Homily: Tuesday, 2nd Week of Easter, Year 1

Readings: Acts 4:32-37; Ps 93; Jn 7:7b-15

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Did you get the sense that Nicodemus maybe didn’t want to be seen with Jesus? After all he was an important guy, a mucky muck. What did Jesus call him? "The teacher of Israel." 

Maybe Nicodemus was concerned that the wrong folks might see him making this visit, so he goes to Jesus at night. And yet he does go to Jesus, doesn’t he? At heart Nicodemus is a man of God, a seeker of truth.

He’s probably heard reports, maybe even witnessed, Jesus' miracles and has seen the crowds that follow Jesus everywhere. But he was different from his colleagues who see Jesus as a threat to their control of the people. Jesus simply refused to be created in their image. Such men never learn because they're so sure that they already know all the answers.

Dorothy Day once said: "Jesus came to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." And the Jewish leadership of Jesus’ time was comfortable indeed.

Nicodemus, to his credit, recognizes the signs, as John calls them. How did he phrase it?

"We know you are a teacher come from God…"

And he decides to find out for himself.

The Pharisees questioned Jesus in public, intent only on trapping Him, but Nicodemus met with Jesus privately, for he seeks the truth. But the truth that he hears from Jesus is not what he expects. Begotten from above? Born again? What can these things mean? Confused, he struggles to understand.

Nicodemus probably expected a theological discussion, but Jesus instead speaks of conversion.

Nicodemus expected a meeting of the minds with a peer. But Jesus demands a meeting of the hearts.

Nicodemus is looking for rabbinic exegesis, an encounter with Scripture. Instead, he gets a personal encounter with Our Lord.

Nicodemus was theologizing, while Jesus was evangelizing.

The lesson for us? We take up the revealed word of God for one reason only: to encounter Jesus, the incarnate Word of God. The Scriptures must first be accepted into our hearts before they make any sense to our heads.

Jesus simply took Nicodemus to the next level, to another encounter, an encounter with the Spirit.

"No one can enter God's kingdom without being begotten of water and the Spirit."

You and I, by the grace of Baptism and Confirmation, have been born again from above by water and the Holy Spirit. But what happens sacramentally must now be lived existentially.

How is such a thing possible? Nicodemus’ question is our question – all the helplessness of it, the longing, the discouragement? How can I ever hope to share in all that is Jesus? And Jesus replies: You can’t, not alone.

You and I and Nicodemus must make a free decision – not to change, but to be changed, to allow the Spirit to move us and to lead us with His gentle Love. To be born again in God is only a beginning, an infancy, as St. Paul calls it.

That’s the second lesson Jesus taught Nicodemus: you can't do it yourself. It demands an act of faith and surrender. In faith, you must abandon yourself totally to the Spirit of God.

Such an act can come only through prayer. The trouble is, so much of our prayer life is occupied by telling God what He already knows. God knows your needs. But do you know God's Will for you? Pray daily to be continually renewed by the Holy Spirit, to have the strength to be weak in the presence of God's Will.

And finally, Our Lord introduces Nicodemus to the depth and breadth of His Love. And it's a Love centered on the cross. Just as Moses lifted the bronze serpent in the desert, Jesus would be lifted up on the cross. And those who look on Him and "believe will have eternal life in Him."

This act of faith on our part is also an act of love, for the two are intimately connected. To embrace the cross, the sign of God's infinite Love, and be grounded in truth. For it is love that lifts us up on our own crosses, and helps us realize that a painless, crossless Christianity is a Christianity without love. And it is the truth that enables us to experience the revelation of God's glory in a broken world.

Lord, send us your Spirit that we may be recreated. Give us a new mind that we may grasp your truth, and a new heart that we may grasp your love.

Let that be our prayer today.

Homily: Saturday, 4th Week of Lent

Readings: Jer 11:18-20; Ps 7; Jn 7:40-53
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"Never before has anyone spoken like this man" [Jn 7:46].

Hearing those words brought to mind someone I first met over 60 years ago. I think it was my first week of high school, and to get there I had to take a train for a few miles, and then a 6-mile bus ride with lots of stops. It took a while.

Bus - Westchester County NY

That morning, when I got on the bus, this kid sat down next to me. Like me I guess he was a little nervous, and so for a while neither of us said much, but he seemed kinda nerdy...not that I wasn't. He was an Italian kid from the tough town and I was an Irish kid who lived in a slightly ritzier town. I sized him up and decided we had little in common, and I should probably seek friendship elsewhere.

Then he told a joke, and another, and another, and had me crying with laughter all the way to school. Yes, indeed, I'd never heard anyone speak like that before. And you guessed it: we became lifelong friends. Today he lives in Jersey and we had another long phone call just a few nights ago.

Reading today's Gospel passage brought him to mind, and made me realize how wrong I can be when it comes to first impressions. And usually the error is rooted in me, not in the other. I had sized up my friend in a few minutes, pretty much all based on my personal biases. I suppose I was a little snob, but my friend, John, and many others have cured me of that fault.

I was like the Pharisees who, knowing little about Jesus, dismissed Him as a nobody; but a dangerous nobody, a threat to their own authority. Without having heard Jesus speak, without having heard His words, they rejected the Word of God. This, of course is exactly what Nicodemus tried to tell them.

"Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him and finds out what he is doing?" [Jn 7:51]

Nicodemus, too, was a Pharisee, but he had taken the time to seek out Jesus, to question Him, to listen to Him, to see if He spoke the truth. And it was to Nicodemus that Jesus first spoke those words of redemption:

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life" [Jn 3:16].

Sadly, though, most of the Pharisees, like that younger me, were a bunch of snobs. You can almost hear them, can't you? This Jesus? He's from Galilee, a nobody from nowhere. How had the Apostle Nathaniel put it?

"Can anything good come from Nazareth?" [Jn 1:46] 

Even a soon to be Apostle can be a bit of a snob.

"Never before has anyone spoken like this man."

Isn't it interesting that so many of the people who encountered Jesus, even the Temple guards, who'd been sent to arrest Jesus, actually listened to Him, and realized they'd heard the truth?

"Never before has anyone spoken like this man."

What a remarkably courageous thing to say, knowing how much the chief priests and the Pharisees, despised Jesus.

What about us? Do we have the courage to speak out for our faith, to proclaim Jesus as Lord when He is under attack, as He is in our world today?

The world really hasn't changed all that much, has it? The Word of God causes division today just as it did in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. 

The prophet Jeremiah encountered the same kind of division centuries earlier, when all the important folks plotted against him, just as their successors would plot against Jesus.

Remember how Simeon had revealed to Mary that Jesus would be "a sign that will be contradicted" [Lk 2:34]?

"a sign that will be contradicted"

And how many ignored Jesus, the sign God had sent, the sign of the Father's overwhelming love, and instead contradicted? 

Jesus' deeds both amazed and provoked, and His words affected all who heard that call to conversion: 

"Repent and believe in the Gospel" [Mk 1:15].

Some responded with hatred, some turned away unwilling to accept God's grace and the changes it demanded, but others underwent a fundamental, transformative change of heart. 

Brothers and sisters, Jesus never stops calling us to conversion: to repent and trust in His mercy; to love God with all our being; to love our neighbor as we love ourselves; to speak always as Jesus spoke, in the language of the Father's love.

As we move through these last days of Lent, you and I must listen and respond to that call. We have to choose because God never wants to force Himself on us. He simply looks on us with love and lets us make the choice [See Mk 10:21].

So today, let's all open our hearts to Jesus, and listen to the One who speaks as no one else has ever spoken. Let His Holy Spirit fill us with the humility and repentance God asks of us.