A Strong Eighth Grader

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

This past Wednesday at our school Mass, we celebrated the Feast of Conversion of St. Paul.  And in my homily I was talking about how God chose St. Paul, even though he had started out persecuting Christians, and trying to arrest them.  And in part of the homily I referenced both what we heard in our second reading today, as well as when St. Paul says that he was given a thorn in his flesh, but God assured St. Paul that God’s power is made manifest in weakness.  To illustrate the point between being strong and weak, I asked one of our eighth grade students to come forward (he didn’t know he was going to be called forward, either).  This was one of our students who plays football and basketball, and is pretty athletic.  Once he was forward, I asked him to flex.  He looked at me for a second, turned a little red with embarrassment, but then flexed and showed off his guns (that’s how some young men talk about their muscles).  And I’ll be honest, I didn’t realize how strong he was!  After Mass he told me that he benches 200 lbs.  I can barely add any weights to the bar, so I was the demonstration of one who is weak.

St. Paul reminds us today that we don’t have to be the wisest, we don’t have to be the most powerful, we don’t have to be nobly born in order to follow Jesus.  God so often chooses those who are not considered strong or powerful or wise to be the vessels of His power.  That’s the way our God works.  More often than not, God’s choices don’t make sense in our modern understanding, whether modern is in the time of Jesus, the first millennium, the second millennium, or even now in the third millennium since the birth of Christ.  

As strange as Jesus’ teaching sounds to us, it probably sounded as weird for the people listening to Jesus.  Now, as then, we don’t tend to think of the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who desire righteousness, the merciful, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted for righteousness as people who are blessed.  Those people, in fact, seem like the ones who are the victims of society, and those who get run over by everybody.  But Jesus calls them blessed.  

How are they blessed?  They are attentive to God and His will, rather than the will of the world.  They are the ones who spend their attention and energy on serving God and bringing about His reign, rather than trying to hoard money, grab after power, cheat people, seek after vengeance, or look for and act on the desires of lust.  

And though Jesus taught on the mount in Galilee some 2,000 years ago, those words still apply to us today.  If we want to be blessed we have to rely on God, work for justice and peace, be meek and merciful, and be clean of heart.  Clean of heart may be one of the hardest in today’s world.  There are so many groups that make purity difficult: every second over $3,000 is being spent on lewd web pages.  Lack of purity can lead to addictions, can rewire the brains of our youth not to appreciate what is truly good and truly beautiful, can destroy marriages and families, and promote human trafficking.  It is an enslaving force in general.  But Jesus desires us to be free.  He wants to unshackle us from this uncleanness, so that we can live in true blessedness.  If you or someone you know struggles with lack of purity, like pornography, the Diocese of Lansing website has resources on its Marriage and Family Life webpage.  

No matter what beatitude strikes you as the most difficult, being weak is not a problem.  God chooses “the weak to shame the strong,” as St. Paul reminds us in our second reading.  All of us have weaknesses.  And so all of us can be chosen by God to show that God does great things, not by human accomplishment, but by His grace.

"What was Jesus' Problem?"

Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“What was Jesus’ problem?”  That was the way one homily I heard in seminary on this Gospel passage begin.  Sitting in Sacred Heart Major Seminary, the Tudor Gothic building, at a 7 a.m. Mass, this first phase certainly got my attention.  “What was Jesus’ problem?” Fr. Muller asked.  The 9 other lepers did exactly as Jesus told them: they went to show the priest that they were no longer lepers, which was exactly what lepers were supposed to do according to the Book of Leviticus.  And yet, Jesus seems quite perturbed that only 1 leper had returned to say, “Thank you.”  In fact, the one leper who did return was being directly disobedient to Jesus; he didn’t go and show the priest.  

In fact, Jesus was praising the faith of the one who realized who the Person was who healed Him.  And what was remarkable was that it was a Samaritan, someone who was not part of the Chosen People.  In fact, the Samaritans were the people who had mixed Judaism with the surrounding pagan religions.  It was this pagan who had recognized that it was Jesus Himself who had healed him.  This was different from our first reading because Elisha never cured the man, but God cured the man.  Elisha was just the one who told the foreigner how God would cure him.

Saying thank you is a basic part of how we are raised, or at least it should be.  When a gift is received, or when someone holds the door for us, or when someone simply does anything kind for us, we are trained, and should be, to say, “Thank you.”  But sometimes we need a reminder.  Just the other day I was sitting at the corner of Utley and Corunna, and there was no traffic in either direction as I was trying to turn left onto Corunna.  It dawned on me that I should say thank you to God, and I did, because that is often a wicked intersection at which to turn left.  Now, we probably don’t often think about thanking God for those little things, but everything we receive from God is a gift, for which we owe God thanks.

But, if we really think about it, when we say that everything we receive from God, we also have to include the trials and tribulations that God allows us to undergo.  God doesn’t send us evil, but sometimes he allows us to go through evil for some greater good.  It’s easy to thank God that we have a choir singing at Mass again; it’s much harder to thank God for the month that felt like an eternity without the choir.  I thank God that I’m able to be involved almost daily with our wonderful Catholic schools: St. Pius X and Powers.  It’s a little harder to thank God for a broken thumb one received while spending time with said students.  But I know that God is teaching me patience as I go through the six more weeks of not having full use of my thumb.  

It may seem like it’s weird to thank God even for horrible stuff that happened.  And yet, that’s what we do every Sunday and Holyday, and each time we assemble for Mass.  Each time the Mass is celebrated we give thanks.  The word Eucharist comes from two Greek words, 𝛆𝛖-, which means well, and 𝛘𝛂𝛒𝛊𝛓, which means to give thanks.  Each time we are here for Mass, we give thanks to God.  For what do we give thanks?  The crucifixion of Jesus.  Each Mass Calvary is re-presented for us, and we are able to share in the fruits of our redemption.  While the Mass draws us in to the entire Paschal Mystery, the Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus, the Eucharist connects us more specifically to the Death of Jesus on the cross, which is why the crucifix is so important for us as Catholics.  We give thanks for God’s death in a horribly brutal way.  

At the Easter Vigil, the Exultet, an old hymn about the very special night, says, “O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!”  We even give thanks for the Fall of Adam and Eve, because that Fall made possible a life more glorious than the Garden of Eden when Jesus died on the cross.  

It’s easy to give thanks when something goes well, or when we get something we want.  Do we give thanks to God even for the things we don't want: an illness; a delay; a broken bone; a boring homily; a new priest who isn’t as good as the old one; a bad grade; a lost job.  Certainly those things are crosses in our life, and God never sends us evil.  But maybe there’s a reason God allowed the evil to enter our life, a way that we can become more of the saint He called us to be in baptism.

We’ve heard it a million times: say please and thank you.  But the Lord is inviting us to give Him everything we’ve experienced since the last time we received the Eucharist: the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Unite it with the bread and wine which will be offered to God.  In giving thanks to God for all of it, and uniting it with the perfect sacrifice of thanksgiving of Jesus on the cross, God promises to transform it, if we allow Him, and give it back to us transformed into something which draws us closer to Him.  As St. Paul says in his first letter to the Thessalonians: “In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.”