A Shout of Joy in the Midst of Darkness (Palm Sunday, 2021)

 To listen to this homily, click here.

What a difference a year makes! Last year was the most restful Holy Week I’ve ever had and it was miserable. Preaching to a camera in an empty church was not great. So, I already feel blessed to enter these holiest days with you present in this church, seeing the whites of your eyes! Sharing this journey together has brought its own blessings and I hope you feel God’s grace as we commemorate the saving mysteries that freed us from sin and gave us hope in the darkness of the pandemic!

Today we received a palm branch in memory of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. We never thought that deeply about the palm as kids, preferring instead to torture each other throughout Mass by sticking them in each other’s ears. However, these palms represent the majesty of Christ the king of heaven and earth. Then, in terrible contrast, we heard about the betrayal of Jesus, his humiliation by scourging and then...the cross.

Those standing near the cross heard those stark words of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Christians throughout the centuries have been troubled by those words: How could Jesus - who is God - feel abandoned by God? But this is not exactly what is happening. In Jesus’ time, rabbis would begin prayer or worship with a line or two from the psalms. Because most people had many of them memorized, this line would prompt those who heard it to join in and recall the message of that psalm. I know it is a poor comparison, but remember a few years ago when the movie “Frozen” came out. All anyone had to do was sing or say, “Let it Go…” and those who had seen the movie would join in the song and remember the movie and its message. For those who had not seen the film, seeing children and adults erupt in song with only the prompt of a few words seemed very strange. Jesus’ uttering those seemingly strange words,"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" would have caused every faithful Jew to bring the entire psalm to mind which begins with fear and pain but ends in the firm belief that God will deliver the faithful one from evil and suffering. 

Jesus endured the entire range of human emotion, starting with the today’s glorious and triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the devastating feeling of abandonment and betrayal of Good Friday. He can sympathize with every feeling we experience, both the high and the low. When we feel desolate, abandoned, defeated, when we wonder where God is; that is the time to come to Jesus, to come to the cross.

        When we go to Jesus, feeling abandoned, overwhelmed, or afraid, something unexpected happens. We see it in the Gospel: After expressing abandonment and ultimate trust in his Father, we hear that "Jesus gave a loud cry." Many Scripture scholars see this as a cry of triumph. In St. John's Gospel, always read on Good Friday, Jesus cries out, "It is finished.” In the ancient Greek it is only one word, “Finished!”, like something we would exclaim after completing a most challenging and monumental task. Jesus' loud cry is a shout of victory.

At the beginning of Mass, we received a victory symbol in the form of the palm branch. Please take it home and place it behind a crucifix as a reminder that if we embrace the cross we will triumph, not because of our own strength and cleverness but because of Jesus' Resurrection.

Next weekend we will begin a fifty-day celebration of Jesus' Resurrection. If at all possible, come to the sacred celebrations of the Triduum on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings. These are the central mysteries of our faith and defining moments of the world’s salvation. To celebrate them is to remember them and to remember them is to make them present and effective in our lives.  

On the cross Jesus took our evil on his shoulders, he bore the full consequences of sin, including the sense of abandonment, betrayal, and fear. But He knew what came next and what always wins! God’s faithfulness and power cannot be defeated, ever. That is the reason why in the end he gave a loud cry - a shout of victory. Amen.

Do We Hide Our Christianity or Share it Joyfully? (4th Sunday of Lent, Year B)

To listen to this homily, click here.

We have reached the tipping point of our Lenten journey, which is the 4th Sunday of Lent. This Sunday has a special Latin name of Laetare Sunday. Laetare is a command to be joyful. So why is our Church telling us to be filled with joy? Two main reasons: One is that our time of waiting and fasting is approaching an end. We are more than halfway done with our acts of penance and self-denial and the somberness of this season, which is great news! The second and even more important reason is that the celebration of our redemption, our liberation from sin and death is almost here. Without the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, there is no hope, no forgiveness and no heaven possible for any of us. So the Church reminds us to rejoice because, in three short weeks, we will once again experience the life-giving mysteries that saved our souls and redeemed the world. Those are pretty good reasons to rejoice no matter what troubles we are facing right now!

Let’s reflect for a bit on what we do when we have good news. Do we keep it to ourselves? Do we try and hide it from the people we love and trust the most? Of course not! When something good happens to us, when we discover something amazing and exciting, we can’t help but share the good news. Part of the joy is being able to bring others into our celebration. Just think about when a couple finds out they are expecting a baby and they begin to announce it to their friends and family. Or when we get a job promotion or an award in school or win some contest or even buy something significant like a car or house. Good news is definitely meant to be shared and it is unnatural to try and keep it to ourselves.

The first reading laments the fact that the Chosen People did not live out their call to be different than other nations by living the laws and customs God had shown them. They were hiding the good news of the Covenant God made with them. The author of Chronicles tells us that all the people of Judah, the princes, the people, and the priests, added infidelity to infidelity and ignored God’s messengers and warnings. The main problem was NOT that they were breaking God’s rules. The issue was that they were not being the witnesses he wanted them to be so the Gentiles around them could be converted and saved. Eventually their wickedness led to their downfall and the people they were supposed to inspire by faithfulness became their conquerors and captors. The same will be true for you and me. If we are afraid to witness to God and the saving teachings of his Church, if we run from sharing the Good News and evangelizing, eventually our neighbors, friends, and family will not know God and will become the ones who humble and chastise us. 

In the Gospel today, a man named Nicodemus has been listening to the Good News Jesus is preaching. He is intrigued, he likes what he hears, he wants to know how he can get in on the deal. But he is also afraid. Nicodemus is a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin. He is a man of status in the Jewish community, he has some power and prestige because of his position. He doesn’t want people to see that he is learning from Jesus; he definitely doesn’t want people to think he is a follower, even if, for all intents and purposes, he is. If people find out that he is talking to Christ, he will go down a few notches, he may lose his elevated status, and he might be mocked and dismissed. Nicodemus has to make a choice; does he want to find fulfillment and meaning in human honors and social status? Or is he willing to embrace this incredible gospel of Jesus, which not only intrigues him but also resonates in his mind and heart? In the passage we just heard, Nicodemus is not ready yet; he still hides and doesn’t want anyone to know that he believes in Jesus. In a couple years, when Jesus is crucified, Nicodemus will be one of the brave souls who cares for the body of Christ and places it in the tomb. After the resurrection, he will become a martyr for Christ, unashamed to be counted as a disciple of Jesus.

Do we not sometimes resemble Nicodemus in his timid and frightened state? Many of us are intrigued by the promise and beauty of our catholic faith. But we are also afraid to be seen as a zealot, a Jesus-freak. Don’t we worry about what people might think if we were vocally christian, unapologetically Catholic? And so we sneak around spiritually like Nicodemus. We are covert Christians, non-offensive, sanitized, might we even say sterile? We pray where no one sees us. We don’t dare confront people who mock or misunderstand our Faith. We worry so much about not offending that we compromise the truth Jesus suffered and died to bring us.

Too many people today are closet Christians; fearful, like Nicodemus, to be seen following the controversial Jesus of Nazareth. Too many of us are shackled by conventions and fearful of unapologetic witness to the gospel. By the way, I am including us priests in this number as well! The opinion of the person next door or online is sometimes more important than that of Christ’s. If our faith is truly good news, why are we afraid to share it? Why is the gospel any different than those other joyful occasions where we tell others the happy and beautiful fortune which has come our way?

Jesus tells Nicodemus that He has come into the world to save the world and anyone who believes in Him will not be condemned. Our faith, by its very nature, is meant to be shared with other people. If it is alive and healthy, it cannot be kept to oneself. And if we truly think that following Christ is what brings salvation as well as joy, peace, and fulfillment, how can we keep our mouths shut when it comes to talking to other people about the gospel? Doesn’t it seem selfish and cowardly to keep it secret, especially if our silence could lead to someone missing out on eternal life?

I know each of you wants to follow Christ; that is why you are here in this church. I hope you also experience the joy that comes from being an unapologetic believer in God, who so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten son. I also pray we experience the transformation of Nicodemus and practice our faith with contagious love, courage, and passion. Our world needs people like that! Our Church needs people like that! Our parish needs people like that! 

  

 

Does God Get Jealous and Angry? (3rd Sunday of Lent, Year B)

 To listen to this homily, click here.

This Sunday’s scriptures call our attention to divine anger and holy jealousy which are emotions we don’t often associate with God. Most of us have been taught to suppress and resist these feelings in our own lives and for good reason. Sinful anger, which the Catechism defines as “a desire for revenge” is destructive to us and to the person who bears the brunt of our wrath. Sinful jealousy covets what belongs to other people and hates them for having it.

So how do we reconcile the fact that our all-good, perfectly-holy God openly admits and displays feelings that cause so much pain and dysfunction when we act on them? Is God being dramatic? Did Jesus put on his crabby pants before he went to the temple that day?! Or is there something we can learn about the anger and jealousy of God? Is there something holy about them?

Let’s start with jealousy. In giving the Ten Commandments, the Lord makes an astonishing admission, "I am a jealous God". Then he threatens severe punishment on those who worship false gods. How do we understand God's jealousy? We begin by looking at human jealousy. For us, jealousy is born out of fear and insecurity. We wonder why someone else has something they don’t appear to deserve as much as we do. We worry about what it says about us that we do not have the same possessions or relationships. Jealousy moves us to either want them for ourselves or want the other person lose them. Jealousy ends up consuming us and making it impossible to enjoy the blessings we actually have. That's what happened to Saul. He was the first king of Israel and in the beginning, a pretty good king. Then along came a young man named David who was a better fighter than him. One day Saul heard the women of Israel singing: "Saul has slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands.” Rather than be glad he had a powerful warrior in his camp, Saul became jealous. He wanted to destroy David but wound up destroying himself. 

God, on the other hand, has no fear or insecurities. He lacks nothing and needs nothing for his fulfillment and happiness. He created everything out of generosity not necessity or neediness. If that is hard to comprehend or imagine, that’s because there is no other being like God. He is completely free, loving, and generous. When God says he is "jealous," it is not disordered like ours. Unlike human jealousy that destroys, God's jealousy puts things back together.  He wants us to belong to him because he knows, as our maker, we will have no happiness apart from him.

A positive word for jealousy is "zeal." The two words come from the same Greek root. Which leads us to the gospel where Jesus cleanses the temple. Jesus is filled with an all-consuming zeal as he sees his Father’s house reduced to a shadow of what it was meant to be. God’s people have settled for less than what God wanted to give them. Their greed and small-mindedness made it difficult even for the pure of heart to offer true worship. To remove barriers between God and his people, Jesus tips over tables, scatters coins and stampedes cattle. He is willing to unleash some chaos in order to get our attention. Seeing such zeal, such jealousy, it makes you wonder: For the sake of our souls, to what lengths will he go? Of course, in a few weeks, we will find out.

Many people read today’s gospel and just figure Jesus lost his cool, as if he was finally pushed too far and he couldn’t take it anymore. However, that is how we experience anger. We know all too well how it feels to absorb the sting of someone else’s rage. Each of us, unfortunately, has done and said things in anger which we later deeply regretted and had to humbly apologize for. Anger can do great harm to ourselves and others. In our daily life we should avoid anger and, when it does boil up, we have a responsibility to find ways to tame and control it. My anger is not the problem of other people, regardless of their words and actions. I must learn how to manage it, hopefully with the grace of God and not simply willpower alone. 

With that being said, as today’s Gospel shows, some circumstances require a different expression of anger which is not rooted in hatred but love. Jesus was not motivated by rage or spite as he knocked over tables and drove out merchants and their animals. He saw how far they had moved away from God and how dangerously close they were to losing their souls. They had made gods out of money, profit and commerce and if they didn’t immediately, they would lose everything.

This was not the first time that Jesus observed the Temple being profaned, but he decided now was the time to act. He wasn’t angry for his sake. God has no ego like we do. His anger is only stirred for our good and conversion. When God gets mad, it’s because he knows that to be patient or quiet would make him a divine enabler or coward. Jesus knew there was one last hope for the temple authorities to change their ways and offer right worship. If they didn’t repent now, the temple would be destroyed forever. Holy anger was the only remaining hope to stir them out of their sinful stupor. Jesus did not hate the merchants or the priests or anyone else with his anger. That’s what is different from us. His anger flowed from perfect love for those who were running full speed into destruction and desecration. He knew full well the consequences of his actions. They weren’t for his benefit but ours.

    This is sometimes called “righteous anger” and it can only come from God. It’s motivation is not to humiliate or destroy. Instead, righteous anger seeks to restore the wrongdoer to right relationship with the one person who can fulfill every desire and offer perfect love, God himself. 

Lent is a season to examine the anger and jealousy within us. Is any of it holy? Do our hearts burn with a zeal for God to be glorified in all things? Is there any righteous anger within us, fueled by love of God and the good of our neighbor? Has God won our hearts or have the temples of our souls become a marketplace of greed, selfishness, and sin? Lent is an opportunity for us to be stirred out of complacency and complicity. God is jealous for us; let’s stop running away from him and tell him we are his and he is ours. 

Why Does God Ask for Sacrifice? (2nd Sunday of Lent, Year B)

To listen to this homily, click here.

This Sunday we hear one of the most important yet disturbing events in the entire Bible: the call of Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. It is a pivotal event not only in the Bible but in human history because Abraham is not only the father of the Jewish race, he is also the spiritual father of Christians. The Muslims also consider him their patriarch thru Ishmael. Because three major world religions trace their beginnings back to this man and his descendants, it is vital for us to understand what this story means and how it might relate to us.

Keep in mind the Church assumes we know the whole story that goes before what we heard in the first reading. I think that is probably a little generous and optimistic of the Church to think we know Scripture so well but if you are listening to Fr. Mike Schmidt’s Bible in Year podcast, you recently heard the background to this story. If you don’t, Abraham probably strikes you as borderline insane and criminally reckless. God comes across as potentially cruel and a bit of a pyscho. So what is the context of this strange episode?

We need to go back about 7 decades in Abraham’s life to make sense of it all. When Abraham was in his 70’s, he was a prosperous, decent man living in the land of Ur, which is present-day Iraq. The people of Ur were wealthy, technologically advanced and had dazzling cities and markets. But Ur was a wicked land. They worshipped many gods and offered human sacrifice, often little children to appease their deities. It was in this context that God appeared to Abraham and said, “I want you to trust me and follow me into an unknown land. Leave behind everything and I will make you into a new people” The sacrifice God asked of Abraham in exchange for his friendship was the letting go of his past. This included Abraham’s many lands and livestock which had been passed down to him from his father and his father’s father. God asked Abraham to trust him so God could give something even better. And Abraham did! As a septuagenarian, he packed up his family and followed God into an unknown land.

But this was just the beginning. God was pleased with the way Abraham surrendered his past so the next step was to ask him to trust God with his present. This was a little more difficult for our Father-in-faith. He wanted to see where he was going; it was hard to live in the present and simply let God give him what he needed each and every day. A number of times he accepted part of God’s plan but then added elements of his own. And every time he did, disaster and heartbreak followed. We don’t have time to go into the details but it’s comforting to know that even this faith-filled and holy man struggled like we do, to follow God day by day. Even though part of him knew God would provide, he couldn’t help but try to move God’s plan along himself. 

One of the central promises God made to Abraham was that if he trusted the Lord with his past and his present, the Lord would provide for his future. He would give him descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. But by this time Abraham was an old man. His wife Sarah had never been able to bear children. Once again, after some ups and downs, Abraham believes and becomes a dad when he is 100 years old! Poor Sarah is 90 when she give birth to their son, their future, Isaac. His name means “he laughs” but who exactly is laughing is up for interpretation. Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?

This is the critical context behind our first reading today. While it seems shocking and wrong for God to ask Abraham to sacrifice his only and beloved son, by this time the Patriarch would have had nearly 70 years of experience dealing with the Lord. He would have known by now that God had always kept every promise he ever made. He would have known that God could be trusted with his past, he had seen that God was utterly trustworthy in the present. Abraham had learned, over and over again, that God never took something away without replacing it with something even bigger and better. Faced with that evidence, only a fool would withhold from God his future, embodied in his son Isaac. 

Some scholars think Abraham believed God would raise his son after the sacrifice. We will never know exactly what he thought but it is clear he knew God would not let him down. He had second-guessed God’s plans enough to realize it never went well. God always came through, even when the situations were absolutely unsolvable with human solutions. 

The foreshadowing is as clear as day. The father of Faith leads his only son, who at this time is in his mid-30’s, up a mountain to be offered in sacrifice. The son, obeys his father, and carries wood for the sacrifice on his back. The mountain Abraham and Isaac climb was in the hills outside present-day Jerusalem. It may have been Calvary itself but if not, it was one of its nearby neighbors. 

In our story today, the transformation of Abraham is complete. When he leads Issac up the mountain, he has finally trusted God with his past, his present, and his future. He gives God everything in his life. And now God can return the favor. He provides the victim for sacrifice to spare Isaac, not only on Mount Moriah but also on Calvary which will redeem not only the decedents of Abraham but all who trust in God for salvation and protection in the name of Jesus.

Through faith, you and I have been adopted into the family and promises of Abraham. We have the opportunity to receive the blessings given to him but we must live in the same way, trusting God with our past, present, and future. We cannot do this without asking for the gift of faith. Good intentions are not enough. We will always want to hold something back or try to revise God’s plan to fit our own. We should ask Abraham to help us see, as he did, that God never takes something away as a sort of cruel penalty or price. Instead, God asks us to open our hands, to free our grip from the things we hold onto, so he can place something even greater within our grasp. 

The book of Genesis goes on to tell us that Abraham died at the age of 175 years old. When he passed, he had everything and more that he had when he first met God and was invited to go on the journey of faith. God kept each and every promise! You and I are still reaping the spiritual benefits of Abraham’s faith and God’s generosity to this very day. Take some time this week to reflect on God’s invitation to trust him more deeply. Be honest about the parts of your past, present, and future that God is not allowed to touch. God doesn’t change but we must! He is dependable, he will keep his promises of mercy, blessing, and redemption made in the name of his Son, Jesus. May we open our hands, our hearts, and our lives so God can lead us to a future of joy, peace, and every other good thing!