Christ's Friends and Ours

Second Sunday of Lent
    [In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen].  One of the great blessings of friendship consists in having someone who can urge you on when you’re being a wimp, or console you when things are legitimately difficult.  Sometimes, on our own, we don’t recognize how much we can do, until someone pushes us beyond our comfort zone.  Sometimes, on our own, we don’t realize that we don’t have to carry a burden alone; others stand by to assist us.  

    As we hear the familiar Gospel account of the Transfiguration, the Gospel we always hear on the second Sunday of Lent, I want to focus this year on the two people our Lord has beside him on Mount Tabor.  While Christ is sui generis, a unique individual because He is both God and Man, Moses and Elijah certainly assist Christ with their witness as Christ prepares for His impending Passion.  I’m not saying that Christ needed Moses and Elijah to learn something, because as God Christ had access to every piece of knowledge and bit of wisdom that He needed.  But still, it helps to have friends to urge you on towards that which is difficult.
    When we look at Moses, we see someone who carries the entire Chosen People in their exodus from Egypt to the Promised Land, from slavery to freedom.  Moses’ experience shows that, while the goal is good, people don’t always move towards what is in their best interest, and do not always trust in God.  From the very beginning, as Moses tells Pharaoh to let God’s people go, the people grumble against Moses because the change isn’t happening quick enough or easy enough.  Even after they leave Egypt because God had struck down the firstborn, they still doubt God’s ability to save them as they come to the banks of the Red Sea with the Egyptians pursuing them behind.  And even after God saves them through the waters of the Red Sea, and destroys the Egyptian army by the same waters, the Chosen People still doubt that God will provide food and water for them.  As much as Moses shows the people God’s fidelity, they still doubt.  And Moses ends up interceding for the people numerous times as God threatens to start over just with Moses.  
    When we look at Elijah, we see a prophet zealous for the Lord who works mighty deeds.  And yet, the political leadership, King Ahaz and Queen Jezebel, still promote foreign deities for the Chosen People to worship.  We think of the great religious showdown on Mount Carmel between Elijah and the prophets of Ba’al, the pagan god.  While the prophets of Ba’al fail to get the pagan deity to consume their sacrifice, Elijah pours water on his sacrifice, but fire from heaven still consumes the sacrifice and evaporates the water around the altar that Elijah had built.  Elijah then destroys the foreign prophets, but has to flee because the monarchs seek Elijah to kill him.  Elijah runs first to a broom tree and hides there, but an angel encourages him to eat so that he has enough strength for the mission.  Elijah then goes to Mount Horeb, and experiences God, not in the powerful phenomena of thunder or earthquake or fire, but in the silence of a whisper.  He feels alone, since he was the last remaining prophet of the true God at the time.  
    Christ has similarities in His mission to Moses and Elijah.  Like Moses, Christ carries the entire people, not just the Jews, who trust when they see amazing signs and miracles, but then doubt shortly after the miracles come to an end.  Christ is the one Mediator between God and men, whose blood saves not just the firstborn, but all those born of water and the Spirit through Holy Baptism.  He takes death upon Himself, in order that God’s justice against sin might be satisfied.  Like Elijah, Christ is also zealous for the Lord, and puts to death not the false prophets, but the false gods themselves, the kingdom of Satan and his minions.  Still, as the only-Begotten Son of God, He, like Elijah, stands alone as the local political leaders, like King Herod and the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, will seek to put the Lord to death, like King Ahaz and Queen Jezebel before them sought Elijah.  
    So who are our friends who push us on and console us with their experience?  Who are our Moses and Elijah?  In one sense, we can look towards good friends we have who can push us onwards despite our trials and tribulations.  These are the true friends who see the virtue we want, who see how much we might have to struggle for that virtue, but don’t let us give up on ourselves.  Or they might be the friends who see the pain and the suffering we endure, and help us to know that we’re not alone, and that others do truly care for us.  We may not have many friends like this, but even just one or two can make all the difference in the world.
    But, also important to consider are our friends who are saints.  Maybe it’s the saints from the Scriptures, who stories remind us of how God works with those who struggle for righteousness, and how God consoles those who struggle through difficult times, saints like Moses, Elijah, Job, the Apostles, the Holy Women, and others.  If we read Scripture regularly we can understand more adeptly how God works and how we can make it through difficult times.  But we also have the saints who have come after the Death and Resurrection of Jesus who help us by their example and their intercession.  When we’re struggling, do we pray to our patron saints like our name saint, our Confirmation saint, or a saint associated with our vocation or profession?  When we’re sad and feel the weight of the world, do we turn to our Blessed Mother or other saints whose lives inspire us to persevere in the midst of difficulties and struggles?  
    God made us for communion: with Him and with others.  God Himself said about Adam that it was not good to be alone.  Especially during Lent, but even during the entire year, may we rely on good friends, both those on earth and those in heaven, who will push on on when the times get tough, and comfort us when we feel down and out.  May we recognize that we are not alone, but that myriad of witnesses surround us, encouraging us towards the heavenly homeland to which we hope to return.  [Where Christ reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever.  Amen.].

Paralyzed, Friends, Scribes, and Jesus

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost
    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  When we hear the Gospel passage today, we hear about two, maybe three, individuals or groups: the paralyzed man and his friends; the scribes; and our Lord.  For today’s homily I’d like to focus on those three as we meditate upon the Word of God, and seek what the Lord is saying to us.

   The first is the paralyzed man and his friends.  The paralyzed man is lying in the bed, and one presumes that his paralysis is at least his legs, but perhaps his arms as well.  He can’t take care of himself by himself.  He is utterly dependent on others to eat, to drink, to clean himself, and even to get somewhere.  Left to himself he has nothing.  Isn’t that us before Holy Baptism?  And really even after Holy Baptism.  Left to ourselves, we can do nothing good.  Our Lord says in John, chapter 15, “‘Apart from me you can do nothing.’”  Any good that we can accomplish only happens because of God.  Any good that is done by a non-believe is still a gratuitous gift of God, and made possible by His power.  We are paralyzed because we are fallen.  We need to be healed.
    Think of his friends, too.  In this passage we don’t have any sense of who wanted to see Christ.  Did the paralyze man hear about this itinerant rabbi who healed people?  Did the friends have some experience of the Savior, and then want to bring their paralyzed man to see if Christ would heal him?  We don’t know.  But we do know that, whoever desired it, or desired it more, the friends brought the paralyzed man to Jesus.  They did what he could not.  They became one of the causes of his healing.
    I preach about friends on a pretty regular basis, partly because of what a treasure friends are.  I have used the quote of St. Thomas Aquinas: “There is nothing on earth more to be prized than true friendship.  Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures, and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.”  I think the Angelic Doctor here is not talking about a mere acquaintance, someone you know and with whom you enjoy spending time, but especially a true friend, someone who helps you to grow in virtue.  Any friend who brings us to Christ is a friend worth having.  Any friend who can rejoice with us and commiserate with us, but who directs both back to God and His Divine Plan supports us in our desire to be saints.  
    Do your friends bring you to our Lord, or do they pull you away from Him?  Can they help you find healing, the healing that you desire and even maybe the healing of which you are not even fully aware?  Friendship is a great means of spreading the Gospel.  It may not happen all at once, and sometimes trying to force the issue of faith can strain a friendship.  But do we share Jesus with our friends?  One of the things I enjoy doing as a Michigan State Police chaplain is sharing my faith with others.  And the conversations come quite easily because they know I’m a priest.  But your friends should be able to ask you about the Lord, too, and should presume that you know Him, because you are His friends.  Conversion may take place over a long period of time.  Or maybe it won’t happen at all, as people have free will and can walk away from the Lord, even if He invites them to follow Him.  But do we participate in sharing our faith with others, and bringing them to Christ?
    The third group is the scribes.  They are not the favorites in almost any Gospel passage.  And we can see why.  Our Savior heals the paralyzed man, and what is their response?  Not, “That’s wonderful!” or “Praise God!”  Nope.  They accuse Him of blasphemy.  To be fair, if Christ isn’t God, then it is blasphemy.  But if Christ isn’t God, or at least a great prophet of God, could He heal a paralyzed man?  The scribes immediately accuse Christ of one of the worst sins.  Their hearts are closed to the work of God.
    We can also sometimes be like the scribes.  If something good happens, we get suspicious if the person doesn’t fit into our categories, or doesn’t have the same expression of faith that we do.  We set ourselves up as judge of what God can do, and what He cannot do.  To be fair, St. John the Apostle was in that same group once.  In Mark, chapter nine, John says, “‘Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.’”  You can almost imagine the Savior cocking his head to the side with a quizzical look.  I mean, what was the other option?  Letting the people continue with their demonic possessions?  Maybe John should have thought it through a little more.  Christ does answer John, saying, “‘Do not prevent him.  There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me.’”
    Lastly, we have the Person of Jesus.  Liberal Scripture scholars will often pedal this nonsense that He never claimed to be God.  They must have missed this passage.  And a lot of others.  Here, and elsewhere, our Lord takes as His own that which was proper to the Lord, the way that the Jews would refer to God.  In this passage, He forgives sins.  The scribes are right in asserting that only God can forgive sins.  But that’s exactly our Lord’s point.  He reveals Himself as God through the forgiveness of the paralytic’s sins.  This was the first and primary miracle that the Lord worked for the paralytic.  But, as a sign that He can forgive sins, Christ also heals the man and allows him to walk.  
    Do we accept that God is God and we are not?  I know that seems like it has an obvious answer, but how many times do we, whether directly or indirectly, say to God, “I can handle this.  Let me take care of this one.  I know what’s best here.”  Pride always lurks, seeking to have us put ourselves in the place of God, just as the devil tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden.  We put ourselves, or some other material good, in place of God, and set up our little altars to worship our will or our possessions.  But that’s not respecting who God reveals Himself to be.  Our approach should always be, “Thy will be done.”  
    As you go home today, think about who you identify with the most in this passage.  Is it the paralytic?  Is it his friends?  Is it, and be honest here, the scribes?  Most likely, we go back and forth among the three.  For those times when you’re like the paralytic, ask God to heal you, especially your spiritual paralysis.  For those times when you’re like the friends, ask God to identify for you those whom you can bring to Him for healing.  For those times when you’re like the scribes, ask God to heal the hardness and blindness of your hearts so that you can recognize God’s work, even when it happens in ways you’re not expecting.  Have faith that you can be healed, no matter who you are, by the Father, and 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.

Communion with God

 Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity

    One of the questions people have been asking me most about my role as pastor of both St. Pius X and St. Matthew (especially now that the new Mass schedule has been released) is how I’m not going to burn out.  And it’s a valid concern; there’s a lot of work and I’ll be kept quite busy.  But I’m not just relying on myself.  I have some good friends that I see almost every week who allow me to relax with them, have some dinner, and set aside the concerns of work.  Sometimes we run together, we often eat (and drink) together, and we just hang out.  My time with them allows my batteries to recharge so that I’m ready to go with whatever the week throws at me.
    I think we all have people that we lean on to help us unwind.  For some people it’s a phone call to mom and/or dad.  For others it’s a spouse or a friend.  Maybe it’s your Bible study group, or a group of friends with whom you go to dinner.  But time with those people seems to make things better, and allows us to enjoy life again, and handle whatever stresses come our way.
    As we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, we celebrate our God who is both One and a Communion of Three Divine Persons.  Jews and Muslims recognize the oneness of God, but only Christians recognize the Trinity of Persons.  We believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, One God, equal in dignity and majesty, co-eternal.  God is transcendent, beyond the confines of our reason.  And yet, in Jesus, God the Son, God also humbled Himself to imminent, to be like us in all things but sin and to be with us in communion.  
    God didn’t need us.  God–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–is perfect in Himself, and lacks nothing.  And yet, out of an abundance of love, God created the universe and everything in it, and then, even beyond any imagining, extended that perfect Communion in Himself to the creatures He had made in His image and likeness.  
    That’s the message we hear from Deuteronomy in the first reading.  Moses says, “‘Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live?  Or did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation?’”  We might not think of that as so great, but, as Moses points out, it was unheard of!  God didn’t simply deign to speak with His creatures, but saved them from their oppressors and gave them a law to help them live the fullness of life for which God created them.  And, as far as Moses was concerned, that was proof enough that God is God, and that He is worth obeying.
    But Jesus did more than simply speak to us from fire and thunder.  Jesus spoke to us while looking like us and sharing our human nature.  He communicated even more of what would truly make us happy and give us joy.  Jesus built on the Ten Commandments that were given on Mount Sinai with the Eight Beatitudes that He gave in the Sermon on the Mount.  He filled out the deeper meaning of the law, and showed us that true happiness comes from giving of ourselves, rather than taking.  
    But by Jesus’ Incarnation, and then by His Passion and Death, He allowed us to be joined to Him through baptism, and to be sustained by Him in the Eucharist, so that the Communion that the Most Holy Trinity enjoys, we could also enjoy.  St. Paul writes about this in the second reading as he talks about our adoption that the Holy Spirit accomplishes so that we are children of God the Father, brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ.  We are not simply slaves to a law, but co-heirs to glory and the Communion of God.
    And communion is what God wants for us: He wants to have communion with us.  And that is what truly sustains us, even in the most stressful times of our life.  Friends are great, and I value mine.  But God is the one who can sustain us through anything.  He lightens our sorrows and increases our joys.  He gives us strength and wisdom to deal with the hardest parts of life, beyond even what our human friends, even beyond what a spouse, can help.  
    And that is the greatest gift of our God.  He is transcendent, higher than the heavens.  And yet He is also imminent, closer to us than we are to ourselves.  God does not only want us to know that He is–Father, Son, and Holy Spirit–a Communion of Divine Persons, He also wants us to be united to that Communion.
    So when things are rough and when things are easy; when life is painful and when life is full of joy; when storm clouds gather and when the sun shines brightly; yes, turn to friends on earth to share in the experiences of life, but turn even more to God, the Communion of Three Divine Persons, and know the strength and happiness of being in Communion with our Creator.