16th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Genesis 18:1-10a; Colossians 1:24-28; Luke 10:38-42

Video

As I suspect was the case with many of you,
I was transfixed last week by the first images
coming from the James Webb Space Telescope.
They were not only beautiful,
but they made visible 
the immense size of the cosmos,
in which vast galaxies appear as tiny spots of light,
as well as its immense age,
capturing light that originated from stars
thirteen billion years ago,
at the very dawn of the universe.

That vastness-made-visible awakened in me 
feelings like those expressed by the 17th-century
scientist and philosopher, Blaise Pascal:
“When I consider the short duration of my life, 
swallowed up in an eternity before and after, 
the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity 
of spaces whereof I know nothing, 
and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. 
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

And yet, at the same time, 
these very same images elicited in me 
a sense of wonder and gratitude,
and the thought that 
what is important about human beings
is not our physical place in the universe,
but the fact that we, 
fragile creatures that live
on a small rocky formation 
in an obscure corner of the cosmos,
sustained and protected 
by a thin layer of gas clinging to its surface,
limited in time and space,
can look up into those silent, infinite spaces
and bring into ourselves
the vastness and beauty of the universe 
through the miracle of thought and understanding.
Pascal went on to say:
“By space the universe encompasses 
and swallows me as an atom… 
by thought I comprehend the world. 
Man is but a reed, 
the most feeble thing in nature; 
but he is a thinking reed.”
Our discovery of the scope of the cosmos
should increase our sense of awe and wonder 
at the power of God’s creative activity
and at the immense privilege of being 
witnesses to that activity,
the glory of knowing even a small slice
of what God is doing in creation.

This sense of awe mixed with terror, 
this sense of a mystery beating in the heart of things
and holding our universe in existence,
is something we as Christians share with all people,
even those who do not call this mystery
by the name “God.”
Who knows? 
Perhaps this sense of awe and mystery
is shared by other intelligent beings—
other “thinking reeds”— 
living on other rocky formations
in other obscure corners of the cosmos.

But, St. Paul reminds us today,
our Christian faith tells us
that there is an even greater mystery 
at work in our world,
for the infinite creative force
that holds the universe in existence
has come to dwell among us in the flesh,
a fragile reed among other fragile reeds,
so that we might know the fullness 
of the riches of his glory 
and live eternally in the light of that glory.
Paul makes it his life’s work to reveal to all people
“the mystery hidden from ages 
and from generations past”
but now made known to God’s holy ones:
the mystery of the infinite power of God
present among us in Jesus Christ crucified.

In our Gospel today we see
Mary of Bethany sitting at the feet of Jesus,
heedless of her sister’s complaints,
because she sees the mystery
that Martha is too busy to recognize:
that the creative force that forged the cosmos
and adorned it with such beauty
is present in the flesh,
as a human being,
in their home,
on a fragile rocky formation
in an obscure corner of the cosmos.
Mary sits at the feet of Jesus 
because she knows that in his presence
she is in the presence of divine glory,
a glory surpassing the beauty
of the stars and galaxies and nebulae
that so captivated us this past week.
She has found the one thing necessary;
she has chosen the better part
and it will not be taken from her,
for it will lead her into eternity.

Pascal saw in the vastness of the cosmos
cause for both wonder and terror.
But he also saw within himself
an even more vast emptiness.
He wrote, “There is a God-shaped void 
in the heart of each person 
that cannot be satisfied 
by any created thing 
but only by God the Creator, 
made know through Jesus Christ.”
The vastness of creation—
the unimaginable scope of space and time—
is mirrored within us by an equally vast yearning,
and knowing this vastness without knowing Jesus Christ
can lead us to despair,
for what hope can we fragile reeds have
amidst such immensity
if all we know is our own fragility?
But in Jesus Christ God has come among us
with a human face and a human heart
to fill the empty space within our own hearts,
to reveal to us the mystery of eternal love
here on this tiny rocky formation 
in this obscure corner of the cosmos.
Pascal writes that because Christ shares 
our human condition,
“Jesus is the God whom 
we can approach without pride 
and before whom 
we can humble ourselves without despair.”

Paul tells us that Christ in us is the hope for glory,
a glory surpassing anything 
that we poor thinking reeds can conceive.
As we ponder the beauty 

and terror of the cosmos,

let us ponder as well 

the hope of glory revealed in Christ,
and let us pray that God would give us that hope,
that God would fill us with that glory,
and that God would have mercy on us all.

 

14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 66:10-14c; Galatians 6:14-18; Luke 10:1-12, 17-20 

Video

In our first reading, the prophet Isaiah 
offers an interlocking set of images:
the image of the human mother who feeds her child 
from the substance of her own body;
the image of God as a mother
who seeks to comfort and console us
in our need and in our fear;
and the image of the city of Jerusalem as a mother
whose nurture and whose care extend to all her children.
Each of these images is worthy of our attention.

First, we have the image 
of the human mother and her child.
We have heard a lot, in recent days, 
about the relationship of mother and child,
a relationship that is, as a matter of biological fact,
unique in its intimacy and in its complexity,
in its intricate intertwining of two lives,
particularly during the months of pregnancy,
but continuing in the years that follow. 
If those on opposite sides of the question
of the legality of abortion agree on nothing else
(and it sometimes seems that they agree on very little),
all acknowledge the uniqueness of that relationship
and its life-changing power.
Indeed, it is precisely this uniqueness and power
that makes the issue so volatile, and so important,
and why the Church teaches the need 
to protect and foster that relationship
in ways that honor both mother and child.

Second, we have the image of God as a mother, 
which might be initially startling,
accustomed as we are to praying to God as Father.
Isaiah suggests, however, 
that in the unique and complex intimacy
of the relationship of mother and child
we see an image of God’s intimacy with us,
an image of the God who brings us 
to birth in the order of nature
and rebirth in the order of grace.
Indeed, some saints have suggested 
that we see in the pains of Jesus on the cross
the labor pains of God incarnate
bringing forth that new creation
of which Paul speaks in our second reading.
Julian of Norwich, writing in the 14th-century, 
says, “our true Mother, Jesus, who is all-love, 
gives us birth into joy and endless living.” 
As Isaiah and Julian suggest,
the image of God as mother
surely has an important place among
the many metaphors that we use
to speak of the mystery of God’s love,
and should shape our understanding
of the dignity of human motherhood.

Finally, we have the image 
of the city of Jerusalem as a mother,
who shares her abundance with all her children.
Isaiah shows us God not simply promising
that the city will prosper,
but that her prosperity will be 
spread abroad among her children, 
reaching far and wide 
so that all will receive her motherly care.
This vision is at the heart 
of the social teachings of the Church:
the political community exists to ensure
that the goods that God 
has lavished upon the world
are shared in justly by all people, 
most especially the weak and the vulnerable.
We might have legitimate disagreements 
on the precise balance 
between public policy and private initiative
in this distribution of goods,
but for us as Catholics 
whatever way we strike that balance
must respect the Church’s teaching that,
as St. John Paul II put it back in 1981,
“the right to private property is subordinated…to the fact 
that goods are meant for everyone” (Lab. Ex. §14).
Or, as St. Ambrose put it in the 4th century,
somewhat less technically and with a bit more bite,
“The earth belongs to everyone, 
not to the rich” (De Nabute c. 12 n. 53).
Saints John Paul and Ambrose teach us 
that our vision for our own city, state, and nation,
no less than Isaiah’s vision for the holy city Jerusalem,
should be of a community in which all are given
what they need, not simply to survive, but to flourish,
and that our politics must be rooted not in self-interest,
no matter how enlightened,
but in concern for the least of these our brothers and sisters.

In recent days many people have said
that with the overturning of Roe versus Wade
the time has come for the pro-life community 
to step up and advocate
for an economic and social order 
that will address the inequalities 
that have often led women
to seek abortion as a solution 
to an unexpected or undesired pregnancy.

This seems largely correct,
though I would add that this is something 
that some have been doing all along.
But more needs to be done,

and more of us need to do it,

and this must be a matter of concern for our nation
and not simply for us as private individuals.
Saint John Paul wrote,
“it is not enough to remove unjust laws…
[T]here need to be set in place 
social and political initiatives 
capable of guaranteeing conditions 
of true freedom of choice 
in matters of parenthood” (Ev. Vitae §90).

Our Catholic faith calls us to embrace fully 
what John Paul called “the Gospel of Life,”
which focuses our concern on life 
at its most vulnerable stages—
its beginning and its ending—
but also addresses questions 
of economic justice, war, the death penalty,
the dignity of migrants, and the environment.
All of these are elements 

of what John Paul called “a culture of life,”
a culture that embraces its children 
as a mother embraces her own,
feeding and nurturing them,
a culture that we are called to labor for,
by word and example,
as we make our journey to God’s kingdom.
We must answer this call, 
going forth gently, like lambs among wolves,
armed with nothing but the love of God.

The task lies before us.
The harvest is abundant.
Let the laborers not be few.
May God, who cares for us 
as a mother cares for her child, 
prosper the work of our hands,
and may God who is merciful
have mercy on us all.

 

Trinity Sunday

Readings: Proverbs 8:22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15

Video

In our Creed we say, 

“I believe in God, the Father almighty…”
and “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God…”
and “I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life.”
Notice that we do not say,
“I believe that God is the Father almighty…”
or “I believe that the one Lord Jesus Christ,
is the Only Begotten Son of God…”
or “I believe that the Holy Spirit
is the Lord, the giver of life.”
In the Creed we profess at Mass 
we do not simply state the content of our belief—
what we hold to be the case about God—
but we make an act of personal commitment.
It is about believing in 
as much, if not more, 
than it is about believing that.

Of course, the Creed does state 
what it is that we believe 
about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
In particular, it states that we believe
that the Son, and by implication the Holy Spirit,
are “consubstantial with the Father”—
that is to say, the Son and the Holy Spirit,
while being distinct from each other 
and from the Father,
are just as much God as the Father is,
and everything that is true of the Father as God—
eternity, omnipotence, omnipresence, and so forth—
is true of the Son and the Spirit as well.
We most definitely believe that this is the case,
and this is what we call the doctrine of the Trinity.

But saying the Creed, 
like the rest of our lives as Christians,
is not ultimately a matter of 
accepting facts about God. 
To say the Creed is not 
to recite the answer to a puzzle
but rather it is to let ourselves be drawn 
into the mystery that is 
at the very heart of existence,
the mystery that we call “God.”

Saint Augustine distinguished three different ways
we might speak about believing (Tractates on John, 29).
First, there is what he calls in Latin credere Deum,
that is, affirming that there is a God
in the way that we might affirm
that there is grass on the ground 
or clouds in the sky.
We assent to the fact of God’s existence,
though, of course, even the devil does that.
Second, there is what he calls credere Deo—
a change of a mere two letters—
and this is to “believe God,”
that is, to accept something 
because God has revealed it.
Finally, there is credere in Deum,
that is, to believe in God.
This is not simply to affirm 
that there is a God,
or to affirm what God has revealed,
but is to make God the object of our love
and the goal of our living.
This is to promise ourselves to God:
to ask God to be our God
and to commit ourselves to be God’s people.
 
And this is what we do when we say the Creed.
St. Thomas Aquinas says that faith 
weds the soul to God (Exp. in Symb. Apost. a. 1),
so we might think of saying the Creed
as something like speaking wedding vows.
When a couple marries, the vows they make
involve both a belief that and a belief in.
I vow myself to you because I believe 
that you are a good person, a loving person,
an honest and steadfast person.
But more than that, my vows are the sign
that I believe in you:
I profess my faith that you will be good to me,
and I will be good to you;
that you will be loving to me,
and I will be loving to you;
that you will be honest and steadfast to me
and I will be honest and steadfast to you.
In believing in you, I join my life to yours,
I join my fate to yours,
I say, wherever you go, I will go,
until the day I die.
In making this vow,
I come to dwell in our shared love.
 
And when we say the Creed,
we certainly say that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
But more than that, we entrust ourselves,
when the world seems empty of meaning,
to the God who made all things good,
who plays upon the surface of his earth
and finds delight in the human race.
We entrust ourselves, when we have sinned,
to the God who has made peace with us 
through Jesus Christ
and in whose grace we stand. 
We entrust ourselves, when the future is uncertain,
to the God who has promised to us the Spirit of truth,
who will guide us into all truth.

And in so entrusting ourselves,
our soul comes to dwell in the eternal mystery of love,
the love that existed before the world was made:
“when there were no depths…
when there were no fountains 
or springs of water;
before the mountains 
were settled into place,
before the hills.”
To believe, not simply that there is a God,
but to believe in God,
is to dwell in the mystery of timeless love 
that we call the Trinity,
not because of anything that we do,
but because God 
has taken delight in the human race,
because God has made peace with us
through Jesus Christ,
“because the love of God 
has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit 
that has been given to us.”

I believe in one God:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
the mystery of love
to whom our soul is wed in faith.
May this merciful God 
have mercy on us all.

Ascension

Readings: Acts 1:1-11; Hebrews 9:24-28, 10:19-23; Luke 24:46-53

Video

Last Tuesday, twenty-one people, 
nineteen of them young children,
were killed in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
Ten days earlier, ten people, all of them Black, 
were killed in a racist hate crime in Buffalo, New York. 
And lest we forget, distracted by fresh horrors,
some 4000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed so far
in Russia’s unjust war in their country. 

I find myself thinking that it would be awfully nice
to be able to rise like Jesus up above this earth,
to enter a place of eternal heavenly rest
above the sorrow and pain that human inflicts on human, 
above the violence and madness that infects us,
above the self-interest and complacency that make us
go on as if these sorts of things are normal or tolerable.
It would be nice to escape this earth we have soaked
with the blood and tears of the innocent.

But the Ascension is not about escape.
It is not about Jesus being plucked from this vale of tears.
It is not about Jesus leaving behind the world’s sorrows,
and even less about him leaving behind we who are sorrowing.
We pray in our liturgy this day:
“he ascended, not to distance himself from our lowly state
but that we, his members, might be confident of following
where he, our Head and Founder, has gone before.”
He ascended not to separate himself 
from the blood and tears of the innocent,
but to bring that pain into the healing light of God.
He ascended not to leave us behind
but so that he might be our great high priest in heaven,
interceding for us before the Father through the Spirit.
He ascended so that our lowly state might touch eternity.

In the Eucharistic Prayer, 
after the gifts have been consecrated—
gifts of bread and wine that we offer
as symbols of our loves and labors,
the bread of life and affliction,
the wine of joy and cup of sorrow,
now transformed into the body and blood of Christ—
the priest prays in our name:
“command that these gifts be borne
by the hands of your holy Angel
to your altar on high
in the sight of your divine majesty,
so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar
receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son,
may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.”
In our celebration of the Eucharist, 
Christ becomes once more present among us,
and is once more lifted up by the angels,
and, as our great high priest, lays our human lives—
their joys and hopes, their anxieties and sorrows—
upon the heavenly altar,
so that we, who receive him at this earthly altar,
might taste eternity in him.

In the days that have followed since last Tuesday,
various media outlets have published pictures 
of the twenty-one people who were murdered.
Each of them is heart-breaking and gut-wrenching, 
but one has repeatedly caught my eye.
It is the picture of Jacklyn Cazares, age nine.
It is a picture from her first Holy Communion,
in her white dress, with a crown of white flowers in her hair.
She smiles with the joy of that day,
that day her life was laid by Christ on the altar on high,
that day she was filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.
Without in any way ceasing to be heart-breaking,
it is for me also an image of hope:
hope in Jesus Christ risen and ascended,
hope amid terror and strife,
hope for life and healing 
in God’s eternal light.

Hope, however, is not simply consolation.
Hope is also challenge.
Hope challenges us to ask, even as we mourn,
what is God calling us to do?
Hope tells us that, even if we cannot fix the world,
even if we cannot absolutely guarantee
that such horrors will never happen again, 
we also are not allowed to do nothing.

The U.S. bishops have noted several concrete measures
that could be tried to reduce the incidence of gun violence:
from mandatory background checks for gun purchases,
to improved mental health services,
to federal laws that criminalize gun trafficking,
to an honest assessment of the effect on people
of the images of violence that pervade our society.
We cannot know for sure 
that any of these things will save lives,
but hope calls us at least to try.

But that is not the only role that hope has to play.
So many in our society live
with a pervasive sense of hopelessness,
a hopelessness that leads people 
to lash out against the world.
This seems to have been the case 
with the killer in Uvalde,
who was bullied at school
and faced conflict at home,
who saw no hope in the world
that his life could ever be different.
Here is where the challenge of hope,
the challenge of following Jesus,
becomes really difficult.
The governor of Texas called him 
“the face of pure evil,”
but, looking with eyes of faith, love, and hope 
we should see a broken child of God,
starving for hope.

To see in this way is, of course, 
impossible for us to do
apart from God’s gift of grace.
But we who have been lifted up with Christ,
whose lives have been laid by him on the altar on high,
have been filled with every grace and heavenly blessing
and given the mind of Christ with which to see.
And he calls us now, not to escape, 
but to be his body in the world,
a world soaked with the blood 
and tears of the innocent,
a world hungry for hope, 
hope that we make visible in our actions.
May God strengthen us 
for this task to which he calls us,
may God raise up the dead 
and comfort the sorrowing,
and may God have mercy on us all.

Easter 2

Readings: Acts 5:12-16; Rev 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19; John 20:19-31

Video

When Jesus rises from the dead
he does not rise 
in a body smooth and whole,
but a body wounded, 
a body dehumanized by torture, 
a body that bears the marks of human hatred.
The resurrection, of course, restores that body to life—
indeed, it transforms and glorifies that body,
giving it a life that shares in God’s own eternity—
but it does not erase the marks of outrage.
It does not erase the wounds inflicted
by the religious leaders who rejected him,
by the crowd that cried “crucify him, crucify him,”
by Pontius Pilate whose cowardice condemned him,
by the Roman soldiers who drove the nails into his flesh,
by the disciples who abandoned him and fled in fear.

The resurrection does not erase those marks of betrayal
because it is only by his wounds that we know
that it is truly Jesus who appears before us.
It is by his wounds that we know
that the one who once was dead
is now the one who lives,
that he who was crucified in time
is alive forever, 
the first and the last.

The wounds, however, do not simply attest 
to the fact of the resurrection;
rather they show us 
what the resurrection means for us.
They show that the resurrection is not simply
a miracle that God works 
in order to rescue Jesus from death,
but is the great saving act of God
by which we are rescued;
the wounds show us that the resurrection
is not just good news for Jesus
but for us as well—
we who are flawed and frail,
sinful and sorrowful,
mortal and mournful.

In the resurrection, 
Jesus does not “put the past behind him”
but rather offers up that past 
at the altar of God’s eternal temple.
Jesus does not abandon the sad story of the passion,
but brings with him into risen glory
all that he suffered in his mortal life,
which he live for us and for our salvation:
the wounds not erased, but redeemed;
the betrayals not forgotten, but forgiven;
the malice not ignored, but met with mercy.
The risen Jesus retains his wounds 
for they are the sign of his great love for us:
“No one has greater love than this, 
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

And in doing this,
Jesus sets the pattern for our own risen life.
It is a longstanding Christian belief
that even in God’s kingdom 
the martyrs will retain 
the marks of their martyrdom,
by which they bore witness to Jesus Christ.
St. Augustine writes,
“this will not be a deformity, 
but a badge of honor, 
and the beauty of their virtue—
a beauty which is in the body, 
but not of the body— 
will shine forth in it” (Civ. Dei 22.19). 
The wounds of the martyrs are not erased
but glorified and transformed,
for their scars bear witness to their love.

And so too for all of us:
everything we have suffered 
for the sake of love—
whether physically or spiritually—
will be taken up in glory,
healed but not erased.
Because it is the things we have suffered for love 
that have made us who we are.
The struggles of marriage and parenthood,
the rejections we endure for our commitment to truth,
the sacrifices we make to aid those who have less,
the betrayals and malice that we forgive,
the illnesses we endure trusting in God’s goodness—
all of these, embraced out of love of God,
become the glorious wounds of our witness,
the beauty of the virtue that God pours into us
over the course of a lifetime lived in faith.
The scars borne by our bodies and souls
are the letters with which 
the stories of our lives have been written,
and those stories are not forgotten in eternity
but are remembered and raised up and transformed 
in ways that we can only begin to imagine.

The good news of Easter is not 
that past suffering is simply left behind.
The body that is tortured on the cross
is the same body that emerges from the tomb
still bearing the marks of torment.
We remember in every Eucharist
the suffering Christ endured for love of us
even as we receive the living Christ in communion.
We ourselves, who have been raised with Christ in baptism,
daily experience the pain to which love leaves us vulnerable.
But Easter places the story of our suffering
within the larger story of Jesus’ triumph over death
and the mercy that he shows to all who suffer,
and in doing so the scars we bear 
are transformed, not erased.
It is this hope of transformation that sustains us
even as the story of our lives continue to be written:
sometimes in sorrow,
sometimes in joy,
but at all times enclosed 
in the merciful love
of Jesus Christ, 
wounded and risen.

 

Holy Thursday

Readings: Exodus 12:1-8, 11-14; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-15

Preached at Corpus Christi Church, Baltimore.

The students to whom I teach Dante's Divine Comedy
are often surprised that in the lowest depth of Hell
Dante places, not those who committed sexual sins
(which is what they expect from someone 
who lived in the prudish Middle Ages),
nor those who committed crimes of violence
(which is who most of them think deserve
the most serious punishment),
but rather those guilty of betrayal.
For Dante, betrayal is the act that ends you up 
in the deepest, coldest circle of Hell
because it is springs, not simply from 
a failure of reason to properly direct our desires,
the ways that sins of lust and violence do,
but from an abuse of the love and trust
that others bear toward us.
You can only betray someone who trusts you,
and to betray such trust is to exploit
the most precious gift one person can give to another.
It is the action that makes us most unlike God,
for God is eternally faithful in love toward us,
and asks for nothing but faithful love in return.
And because it makes us most unlike God
it places us at the farthest distance from God.

We all know the experience of betrayal
because we live in a world marked by betrayal.
In the Biblical story of humanity’s fall
we find not only the disobeying of God’s command
not to eat from the tree in the garden
but also a primal act of betrayal:
“it is her fault; she made me do it.”
We all know betrayal,
and we know it from both sides:
we have had our trust betrayed
but we have also betrayed the trust of others.
Perhaps it is a seemingly trivial betrayal—
a small promise made but not kept—
or perhaps it is a life-shattering breach of trust:
a deceptive co-worker,
a devious friend,
a disloyal spouse.

And the betrayal that pervades our world operates
not just on an interpersonal level
but on an institutional level.
Many today feel betrayed by our government,
by our educational and medical establishments,
by our Church.
Some, faced with crushing disappointments in life,
may even feel betrayed by God
We feel that there were 
promises made
that were not kept,
hopes held out 
that were not fulfilled,
trust engendered
that was not deserved.
We may be tempted to adopt the view 

that trust is for suckers,
and the only way to avoid betrayal
is to hold yourself back 
from trusting anyone or anything,
to protect yourself by sealing up your heart.

Tonight puts us into the middle
of the story of history’s greatest betrayal:
the betrayal of the God who took flesh
for us and for our salvation,
and whom we handed over 
to suffering and death.
In every celebration of the Eucharist
we recall this night with these words:
“For on the night he was betrayed…”
Jesus is betrayed by Judas with a kiss,
for thirty pieces of silver.
Jesus is betrayed by Peter and the other disciples,
who had said that they would die with him,
but then flee and hide and deny that they knew him.
Jesus is betrayed by religious and political authorities,
who claim to rule in the name of piety and justice,
but show themselves instead to be ruled by fear
and by the desire for domination.
Jesus is betrayed by the crowd,
which had rapturously greeted him 
as he entered Jerusalem,
only to call for his crucifixion a few days later.
It seemed to some, even, 
that he has been betrayed by God:
“He trusts in God; 
let God deliver him now, if he wants to” (Mt 27:43).

In this midst of this scene of betrayal, however,

Jesus does not hold himself back from trust,
but rather leans into it,
knowing that the one whom he calls Father
remains faithful in his promises.
He does not protect himself by sealing up his heart
but opens his heart to us in love
so that water and blood might flow forth—
the water that washes our sins away,
the blood that becomes our food and drink.
For on the night he is betrayed,
the night he is handed over by a friend
and abandoned by his followers,
he takes bread and wine 
and, giving thanks, hands himself over to us
in an act of loving self-abandonment:
“This is my body that is for you….
this…is the new covenant in my blood.” 
He offers his own blood as the sign of covenant,
the sign of promise in which we can trust, 
even in the midst of betrayal.
In the night that lies at the center
of the long, sad history of human betrayals,
Jesus shows us that betrayal must be answered with love.
He is not telling us to turn a blind eye to betrayal,
to ignore it or pretend it doesn’t happen.
Jesus knows Judas will betray him,
and lets him know that he knows.
But still he washes his feet,
for he also knows that if betrayals make us bitter
it is we who are defeated, not our betrayers.
The only way to defeat betrayal
is through the reconciling power of love—
not our paltry human love,
which falters so in the face of betrayal,
but the love that pour itself out
into our hearts to wash away our bitterness,
the fullness of charity and life
that becomes our food and drink 
in this banquet of Christ’s love. 

In this night that he is betrayed,
Jesus hands himself over to us
so that the power of divine love
that carried him from betrayal 
through the cross
to the resurrection
might come to dwell in us as well.
Even in the midst of betrayal he invites us,
come to the feast of love.

 

Lent 5

Readings: Isaiah 43:16-21; Philippians 3:8-14; John 8:1-11

Video

We are told that the woman 
was brought to Jesus as a test.
The dilemma is whether or not to stone her,
which was commanded in the Law of Moses
as the penalty for adultery,
but which violated the Roman ban
on the Jews carrying out death sentences,
a privilege they reserved for themselves.
If Jesus said to stone the woman,
he would be speaking contrary to Roman law,
but if he said not to stone her
he would be speaking contrary to the Law of Moses.
So it is a test, a trap, a trick
designed either to discredit Jesus 
in the eyes of his fellow Jews
by showing his disregard for Jewish Law,
or to mark him out in the eyes of the Romans
as one who flouted the laws of Rome.

But what of the woman?
To those who bring her before Jesus
she is merely a means to test Jesus,
a tool they can use to trap and trick him.
They do not care about the terror on her face.
They do not care about her public humiliation.
They do not even care how Jesus decides her fate,
for whichever way he decides 
they will have caught him in their trap.
She is simply a pawn to be sacrificed
in the game they are playing.
It is as if they do not see her.

But Jesus sees her.
He sees her fear and her shame.
He sees the deep pain of the wound
that sin has inflicted on her soul.
He sees her accusers as well.
He sees that they seek to trap him
because they too are afraid,
afraid of Jesus and the threat he poses
to their all-too-complacent picture
of themselves as people of virtue,
people with whom God must be well-pleased.
He sees that they too bear the wound
that sin has inflicted on their souls.

Some say that when Jesus bends down
to write in the sand
he is writing the sins of the woman’s accusers.
But perhaps he is simply pausing
to create a space in which they can begin 
to examine their own consciences,
a pause in the frenzy of accusation
for a moment of self-awareness.
And when the accusers persist,
Jesus says “Let the one among you who is without sin
be the first to throw a stone at her,”
and then resumes his writing,
letting them realize to their shame that they
have been caught in their own trap.
He keeps his eyes on his writing,
giving them a chance to drift away
unseen by the one who has already 
seen into their hearts.

St. Augustine paints a striking picture 
of that moment when the crowd has melted away
and the woman is left standing before Jesus.
He writes, “The two of them alone remained: 
mercy with misery” (On the Gospel of John 33.5).
Augustine is playing on the connection between
the Latin word for misery—miseria—
and the Latin word for mercy—misericordia,
which combines the word miseria
with the word cordia, which means “heart.”
To have mercy on someone, 
to have misericordia,
is to take that person’s misery 
into one’s own heart,
to know within oneself another’s suffering
and to act accordingly.
To have mercy on someone, 
we must see them,
see the beloved creature of God
whom fear and shame afflicts.
Jesus sees the woman for who she is,
both her glory as God’s creature
and her sinful, shameful misery,
and in his heart that misery 
is washed away in a flood of mercy.
“Go, and sin no more.”
The voice of God speaks:
“Remember not the events of the past,
the things of long ago consider not;
see, I am doing something new!”

In this holy season of Lent
the Church asks us to prepare 
to celebrate the Pascal Mystery
through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.
We usually think of almsgiving 
in terms of monetary giving and material support.
But our word “alms” 
comes from the Greek word eleemosyne,
which in turn comes from the word eleos,
which means “mercy,”
as in the phrase Kyrie eleison—“Lord have mercy.”
The call to give alms in Lent
is at its root a call to plunge into the heart of mercy.

It is a call to seek mercy for ourselves 
through the sacrament of penance,
in which we allow Christ to see us 
as he saw the woman caught in adultery: 
God’s beloved creature afflicted by misery.
But it is above all a call 
to open our own hearts to the misery of others—
the misery of human suffering
that our material support can alleviate,
but also the misery of sinners, 
especially those who have sinned against us.
These are the alms we often find most difficult to give:
the alms of forgiveness to those who have hurt us,
the alms of seeing enemies as God’s beloved children,
burdened with fear and shame;
the alms of opening our hearts to them in mercy,
so that the mercy we have received from God
might flow forth from us into the world,
like “water in the desert
and rivers in the wasteland.”

The days of Lent are growing short,
but it is never too late to seek mercy—
to receive mercy and to give mercy
so that misery and mercy might meet.
May God who is rich in mercy
have mercy on us all.

Lent 3

Readings: Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15; 1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12; Luke 13:1-9

Video

The season of Lent is offered to us 
as a time of self-examination.
But why would we need to examine ourselves?
Normally when we speak of examining things
we are trying to find out something that is 
somehow obscure or hidden from us.
Doctors examine patients 
to see if there might not be ailments
that are not immediately apparent.
Teachers subject their students to examinations
to find out what knowledge they have 
hidden away in their heads.
Juries are invited to examine evidence 
to uncover the truth of what has occurred.
So why should we need to examine ourselves?
Can I be obscure to myself,
hidden from myself?

The fact that the Church calls us 
to self-examination during the season of Lent
suggests that this may actually be the case.
It suggests that we may have a way of hiding from ourselves,
deceiving ourselves about the state of our own souls,
convincing ourselves to ignore certain truths about who we are.
Jesus himself suggests as much in today’s Gospel,
saying that if we find ourselves thinking
that those who suffer tragic misfortune
must have been great sinners,
and a lack of tragic misfortune in our lives
must be a sign of our virtue,
we are fooling ourselves.
Jesus breaks through such self-deception,
saying, “I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!”
Paul makes a similar point 
in his letter to the Corinthians.
After he recounts the unfaithfulness 
of the Israelites in the desert after the Exodus,
he warns his readers not to grow too smug 
about their standing before God;
the unfaithfulness of their ancestors in faith
should rather stand as a warning to them:
“whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall.”

We human beings, it seems, 
have a propensity for self-deception.
Saint Catherine of Siena said that this is why 
we must make self-knowledge 
the foundation of our spiritual lives;
we must dwell, as she put it, 
in the house of self-knowledge.
But how do enter into 
this house of self-knowledge?
How do we examine ourselves 
so as to overcome 
our propensity to self-deceive?
Is self-examination simply a matter 
of cataloging our sins and failings,
of minutely poring over all 
that we have done wrong?
I don’t think so,
for we are not only more miserable
than we will admit to ourselves,
we are also far greater 
than we are willing to recognize.

Saint Catherine says that we 
cannot come truly to know ourselves
without knowing God.
And what we must know 
about ourselves and about God
is that God is, as he declares to Moses,
“I am who am”—the One who is—
and we, in contrast, are the ones who are not.
What Catherine means by this 
is that it is God’s very nature to exist,
and that everything else in the universe
has been created by God from nothing.
So while God is the One who is,
we are beings who have been drawn by God
out of nothingness into existence, 
in an act of unimaginable love.
When Catherine says 
that we must know that we are not,
she is saying that we must know that we exist
only because God has loved us into existence,
and we must also know that 
when we turn away from God
we begin to disappear back into nothingness.
To dwell in the house of self-knowledge
we must both acknowledge ourselves 
as artifacts of divine love,
and understand how catastrophic it is for us 
to turn away from that love
to a fruitless love of ourselves. 

During Lent we should ponder 
this double truth about ourselves,
the grandeur and misery of our condition.
We should hear Jesus’ words, 
“if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!”
not as a threat of divine punishment,
but as an invitation to let grace turn us back
to the God who has loved us 
out of nothingness into existence.
We should hear St. Paul’s words,
“whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall,”
not as an exhortation to anxiety and fear
but as an invitation to us, who are not,
to plant our feet more firmly
on the solid rock of the One who is.
Our recognition of our own poverty
should make us only marvel more
at the richness of God’s grace
that has been bestowed upon us.

Our Lenten self-examination,
if it can pierce our self-deception,
should lead us to sincere sorrow 
for our sins and failings,
but also to a deep gratitude to God
for our creation and redemption
and our hope of eternal glory.
We begin Lent as the fruitless fig tree,
having done little with the time bestowed on us,
but given by grace one more season to turn 
from the sterile self-love that pulls us into nothingness
back to the embrace of the God who loves us.
And within that embrace we can become
like the thorn bush from which God spoke to Moses,
ablaze but not consumed by the fire of the One who is,
beacons that draw others into the embrace of God.

In this Lenten season,
may we come to know ourselves
as we come to know the One who is,
and may God have mercy on us all.

Lent 1

Readings: Deuteronomy 26:4-10; Romans 10:8-13; Luke 4:1-13

Video

There is nothing like starting Lent 
with a little metaphysics.
For those of you whose philosophy may be a tad rusty,
“metaphysics” is the study of existence itself:
asking what it means for something to exist
and what different sorts of existence there might be.
I think it is good to begin Lent with a little metaphysics
not simply as an act of penance,
though it might be that for some,
but because we begin Lent with the story
of Jesus in the wilderness, 
tempted by the evil one,
and we are ourselves are invited,
as we prayed on Ash Wednesday,
to “take up battle against spiritual evils.”
So it is good to ask what sort of existence evil has.

St. Augustine famously spoke of evil as privatio boni,
an absence or lack of a goodness that should be present.
He wrote, “In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds 
mean nothing but the absence of health….
Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul
are nothing but privations of natural good” (Enchiridion ch. 11).
Evil is like a wound in existence,
a kind of nothingness that afflicts things;
it is a thing’s existing in a diminished way.
To some, the claim that evil exists 
only as an absence, a lack of a goodness,
might make it sound as if evil were somehow unreal,
which flies in the face of our experience of evil.
But, as the theologian Herbert McCabe noted,
the fact that the hole in your sock exists
only as a lack of sock where there should be sock
in no way suggests that the hole in your sock is unreal.
And likewise, the characterization of evil
as a lack of goodness where there should be goodness
in no way suggests that evil is unreal.

But even if we find this metaphysical account of evil convincing, 
there remains the question of how any of this helps us
to “take up battle against spiritual evils” in this season of Lent.
Are their practical implications to all this metaphysics?
I would argue that there are at least two.

First, we can be tempted 
to think that some people or things are purely evil, 
possessed of no goodness at all.
But, in fact, you can’t have all hole and no sock.
If the hole in my sock were to expand
to the point where there were no sock
there would be, funny enough, 
no longer any hole either.
Likewise with evil;
if it exists as a flaw within goodness,
then it needs some goodness within which to exist.
There is, in this sense, no such thing as “pure evil,” 
but only “wounded goodness.”
The things by which we are tempted
tempt us because they are good;
temptation is not the desiring of evil,
but desiring some good in the wrong way:
desiring too much food,
desiring the wrong sexual partner,
desiring success at the cost of others.
Food and sex and success are all good things,
but we can desire them in the wrong way.
And desire itself is a good thing:
we desire because we are alive
and that is certainly a good thing.
After forty days of fasting, Jesus is hungry,
and his hunger is good,
a sign that his body is functioning properly.
But desire can become twisted, misdirected;
it can become the occasion for temptation.
If there were such a thing as pure evil,
we could resist it quite easily;
but temptation grows from the fact
that evil is always lodged in good
in ways that are difficult to untangle.

Second, we can be tempted to think
that we can overcome evil simply by eliminating
the people and things we judge to be evil.
But if you have a hole in your sock,
you can’t get rid of it 
by cutting it out with a pair of scissors;
you end up only making the hole larger.
The hole must be repaired, reknitted, restored.
Likewise, you can’t eliminate evil from the world
simply by eliminating all the evil people.
Since evil only exists
as entangled with good,
our attempts to eliminate evil often result
in our inflicting further damage on the good.
This is one reason why the Church 
has come to reject the use of the death penalty,
seeing that it does not remedy evil
but only implicates us in it.
Just as you can only eliminate a hole in your sock
by knitting the sock back together,
so too you can only eliminate evil
by restoring the good it is afflicting.
As St. Augustine says, the only way 
to truly destroy your enemies
is to make them into your friends.
It is love that brings about this repair,
and we call this repair “conversion.”

Of course, in a world at war
all this may be a hard pill to swallow.
Can we really see someone like Vladimir Putin
not as pure evil but as wounded good?
Can we really believe that the evil 
being perpetrated in Ukraine
can be healed by love?
Wouldn’t it be easier, 
as some have suggested,
simply to take Mr. Putin out?
It is hard not to think so.
But the narrow way of the Gospel
that Jesus calls us to walk
is an invitation to mercy and forgiveness;
it calls us to see evil as damage
and to pray for the conversion of our enemies
even as we pray for healing for their victims.
Above all, the Gospel calls us to see 
the wounded good in ourselves,
to see ourselves as those in need of repair,
those in need of conversion.
And in this Lenten season Christ invites us 
to seek through God’s power
that which seems impossible for us
but which faith tells us is possible for God.

Let us pray that, in the weeks ahead,
God would turn us from the nothingness of evil,
back to himself, the source of all goodness,
to let grace repair the evil in our own hearts
so that we, in turn, can bring his healing to our world.
And may God have mercy on us all.

Words in Time

The following are the remarks I made at Corpus Christi Catholic Church at the launch of my homily collection How Beautiful the World Could Be (Eerdmans 2022).

Often at book signings, authors will do readings from their books. In this case, this would involve subjecting you to a sermon. You’ll be glad to know that I will spare you that. But I do want to speak for a few minutes about what preachers try to do when they preach, or at least what this preacher tries to do. In particular, I want to think about how preaching is situated within particular times and places, yet strives to make present in those times and places an enduring—one might even say eternal—word. 

Mary Jane O’Brien, a long-time and much-beloved parishioner at Corpus Christi who died in 2016, once said to me, after I had given a homily that quoted some Church Father, “you are able to find those old guys saying the most interesting things.” And Mary Jane was not someone inclined to think that old guys had very much interesting to say. So it is in honor of Mary Jane that I would like to begin my remarks with St. Augustine. 

In book nine of his Confessions, Augustine tells of being in the port city of Ostia with his mother Monica, not too many months after his conversion and baptism. They are preparing to leave Italy and return to their home province of North Africa, which for Augustine meant leaving behind his secular ambitions, which he had come to see as built on shifting sands, and seeking what God desired for him on the periphery of the Empire. They are standing looking out a window, engaged in conversation about what the life of the saints in heaven must be like, a life freed from the transitoriness of time. Augustine says, “our minds attempted in some degree to reflect on so great a reality” (9.10.23), and as they spoke, he says, “our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection toward eternal being itself…. And while we talked and panted after it, we touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of the heart. And we sighed…as we returned to the noise of our human speech where a sentence has both a beginning and an ending.”  He concludes, “But what is to be compared with your word, Lord of our lives? It dwells in you without growing old and gives renewal to all things” (9.10.24).

I think of preaching as an attempt to take that word that never grows old and gives renewal to all things, that word that we at best touch in some small degree in our most exalted moments, and render it in the noise of our human speech, where a sentence has both a beginning and an end. Augustine had a keen sense of how paradoxical our attempts are to speak of the eternal God in words that only exist as moments in the flux of time. As he says near the outset of Confessions: “What has anyone achieved in words when he speaks about you? Yet woe to those who are silent about you” (1.4.4). It is this paradox that accompanies all attempts to speak about God, but perhaps preaching most of all. For preaching is theology—God-talk—at its most ephemeral. Even when we try to make our words memorable, so that they live on in our hearers’ hearts after their sound has faded in the air, even the most memorable words will someday be forgotten. Even if, like me, you write them out, because you don’t trust yourself to speak without a script, they are often addressed to such highly specific times and places that their relevance would seem to pass away, carried on the tide of time. This ephemeral quality is not, of course, accidental, for preaching demands that we address our own particular moment, moments that come hurtling toward us from the future and quickly fade into the past, even as we seek to honor the timeless word. But I do wonder if such ephemeral theology merits printing and binding into a book.

When I was persuaded by Maureen to attempt a book of homilies, I was keenly aware of this question. So I was tempted to pick out homilies from the past fifteen years that were more “universal” in their content: homilies that could have been preached anywhere, at any time, and, in theory, to any congregation. Of course, having read Augustine a few times, I was pretty sure that no homily—indeed, no human act of speech—ever attains that sort of universality. But I also found that the less my homilies were tied to particular moments, particular people, particular places, the less “bite” they had, the less interesting they were. I found myself rereading the most generic ones, those that did not in any way reflect their time and place of origin, and thinking, “meh.” The less-generic ones seemed to draw some sort of energy from the particularities of their origin, an energy that may be noisy by comparison with the stillness of the timeless divine word, but noisy in the way that Jesus, the Word made flesh, is noisy: proclaiming, promising, denouncing, consoling. So I decided to lean into particularity.

In a sense, this book is a gamble that my reaction as an author will also be the reaction of my readers, that they too will feel in these homilies a hint of the energy unleashed by the timeless word taking flesh in time. Which is to say that the homilies in this collection are by design artifacts from particular places and moments: the homily I gave at my father in law’s funeral in Pittsburgh that required the negotiating of some complex family dynamics; the homily I gave at Cathedral of Mary Our Queen on the Sunday after the January 6 attack on the Capitol that led, after Mass, to what I will euphemistically call a spirited discussion; and the homilies I gave at my dining room table and streamed over Facebook in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic. But most of these homilies are homilies I gave in this place, listened to (if perhaps no longer remembered) by some of you sitting here today. I dedicated this book to the people of Corpus Christi because it draws much of its energy from their lives.

A few familiar names appear, such as Mary Hurson and Theo Kostic in the homily I gave at their baptism, but far more individuals are present in these homilies than those that are explicitly named. Because many of you were on my mind and in my heart as I wrote these homilies. I would often be thinking of what specific people were going through—their joys and sorrows, hopes and anxieties—and even if their names were never spoken, they shaped what I had to say. Some question raised at an RCIA session, some conversation at the church door, some struggle that was shared with me in private: all of those are in here, unspoken and yet somehow, I hope, speaking through my words. 

But it was not simply individuals who shaped this book. It was a community, the parish of Corpus Christi, a community shaped by certain practices. Some of these are practices that are universal to Catholics and Christians: listening together to God’s Word, initiating new members into Christ’s body, being nourished together at the Lord’s table. But some are practices that are particular, if not unique, to Corpus Christi. The practice of people expecting, even demanding, that homilies address the concrete realities of life, an expectation and demand that people are not afraid to articulate (I am forever grateful to Gerri Gray for telling me repeatedly that I need to give people something to do in my homilies). The practice of celebrating the liturgy in a way that underscores the full, conscious, and active participation of the whole assembly, which provided the context of worship in which my homilies were preached. The practice of welcoming those on the margins of the Church, which meant preaching to a congregation with a lot—a lot—of questions about the teachings of the Church, and a disinclination to simply accept them without argument. The practice of sharing our lives with each other outside of the liturgy, of providing me an opportunity to glimpse the richness and complexity of the lives of those who listened to me. 

This place is called Corpus Christi, the body of Christ. Its very name is a reminder that the Word takes flesh in particular times and places. For my first twelve years as a deacon, it was the body in which I tried to let the Word take flesh through my own noisy, time-bound words. To whatever degree I succeeded, the credit belongs to the Spirit who is at work in you, and, as in all things, to God belongs the glory. Thank you.