THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

26 JUNE 2022

 

            Saint Luke tells us that the days for Jesus’ taking up were fulfilled.  In other words, his work in Galilee has been completed.  He has announced that he is the promised Messiah of God.  He has worked many miracles as signs of this truth.  He has proclaimed that God’s kingdom has come.  He has gathered around himself people who want to become his disciples.  Now he is setting his face on his journey to Jerusalem, where he will be crucified, buried, raised from the dead, and return to the Father in the Ascension.

            On the way, he teaches those who want to follow him what it means to be his disciples.  He teaches James and John how to respond to rejection. The “sons of thunder” want him to call down lightning on his Samaritan enemies, because they would not welcome him.  Instead, he teaches them the path of nonviolence, of continuing the journey without taking revenge.  Ironically, in the second volume of Saint Luke (the Acts of the Apostles), John will be sent to evangelize the Samaritans.  He will have learned how to turn revenge into love.

            Then Jesus gives three sayings about discipleship to those who seek to follow him.  He says that it will be necessary to renounce all possessions, as he has done.  When the second person wants to bury his father before following Jesus, he dismisses the excuse.  He does the same with the third person, who wants to bid farewell to his family before becoming a disciple.  Jesus is even more demanding that Elijah, who had called Elisha centuries before to follow him.  At least Elijah grudgingly allows Elisha to say goodbye to his family and their wealth.

            What are we to make of these demands?  Saint Paul provides a key in his letter to the Galatians.  He talks about freedom.  We often define freedom as doing whatever we want whenever we want.  That is not Saint Paul’s definition.  He urges the Galatians to be free from the temptations of the flesh.  By flesh, he means a focus on our own ego and our perceived needs.  We must be free from focusing on ourselves in order to be free to live by the Spirit.

            We can understand this freedom in the call of Elisha.  When Elisha returns to bid farewell to his family, he realizes that he cannot be the successor to the greatest prophet of his time if he remains tied to the great wealth of his family.  Very few farmers could afford the luxury of twelve yoke of oxen!  He demonstrates his freedom from that limitation by slaughtering the oxen and using the plowing equipment as fuel to boil their flesh to feed his people.  He is now free to take up the yoke of Elijah and to continue his prophetic role.

            Jesus challenges us to examine our freedom to be his disciples.  He is not asking us to abandon all our property and possessions.  However, he wants us to examine how much wealth and possessions dominate our energies and activities.  If we are consumed with pursuing those goals, we are not free to follow him.  Jesus does not expect us to abandon our families and stop going to family funerals.  We often assume that the son’s father just dropped dead.  His father is probably as healthy as an ox.  The son’s excuse is to delay leaving the family nest until everyone is dead and buried.  Jesus makes the point is that now is the time to start building the kingdom.  Don’t use excuses to put it off until tomorrow.

            If we are to remain as authentic disciples of Jesus Christ, we must examine our priorities.  We cannot wait until all our family responsibilities are resolved to embrace the message of stewardship.  We cannot wait to win the lottery to commit ourselves to the vulnerable and the poor.  Freedom for Jesus Christ requires making sacrifices.  We understand the value of sacrifice when we celebrate the Eucharist.  We bring forward gifts of bread, wine, and our sacrificial tithe to offer them to God.  In return, we receive much more than we could ever have imagined.         

 

THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST

19 JUNE 2022

 

          Jesus leads his disciples into the wilderness to avoid the threats of King Herod.  Instead of finding a place where he can be alone with them, he finds five thousand people who tracked him down and wanted to hear him.  Centuries before, Moses had led his people into a wilderness to escape the threats of Pharaoh.  In the wilderness, the people cried out for bread.  God fed them with manna.  When they longed for the fish they had eaten in Egypt, God gave them quail.  Moses reminded the people that they were not alone.  God was with them to care for them.

In this wilderness, Jesus also cares for his people.  Like the prophet Elisha, he has already fed them with his words and deeds.  In the wilderness, Elisha had taken twenty loaves to feed a hundred people.  Now, Jesus takes five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand people.  Unlike Moses or Elisha, who were mere human beings, Jesus is the Eternal Word of God who feeds the crowds so abundantly that twelve baskets of fragments are left over.  He instructs them to have the people seated in groups of fifty, much as Moses had instructed his people to be seated.  He takes the loaves and fish, looks up to heaven and blesses them, breaks them, and gives them. 

That is what he does at the Last Supper.  That is also what he does when the disciples recognize him at Emmaus after the resurrection.  That is what happens at every Mass.  The priest takes bread and wine, blesses the Father in the Eucharistic Prayer, breaks the consecrated Host (during the singing of the Lamb of God), and gives the Eucharist to the gathered assembly. 

On this feast of Corpus Christi, we renew our faith that the Lord is truly present in the Eucharistic bread and wine.  Like the Mystery of the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost, and like the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, we will never completely understand this Mystery:  how ordinary bread and wine can be transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ.  In the fourth century, Gaudentius, the Bishop of Brescia, in northern Italy, wrote a meditation on why bread and wine are used to be changed into the Body and Blood of Christ.  Bread is made by gathering many grains of wheat together, mixing them with water and baking them with fire.  In this process, Gaudentius recognizes us as the Church, the Body of Christ.  We are like the grains of wheat.  We become God’s people through the waters of Baptism.  We are confirmed in the fire of the Holy Spirit.  In a sense, we are like the bread offered for the Eucharist.  Like bread, we are lifted up, sanctified, and transformed through the celebration of the Mass.

Gaudentius then considers wine.  Grapes come from vineyards.  In the Bible, vineyards are symbols of God’s people.  In order to transform the grapes into wine, the grapes need to be pressed and left to ferment.  The cross becomes for us the winepress.  We need to embrace the cross by breaking out of our thick skins of selfishness and indifference.  Once crushed, we can be fermented like wine and become something greater than we were before.           

Gaudentius helps us to understand why our celebration of the Eucharist is the source and summit of our life of faith.  Through the ministry of the priest, the Church makes the Eucharist.  The Eucharist makes the Church.  Whenever the people of God gather, we form the Body of Christ.  The Body of Christ is most itself at the celebration of the Eucharist.  Saint Augustine said it best.  We become what we eat.  Eating the Body of Christ, we are Christ’s Body in the world.  Like the disciples who do not think that they can do much with five loaves and two fish, we might think that we cannot make a difference.  But nourished by the Eucharist, we can do more than we can imagine.  All of us, including us dads, are sent forth from this church to transform the world, as we are transformed through this incredible Mystery.

 

 

THE MOST HOLY TRINITY

12 JUNE 2022

 

          Last Sunday, we ended the Easter Season when we celebrated Pentecost. But the Church likes to do things in threes.  Even though we have returned to Ordinary Time, we add two more Solemnities to reach that number of three:  today’s Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity and next Sunday’s Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord (Corpus Christi).

            Preaching about the Trinity can be a daunting task.  It is a challenge to convey a Dogma that we priests spent hours studying in Systematic Theology classes to put into understandable language that speaks to a congregation.  The Trinity is a Mystery that defies our understanding.  How do we get our minds around a Mystery that there is one God and three distinct Persons?  Truth be told, that is the challenge of all the Mysteries that we celebrate.  At Christmas, we were invited to believe that the infinite God became a finite man in Jesus.  During the Sacred Paschal Triduum, we reflected on the reality that the crucified, dead, and buried Jesus was raised to new and eternal life.  On Pentecost, we tried to grasp how ordinary, uneducated fishermen could lay the foundation for a Church that has lived on for over two thousand years.

            We may not understand any of these mysteries.  But we embrace them in faith, because we remain open to the wonderful ways that God has chosen to work with us.  The same is true of the Doctrine of the Trinity.  There are three distinct persons in one God, existing at the highest level of being in absolute love.  The Doctrine is all about relationship.  Jesus reveals to us that God is our Father, and that God is love.  Love is the binding force that holds all relationships together.  Trinitarian theology teaches us that the love relationship between the Father and the Son (the Creator and the Redeemer) is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

            Saint Paul expresses the power of this Mystery when he writes to the Romans in our second reading today.  He insists that hope does not disappoint.  That hope is not based on our efforts to reach out to God.  That hope is based on the Trinitarian love of God reaching out to us.  We see that love in the Book of Genesis and believe that the Father has created everything out of love for us.  We see that love in the person of Jesus Christ who gives himself totally to us in reconciling us to God, despite all the times we choose to break those bonds of love.  We see that love in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit who makes present the redemptive love of God in so many ways, but especially in the sacramental life of the Church.

            Saint Paul talks about the afflictions he has suffered in bringing the message of God’s love in Jesus Christ to so many people around the Mediterranean Sea.  He has been rejected by his own people.  He has been stoned and scourged.  He has endured hardship in his travels and shipwreck on the seas.  In all of these afflictions, he boasts in hope of the glory of God.  His reason is simple.  The Holy Spirit has been poured out in him, giving him that hope which does not disappoint.  The presence of the Holy Spirit produces endurance and proven character and ultimately the virtue of hope.

            The Dogma of the Holy Trinity may be a Mystery that cannot be defined in human words.  But the Trinity is a bond of love drawing us to be union with the Trinitarian God.  It is easy to become discouraged and despair in a world so filled with division, hatred, war, violence, racism, and a lack of respect for the dignity of human life.  Through the indwelling of the Trinitarian God, we are given the gift of hope, which will never disappoint.  The Trinitarian God invites us to be open and respond to that love, giving it to others.

             

 

PENTECOST SUNDAY

5 JUNE 2022

 

          Throughout this Easter Season, we have been hearing from the Farewell discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper from the Gospel of John.  Today, Jesus commands his disciples to love as he has loved them.  They are to give themselves in humble service, as he had washed their feet.  They are to imitate his total gift of self, as he will do on the cross.  However, he will not leave them alone to obey this command.  He promises to send another Advocate to be with them.  When he returned to the right hand of the Father in the Ascension, he did not tell them to make plans to organize a new Church.  He did not tell them to form work details or to develop strategies to begin their mission as Church.  He told them to wait in Jerusalem to pray and wait for the promised Advocate.  The power of the Church in the world is sustained by prayer and faith, not by might and muscle.  At the time that Saint Luke wrote the Acts of the Apostles, King Herod and the Roman Caesar were using their might and muscle to accomplish their goals.  Both of them are long gone.  But the Church of Jesus Christ remains, with all our faults and failures and sins.  Of course, we need to give our gifts to build up the Body of Christ, established in this parish through our Baptism and Confirmation.  But, the work of the Church in this parish is most visible when we grow in authentic prayer and faith, trusting the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

            We heard Saint Luke’s account of the fulfillment of the promise Jesus made at the Last Supper in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles.  We need to look beyond the drama of the mighty wind, the tongues of fire, and the many languages to understand the dynamics of the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Those dynamics impact us as much as they impacted the 120 disciples in that upper room on the Day of Pentecost in at least three ways.

            First, Saint Luke emphasizes that the gift of the Holy Spirit occurs during the Jewish Festival of Pentecost – 50 days after the Feast of Passover.  This Jewish Festival celebrates the giving of the Law to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai.  It was one of the three pilgrimage festivals when Jews came from around the Mediterranean to come to Jerusalem.  Occurring 50 days after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Spirit’s descent enacts the giving of the New Law – the law of Christ to love God and neighbor, as he has loved us.   That same Holy Spirit is given to us, so that we can obey the new law of love in our day.

            Second, we need to understand the meaning of the tongues of fire.  The tongue is a symbol of speech.  At the Tower of Babel, the unity of speech was destroyed.  Confusion and conflict replaced the original unity.  The opposite happens here.  The gift of tongues enables the disciples to speak as one body.  The Spirit unites what had been divided.  Even though the tongues of fire hover over individuals, that gift is for the gathered community.  That same gift is given to this gathered community to speak the one language of God’s love.  We speak that one language when we give ourselves in humble service and are willing to die to ourselves for others.

            Finally, the Holy Spirit moves them outside the upper room to the outside world.  The gift of the Holy Spirit is not meant to isolate them as a group holier than any other.  The Holy Spirit moves them to transform that world, even in the face of opposition.  That same gift moves us out of this church to transform our world, even in the midst of opposition.

            As we celebrate this Memorial of the Last Supper and conclude the Easter Season, we too can be assured that Jesus has fulfilled his promise to us.  With the promptings of the Advocate, we can obey the new law of love.  We can speak the common language of love and mercy, especially as we emerge from the pandemic.  We can make a difference in our world.