homilies

on the liturgy of the Sundays and feasts

by joseph w. koterski

Called to be saints

All Saints-November 1

Purpose: To explain: (1) what sanctity is; and (2) sanctity as the goal of our life.

n "Sancta sanctis!" Holy gifts for the holy people of God! By calling attention to the words of the celebrant at the elevation that takes place just before communion in many Eastern Rite liturgies, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (#948) reminds us that the Communion of Saints has two closely linked meanings: communion "in holy things" (sancta) and communion "among the faithful," since all the faithful are called to holiness of life (sanctis).

The familiar words at the same point in the Roman Rite ("Behold the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to His supper") invite us to receive those holiest of gifts, the body and blood of the Lord. By receiving this Communion the faithful are provided anew with the life of the Savior and the grace that sanctifies. Those who answer this ritual invitation and choose to come forward to Holy Communion thereby express their desire "to stand before the Divine Throne and the Lamb amid the countless throng from every nation and race, people and tongue," mentioned in the passage read today from Revelation. With a loud voice that huge crowd cried out, "Salvation is from our God, who is seated on the Throne, and from the Lamb!" and the angels gathered about answered "Amen." It is not from any presumption that we are holy already that we dare to stand in the Communion-line, but only by the confidence that receiving Our Lord will sanctify us, as this liturgical invitation suggests.

If we hope someday to join the Communion of All Saints, we will take seriously the call in the First Letter of John to pray and work for purity of life: "What we shall later be has not yet come to light. We know that when it comes to light, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. Everyone who has this hope based on Him keeps himself pure, as He is pure." The sanctity here called for is something we could never manage to accomplish on our own, and yet something the simplest and weakest among us can come to share by living the life that union with Christ in the sacraments promotes. In fact, it is one of the promises mentioned in the Beatitudes of today's Gospel: "Blest are the pure of heart, for they shall see God."

The transformation that has to occur for us, as it did for every one of the Saints commemorated on the Feast of All Saints, is suggested by the color scheme in the closing lines of the reading from Revelation: "Who do you think these are, all dressed in white? . . . These are the one who have survived the great period of trial; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." How could immersion in the red of Christ's Blood render their robes so white? There is a curious parallel in the physics of light: white light contains all the colors, but what we see as blue-light, or gray-light, lacks elements from the reddish portion of the spectrum, and pitch-black darkness is not so much a color of its own as the absence of all light. Here the rich red of His charity poured out in the sacrifice of the Cross and present for us still on the altar fills up what is lacking in the darkness of our sins. The blood of the Lamb restores the robes of those called to be saints to a dazzling white, a purity we on earth are glad to accept and must try to preserve, but which we cannot of ourselves create.

Perhaps we may be spared the "great period of trial" prophesied by Revelation, but there are daily crosses aplenty. Whatever they be, we are to carry them, mindful of the consolations of the Beatitudes: "Blest are the sorrowing, they shall be consoled . . . . Best are they who show mercy, mercy shall be theirs . . . . Blest too the peacemakers, they shall be called sons of God." In its section on Christian Holiness, the Catechism calls our attention at once to both the Cross and Beatitudes: "The way of perfection passes by the way of the Cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle. Spiritual progress entails the asceticism and mortification that gradually lead to living in the peace and joy of the Beatitudes" (#2015).

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 946-62, 2012-16.

Respect the Law

31st Sunday of the Year-November 3

"A" Readings: Mal. 1:14-2:2,8-10 1 Thes. 2:7-9, 13 Matt. 23:1-12

Title: Precepts of the Church

Purpose: (1) to explain in general the six special Precepts of the Church and (2) why the Church has Precepts; and (3) to encourage their faithful observance.

Many people find law alienating. The very same thing they might choose of their own accord leaves a distaste when it is required. Yet, there is something of adolescent rebellion in such an attitude, and the great importance accorded to law and to covenant in the history of revelation makes it clear that such resentment cannot be the attitude of the mature Christian. Often an adult can understand the purpose of civil laws that direct or restrain certain types of conduct as regulations for the sake of peace, security, and good order, but the teenager finds the same ordinances repressive, hateful, or at least inconvenient. What everyone must learn in the course of personal development is how to understand laws as something rather like the walls of a house. They provide privacy, security, and the opportunity for a fulsome range of free activity, but they must be firm, well-designed and stable. So too the Law given to Moses was a necessary aspect of the development God intended for his chosen people, and Christ's cultivation of respect for the Law he came not to abolish but to fulfill testifies to its ongoing importance for Christian development. It will be no surprise that the Church too has her own special precepts, enacted for the good of Christians as they learn to grow in Christ and to live according to his plan for them.

The prophets are sometimes portrayed today as anti-social elements, deeply opposed to the establishment (and by implication, to the Law), but that is an interpretation fashioned more out of modern resentment to law as an inconvenient constraint on personal freedom and autonomy than drawn out of the actual text of Scripture. The lesson from the prophet Malachi today castigates those who break faith with one another and have thereby made void the ancient Covenant with God for some advantage of their own. Invariably the severe punishments the prophets announced were to come upon Israel for forgetting the Covenant God made with Moses, with all its precepts about proper worship of God and proper respect for human relationships. The commandments are "my ways," says the Lord, and all the subordinate laws within the Torah that form a kind of "fence" around the commandments were designed to prevent anyone from ever getting close to breaking one of these divine commandments. Yet, none of them was enacted to repress, harass, or alienate, but only to "give glory to my name, says the Lord of hosts," for observing them will bring the blessings of happiness, peace, and good order which God intends for his people by having them committed to right worship and to right social relations.

But respect for Divine Law and even for the "fence around the Law" created by human ingenuity need not involve Pharisaic legalism. In today's passage from Matthew's Gospel, Our Lord makes the crucial distinction: "Do everything and observe everything they (the Pharisees) tell you, but do not follow their example, for their words are bold but their deeds are few. They bind up heavy loads, hard to carry, to lay on other men's shoulders, while they themselves will not lift a finger to budge them . . . ." As their very name suggests ("the separated, the pure"), the Pharisees are right to preach purity in observance of the Law. But they have mistaken the fence around the Law for the Law itself, and they have prided themselves on keeping dietary and ritual regulations in all their infinite detail ("All their works are performed to be seen . . . . They are fond of places of honor . . .") as if they could save themselves by the perfection of their observance.

When Christ insists that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, he is not being anarchic but is recalling to our minds the purpose of the Divine Law itself: to give glory to God by fashioning a people that is well-prepared and well-ruled, one that remembers the need for worship and for rest, and not just for the dizzying labor of human projects. There is a genuine freedom that comes from living within the Law once one grasps that the Law is God's own plan for the human race he has created and redeemed. This insight is part of the point in those mysterious words at the end of today's Gospel: "Call no one on earth your father. Only One is your father, the One in heaven. Avoid being called teacher. Only one is your teacher, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be the one who serves the rest." These phrases are no more a repudiation of respect for our human fathers or teachers than the Sabbath instruction is anarchic; rather, they remind us that human fathers and human teachers are genuine and authentic only insofar as they imitate the heavenly model and do not set themselves up as independent authorities. So too the Law: the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament and the Two Commandments of the New are no human inventions, designed to repress and restrain our creativity and initiative, but a gift from God that explains the Divine plan for happiness in human living by right ordering toward God and society.

What few precepts the Church has established by Canon Law follow precisely on these lines. The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that these precepts are moral and liturgical in character and were decreed by pastoral authorities in the Church "to guarantee to the faithful the indispensable minimum in the spirit of prayer and moral effort, in the growth in love of God and neighbor" (#2041). (1) The obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days summons the faithful to gather for prayer on the day of the week when we commemorate the Lord's Resurrection. (2) The duty to make a sacramental confession at least once a year is designed to ensure preparation for the Eucharist and thus to continue the work of conversion and forgiveness begun in Baptism. (3) Although now seldom preached because most people do come often to Communion, there remains an "Easter duty": "You shall humbly receive your Creator in a Holy Communion at least during the Easter season" (canon 920). (4) Observance of the holy days of obligation supplements the duty of Sunday worship by requiring participation at the principal liturgical feasts which honor the mysteries of the Lord, Blessed Mother, and the saints. (5) If the number of days prescribed for fasting and abstinence has been greatly reduced, Church law is still trying to teach the need for penance and asceticism by specifying certain times in Lent as preparation for Easter. (6) The faithful have the duty to provide for the material needs of the Church and her works of charity and social justice, each according to his abilities (canon 222).

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2041-46, 2048.

On dying well

32nd Sunday of the Year-November 10

Purpose: to describe (1) the importance of dying well and (2) the way to prepare for a good death.

The vision of hindsight is always 20/20. From the knowledge we have of Christ's resurrection, we may find ourselves wondering how the disciples could ever have misunderstood Our Lord when he spoke about the resurrection that would follow his death. But the freshness and novelty of his teaching on this subject should not escape us.

One of the last doctrines to be revealed in the history of the Old Testament was the promise of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, and its fullness only became clear with some of the miracles Jesus worked and with Our Lord's own resurrection from the grave (see Catechism #992). There are hints and allusions in the psalms and in the prophets, but little was clear about the afterlife beyond some expectation of a shadowy existence in Sheol, the land of the dead, until the centuries just before Our Lord's coming. The books of Daniel and Maccabees revealed a bit more, but it was not until the Wisdom of Solomon that God chose to reveal a picture of the souls of the just who died under persecution for their observance of the Torah who were suddenly placed as judges over those who had persecuted them. The passage read today is from Solomon's testimonial to his fellow kings of the earth about their need to pray for the magnificent gift of Wisdom. By divine wisdom alone, and not just by their own cleverness, will they be able to judge justly on earth. Only thus will they obtain immortal life with God, free of the cares that now trouble them as rulers and free from the false judgments by which they are tempted to oppress the weak for temporal advantages, as if might made right. In short, they are to live their lives honestly in the positions of authority they occupy and to prepare with a holy fear of the Lord for the judgment to which they themselves will be subject after death.

Our own situation is probably not so troubled by the cares of kings, but the Scriptures are deeply consistent for all of us about the importance of dying well and of preparing well for death. Jesus' parable about the bridesmaids, those well prepared and those poorly prepared to meet the groom, applies directly to the hour of our own deaths as much as to those still alive at his Second Coming. In both cases "the moral is: keep your eyes open, for you know not the day nor the hour." In the passage of Paul's letter to the Thessalonians we are likewise reminded that we may still be alive at the Second Coming, but it makes no difference whether we are alive or dead if we have lived according to the Lord's teachings. Although most of our world presumes that "when you're dead, you're dead" and thinks the doctrines of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body mere wishful thinking, this is the very substance of our hope. It is a hope rooted in the person of Christ, who announces himself as "the resurrection and the life" and promises to "raise us up on the last day."

But long before this comes, most of us will die. One recalls the pastor who asked his congregation to raise their hands if they wanted to go to heaven. All hands were raised, but then quickly lowered when he then asked, "Now, who wants to go tonight?" The withdrawal of their hands is natural, but it indicates precisely the reason why we need to prepare quite consciously for dying well. The closing lines of the Hail Mary ("pray for us now and at the hour of our death") are a more deeply mature Christian attitude. They ask Mary's intercession for us, not just in those closing moments, so that fear does not sweep us into despair or rage or presumption, but for her help all life long. We are not to worry about when death comes, and at the same time we are all throughout our lives to practice "dying to ourselves" so that we may daily live with Christ.

But how to do this in the practical order? One of the most-sustained pieces of spiritual advice in the history of Christian spirituality is the regular examination of conscience. St. Ignatius Loyola recommends that we make it a daily prayer by reserving about ten to fifteen minutes at the close of each day, or at some other moment when we can steal a bit of quiet from our busy schedules. Begin, he urges, with a moment of gratitude, and be specific-think of something about the day that is past, or about something in your life for which you are grateful and say a word of thanks to God. Then ask of God the light by which to see your life as he wants you to see it. This request for his light is most important in making the examination of conscience a genuine prayer, and not just another self-help technique, done by my own willpower and thereby a temptation to pride rather than an act of humility before our Maker.

Third, make an account of all your actions and attitudes in the course of the day just past. This is likely to be the longest portion of the examination of conscience, but if done faithfully, day after day in the Lord's light and thankful to him for the grace of perseverance in doing it, it can reveal the patterns of sin as well as the patterns of grace in your life and help you to see yourself as the Lord wants you to do. Over some portions of the day you can pass quickly, like a videocassette on fast-forward, but over certain moments you will do well to pause and go slowly, watching to see what triggered what. With God's grace one can notice where the angers start and how they grow, or see just how God's grace protected you from jealousy or gossiping, or take note of just what those "near occasions of sin" really look like so that you can avoid them a little better tomorrow and not just rationalize away what takes too much effort to change!

The fourth step is to chart a course, whether it be to continue the course you're already on, or to correct your course when you have strayed. If your account of the actions and attitudes of the day just past has alerted you to anything of sin, you will be all the more prepared for your next confession. If you find that things have gone well, you will have ready to hand something to be especially grateful for when you begin your next examination of conscience. The final portion of this short prayer is to ask God for the energy and enthusiasm to carry out the course just charted. In all honesty, we cannot save ourselves, no matter how hard we try, but we cannot fail if we take the help God is so eager to offer.

This examination of conscience is easy to remember by the letters in the word "GRACE:" (1) Gratitude, (2) Request for God's light, (3) Account of Actions and Attitudes, (4) Chart your Course, whether to Continue on Course or to Correct it, and (5) Entreat God for the Energy and Enthusiasm you need. After all, the linguistic root of "enthusiasm" means "filled with God" and when one is filled with God's life, one will have no need to fear death. One will be well prepared for dying, for God's life within us is unquenchable.

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 988-1019, 1680-90.

The divine plan

33rd Sunday of the Year-November 17

The Baltimore Catechism had a swift and sure answer to the question why God made us: to know and love and serve him in this life, and to be happy with him in the next. The new Catechism of the Catholic Church opens on the same theme: "God, infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in His own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek Him, to know Him, to love Him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of His family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent His Son as Redeemer and Savior. In His Son and through Him, He invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, His adopted children and thus heirs of His blessed life" (Catechism #1).

This is our purpose in life. There are many ways to fulfill this purpose, many paths in life to reach this goal, but a common goal for all: to know and love and serve God, to seek him who seeks us, and by becoming his loyal children, to inherit eternal life with him. Those who do not know that there is a purpose divinely arranged for human life, or who have mistaken what that goal is, often spend their lives seeking goals of their own devising, most quite well-meaning, but some disordered or even perverse. A bitterness can set in-the hardness of heart that would scotch the happiness others seem to be finding if we cannot have it ourselves. Or we can sulk through life, not feeling that others bend far enough to meet our needs and desires, that they ignore what are so obviously our wounds and hurts. Or a thousand other distortions.

The truth will set you free, Jesus insists. The truth about our purpose in life is that we are not made to live for ourselves, but for God and for one another. Today's Gospel parable about the three servants to whom their master entrusted different sums of money when he went away on his journey is not just a commercial about the joy of investing in mutual funds! Rather, it bears witness by a clever financial analogy to the common goal that is the same for all of us, despite any differences in our natural endowments or worldly opportunities. The master is equally pleased with the servant who made two thousand as with the one who made five thousand, for the fellow used well what he had. His fierce anger comes only with the servant who refused to use what he had-was it from fear of losing the principal, or simple laziness, or perhaps the result of sulking about his meager endowments?

As a parable about the purpose of human life, the story reflects an extremely important facet of how we are to imitate Jesus himself. Consider the mission he undertook from the Father, from whom he as the Son eternally received all that the Father is. His Divine response is complete obedience to the Father's will that he take on a human nature, that he spend himself even to the point of suffering and death on the Cross, and thereby redeem us and restore to the Father a world that had been corrupted by sin. His effort far exceeds those of the first two servants, but they share this important element of the structure of his labors. What they have been given by the master according to their abilities they use for the master's purpose, not some private advantage of their own, and they return it to him on the day of reckoning, glad that their industry has made a profit. Delighted in the fullness of their obedience and its fruits, he invites them to share their master's joy. In this way the parable depicts what our catechisms identify as the divine purpose of human life: to know our Divine Master, to love and serve him in this life, that we may find eternal joy with him in heaven. Jesus as the Word Incarnate did his Father's will perfectly, offering the entirety of himself, and he summons us to do the same, whatever our talents, that we too may share in his Father's joy.

Suggested readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1, 2012-16, 2401-63.

Christ will come

Christ the King-November 24

"A" Readings: Ezek. 34:11-12,15-17 1 Cor. 15:20-26,28 Matt. 25:31-46

Title: The Last Judgment

Purpose: To give the Church's teaching on (1) the Particular and (2) the General Judgment.

All that we need to know for salvation God has revealed to us. Many are the mysteries that remain, especially about end-times, but we can rest in the confidence that he has disclosed what is essential. In the feast of Christ the King the Church reminds us that Christ has already triumphed over sin and death and that he already reigns through the Church. Part of the mystery that remains is that not all things of this world have yet been subjected to him. But on Judgment Day at the end of the world, Christ will come in glory for the definitive triumph of good over evil. When he comes to judge the living and the dead, the glorious Christ will reveal the secret disposition of all hearts and will judge everyone according to their works and according to their acceptance or refusal of grace.

The prophecy Jesus utters in Matthew's Gospel about his Second Coming takes up Ezekiel's image of God as a shepherd dividing sheep and goats. We might well wonder about the privileged place that shepherds seem to have throughout the Scriptures. Abel was a shepherd, as was Abraham; so were Moses, and David. The psalm of the Good Shepherd that is today's responsorial Christ applies to himself. One might explain it all away as an accident of material culture, that this was simply what people in that part of the world often did, and so there is no surprise that it should come into the Scriptures. But if we look more deeply, we cannot help but notice in this solitary way of life a special disposition for prayer and for sacrifice that are found perfectly developed in Our Lord. While pasturing one's flock in the open country beneath the stars, the shepherd has a natural setting for contemplation and union with God. But the bucolic idylls of a romantic imagination should not obscure the dirt, the drudgery or the dangers of the job. He must live with the flock, not in a comfortable house; endure long periods of quiet without any of the sensational excitements of city life; and risk life and limb on the thorn-bushes, gullies, and menacing wolves that threaten the sheep. The Good Shepherd is the one who refuses to abandon the flock but leads it home, knowing each member of that flock so well as to be its best possible judge by the journey's end.

It is no surprise then Our Lord takes up the shepherd image for the last judgment. As the Catechism reminds us (at #679), "Full right to pass definitive judgment on the works and hearts of men belongs to him as redeemer of the world. He 'acquired' this right by His cross. The Father has given 'all judgment to the Son.' Yet the Son did not come to judge, but to save and to give the life He has in Himself." During his life on earth he refused to pass judgment, but laid down his life for the flock. But when he comes again in glory, it will be as the just judge of all.

The Catechism further explains that we may expect both a particular judgment and a general judgment. At the end of time we may expect the resurrection of the dead (according to the Acts of the Apostles 24:15, "of both the just and the unjust") and then a general judgment, in which the fates of all will be disclosed. But immediately after death each person will be rewarded in accordance with his works and faith, as we know from the parable of the poor man Lazarus and the words of Christ on the Cross to the good thief (Catechism 1021). For some this judgment will mean immediate entrance into the blessedness of heaven, for others entrance to heaven only after a period of purification, but for still others immediate and everlasting damnation.

It can be a frightful thought to have to meet him "face to face," but the clarity of his words, almost identical for the sheep and the goats, make his teaching at once a gentle and consoling invitation and a severely admonitory exhortation: "I assure you, as often as you did (or 'neglected to do') these things for the least of my brothers, you did (or 'neglected to do') them for me." The Catechism puts these matters into perspective when it soberly reminds us that we do not know the day nor the hour of Christ's return in glory as King. Only the Father knows the day and the hour, so it is apparently not one of those truths that we need to know for our salvation. What we do need to know is that Christ will come. "The message of the Last Judgment calls men to conversion while God is still giving them 'the acceptable time, . . . the day of salvation.' It inspires a holy fear of God and commits them to the justice of the Kingdom of God. It proclaims the 'blessed hope" of the Lord's return, when He will come 'to be glorified in His saints, and to be marvelled at in all who have believed'" (Catechism 1041).

Suggested Readings: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 668-82, 1020-41. n