Mom and Jesus Lead us Home

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

One of the great things about mothers is that they generally know how to make a house into a home.  Whether as a family you have as much money as Warren Buffett, or you’re struggling to make ends meet, a mother has a way of making a place feel comfortable, and making it a place where you want to return.  Home is the place you know you can go back, even if things aren’t going so well.  It’s the place where there is love and acceptance of the person, even if not everything the person does is accepted.  Home, as the saying goes, is where the heart is, and where mom is, there is always a lot of heart.

Today, in the convergence of the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord and Mother’s Day, we celebrate in the fact that Jesus has prepared a home for us, and is waiting for us to go there.  We have not been there, but the disciples saw Him go there.  Jesus ascended into heaven, our true home, and wants us to go there.  Heaven is the place of ultimate love, as those who live there forever are embraced by God, who is Love Itself.  Jesus is not our mother, but He wanted to show us the way home.  He has taken our Blessed Mother there, body and soul through the assumption, just as He is present there through the Ascension.  There are members of our Catholic family there already, the saints, both those who are canonized and those who are known only to God, hopefully including our mothers who have gone before us.  

But Jesus hasn’t shown us the way so much in a physical manner.  He did ascend, body and soul, into heaven, but it’s not as if we shoot up in a space shuttle that we can get to Him.  He has shown us the way in the manner He lived His life.  We are meant to imitate Jesus’ life, and in that way, we follow the way that Jesus has shown us to our home.  If we follow Jesus’ teachings in Scripture, some of which can be pretty hard, then we’re on our way, because, as Jesus Himself said, He is the way.  If we love others and God loves us; if we do not hate each other; if we are humble, poor in spirit, clean of heart; if we live marriage as God created it from the beginning; if we pray for those who persecute us; if we are willing to suffer for the ones we love, even to the point of death; then we are no longer living our life; we are living the life of Jesus, and, as St. Paul says, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”  And if Christ lives in us, then we will know the way home to Him in heaven.

In the meantime, our Mother, the Church, helps us to allow Christ to live in us.  It cannot be forced.  No one can force us to live life in imitation of Jesus.  Holy Mother Church helps us through her laws, her rules, but also through her liturgy.  The Letter to the Hebrews talks about how Jesus entered into the true sanctuary in heaven.  And in the Solemnity of the Ascension, we celebrate that Christ is seated forever at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us.  Because He is there, in the heavenly sanctuary, our true home, we can enter through His way, to participate in His worship as High Priest of the New Covenant in His Blood.

In the liturgy, we are given a taste of heaven.  Of course, this isn’t heaven; this is Adrian (to paraphrase the movie “Field of Dreams”).  And because we live in a fallen world, even our liturgy is a shadow of the eternal liturgy in our heavenly home, which will be perfect.  But we get a taste of heaven in the Mass, where God is made known to us, just as He gives Himself to us in His Word and the Body and Blood of Jesus.  We get a taste of heaven in the Mass as we gather in a community, part of the communion of saints.  Of course, in heaven the only ones there will be perfected, and none of us is there yet.  But still, we get a taste of being in the communion of the saints of heaven as we gather here on earth.  We get a taste of heaven through the light, shining through our stained-glass windows, giving us a glimpse of what a glorified body might look light through the images of the saints that we have in our stained-glass windows.  We get a taste of heaven as we have union with (communion) God.  In all these ways, Holy Mother Church prepares us for the home that her Groom, Jesus, has prepared for us.

Sadly, and some of you know this all too well, sometimes children don’t go home.  Sometimes they choose to stay away from home for a variety of reasons.  And God will not force us to go home to heaven.  If we choose to live our own life, a life in contradiction to what Jesus teaches us, then we will not go home, will not go to the place of love and joy and peace.  But I pray that, by the power of the Holy Sprit, we will use the grace God gives us to live the life of Christ, to let Christ live in us, so that we can go to the place God has prepared for us, the love and joy and peace of heaven, our true home.

Welcoming Jesus into our Homes

Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

            What are the reasons we invite people over to our house?  Maybe it’s a birthday party, and we want to celebrate the anniversary of our birth with our friends; maybe it’s a school project that has to get done; maybe it’s to watch movies with our friends or a significant other; maybe it’s to watch the big game.  No matter what the reason, we invite people over to share friendship and fellowship; we want to enjoy one another’s company; we want to celebrate a holiday or Holy Day with family.  Inviting someone over to our house is a way of expression communion with them, even if it’s on a very basic level.

According to tradition, the tree that
Zacchaeus climbed to see Jesus

            In our Gospel today, though, Zacchaeus does not invite Jesus into his home.  Rather, Jesus invites Himself in.  What is interesting is that Jesus did not originally intend to visit Zacchaeus.  St. Luke relates that Jesus, “intended to pass through the town” where Zacchaeus was.  But, passing through Jericho, Jesus must have felt the intense love, a love so strong that it caused him to climb the tallest tree on the roadway, so that Zacchaeus’ lack of height would not impede him from getting to see this great man.  And so Jesus approaches Zacchaeus in that tree and says, “‘Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.’” 

            Jesus wishes to be in communion with Zacchaeus.  He wishes to enjoy friendship and fellowship with his tax-collecting host.  Jesus loves Zacchaeus with the love of God, the love of a caring Father, and wishes simply to spend time with one whom others certainly would have shunned from their homes, since he worked for the foreign, idolatrous, Roman government. 

            This recounting of what happened to Zacchaeus is not meant to make us simply say, “Wow!  That was really nice of Jesus.  Look how welcoming He was to the outcasts of His day.”  Rather, it is meant to currently, this day, tell us something.  It is meant to communicate to us how much Jesus wants to enter into our homes and share communion with us.

            “But Father,” you might say, “Jesus doesn’t want to come to my house.  The dishes aren’t done; the room is dirty; we don’t have the special towels out in the bathroom.  And, most importantly, I’m a sinner.  Jesus doesn’t want to come over.  Doesn’t he know what I’ve done?”  Or maybe it’s not that we’re afraid that Jesus will find out that we’re a sinner, but that we’re convinced that Jesus wants nothing to do with us because we’re a sinner.

            In either case, we are wrong.  Jesus does want to come into our homes.  He does want to share His joy and His friendship with us.  He wants to love us.  In the Book of Wisdom, from where our first reading came today, we hear this truth almost in the form of a dialogue: “For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned…O LORD and lover of souls.”  If we have life; if God has brought us from the nothingness of non-existence and created us, with the cooperation of our parents at the moment of our conception, the God loves us.  In fact, it is precisely His love which brings us into existence and keeps us existing for all eternity.  God’s love is stronger for us than a loving mother or father, a devoted grandparent, and even stronger and more intense than the love between a man and a woman united in the sacred bonds of marriage. 

            God wants to come to our house, to be a part of our family.  And His love and His mercy, if we allow it into our lives, will change us, will lead us to repentance for the sins we have committed, so that our home is a fitting place for such a Guest.  And God is not alone in wanting to dwell in our homes.  All of our extended family wants to be at home in our home.  And as a family of faith, our extended family doesn’t just mean grandpa and grandma, uncles and aunts, cousins, and the like.  It means the saints, the holy ones, those parts of our Catholic family that have gone before us and have witnessed to Christ in heroic ways as martyrs, virgins, priests, religious, mothers, fathers, children, and in every way of life of which we can think.  They want us to have fellowship with them, because, as St. John says in his first epistle, their fellowship is with God. 

This Sunday evening and Monday we as a Catholic family celebrate our Catholic saints.  So many of our parents and grandparents used to, and hopefully still do, have images of the Jesus, Mary, and the saints in the home.  And while pictures don’t necessarily mean that we welcome the saints, they do a lot to remind us that the way we live, and the way we have communion as an earthly family, should be a place where Jesus and the saints feel welcome, should feel like family.  We can think of particular patron saints that we have, especially the ones associated with our state of life or work.  We can think of American saints.  We can think of the saint name we have or chose at confirmation. 

Soon Jesus will dwell within us who approach the Eucharist and receive it worthily.  He will make His home in our hearts.  Let us use that grace that we receive from the Most Holy Sacrament, so that in all parts of our life, Jesus and the saints are welcomed.  Let us remind ourselves how much Jesus and the saints are a part of our life by reclaiming the Catholic practice of pictures and statues of the Jesus, Mary and the saints in our homes.  Jesus wants to come and have communion with us.  Will we, like Zacchaeus, welcome him in?