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homilies
Mid-summer hardly seems the time to be speaking of this. It is not a special season like Lent which the Church dedicates to ascetical practices. But, in a curious way, even the daily disciplines of the athletes of summer remind us of the ongoing need for self-discipline in our religious lives. A hitter who wants to keep up his batting average, let alone one who has fallen into a slump, does well to get back to the regimen of spring training. All the more so in the far more serious matter of living a Christian life: a habit of regular daily prayer, the pinch of some self-sacrifice to stay remindful of the Lord all day long, and an alertness to the demands of practical charity. What the Church requires of us in the forty days of Lent by way of self-denial and spiritual renewal is a cue for how to undertake a life of Christian asceticism the whole year round: quietly, without fanfare or public notice, doing what we can to keep our eyes fixed on the Lord and pleading for his mercy to sustain us. The Scriptures today give us some important reasons for adopting such asceticism. When we hear in the first reading that the Holy Spirit commissions Ezekiel (“I heard the one who was speaking say to me: Son of man, I am sending you”) to preach the need for repentance to “the rebellious house” of Israel, we dare not presume our own good-natured innocence. “Hard of face and obstinate of heart are they to whom I am sending you”—these are lines that apply not just to a certain group of people a long time ago, but (in all honesty) could easily pertain to us when we look indifferently past the beggar in our path, when we refuse to give a second chance to a co-worker who has offended us, or when we will not take even some small risk of offering much needed fraternal correction to an erring family member, lest we not be liked. The practical charity to which the Church summons us by mentioning “alms” in her ascetical litany of “prayer, fasting and alms-giving” need not (and sometimes should not!) simply mean doling out a dollar or being nice to those to whom it is nice to be nice. It is, rather, an imitation of Christ’s charity, and we must rely on the Holy Spirit to direct us. It is no surprise that Ezekiel suddenly finds that “The Spirit entered into me and set me on my feet.” Genuine Christian asceticism begins by stirrings and promptings from God, and not just by some good idea we’ve had from ourselves. It is Our Lord who raises up true prophets, not human beings who take the role upon themselves. And it is Our Lord who calls us to himself in daily prayer and will there direct us to the specific acts of charity we need to be doing, often using the intermediary of the Church to encourage and direct us. One of the later verses in today’s psalm explains why some fasting and abstinence also need to be part of the picture: “Have pity on us, O Lord, for we are more than sated with contempt; our souls are more than sated with the mockery of the arrogant, with the contempt of the proud.” If by the grace of God we have been spared from anything as ugly as full-blown contempt or open mockery, we will still do well to remember the sluggishness of feeling so sated or full of food that we only want to take a nap. The contentment that is perfectly right and normal after a good meal can easily make us feel so good as to think that it is merely what we deserve, and then to forget the meaning of what we say in our table-grace, that what we enjoy is something “we receive from Thy bounty.” Whatever voluntary fasting or abstinence we undertake, much like the abstinence required of us on the Fridays of Lent and the modest fasting demanded of adults throughout those forty days, the pinch of hunger-pains is intended to serve us in some way comparable to the “thorn in the flesh” mentioned by St. Paul in today’s reading from Corinthians. It will do its part to keep us “from getting proud” and remind us of what Our Lord told St. Paul: “My grace is enough for you, for in weakness power reaches perfection.” It is the power of Christ that must flow through us. We cannot make that happen by our asceticism, but it is our task to be disposed and ready. If we are unwilling to be ready to receive Christ’s power in us, we risk being like the townspeople of Nazareth mentioned in the Gospel. We may stand amazed at his wisdom and his miracles and yet give him no honor in the place he has chosen to make his native place, our souls. Their familiarity with him bred a certain contempt: “Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, a brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?” The charity he wanted to work there he took instead to “the rounds he made of the neighboring villages” since the lack of faith in his own people so distressed him. This will be an awful realization when we meet him as our judge: we were so busy with great projects of our own devising that we missed him in the person of the beggar, we condemned him in the person we would not forgive, or we ignored him in the person we couldn’t bring ourselves to confront, not out of any misguided self-righteousness, but for the Lord’s own sake. The demands of practical charity are not light. But St. Paul assures us
that “when I am powerless, it is then that I am strong.” Merely on our own we
dare not undertake such a burden. But we do so with fasting and steady prayer, “our
eyes are fixed on the Lord, pleading for His mercy.”
When Jesus left his home in Nazareth at age thirty to begin his itinerant mission around Galilee and Judaea, before going up to Jerusalem, he lived simply and frugally, and he taught the Twelve, according to today’s Gospel, to do the same. Early in their training as his apostles, he started sending them out to preach repentance, two by two, and he “instructed them to take nothing on the journey but a walking stick—no food, no traveling bag, not a coin in the purses in their belts.” We may well smile when we hear that they were allowed to wear sandals, but the gravity of his voice ought to turn that smile to an expression of wonder as he continues: “No second tunic . . ., and whatever house you find yourself in, stay there until you leave the locality.” They are not to look for a better meal somewhere else, nor for better lodgings. And if a town will not receive them or listen to them, they are to shake its dust from their feet as they leave. With these instructions, off they went, casting out the demons over which he had given them power, anointing the sick, and working many miraculous healings. Precious few of us have been called to a vocation as mendicant friars, begging our daily bread and moving from town to town, like the early followers of Francis of Assisi, whose imitation of the poverty of Christ inflamed all of Europe by raw zeal. In our own day God continues to summon many to serve him in this way. Most of us, however, have never felt that calling. We stand rather in the number of those for whom St. Paul speaks today in Ephesians: “God chose us in Christ before the world began, to be holy and blameless in his sight, to be full of love.” This is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the universal Christian vocation to holiness (#2013-14). Many are the paths, but the goal is the same for all—the sanctification of the ordinary things in daily life. St. Paul insists that the time of our calling does not matter so much as our timely response to “the plan God was pleased to decree in Christ, to be carried out in the fullness of time.” He yokes together those who lived in Christ’s own time with all those who have been born later: “In Christ we were chosen; for in the decree of God . . . we were predestined to praise his glory by being the first to hope in Christ. In him you too were chosen. When you heard the glad tidings of salvation, the word of truth, and believed in it, you were sealed with the Holy Spirit who had been promised.” We live so many generations after those who knew Christ in the flesh, and yet we stand with the Ephesians to whom Paul wrote: “It is in Christ and through his blood that we have been redeemed and our sins forgiven, so immeasurably generous is God’s favor to us.” The opportunity to participate in the plan of God is ours by gift, not by right: “such was his will and pleasure, that all might praise the divine favor he has bestowed on us in his beloved.” Should God be calling us to a radical renunciation of personal property according to a life consecrated by a vow of poverty, he can make it clear to us in his own good time. But where this has not been made clear, the Church still encourages us to live by the virtue of modesty. In general, this means living with deep gratitude for what we have, with a profound sense that the goods of this world are his gifts rather than our sovereign right, goods to be used with respect for the giver, and remindful that they are means to a higher end and not an end in themselves. It is not out of any scorn for the goodness of God’s gifts that the virtue of modesty directs us to avoid ostentation; nor is it out of any hatred for the body that the virtue of modesty in bodily affairs directs us to dress and to act chastely. Christians trying to live out this virtue of modesty will often be misunderstood and accused of both scorn and hatred by the worldly, who take a good offense to be their best defense against any possible call to self-renunciation. But, in fact, believers who try to practice the virtue of Christian modesty are trying to live out the very respect for human persons they are so anxious to teach their children. St. Thomas More offers an example of how to cultivate an appropriate sort of indifference to this world’s goods. Although required by his various posts at the King’s Court to dress according to his state of life and frequently to entertain aristocracy and ambassadors, More constantly reminded himself to consider the goods of the world as merely at his disposal “to use but not to own.” The intentional simplicity of his life at home, so delightfully surprising to guests like Erasmus, is a lesson in how to manage one’s efforts at real modesty: the More family’s unpampered ways were not worn on the sleeve, out of some misplaced vanity about how virtuous the family was, but simply enjoyed and gladly shared with any visitors who came. More’s fatherly good sense would sometimes bring him to tease his daughter Meg at any hint of excessive attachment to possessions, but always with the good humor, so that she might learn how to take true Christian delight in the goodness of the good things of the world as divine blessings without becoming overly fond of them. From prison he would write to her of the equanimity God had given him over the loss of “goods, land, and life too rather than swear against my conscience,” and even imprisonment seemed “the very chief . . . among all his great benefits heaped on me so thick.” To think otherwise would be “to mistrust the grace of God.” As in the More household, so too in our households, the cultivation of the
virtue of modesty requires some prudent decisions and some persistent prayer. Immodesty in
dress and ostentatious display of wealth are so common in the world presented by the media
that we could unthinkingly take them as normal and right. The seductive glamour of fast
living and power saturate modern life and will easily crowd out the Christian vision of
the proper use of clothing and goods if we are not careful for ourselves and for our
children. But Christian families can take comfort and direction from today’s Gospel
story about the mission on which Christ sends his Apostles. They are to travel light and
to bear witness to his poverty by their own begging and preaching. Christian families can
model themselves on the homes to which those Apostles went: places of simplicity and
generosity at the same time, places of hospitality that are more beautiful by reason of
their receptivity to the call of the Gospel than by lavish decoration. With St. Paul they
will say, “Praised be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has bestowed
on us in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavens!” And with the household of
St. Thomas More they find more joy in one another’s company than in the fancy treats
of the court or the glamour of the shopping mall!
Although it is the cross that has long been the most prominent Christian symbol of his sacrifice, we hear in today’s Scripture readings about another ancient image that Our Lord often applied to himself. In fact, in Christian art this image antedates the use of crosses and crucifixes: the image of the good shepherd. Throughout the catacombs beneath Rome, for instance, one finds many images of the Good Shepherd, and it is the most frequent subject of all those represented in the statuary of the early Christian period. Sometimes the romantic notions we hold of a shepherd watching over his sheep in a bucolic pasture can make us forgetful of the sacrificial nature of this symbol. The shepherd is one who must endure the weather with his flock, day in and day out, and thus the smells, the dirt, and, of course, the dangers from those who would prey upon his flock. It is for this reason that Christ reminds us that the Good Shepherd will lay down his life for his sheep, and it is with this in mind that in today’s Gospel he pitied the vast crowd, “for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” Although by his own background Christ was a carpenter like St. Joseph, he applies this image to the work of his public ministry in order to take on the role God had so often assigned to the patriarchs of old whose work he now brings to completion. There is, first, the shepherd Abel, whose offering of the firstlings of his flock was judged pleasing to God. Abraham too was a shepherd, one whom God called to be the father of his special people and to guide them on the long trek from Ur to Palestine. Moses learned the ways of God in the quiet nights of shepherding and then consecrated his life to guide the chosen people scattered like sheep in Egypt back to the promised land. The ruddy youth David was summoned from far pastures to be the Lord’s anointed King, and yet his passions nearly made him one of the shepherds whom the prophet Jeremiah castigates: “Woe to the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock of my pasture, says the Lord.” Again and again the prophets will be given by God a longing for a shepherd after God’s heart, as in today’s first reading: “I will appoint shepherds . . . so that they need no longer fear and tremble . . . . Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up a righteous shoot to David; as King he shall reign and govern wisely, he shall do what is just and right in the land.” The psalmist confirms the thought: “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.” This understanding of Christ’s life by way of Psalm 23—Christ tirelessly guiding his flock during his life on earth, gathering together the lost sheep of Israel, and training up good pastors to continue his work, with his death on the cross as the ultimate sacrifice the Good Shepherd has to make—points us to certain important truths about the Mass as a sacrifice and about our participation in his sacrifice. As our central way of praying together, this sacred ritual is to be our repose in verdant pastures and our place of refreshment by restful waters. The Scriptures we hear are crucial to his way of guiding us in right paths, his way of freeing us from fear, wherever we have to walk in the dark valleys of the world. In fact, the psalm fits the picture of the Mass in ways we might not have spontaneously associated with the work of a shepherd when it prays: “You spread the table before me in the sight of my foes; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” It concludes on the very note of the Church as the household of God with its evocative promise, “And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.” The calm and peace of this attractive picture are possible for us because we know of the success of his sacrifice and the victory over death which he won. It is not a false peace that is unmindful of his sacrifice, and for this reason St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians recalls that precise point: “In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near through the blood of Christ. It is he who is our peace.” This is to remember the price he paid, the suffering and rejection, the abuse and contempt, the torture, the pain, and the death-agonies. “In his own flesh he abolished the law . . . to make peace, reconciling us to God in one body through his cross which put that enmity to death.” It is of this picture that the Canon of each Mass reminds us. He was not a shepherd who kept his distance, in comfort and safety. Rather to him we can pray: “for you are at my side, with your rod and your staff that give me courage.” The new Catechism explains our participation in his sacrifice as “sacrificial memorial” in this way: “The Eucharist is thus a sacrifice because it re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross, because it is its memorial and because it applies its fruit” (#1365). The sacrificial character of the Mass (and the summons for us to participate in it!) is clear in the very words of the consecration: “Take this, all of you, and eat it: This is my body which will be given up for you” and “Take this, all of you and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all, so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.” The sacrifice of Christ the Good Shepherd and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are thus one single sacrifice, and only the manner of the offering is different. It is the same Christ who died on the Cross and whom the Church joins in the offering of the altar. The Catechism explains: “The only perfect sacrifice is the one that Christ offered on the cross as a total offering to the Father’s love and for our salvation. By uniting ourselves with his sacrifice we can make our lives a sacrifice to God” (#2100). On a practical note, we may well find ourselves at various points in our
lives needing to refresh the vigor of our participation in this sacrifice. Thankfully, the
possibilities are numerous. Just to increase our devotion during Mass it may be quite
helpful to pray just before Mass begins for precisely that gift, asking God to increase
our alertness and responsiveness during the Mass about to start. Finding a bit of time
beforehand (perhaps by just coming to Church five minutes early) to read the Scriptures
that will be proclaimed can increase out attentiveness and let us understand them better
when they are read from the pulpit. And our prayers of thanksgiving after communion would
do well to include a request of God that we remember just whom we are carrying within us
as we get busy with the day’s normal routines, so that we can let him sanctify all
the parts of our lives, even the most ordinary.
The first reading can come from any part of the Old Testament and tends to have a very direct correlation with the Gospel reading. Today, for example, when the Gospel reports the miraculous multiplication of the bread and the fish, the first reading is from the second book of Kings and concerns a similar miracle God gave Elisha the power to do, the multiplication of some barley loaves. The psalm often echoes the common theme, as it does today in the responsorial verse: “The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.” The second reading, on the other hand, tends to be part of the continuous reading of one of the epistles stretched out from Sunday to Sunday. At this point in the year we are listening to the letter to the Ephesians and today we hear the summons to live our lives according to the Christian virtues of humility, meekness, and patience in the one body of Christ. The miracle we hear of in today’s Gospel has something of the structure of the Mass about it and thus can be applied to a consideration of the component parts of this sacred ritual. The multitudes who had heard of the cures he had worked for the sick have now followed him across the Sea of Galilee to Tiberias. His words to the gathered masses must have rung as sharp and true as the words we hear in the Scriptures in the Liturgy of the Word that is the first part of every Mass. The second part of the story resembles the second part of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Eucharist. For then, taking up the barley loaves and dried fish which the Apostles have begged from a lad in the crowd, Jesus offered thanks to his Father and broke them for distribution to those assembled. By his miraculous powers there turned out to be more left over than when they began to distribute the food. John’s Gospel reports that many of those in attendance believed Jesus undoubtedly to be “the Prophet who is to come into the world” from this multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. The Church has long held it to be an anticipation of the miracle that takes place at every Mass when bread and wine are consecrated to become his Body and Blood, endless in supply over the long centuries since the original miracle. The pattern that makes up the ritual of the Mass is made up of two inter-related parts: the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, each with its own component parts. Before we listen to the readings from Scripture in the Liturgy of the Word, we are summoned to two other kinds of prayer, the prayer of repentance and the prayer of praise. There is a profound realism about starting the liturgy with a penitential rite, for we would be deceiving ourselves to think we do not need God’s healing and forgiveness. We believe that the Church is holy because of Christ her founder and because he has left her the means of sanctification, but, if we are honest, we who belong to the Church must admit that sin is all too common in the best of us. As Our Lord so often explained, he came to save sinners, not the self-righteous. Mindful of our need and his generosity with the means of forgiveness, we begin each Mass with a penitential rite, publicly admitting our sinfulness in the Confiteor and asking our brothers and sisters in Christ to pray for us in the chant Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Except in the season of Lent, where the theme of repentance receives special emphasis, we next turn to the praise of God in the Gloria. This ancient hymn leads us to pray in the spirit of adoration and glorification that creatures owe to their Creator. It is a hymn we owe in part to the angels at Bethlehem who praised the Christ child and in part to unknown Christian musicians of the earliest days of the Church who have given us the words by which to turn directly from the prayer of repentance to the prayer of praise, as when we say: “Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us.” We then settle ourselves to listen to the Word of God and hear some explanation of the faith as those crowds in today’s Gospel listened to Christ’s words. Naturally, any given Sunday we hear only one small part of the vast mystery, but when that is finished the Church has us rise and recite the summary of this mystery that has been so carefully worked out in the Creed. In the first quarter of the Catechism of the Catholic Church each phrase is explained with clarity and in great detail, including some of the fascinating story of the theological debates that took place in the effort to state these crucial points of our faith just right. The first half of the Mass then ends with our prayers of petition, prayers that are always to include the needs of the Church as a whole and our society as well as the concerns more specific to our parish and our families. Likewise, the Liturgy of the Eucharist has several components. During the preparation of the altar and the presentation of the gifts of bread and wine to be used for the consecration, we are generally asked to present an offering for the support of the Church and her charities, a sign of the offering of ourselves that in the Eucharistic prayer we will be joining to Christ’s offering of himself to the Father. The “preface” to the Eucharistic prayer which the priest then says or sings is designed to sound the note of thanks, for “thanksgiving” is the very meaning of “Eucharist” and is central to the way Christ instructed us to pray at the Last Supper. There are a number of Eucharist Prayers now available for use as the Canon of the Mass. In their different forms they invariably include the offering of prayers for the Church throughout the world and the local Church, the calling down of the Holy Spirit upon the gifts of bread and wine (the “epiclesis”) and the consecration of these gifts in the words of Christ himself, by which they become his Body and his Blood. The Eucharistic Prayers then recall God’s abiding mercy in allowing us to share in Christ’s sacrifice and offer certain prayers for the faithful departed. The Communion Rite begins with the prayer Our Lord himself taught us, the Our Father. Here too the new Catechism may be of great use in helping us to refresh our sense of what these often recited phrases mean. In the last quarter the Catechism takes up each phrase in turn as it explains the nature of Christian prayer. After praying to our Heavenly Father, we his adopted children are invited to extend a sign of peace to our brothers and sisters in the Lord, and then we again turn to the preparation necessary to receive Our Lord devoutly in communion. Using some of the same phrases we prayed earlier during the Gloria, we beg the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world to have mercy on us and to grant us peace. After the priest repeats some of this prayer while holding up the host before us, we pray in words inspired by the centurion whose servant Christ once healed: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Like those who ate of the bread Christ miraculously multiplied in
today’s Gospel, we too may partake of his miraculous abundance. The Church asks us to
be in the state of grace when we come up to receive him in Holy Communion, and if we are
not, then to go and be reconciled by sacramental confession so that we may return as soon
as possible to his holy banquet. More often than with any other single image, the
Scriptures speak of heaven as a banquet, and Holy Communion is already a taste of this
banquet. Before the final blessing that concludes the liturgy, we are invited to make our
thanksgiving for this gift. Sometimes in the silence of our hearts, sometimes in the
strains of song, we have the means of expressing our gratitude and resonating with the joy
he brings by his presence. Reverend Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at St. Louis University and was ordained in 1992. He has taught at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Tex., and at Loyola College in Baltimore, Md. At present he is an assistant professor of philosophy at Fordham University, Bronx, N.Y., and is the current editor of the International Philosophical Quarterly. His last series of homilies in HPR appeared in October 1996. |