlines for all the wrong reasons. 

Isn’t it sad when famous people fall prey to human failings, when they forget the real purpose of their lives and work, and become ruled by greed or pride or any of the other deadly sins?

Of course, it’s easy for you and me to shake our heads at those who get caught up in such things, and forget that we too are susceptible. Maybe our sins don’t make the headlines, but they still separate us from God; they’re still sins. And it’s nothing new. Just look at today’s readings.

The Prophet Jeremiah...Weeping

Prophets are like whistleblowers, always telling people things they don’t want to hear. And they tend to be treated like whistleblowers too. Jeremiah’s family had already turned against him, and now the religious and political authorities were plotting to do away with this troublesome man who constantly challenged their decisions and motives. And in our Gospel reading, the mother of James and John seeks to wrangle a promise out of Jesus:

“…that these sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom” [Mt 20:21].

Mother of James & John Pleads with Jesus

If Scripture tells us anything, it’s that God’s plans aren’t advanced by personal ambition. But as Christians what should be our attitude regarding those who do these things? Actually, Jeremiah tells us when he says an essential attitude for the disciple is prayer for the welfare of others. How did he put it?

“Heed me, O Lord...Remember that I stood before you to speak in their behalf, to turn away your wrath from them” [Jer 18:20].

Like Jeremiah, we’re called to seek their goodness, their repentance, their peace, their life. 

Hard to do, isn’t it? It goes against the grain of our human nature. Indeed, we can’t do it on our own. Jeremiah demonstrates this when he curses his enemies. He’s not proud of himself for doing so; he’s simply being honest and open before God, saying, in effect, “Here’s, how I feel, God. Help me.” By turning to God in prayer for others and for himself, Jeremiah demonstrates his belief in God’s plan for all his people.

And here we encounter another essential attitude of the disciple: to seek the Lord’s will in all things. As St. Paul reminds us, God’s will is revealed in... 

“God’s secret plan…the mysterious design which for ages was hidden in God, the Creator of all” [Eph 3:9].

Jesus demonstrates this when, deferring to the Father, He promises Mrs. Zebedee nothing regarding her sons.

Why does Matthew include this incident? To embarrass the Zebedee family? No, not at all. It’s there to remind us not to seek special status or to focus on our own needs and ambitions, while forgetting the needs of others.

Only through prayer can we keep in touch with God’s hopes for us and begin to sense the small part we are to play in “God’s secret plan.” Today’s Gospel passage begins and ends with an announcement of Jesus’ impending death:

“Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life...” [Mt 20:28].

Like Jesus, then, all the work we do in God’s vineyard is Godly and holy only when it raises others above ourselves and places them before God, whom we should thank and praise for all things. As the psalmist reminds us:

“Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory” [Ps 115:1].

Two Cities

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo

Over 1,600 years ago St. Augustine wrote his masterpiece, The City of God, in which he strove to convince his readers, then and now, that the entirety of human society, from its very beginnings until its yet to be encountered finality, has as its end the formation of a Holy Society. This society, toward which we are struggling, is the very reason everything, meaning the entire universe, was created. Certainly very few prior to Augustine, with the obvious exception of Jesus Christ Himself and the Mosaic author of Genesis, had ever considered human society in such expansive, universal terms. In other words, according to Augustine, this City of God not only includes the entire world, but explains its very existence. All of creation, therefore, has meaning only as it relates to this Holy Society, the City of God.

In his work, Augustine compares this City with the human city, which in Augustine's time was the city of Rome, and by extension the entire Roman Empire. Of course, at the time the Empire was under siege. Alaric and his Visigoths had recently shocked the Empire by a decade-long ravaging of Italy culminating in the sack of Rome itself (410 A.D.). The pagans, and there were still many Roman pagans, ignored Rome's decline and moral decay that had begun long before the Christian ascendancy and blamed Christians for the failure of Roman power to protect the capital. Augustine would have none of it. Through many pages of wonderful argument Augustine shows that the Roman city was really no true city because it lacked true justice. The only true city is the city that manifests true justice, and this can only be a city with Christ as its head. This is the City of God.

Alaric and the Visigoths Sack Rome (410 A.D.)

Today we inhabit both of these cities. We live and work and struggle in a city of man with its distorted sense of justice, peace, and well-being. For many of this city's inhabitants justice has come to mean only order, peace only the absence of conflict, and well-being only material prosperity. Such attitudes can easily lead a worried populace to accept a level of authoritarianism that promises stability and safety. But with that authoritarianism comes its partner, injustice. Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China and too many others all morphed from authoritarianism to totalitarianism and brought injustice on a massive scale to their enslaved people. Lest we become complacent, it's important to understand that no nation, even a constitutional republic such as ours, is immune. Just glance back through our own recent history to a time when American citizens were confined in camps and stripped of their liberty and property because of their national origin or ancestry; or when an entire class of citizens were deprived of their constitutional rights because of the color of their skin. Yes, even the United States has sometimes succumbed, although it has struggled mightily to correct some of these injustices. But injustice continues simply because it will always be present in the city of man. Indeed, today our nation allows the slaughter of its most innocent, the unborn, an injustice that has cost the lives of over 50 million future citizens.

The city of man offers us a series of imperfect choices of the kind we now encounter in the upcoming election. And because we must inhabit this city, we must choose. We must choose one candidate or another or none at all. But whatever our choice, as Christians we should be aware that no election will ever lead to a society of perfect justice, despite the predictions of the candidates and hopes of the people who support them.

I'm not advocating an abdication of our civic responsibility or a pulling away from human society. We must still live and work; we must pay our taxes; we must respect legitimate civil authority; but in all these we must avoid doing evil. St. Paul reminds us of all this in Romans 13, calling us as Christians to be good citizens in the city of man

This doesn't mean that we don't confront our society when it falls short of God's will for it. After all, as individuals and as a society, we must always obey God's commandments: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments" [Jn 14:15]. And we must encourage our fellow citizens to do the same, to turn to God in love and to obey His commandments, which were given to us for our good and the good of society as a whole. But we cannot expect political solutions to cure all our societal ills. For example, I have long believed that the end of the scourge of abortion will never come about through political means. Such a change -- a change in a society's deep-seated morality, in its sense of justice -- demands a real change in the hearts of its citizens, and that can happen only when those citizens turn to God in repentance and love. We repent because we are a society of sinners and we love because God commands it. How did St. Paul put it?

"Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law" [Rom 13:10]

And with what words did Jesus begin his public ministry? "Repent and believe in the Gospel" [Mk 1:15]. If we, as a society, obey this timeless command of our Lord we will see the coming of the City of God. This is why the Church constantly preaches that its primary task is one of evangelization, and why all Christians are called to join in this effort. We are called to do God's work in the world, to bring about the Holy Society Augustine foresaw so long ago. No politician will do this for us.

Pray for our nation.

Homily: Wednesday, 23rd Week of Ordinary Time

Given the busyness of my life in recent weeks, I neglected to post this brief weekday homily. Better late than never, I suppose.
----------------------

Readings: 1 Cor 7:25-31; Ps 45; Lk 6:20-26

How did Paul put it? “The world as we know it is passing away” [1 Cor7:31].

Kind of a scary thought, isn’t it? Well…not really, since it’s one of those statements that’s always going to be true, for the world and those who live in it are always undergoing change, always, in a sense, passing away. So it’s really not that radical a thought…at least not to our way of thinking today.

But for the ancients, who lived when Paul wrote these words –the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Romans – these words were radical indeed. About the only people of that time who would have accepted this idea were Jews and Christians. You see, the Greeks and virtually all other pagan societies saw the world in cyclical terms. To their way of thinking, all of life, all of history, imitated the seasons, the movements of the heavenly bodies, always returning, constantly repeating, never moving toward any defined end.

If you think about it, this way of thinking was utterly depressing, and led to nothing but despair. It saw humanity as spending eternity on the global equivalent of a gerbil wheel, expending lots of energy but never really getting anywhere. And their pagan religions mirrored this thinking. The pagan concept of the divine came from within man and depicted the gods as man envisioned them.

But Judaism and Christianity were different…very different. You see, their concept of God -- our concept of God – comes from God Himself. It’s not so much a religion as a revelation. The pagans described their gods as they saw them, created in their image. The Jews and later the Christians received God’s revelation of Himself. They described God as He revealed Himself and His relationship with humanity. God creates us in His image.

God reveals Himself to Moses with the words, “I am who am” [Ex 3:14-15] – in other words, I am existence itself -- words no pagan, with the possible exception of Aristotle and perhaps a few other Greek philosophers, would likely have used to describe a divinity.

"I am who I am." ...This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.

At the center of this revelation – this self-disclosure by God – is His plan for the future of humanity. And it has an end – eternal life and the consummation of the world – an end revealed in those closing words of the book of Revelation, “Come, Lord Jesus” [Rev 22:20]. Yes, the world will be consumed, and so as Christians we must avoid getting caught up in the things of this world…always considering ourselves as poor in spirit.

For the Kingdom of God belongs only to those who experience this stark poverty. Brothers and sisters, never deny that reality. Never fail to acknowledge the hunger of your heart for God's food. If we don’t experience poverty in its realistic starkness, let us be poor in spirit and accept our own inner poverty. And let us always be oriented practically to the needs of the poor, Gods blessed ones.

And so let us pray today that we may not be conformed to the world but transformed by the Holy Spirit with the spirit of poverty.

“Come, Lord Jesus.”