homilies
on the liturgy of the Sundays and feasts



by john j. conley

Prophetic admonition

23rd Sunday of the Year—September 5

“A” Readings: Ezek. 33:7-9 • Rom. 13:8-10 • Matt. 18:15-20

Title: The Mature Christian (A)
    Purpose: to hold up the gospel ideal: (1) each of us another Christ,
(2) acting as Christ, (3) seeing Christ in others.

Whenever I teach Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I dwell upon Aristotle’s theory of friendship. At first, students find this view of friendship extremely odd. There is no sexual passion in it. There is no financial gain in it. There is no mutual admiration in it. But slowly, students discover the power of Aristotelian friendship. The purpose of friendship is to permit us to grow in virtue. Friends help each other by urging each other to walk in the path of moral truth. “Friends are indeed a help both to the young, in keeping them from mistakes; and to the old, in caring for them and doing for them what through frailty they cannot do for themselves; and to those in prime of life, by enabling them to carry out fine achievements” (NE VIII.1). Mature friendship uses fraternal correction to guide us toward a happiness rooted in the moral good.

The Scripture lessons today sketch a portrait of mature friendship with God and with each other in the order of grace. And they underscore the role of admonition as we progress in the path of authentic love for God and the members of the Church.

Ezekiel depicts the prophet as a sort of watchman for Israel, always vulnerable to destruction. The purpose of the watchman is not to protect his security alone. He must vigilantly defend the security of the entire nation. When an enemy—even a possible enemy—appears, the watchman must sound the alarm. The watchman is rarely popular. He drags us out of bed in the middle of the night. He searches our bags at the gate. He shouts at us when we act in a dangerous way. Yet, without his stark reminders of the truth concerning law and security, the rights of everyone are at risk. His work is an austere task of love for the entire society—oppressive for the prickly adolescent, admirable for the mature citizen devoted to the common good.

For Ezekiel, the watchman’s political office mirrors the prophet’s spiritual vocation. The purpose of the prophet is not to pursue his personal spiritual development and avoid comment on the lives of others. The prophet’s task is to trumpet loud and clear the dangers threatening the members of Israel and to warn the members to return to the path of the Law. His admonitions include broad jeremiads against idolatry and very specific critiques of a particular treaty or a recent spiritual trend. Unpopular, ridiculed, occasionally martyred, the prophet starkly reminds Israel of the moral truths essential to mature friendship with the living God.

Ezekiel’s portrait of the prophet underscores the proper path for the formation of conscience, essential for mature friendship with God and neighbor. The prophetic authority in Israel or in the Church cannot limit itself to one half-truth: “Follow your conscience.” Rather, impelled by the Holy Spirit, it admonishes the human person to form his conscience in accordance with the demands of the Law. This admonition includes the great synthetic command to love God and one’s neighbor with every power of the intellect and the will. But this call to conversion also includes very specific instructions on how we love in truth: by keeping our promises, by observing the Sabbath, by respecting the life of every human being from the dawn of conception until the dusk of natural death.

The Gospel according to St. Matthew outlines how this prophetic work of mutual correction operates in the Church. The loving Christian is free to confront the fault of another—and must be simultaneously willing to receive criticism from another. St. Matthew indicates that this work of prophetic correction must proceed carefully or it will destroy the very growth in charity it seeks to foster.

The instruction of Jesus directs the disciple to first confront in privacy the individual whom he believes to be guilty of serious sin or error. The privacy of this first step is crucial. We can easily misinterpret the public word or gesture of an individual. When we raise the issue with an individual in private, we often discover that the alleged transgression is not what it actually appeared to be in our first impressions. If the transgression did actually occur, a private confrontation permits us to take personal responsibility for our charges and for our call to change and atonement. The summons of Christ to prophetic dialogue has nothing in common with rash judgments at the cocktail party or the venom of the anonymous letter.

Jesus directs the disciple to bring the issue to the attention of another, only if the private confrontation has failed. Again, the enlargement of the prophetic confrontation is not an occasion to pressure or humiliate the accused. The additional parties called to mediate the dispute are to act as a good jury assessing the witnesses. They are dispassionate, disinterested, focused only on the truth of the case—and desiring only the repentance and conversion of the guilty party.

Finally, Jesus focuses upon the Church herself as the final arbiter of the dispute. The Church is not simply the court of last instance to resolve serious accusations—of a cleric’s misconduct or of false doctrine by a teacher. Christ emphasizes the power of the Church to “bind and loose” in her teaching authority. The Church continues the prophetic mission of Christ himself. By her merciful conduct as well as by the truth of her doctrine, she continues to form the conscience of her members in the law of Christ. By her worship and catechesis, she guides the Christian toward the love of God and neighbor at the heart of mature love. By her specific magisterial interventions, she warns the Church and the world of specific dangers to the right belief and the right conduct of the human person.

Rather than being a crutch for the weak, the teaching office of the Church nurtures the maturity of the Christian. It summons the person to renounce an ethic of self-interest for the bracing ethic of virtue. It replaces self-indulgent affection with sacrificial love. This authority cajoles, corrects, reproves—even, on occasion, excommunicates—in the service of a mature friendship with God which is the graced vocation of us all.

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1776-1802; John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor 54-64.

The forgiving heart

24th Sunday of the Year—September 12

“A” Readings: Sir. 27:30—28:7 • Rom. 14:7-9 • Matt. 18:21-35

Title: The Mature Christian (B)
    Purpose: to show how the mature Christian relates to others—always forgiving, always judging kindly, with the love of Christ.

In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola asks the retreatant to make a special meditation upon the moment of his death. This deathbed meditation draws the retreatant to a greater contrition for sin and to a deeper desire to follow Christ with ardor. It also leads the prayerful Christian to see how superficial his life has been. The retreatant awakens to the pettiness of the conflicts, grudges, and resentments that easily eclipse life. The retreatant tastes more profoundly the call to forgive and be forgiven by others. This mature experience of the depth of God’s mercy—and the summons to forgive and be forgiven—frees the disciple for the great work of the Christian adult: the wholehearted praise of God and the sacrificial service of the people God sends our way.

The Scriptures today etch the details of the forgiving heart which should characterize the mature Christian. And they offer a stark image of the personal destruction brought about by the refusal to forgive.

The sage Sirach summons the believer to forgive those who have transgressed against him. Such forgiveness conforms to the grandeur of God in his own merciful treatment of our own sinfulness. But Sirach earnestly argues that forgiveness is central for the believer’s own happiness. The refusal to forgive plunges the believer into anger. The person who refuses to forgive turns his life into a bitter wall of recrimination. The past becomes a string of slights, none of which can be healed. The future becomes a dream of vengeance, where enemies are humiliated. The present becomes a straitjacket of fear, where the soul anxiously pounces on the smallest failure, the slightest contradiction. There is no peace in such a bitter life. And, as Sirach tartly concludes, what can such a wrathful person expect from God other than more flaming wrath?

In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Christ transforms the call to forgiveness into a parable. God’s summons to forgiveness is without limit: the hyperbolic “seventy times seventy.” Forgiveness now has a face: the kind master who graciously remits the debt of his servant.

This portrait of the merciful master, of course, is more than literary. It is the portrait of the speaker, Christ himself. Through the cross, Christ forgives our own debt. We have no right to this forgiveness. We have no claim to press against God for redemption. Christ’s forgiveness of our transgressions is a gift outright of God’s mercy. It is the heart of the order of grace.

Christ’s parable also gives a face to the one who refuses to forgive and plunges himself into the circle of anger. The forgiven servant refuses to share this mercy with the servant indebted to him. Rather than treating the debtor with kindness, the servant employs the weapons of anger. The anger becomes physical, as the infuriated servant grabs and shakes the debtor. Rather than inspiring pity, the debtor’s plea for time only inflames the wrath of the creditor. The physical and psychological rage climaxes in the punishment devised for the debtor: imprisonment, where the indebted servant cannot possibly work off the debt and where the debtor’s family life is destroyed.

The enraged servant-creditor can only follow the logic of vengeance. The master may have attempted to redeem him, but the choleric servant cannot truly receive this redemption and, hence, cannot share this forgiveness with others. And what can this wrathful servant now receive from God except a similar wrath?

Anger and the refusal to forgive represent a great pastoral challenge. It is striking how often in confession and spiritual direction, Christians cite anger as the greatest obstacle to love of God and of neighbor. Often in ministering to the sick and the dying, we witness how smoldering resentments from decades before, often over the slightest conflicts, entrap the Christian in the circle of vengeance and prevent the Christian from embracing and sharing Christ’s mercy. Anger may seem less dramatic than adultery or drunkenness, but it can easily gnaw at the soul until nothing but an echo-chamber of resentments is left standing.

In summoning the members of the Church to a life rooted in God’s mercy, we are not calling them to ignore injustices of the past or to suppress anger by their own power. We are calling them to receive God’s forgiveness from the heart of the cross and to bring this mercy to all others who have offended them. We should also call them to receive this forgiveness in its most personal form; in the sacrament of reconciliation, where we personally name our sinfulness, personally receive the absolution of Christ, and personally hear the counsel of the priest for a future life more grounded in the mercy of Christ.

The forgiveness proclaimed by the Scriptures today is not a call to a sentimental life, as if there were no injustices and as if evil could be wished away. On the contrary, the forgiveness proclaimed by the gospel requires a mature assessment of where we have turned against God, where we have violated others, and where others have sinned against us. Only an adult, inspired by the light of the Holy Spirit, can make such a searching appraisal. Only a mature disciple can freely receive the mercy of Christ in the mystery of the cross and, through the grace of Christ, can treat one’s opponents, not with waves of anger, but with the patient work of reconciliation.

Evangelical forgiveness is not the virtue of the child or the naive. It is the mature outlook of the Christian who has been redeemed by the cross and has been freed to face a violent world in the light and power of that mercy.

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church 1422-1498; John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia 28-34.

An odd parable

25th Sunday of the Year—September 19

“A” Readings: Isa. 55:6-9 • Phil. 1:20-24. 27 • Matt. 20:1-6

Title: The Mature Christian (C)
    Purpose: to show how the mature Christian relates to the things of this world: without attachment, with simplicity and with generosity.

Today’s gospel appears to make no sense.

The parable is an odd one. The owner of a vineyard hires men to work in his vineyard at different moments of the day. One groups starts at 6 a.m., another at 10 a.m., another at noon, another at 2 p.m., another at 4 p.m. At sunset, the employer begins to pay the workers. But he pays everyone the same wage. The person who worked for ten hours receives the same money as the one who worked two hours. When some of the morning laborers begin to complain, the employer bluntly cuts them off by reminding them that he could do what he wants with his money. No contract has been violated.

This clearly is not a tale about labor relations. The owner violates principles of basic equity. Indeed, such behavior today would provoke a riot. So what is going on in this story that only seems to prove the thesis of the opening lesson from Isaiah: that God’s ways are not our own?

Exegetes have argued that this curious tale makes a veiled point about the early history of the Church. Christ united Jew and Gentile in the new communion of the Church. But this union between Christians of Jewish descent (long observant of the Law) and Christians of pagan descent (completely new to the religion of the Covenant) provoked grave friction. Fights over ritual purity, dietary laws, and church polity broke out—and would have been well known to St. Matthew’s public. Like the owner’s wages, the grace of Christ is a gift of sheer generosity. No one has a right to it. Therefore, no one can resent those who receive it later than others.

The parable of the vineyard owner, however, has more than historical interest. It indicates how grace guides the mature Christian to detachment from the various goods of life.

The gospel proclaims that God’s grace is rooted in God’s sovereign goodness. It is not something we earn. Indeed, God’s grace, especially God’s love for the sinner, is something that defies our habits of rights and claims. This love easily disconcerts us.

The parable indicates how fleeting are the material goods by which we erroneously measure our success in life. We live in a culture that piously believes that there is a correlation between moral-religious worth and the state of our bank account. Several years ago, a Jesuit university proudly advertised the average earnings of its recent alumni. I wrote a letter to the public relations officials, asking if the university had any statistics on alumni who had renounced personal possessions (in order to enter religious life) or who had deliberately chosen a less lucrative career because of the service that could be rendered. I received a response that they had no data on such questions.

The parable reminds us that material wealth is often not linked to the degree of one’s effort. The evil often flourish in sylvan suburbs, while the righteous often wilt in the pillars of public housing. The parable also echoes the wisdom of the ancients on the wheel of fortune: the wealth and power acquired on one day easily become the penury of the next. A quick accident, a sudden illness, an unexpected lawsuit—and the material comfort we thought we had earned disappears.

The child is immersed in immediate gratification. But the mature Christian knows the detachment from material goods that true discipleship requires. Material possessions can foster the happiness of ourselves and others. But economic gain and loss is not the central drama of our lives. We need to recognize our possessions as the creatures they are, use them with simplicity, and learn the art of subordinating them to the praise of God and the better service of those God has entrusted to our care.

The parable not only underscores the detachment proper to the Christian. It also trumpets the generosity that should mark the mature Christian. We are not only the beneficiaries of God’s bounty. God summons us to share our bounty with others, as the master shares his possessions with abandon. If we are convinced that we have a strict right to everything we possess, the gift of our possessions to others becomes a risk. We might lose our security. We might be cheated by others. We might help others who don’t deserve it. But if, through the light of the Holy Spirit, we grasp that what we possess is a sovereign gift of God—often mediated by the families who raised us, the teachers who instructed us, the acquaintances who encouraged us—the generous gift of ourselves and our time to others, especially to the Church, is a work of gratitude.

Through this odd parable of the vineyard, the gospel summons us to be rather odd ourselves. It calls us to reverence the mercy of God, who forgives us out of sheer goodness, not out of strict duty. It urges us to move beyond the grind of cash-for-service to the logic of sacrificial love. It proclaims that maturity is something other than the prim professional with an account book firmly balanced. Christian maturity is the astonished recognition of God’s unearned gifts which lie behind every achievement, indeed behind our very existence, and which free us to treat each other with a simple mercy unknown to the ledger and the contract.

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church 1716-1729.

God’s messengers

26th Sunday of the Year—September 26

“A” Readings: Ezek. 18:25-28 • Phil. 2:1-11 • Matt. 21:28-32

Title: The Old Testament Prophets
    Purpose: to teach (1) the meaning of prophet; (2) the major and minor Old Testament prophets; (3) how in a sense we are to be prophets.

While waiting for the subway, I noticed a tabloid with the flaming title, Prophecies Galore, on the newsstand. I purchased the paper and had a smorgasbord of the future. Nostradamus predicts that Saddam Hussein will rule Russia. My astrological sign says that “big money is right around the corner.” The tarot cards warn that Clinton “might be stained by another devastating scandal.” “Our Lady of Roses” has provided a map showing where the A-bombs are hidden in the New York subway system.
There’s nothing here that a good Chinese fortune cookie wouldn’t give. But millions of Americans devoutly believe such oracles. And, for many, this is exactly what the prophet is: someone who predicts the future—and the zanier the prediction, the better.

The Scriptures today also hand us a picture of the prophet. But the prophet in God’s Word is not the hustler in the Star.

The biblical prophet, such as the prophet Ezekiel in today’s first lesson, is literally one who speaks in the name of another. The prophet, in other words, speaks in the name of God. The prophet’s message does not spring from his own wisdom or art. It springs from God’s wisdom, often communicated in a vision seen by the messenger in prayer. It is not Cecil B. DeMille pyrotechnics that make the authentic prophet. It is the truth and authority of the message.

The Old Testament names numerous prophets who thus served as God’s messengers. The major prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel. The minor prophets are Hosea, Joel, Amos, Jonah, Abdiah, Micah, Nahum, Habacuc, Sophonia, Aggai, Zachariah, Malachi. The “major” and “minor” only refer to the respective length of their biblical books. The Scriptures also designate several women as prophets: Miriam and Debora in the Old Testament, Anna and the daughters of St. Philip the Deacon in the New.

The prophets usually fulfilled their mission to Israel and to the Church in three related ways. First, they reminded the members of the community what God had done for them in the past and what their duties to God were. Many an Old Testament prophet begins his message with a stark reminder of the Covenant: “Remember, O Israel. . . .” Many a prophet in the Church recalls the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and, in the light of the paschal mystery, summons the members of the Church to return to their original fervor. The role of the prophet here is to rouse God’s People from the torpor that easily overwhelms religious memory.

Second, the prophet admonishes the members of the community to change their moral conduct. This is a call to repentance and reconversion to the demands of the Covenant. In today’s readings, Ezekiel and Christ both urge their audiences to repent of sin as a sign of authentic religious conversion. Other prophets summoned their public to repent of sexual sin or of idolatry or of contempt for the poor. The terms of the call to conversion vary from one generation to another. But the prophet always proclaims the price of true conversion: a renunciation of the actions and attitudes that destroy our friendship with God. It is this austere summons to moral conversion that earns the prophet low ratings in the polls and can result in the prophet’s exile or even death.

Third, the prophet points the community toward its future. But this is not the future of Lottery winnings or candlelit dinners. It is the future redeemed by God. Several Old Testament prophets pointed toward a Messiah, fulfilled in the life, death, and resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Many prophets point toward the future at the end of the time, where God’s Kingdom will be established in its fullness and where we will face God’s final judgment on our choices for and against the Covenant.

The prophetic mission continues in the Church—often without the fireworks. As disciples of Christ, we are called to proclaim a message of salvation which we have not invented. We are sent to witness to Christ and his saving gospel, an urgent task in a culture and a Catholic community marked by religious ignorance. We are summoned to judge our moral actions and the actions of others by the light of the gospel. The Holy Spirit will provide the gifts of courage and perseverance to sustain us when we, like the prophets before us, discover that the call to moral conversion does not win us tenure or an election. And we are commissioned to point our parishes and groups toward a future that is greater than the next job or the next house or the next romance. This is the future of God’s judgment, where God simply asks us what we have done with our brief freedom.

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church 2581-2584.

Reverend John J. Conley, S.J., is chairman of the philosophy department at Fordham University in New York City. He received his doctorate in philosophy summa cum laude from the Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium. Fr. Conley has published widely in the fields of ethics, aesthetics and modern French philosophy. His last article in HPR appeared in March 1999.

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