What Do You Want Me to Do For You?

 Quinquagesima Sunday
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  “What do you want me to do for you?”  What a question!  Besides asking the blind man in the Gospel, our Lord asks us the same question today: what do you want me to do for you?  
    It would be easy to treat this offer like Aladdin, rubbing the lamp and having the genie come out, offering us three wishes.  It’s interesting that, when it comes to genies, most stories involve some level of greed.  What is desired is personal gain, whether it be money, power, notoriety, or some other fleeting good.  Of course, then there’s the other reality with a genie, that you have to be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it and get it literally, or in a way you never intended.  

    But our Lord doesn’t operate that way.  He promises neither to give us fleeting goods which are really the idols of the world (power, pleasure, money), nor to trick us with what we ask.  He sincerely asks us what we want to receive from Him.  And notice that the blind man does not ignore his physical reality.  He doesn’t deny the trouble that being blind gives him, or pretend that all he wants is eternal life.  He asks for his eyes to be healed.  We don’t know how old this man was.  Maybe he was young; maybe he was old.  But his eyes would eventually fail him again as he continued to age.  Still, God gave him that gift.  
    So what do you want from God?  What do you want God to do for you?  When you’re thinking about it, make sure that it’s something that is actually good.  I used to, when I had some extra cash, buy

MegaMillions or PowerBall tickets.  I would tell God that if I one, I would give 10% to the church, so it would really be a good thing if I won.  I haven’t won, for the record, and I am convinced that God hasn’t wanted me to.  I hear so many stories about people who came into quick and easy money, and how horrible their lives became.  So maybe God was saving me from that pain (some of you may be thinking, ‘I’ll take my chances, God; let me understand what it is to have that kind of problem!’).  But what do you want God to do for you?  Solomon didn’t ask for riches or victory over his enemies, but wisdom.  That would be a great gift to get from God.  Or maybe you want God to increase your faith or your hope.  Those are also good.  Or maybe you desire healing from God, like the blind man.  God also grants those prayers if it’s for that person’s good.  What do you want from God?
    Have confidence that God can do it for you.  In another story of healing, a man asks our Lord to heal his son who is possessed.  The man says, “If you can,” and Christ replies that all things are possible for the one who has faith.  Do we have confidence that God can do great things?  Does He do every great thing that we desire?  No.  Does that mean that He can’t.  No.  It means it wasn’t His will.  But if you look at almost every healing in the Gospels, they come as a result of faith.  When we have faith in what God can do, it opens up for possibilities that we never imagined were possible.  As the Lord asks us, “What do you want me to do for you?”, do we really think He can do something for us?
    That question, “What do you want me to do for you?”, takes on a special meaning for us as we approach Lent.  Perhaps the Lord is asking you and I today: “What do you want me to do for you this Lent?”  What do we expect to get out of this upcoming Lenten season?  Are our sacrifices something that we do because we’ve always given up this, or done this extra thing?  Or will they truly help us to grow in holiness?  Will our Lenten practices help us to be ready for Easter, to celebrate the Resurrection of our Lord from the dead?  
    If we ask the Lord for something this Lent, He will give it to us if it is for our good.  Do we have a particular sin that we want to fight more and eliminate from our life?  Do we have a family member or friend with whom we need to reconcile?  Do we have an enemy that we need to forgive?  Lent is the perfect time to open ourselves up even more to God’s grace to allow us to live the divine life.  Lent is the time of metanoia, a change of heart and mind, a time to put on the mind of Christ, as the Apostle says.  Do we want that from God?  Do we want to change, or are we happy in our set ways of operating or the spiritual plateau on which we may find ourselves?  
    Do we need to grow in love?  Not the romantic love that we so often associate with the word love, but the agape love that St. Paul describes in our epistle.  Do we need to become more patient and more kind?  Do we struggle with envying what others have, or do we seek to elevate ourselves above others?  Does our love for others depend on our emotions or how the day is going?  If we wish to grow more like Christ, it necessary entails growing in love, both for the God we cannot see and the brother and sister that we can see.
    God is not a genie.  We are not limited to three wishes.  God truly desires our good, and wants to know what we feel we need.  He is our loving Father, and wants to give us every good gift.  As we go through this week, and as we prepare for Lent, may we hear the Lord asking us, “What do you want me to do for you?”, and prayerfully consider what it is that we desire from the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Death and Him that Conquered It

 Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    As we enter into Lent this Wednesday, we enter into a time of penance.  We begin our observance of Lent with the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  And throughout Lent we give things up in order to die to our will.  We fast, we abstain, and we enter into a time of making do with less.  Why?  Why all this negation?
    Our little sacrifices are meant to remind us of the one big sacrifice that Christ underwent for our salvation.  But do we really understand salvation?  Do we know from what we were saved?  Do we want to be saved daily?
    St. Paul talks about that which is corruptible and that which is mortal, and talks about death and sin.  This is something that we don’t talk about a lot in modern Catholicism, but it’s important.  Because if we don’t understand the sorry state we were and can be in, then we don’t appreciate the gift of incorruptibility, immortality, and victory that our Lord Jesus Christ won for us.
    We have certainly grown up in a society that says that everyone is basically good, and everything is basically alright.  That’s one view of the world, but it’s not the Catholic, Christian, or Jewish worldview.  Yes, God created all things good, as we heard in Genesis, but through Adam and Eve’s sin, everything in creation was corrupted.  Death entered the world, and not simply the death that signals the end of life, but eternal death, eternal separation from God.  
    And that was not simply for Adam and Eve, it was for everyone who came forth from them, that is, everyone.  We don’t enter into this world on the path to heaven; we enter this world on a path to hell, because we are separated from God.  We belong to sin, and sin means death, which is the opposite of God, who is Life.  All we can produce is bad fruit.  Even the best of us–Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah–were all still bound in sin and could not enter into eternal life, no matter how good a life they lived.
    This is the victory that St. Paul was talking about for death.  Death claimed every person of the human race before the Incarnation.  It was as if everyone was in a prison, by humanity’s own making, and the warden was the devil.  So many came so close to getting out, only to be dragged back in.  

    But, the victory of Christ was the opening of the prison gates by one who died, but who was not under its penalty.  Christ knew no sin, and yet suffered the penalty of sin so that we would not have to.  He was able to transform the bad fruit into good fruit.  He freed us from sin and death.  And He did this by His Death and Resurrection.  And He imparts that Death and Resurrection to us through Baptism, and through all the Sacraments, especially the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist.  
    So without Baptism, without the Death and Resurrection of Christ applied for us and accepted by us, we are still in that prison; we are still subject to eternal death.  Without Christ, nothing we do is meritorious and helping us get to heaven.  With Christ, even the smallest sacrifices that we make help us to accept eternal salvation that Christ won for us.
    But while Baptism frees us from the prison, we can, by our decisions, freely walk back in.  We would consider it crazy for a prisoner who was just released from prison to walk right back and close the cell door on him or herself.  But that is what we do when we sin.  
    And so, as we get ready for Lent, we do those small sacrifices that show Christ that we are grateful, but we are also training ourselves not to turn back to sin.  The things that we give up, the extra penances and charitable works that we do are meant to help us be closer to Christ and keep us free with Him.  We give up stuff that reminds us of how bad prison is, so that when we go throughout our day we reject the path back into prison and accept the freedom that Christ wants for us.  
    So, as we prepare for the beginning of Lent on Wednesday, we are not preparing for a Catholic diet.  We are not preparing for a random, 40-day period where we give up stuff just because it’s what we’ve always done.  We are not preparing simply for a season.  We are preparing ourselves to continue in the freedom that we received in Baptism and that we receive in the Eucharist and through the other sacraments we have received.  We are preparing ourselves to recognize and resist the ways in which Satan seduces us to come back to his prison and be his slaves.  We are preparing ourselves to stay close to Christ and the victory He won, so that, in Christ, we can say, “Where, O death, is your victory?  Where, O death, is your sting?”  And “thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ,” whom we will have the opportunity to worthily receive as we continue towards the climax of the Mass, the consecration and reception of the Eucharist. 

Weaknesses

 Sexagesima Sunday
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Especially for guys, weakness is not a trait that is desired.  No one is impressed by the 98-pound-weakling.  We are impressed by muscle mass, by big biceps, and the ability to do great feats of strength.  And yet, St. Paul today relates to us a weakness of his.  He tells us about a thorn in his flesh that he asked the Lord three times to remove.  But God told him that His power was made manifest in weakness.

St. Paul

    Isn’t this the whole history of salvation?  When God chose a people, the Jews, He did not choose the strongest nation on earth, or the wisest, as God tells Moses in Deuteronomy.  God chose the weakest.  But, because of that, no one could argue that the success of the Jews was because of their own strength or cunning.  No, it was because the true God was their God and supported them.
    So, too, through the times of the Judges.  When the Israelites relied on God and turned back to Him and away from their foreign gods, God would give them victory over their enemies, even though their enemies were stronger than they.  Think of the Book of Judith.  God chooses a woman, who would have been considered a weak sex from a weak nation, to conquer the great Holofernes.  Or consider King David: he was not the son of Jesse even Samuel thought would be king.  And yet, this small, shepherd boy dispatches the great giant Goliath.  And during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, even though Sennacherib and the great Assyrian army was at his doorstep, after Sennacherib had destroyed the Kingdom of Israel, and mocked the soldiers in their own language, God grants the victory, as Isaiah the prophet had foretold, thanks to Hezekiah’s continuing trust in God.
    But, of course, the example of God choosing weakness par excellence is our Lord Himself, who came, not in the power that was and is His, but as a defenseless baby.  He conquered the dominion of the devil not by strength of arms and force, but by His weakness of taking upon Himself human flesh.  
    And the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is no different.  The princes that Christ chooses to be the new leaders of His Church are generally uneducated men who do not have much to them.  If anyone could boast about being a theologian and a religious man it was Paul, who came to the Church after first persecuting it.  But none of the twelve was anyone to talk about when it came to being a natural leader or vision of spiritual strength.  Even Peter, the great rock chosen by Christ as our first pope, was, after being named pope, called Satan by our Lord and rebuked for his lack of trust in God’s plan of the crucifixion and death.  Weakness is how God works.
    And it is how God works in us.  The more that we trust in ourselves, the less God can work through us.  This is not to say that God lacks any power, but to say that God loves us, and so does not force Himself on us.  He could, but He doesn’t.  But, when we decrease, we allow the Lord to increase, as St. John the Baptist said.  
    So how do we decrease?  How to we remain weak so that the Lord may be strong in us?  One easy way is to consider how we make decisions, especially big ones, but even the daily decisions of life.  Do we trust in our own reasoning, our own intelligence, or do we take our decisions to God in prayer?  Asking God to guide our decisions means acknowledging that another is wiser than we, and may have a better plan.  When it comes to a job to take or leave, a path of business to pursue, the choice of a car, the decision of whether or not to try to have another child, how to educate our children, etc., we should place it first at the feet of our Lord, and ask for His guidance.  He may have some wisdom to impart to us, which may even seem counterintuitive sometimes.  St. Maximilian Kolbe is a beautiful example of relying on the Lord’s wisdom, rather than our own.  When founding a monastery in Japan, St. Maximilian decided to build his monastery on the opposite side of the mountain from that which seemed the best.  The name of the town outside which St. Maximilian built his monastery was Nagasaki, and because St. Maximilian had built it on the opposite side of the mountain, it was not destroyed by the atomic bomb that was dropped in 1945.  
    Sometimes, after placing the decision at God’s feet, God does allow us to use our reason to arrive at a prudent decision.  God sometimes gives us signs of how we are to proceed, but sometimes He trusts our judgements.  But He always loves being consulted so that we might know His will first.  We see this even in human relations, where we may think we know what is best, but we ask our spouse or our friend first to get their opinion.  Of course, God doesn’t deal in opinions, He deals in truth, but still it is good to have access to the source of truth when we make decisions that affect our present and future.  
    Paul was not afraid of his weakness, and neither should we be.  In fact, the Apostle recognized that, without God, he had nothing.  But with God, he had everything, even in the midst of his sufferings for spreading the Gospel.  So should we recognize that, without God, we are nothing; we have nothing.  And recognizing our poverty without God, we can cry out to God to give us what we need, and to supply for us in our weakness.  And we can have confidence that we will receive what we need from our Loving Father, who with the Son and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen. 

In It to Win It

 Septuagesima Sunday

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  There are no participation trophies when it comes to eternal salvation.  There are winners (those in heaven and those in purgatory), and there are losers (those in hell).  Luckily, it’s not winner take all.  There can be more than one winner, inasmuch as more than one person can go to heaven (thanks be to God, because Mary would be the only one there).  
    But we are still called to give it our all.  St. Paul reminds us that we should run so as to win, and train our bodies for victory, which means denying them things that keep us from winning.  And it means taking things that help us win.  

    Since June, at the advice and with the occasional help of a friend, I’ve been working out pretty much every day Monday through Friday (though, I will admit, I didn’t quite work out while on vacation).  I recently had a doctor’s appointment and he noted that, as far as the bloodwork I had done is concerned, I’m doing much better, especially considering that the blood was taken not that long after Christmas, with all of the goodies associated with it.  I may not be swoll (the Troopers at the State Police Post where I work out often say I’m doing my “holy gains”), I am getting a bit stronger.
    To do that I have to stick with it, day in and day out.  I also have to be more careful what I eat.  That includes not eating as much frozen pizza, but also adding good calories that helps my body grow stronger.  It isn’t always fun to go to the Post for “holy gains,” and the bulking powder I mix isn’t always a delicious, refreshing beverage.  But it helps me, little by little, to keep my body fit and lean.
    The same is true in the spiritual life: we cannot stop (not even for vacation) our desire to grow in holiness and the actions we take each day to develop our relationship with Christ.  The prayers that we say, the foods from which we fast or abstain, the little mortifications that we endure are all meant to help us train to be winners and to receive the crown of heaven from our Lord.  Some days we enjoy those things, or we notice the difference that those ascetic practices are making in our spiritual life.  Other times we seem to be the same, unfit person that we were when we started.  But the key is to persevere.
    Another key is not to make too many comparisons.  Certainly we can look to others as guides, especially the saints.  They help us to know how we can grow in our love of God and neighbor.  To continue the analogy I began earlier, the friend that I occasionally work out with is much stronger than I am, and you can see it clearly in his biceps.  Desiring to be stronger like him can sometimes push me to workout, even when I don’t want to.
    But, on the other hand, comparisons can also be less than helpful, because we’re not concentrating on our own pilgrimage, but get caught up in what others have and do.  That’s one of the messages of the Gospel today.  The landowner promised a certain pay to those who worked all day.  He even promises those who started a little later than the first laborers a just wage.  But when he distributes the pay, those who came last, who only worked a couple of hours, received full pay.  The first workers starting looking at others, and comparing their work to those who came at the end of the day, and assumed they would get more.  But they received what they were promised, no more, and no less.  Their comparison did not help them, but actually drew them away from the goal, which was to work well for the landowner.  
    So in our spiritual life, when we look at what others are doing, sometimes it does not lead us to imitate others’ greatness, but makes us jealous of what they have, and unsatisfied with what we have.  Maybe we feel like we’re doing a lot of work, praying a lot, fasting and abstaining a lot, doing those mortifications, big and small, that are supposed to make us holy.  And all it’s doing is making us look down our noses at those other people who don’t practice the same penances that we do.  Or maybe we see what others do, and we feel like it’s hopeless, like our spiritual muscles will never be as big as that other person’s.  
    God doesn’t want our negative comparisons.  He wants us to be who we are, not someone else, and cooperate with Him in growing in holiness, according to our own state in life, graces and temptations, and abilities.  He doesn’t want us to be Martha, comparing what we are doing to what Mary is doing.  He simply wants us to be Mary, attentive to Him and following His direction for our life.  

    It’s also important to note how merciful the justice of God is.  As I said earlier, the landowner promised to give what was just to those who worked in the morning.  But out of a desire for others to be a part of the great work, he pays the later workers the same as the earlier.  There’s no evidence in the parable that the later workers knew they would be paid the same as the earlier workers.  But they were.  God’s justice was colored with His mercy.  God was generous.  And so he is with us.  God is always looking to forgive us, to draw us closer to Him, even in the last moments.  Think of the good thief, St. Dismas, who at the last moments of his criminal life sought the mercy of God, and it was granted to him, like to the later workers.  So for us, even if our conversion has come late, or even if we’re still working on the conversion we know God wants for us, we should never despair of God’s mercy.  Neither should we presume on it, and wait until the last moments of breath to make a true conversion, but if we are doing what we can to grow in living a life like Christ’s, we know that God will reward that, not only justly, but abundant with mercy.  
    So, as we get closer to Lent, and are starting to think of the Lenten penances we can take on, let’s follow the advice of St. Paul and do the things that will help us truly convert our lives, not make Lent a Catholic 40-day diet.  Choose a penance that will help you be a winner!  But, also know and trust in the mercy of God, who desires heaven for all His children, so they can rest eternally with Him, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Our First and Most Important Friend

 Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Some of the greatest blessings in life are friends.  They are there for you to share in your joys and comfort you in sorrow.  The best friends help you to be the best version of yourself, which is sometimes easy, and sometimes a bit painful.  St. Augustine of Hippo had a beautiful reflection on friendship from his book The Confessions:
 

Friendship had other attractions which were very important to me – we could talk and laugh – help each other in small ways – we enjoyed doing lots of things together – reading some book – going somewhere – sometimes we would be very serious together – sometimes we were able to act the fool together.  Sometimes when we argued with each other it was not a bitter argument but like the kind of argument you might have with yourself.  In fact, sometimes the argument was the kind only friends can have when they have some disagreement – it sometimes made our usual harmony more meaningful.  Each of us had something to learn from each other and something to teach in return.  If someone was absent for some time they were missed and we welcomed them back warmly.

Maybe as I read St. Augustine’s description, your own memories with friends came to your mind, and the good and difficult times you made it through.
    But, as good as friendship is (and St. Thomas Aquinas calls friendship one of the highest goods on earth), we hear a very different message from the Prophet Jeremiah today as he proclaims, “Thus says the Lord: Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings, who seeks his strength in flesh, whose heart turns away from the Lord.”  Did St. Augustine and St. Thomas decide that Jeremiah got God’s message wrong?  Does God not want us to have friends?  
    Friendship is a gift from God, and in fact, Jesus calls tells the apostles, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.  I no longer call you slaves…I have called you friends.”  So maybe Jeremiah did get it wrong!  God seems to encourage friendship, which necessarily entails trust in other humans.
    Of course, there’s a way to see this to brings together Jeremiah and Jesus, and Scripture and St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.  As with everything, it deals with the proper ordering of goods.  Ordering good things is one of the harder tasks in life, because we don’t have to reject what is evil, but decide which good is a higher good than another.
    As good as friendship with our fellow human beings is, our friendship with God is even more important.  And this is the message that Jeremiah is getting at in the first reading.  If all we do is trust in our fellow man, then we’re missing out, and in a great way!  There are things that only a human friend is going to accomplish (short of a miracle): helping you work on your house, throwing a birthday party, and the like.  And so it can be very natural in any need to turn to a friend to find comfort or to rejoice.  But our human friends are limited by time and space, whereas God is not.  So to neglect going to God first is to wrongly order our loves.  And, ironically, the Psalmist says, “Unless the Lord build the house, in vain do the builders labor.”  And St. Paul tells us to rejoice in the Lord always.  So even with fixing up a house, or throwing a party, we should start by turning to the Lord.  We may still need friends to accomplish the manual labor, but unless that effort is done according to the will of God, it won’t be as successful as it could be, and may even be a disaster.  
    In my own life, the temptation to turn to friends first is most evident and most seductive when I’m feeling down.  Again, there’s nothing wrong with turning to a friend to find some comfort and consolation.  But my friend, as well as he knows me, does not know me as well as God does.  And my friend cannot see how certain things are meant to happen in the grand scheme of things.  So his advice is going to be limited by whatever finiteness he has, whereas God is infinite, and is limited by no external factors.  When I need a friend to lean on, God wants me to turn to Him first.  I might still turn to my human friends, but God gets first billing, or at least, that’s what he deserves and that’s what will help us the most.  
    Relying on God first is precisely the principle behind all of the Beatitudes that we heard today in the Gospel.  The poor, the hungry, those who weep, and those who are hated do not seem to be blessed.  But they have to rely on God first, and when you get that right, everything else can be put into its proper place.  Those who are blessed are those who know that they need God, first and foremost.  Those who are cursed are those who think they can get by on their own, and do not need God.  Why?  Because God has made the world contingent on Him and His will, and truly to succeed in life means acknowledging and living by that reality.  We may not always like it, but that’s the way the world works.  In the same way, we have this force called gravity.  We may not always like it, but if we try to live as if gravity didn’t exist, eventually we get to a place where gravity imposes itself on us, whether we like it or not, and reminds us that we have to live according to that force.  
    Friendship is a great gift.  “There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship,” wrote St. Thomas Aquinas.  “Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.”  But, friendship with God, and relying on Him first is the key to any true friendship, and not only natural but supernatural friendship.  May we not only develop our friendships on earth, but also the friendship that will last into eternity: our friendship with God.

Christ Visiting Our Home

 Solemnity of the Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Matthew
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.]. Bishop Boyea has a homily he wants read at every Mass this weekend about the upcoming Synod on Synodality.  But we have a special celebration as we celebrate the Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Matthew today.  So you get two homilies for the price of one today.  Still, I’ll try to keep mine brief.
    I want to focus in particular on the Gospel.  Zacchaeus might seem an odd choice for a Gospel on the Anniversary of the Dedication of a Church.  [In the Ordinary Form, there are other options like a pericope from the encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, or I think the cleansing of the Temple].  But it really does make sense, if you think about it.  In this encounter with Zacchaeus, our Lord wants to visit his house.  Isn’t this precisely what our Lord does in a church building?  Doesn’t He ask to dwell with us, in the house of worship of our parish?  Of course, He doesn’t simply stay for dinner.  He remains here, which is why this space is dedicated, or set apart for sacred use.  

Zacchaeus' sycamore tree in Jericho

    We are, in this interpretation, Zacchaeus.  We are a tax collector, who is rich, that is to say, we probably have skimmed off the top.  That’s how tax collectors made reasonable money in the ancient days (hopefully not the present day): they would add money to the taxes owed, that they would then pocket.  But, whether we collect extra money literally or figuratively, we’re sinners.  Still, the Lord wants to dwell with us.  And once we encounter Him, it should lead us, like Zaccheus, to change our lives.  The whole point of Christ coming to dwell with us in this sacred temple is that we might be more configured to Christ, that Christ may more easily dwell within the temple of our hearts and souls.  If we are not drawn to change our lives, even if we feel like we’re making the same changes week by week, then we’re not truly encountering Christ.  This is not because He’s not here, but because we haven’t welcomed Him in.
    But Christ also wants to dwell in the hearts of other people.  And so this sacred space should also encourage us, through what we engage in here, to help others see the Lord.  We are the disciples who bring the Lord to other towns besides Jericho, so that Christ may dwell in the hearts of other sinners who need saving, just like we need saving.  In that way, Christ doesn’t just stop at the house of Zacchaeus; He goes to other houses, too.  
    So while we celebrate this beautiful church today, and the anniversary of when it was set aside for divine worship, we cannot rest on our laurels.  We are asked by Christ to take Him to others, so that He can draw them from their sin, and so feel comfortable living in them.  So, too, we work at continuing to make the temple of our hearts a place where Christ feels at home, so that our souls are the temples of the Holy Spirit, who with God the Father and God the Son, is one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.