Homily: Wednesday, 2nd week in Ordinary Time (Year 2)

The following are a brief reflection on the day's readings offered during Eucharistic Adoration after Mass. 

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Readings: 1 Sam 17:32-33, 37, 40-51; Ps 144; Mk 3:1-6

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A couple of years ago, during a Bible-study session, someone asked me why the Pharisees lacked faith, but the Apostles didn’t. At the time we were reading today’s Gospel passage from Mark, so I asked the group if they noticed anything different about Jesus before he healed the man with the withered hand.

Almost immediately someone said, “Jesus is angry.”

Mark is the only Gospel writer who mentions the anger of Jesus. Oh, John tells the story of Jesus driving the buyers and sellers from the Temple, but he never explicitly says that Jesus was angry. Only Mark does that.”

Jesus had just asked the Pharisees a question: “Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than to do evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?” It’s a pretty simple question. And so how do the Pharisees answer it?

They don’t. “But they remained silent,” Mark tells us. And it’s easy to see why. A “Yes,” would be a lie and would highlight their hypocrisy. But a “No,” would be a public admission of their lack of charity. They had set out to trap Jesus and, once again, he had trapped them. Usually, it was their words that exposed them. This time it was their silence. What happens next? Well, Mark tells us that Jesus looked “around at them with anger and grieved at their hardness of heart,” and then went on to heal the man’s hand. 

Pharisees Silent

It's interesting, virtually every scene in the Gospels has at one time or another been the subject of a painting. Except this scene. I know of no painting that shows Jesus looking around at the Pharisees with anger. I suspect such a painting wouldn’t be very popular among those who have this distorted image of a warm and fuzzy Jesus who roams through Galilee and Judea dispensing hugs.

It reminds me of a woman who told me she had left the Church to “join a denomination that wasn’t so judgmental.” I just told her to read the gospels and then tell me Jesus doesn’t judge.

“Why was Jesus angry?”

One translation says, “Because they had closed their minds.” And another, “Because of their hard-heartedness.” Closed minds or hard hearts -- these only seem different. The mind is open by its very nature. Notice how young children are very open-minded, always ready and able to learn. It’s only when they grow up and get stupid like the rest of us that they do otherwise; for it is the heart that closes the mind.

But these particular Pharisees had lost any sense of compassion for others. They had ceased being childlike. They had stopped loving. And because love couldn’t penetrate their hearts, their minds were closed as well, so tightly that they couldn’t even recognize the hand of God in the miracles that occurred right before their eyes. They had created an almost impenetrable barrier to the gift of faith.

The Apostles, on the other hand, were in a sense more childlike, more open to the Spirit’s urgings, more open to receiving the gift, more willing to love.

You see, brothers and sisters, hatred closes, and love opens. Indeed, love is itself an opening, a kind of wound.

The 14^th century mystic, Julian of Norwich, when she prayed, prayed for “the wound of true compassion.”

Let’s all pray today that we may never be healed of it!

9/11 Twenty Years Later

On that Tuesday morning in September 2001, I was in my office in Hyannis, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, engaged in a conference call with perhaps twenty other people from around the world. Suddenly, one of the callers, a woman in London, interrupted and said, “A plane just flew into the World Trade Center in New York. It’s on the telly.” I asked only one question: “Can you tell what the weather’s like in New York?” Her response, “Oh, yes, I can see blue sky, so it must be good weather.” I simply said, “Then it also must be a terrorist attack. Planes don’t fly into Manhattan skyscrapers when the weather is good.” 

With that I stopped the call, rescheduling it for another day, and went to our corporate dining room where I knew there was a large screen TV. Of course, when the second plane crashed into the south tower, everyone knew we’d suffered a terrorist attack. This began our 20-year journey to the present day and its confusions.

This Sunday morning our local newspaper devoted its entire first section to the vicious terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 and it’s aftermath. This is a good thing, and I look forward to making my way through the series of articles as I try to relax this Sunday afternoon. But our newspaper’s primary, front-page headline made me cringe. The paper? The Villages Daily Sun, and the headline read:

After the towers fell, we were frightened and angry. We ached for security, and we’re willing to trade some civil liberties to get it. 

Now, unlike the so-called journalist who penned this headline, I can speak only for myself. So what’s wrong with the headline? Well, I certainly agree with part of his first sentence. I was angry. No doubt about that. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever been angrier. But of one thing I can be sure, I was not frightened. Only a coward, a fool, or  one of little faith would be frightened in the wake of a terrorist attack like 9/11. Sadly, we have many of each in our nation. I pray for them, that they will open their hearts to God’s gift of faith to obliterate their fears.

I also turned immediately to prayer, not through fear, but because I knew we must, as a people, turn to God. We must beg for His help and direction, for His grace in dealing with this horrendous attack on our nation, this act of war. And because of its source, this attack was actually an attack on Judeo-Christian society, on Western Civilization, or what’s left of it. 

As for the second sentence of today’s headline, I completely disagree. Back on that first September 11th, I did not, in any way, “ache for security.” No, as an old Navy pilot, as a retired Navy Captain, I wished I were about 20 years younger so I could have joined the fight-to-be. If I ached for anything, that was it. 

And so, after prayer, the first thought that ran through my angry mind was one of concern, for I knew that governments love to accumulate power and once they have it, they never relinquish it. What will our government do to enhance our security? At first, I dismissed those concerns and naively believed government agencies responsible for our security would take proper and wise steps to protect our nation from future attacks. Again, unlike the headline writer, I definitely was not willing to trade my constitutional rights, my civil liberties, for a bit more security. In fact, drastic security measures were about the last thing on my mind. I had hoped we would learn from the one democratic nation that had been the most successful in preventing terrorist hijackings, the nation of Israel. Israel’s approach was personal; that is, it focused on the person more than the stuff. They didn’t ignore the contents of baggage and personal belongings, but they turned their attention primarily to the person. They had discovered that terrorists often had obvious, predictable traits, that potential terrorists could be identified before they boarded an aircraft. But instead, President Bush created another pair of unwieldy bureaucracies, the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, and along with his successor and an agreeable Congress, resorted to extreme but not always the most effective means to increase security. In this effort we often use blatantly unconstitutional, and often quite foolish, approaches to security. Today the elites who burden the nation’s citizens with authoritarian rules avoid them by flying in government or private aircraft. I, too, avoid commercial air travel whenever possible, but since I lack the means, I must drive. I simply refuse to subject myself and Dear Diane to the folly of present day aviation security…like the time a TSA employee revealed that I was singled out for more intensive search because I wore a cross on my lapel.

And today, we look to Afghanistan, where all this began twenty years ago, and for reasons we can blame only on ourselves, nothing has changed.

Pray for our nation.