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. 

New Life

Easter Sunday

           

New life.  The phrase has become so common that we often forget the power of those two, short words.  But those words have power, because everything changed from that point in time for all eternity, both all time that had come before, and all time that would follow after.  People had dreamed about life that would never end, but it was always something that could not be seen, could not be experienced.  Now, new life was not just a theory or a pious idea, but a reality that we saw in Jesus.  He was the same Jesus, but He was different.  He still bore the marks of His crucifixion, but His body was not the same type of body as before; it was filled with the glory of God.

            New life.  What an effect it had on those first disciples: Mary Magdalene, the first to see the risen Christ; Peter and John who ran to the tomb in today’s Gospel; the Blessed Virgin Mary, who received back the Son that she had watched die on the cross.  What a shock it was for them first to find the empty tomb, and then to see Jesus appear in their midst, though the doors were locked. 

            New life.  It gave Peter the courage, after the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, to proclaim to the Jews who were gathered for Passover that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, the fulfillment of the prophecies of Moses and all the other prophets.  It gave Peter the courage to preach that Jesus is “‘the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead…[and] that everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.’”  It gave countless numbers of people the courage to be put to death rather than deny Jesus as their Savior.

            New life.  It caused the first believers, most of who were Jewish, to not only observe the Sabbath, the Saturday rest, but also to observe the 8^th day, the first day of the week, when Jesus rose from the dead, and gather together each Sunday to remind themselves of what seemed to good to be true, but was true; to hear the prophecies that referred to Jesus; and to fulfill the commandment of the Lord made at the Last Supper and celebrate the Eucharist in His memory.  It caused the first believers, especially Gentiles, non-Jews, to change the entire way they lived their lives.  No longer would they worship idols or the emperor; no longer would they participate in the sexual immorality of their neighbors; no longer would they base their life on pleasure and worldly wisdom, but on the Word of God, both through what was in Scriptures and the Teachings of the Apostles, as what ruled their lives.  They did as St. Paul wrote to the Colossians, and as we heard in our second reading today: “seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.  Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.”  They put on a heavenly mindset, even while living their earthly pilgrimage.

            Brothers and sisters, the power of the resurrection, the power of new life is not only in the past.  It is a power still as potent today as it was in the first century when Peter and John ran to the tomb.  It is still as potent as in the third century when Sts. Perpetua and Felicity died in the arena rather than deny Christ.  It is still as potent as in  the thirteenth century when St. Francis divested himself of all that his earthly father had given him in order to follow in poverty his Heavenly Father. It is still as potent as in the nineteenth century when St. Marianne Cope dedicated her life to serving those in Molokai who had Hansen’s disease.  It is still as potent as in the twentieth century when St. Maximilian Kolbe put himself in the place of another prisoner at Auschwitz.  You can grab on to that power, and you can have new life.  You can be transformed, first on the inside, and then, after the resurrection of body at the end of time, on the outside.

            If you know Jesus, then everything is different.  Sure, we may look the same as we did before, but the way we live our lives will testify to the fact that we have new life in Jesus.  It changes the way we treat each other.  It changes the way we make decisions.  It changes the way we spend our time.  We base our lives not on our own ideas, but on the logic of God found in the Scriptures and in the Teachings of the Apostles and their successors.  We gather together each Sunday to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus and to remind ourselves of the power that new life can have in our lives.

            “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad.”  Jesus said to his disciples how He came to set this world on fire, and how He wishes it were already burning.  New life, and the power it has, can set this world afire with God’s love.  I invite you today, paraphrasing the words of St. Paul: Arise, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you new life.