Jesus' Mission–And Ours

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
    The analogy that St. Paul uses of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, being like a human body is pretty accessible.  We think about the different parts of the body, and how they all work together.  And if a part is not working, it can pretty easily lead to problems.  Even something as simply as a foot falling asleep can be quite problematic.  The brain may want it to work, the lungs may be getting enough oxygen for the foot to work, but if there is no blood flow, the muscles can’t respond like they’re supposed to and walk.   
    But the Church isn’t about walking.  The Church’s mission is the exact same mission that Jesus outlined in today’s Gospel.  We have been anointed “to bring glad tidings to the poor…to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,…and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”  Maybe you’re thinking that you didn’t sign up for that, but you did, when you were baptized, or when your parents had you baptized.  By being configured to Christ through baptism, your mission became the same as the Lord’s, as Isaiah prophesied in the Old Testament. 
    Of course, we need to go beyond the literal meaning of the words, and go to the deeper, spiritual meaning.  What does it mean to bring glad tidings to the poor?  How do we proclaim liberty to captives?  Is there any way that we can give sight to the blind?  What is an acceptable year to the Lord, and how do we proclaim it?
    First, let’s look at bringing glad tidings to the poor.  Who are the poor?  We tend to think of them as those who do not have enough money or resources, for a variety of reasons.  But as we go beyond the economic definition of the poor, we can look to those who are spiritually poor.  Those who are spiritually poor are those who don’t have enough of what they need, but instead of focusing on money, they don’t have enough of the Lord.  We are each made for God, and, as St. Augustine says, “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God].”  So when a person doesn’t have that connection to God, they are spiritually

hungry and thirsty, and need that sustenance.  Bringing glad tidings to the poor means connecting people to God.  It may be a co-worker who is bemoaning a difficult decision in life, or a family member for whom nothing seems to go right.  If we are to continue the mission to bring glad tidings to the poor, we need to tell that co-worker about Jesus, and about how He can give us wisdom to make the right decision according to what will make us truly happy.  Or we can ask the family member if we can pray with them and for them about the bad situations they are experiencing.  That is how we bring glad tidings to the poor.
    When it comes to proclaiming liberty to captives, we’re not talking about letting people out of jail, which is generally a bad idea.  The captivity that binds us all is sin, as Jesus says in the Gospels, and St. Paul reaffirms in some of his epistles.  To proclaim liberty is to let people know that there is a way to unload their burden of sin, and find the freedom they want.  It may mean inviting someone to go to confession with us.  Or it may mean being an accountability partner for someone who is stuck in a cycle of addition.  But Jesus charges us with the task of letting people know that they do not have to continue in slavery to sin, but can find the freedom that they desire, the freedom of the children of God.
    In the Gospel according to John, Jesus calls the Pharisees blind because they are unaware of their sin, even while they are condemning the man who was born blind but whom Jesus healed.  The physically blind cannot see the physical world, which creates unique challenges to life.  The spiritually blind cannot see the spiritual world, which creates challenges both in the spiritual and the physical world.  If a person believes that this life is all there is, that there is no God, they will stumble through a world that God created according to His plan.  If a person does not acknowledge what God has revealed to make them happy, then they will be miserable.  So our duty as people on the mission is to help them see how the world truly works, not from an earthly point of view, but from a spiritual point of view.  We do this by encouraging those who can work to do so, to build up the society in which they live, rather than simply taking from a government program.  We encourage the virtue of chastity, especially, but not only, to the youth in our families, because the vice of lust leads people to trip and fall over many pitfalls that God does not want for their lives.  We invite people to come to Mass with us on Sunday, not because it’s easy or we always feel we get something out of it, but because God has made us to praise Him, and when we don’t, we’re lacking the ability to hear how God wants to most easily speak to us.
    Last, but not least, to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.  The acceptable year of the Lord was the jubilee, the celebration every 7 years, and especially in the 50th year, of a rest granted by the Lord.  Our words and our actions should point to heaven, which is the eternal rest to which the jubilee year pointed.  But we get there by the narrow path, not by the wide road.  So proclaiming that acceptable year means reminding people that this life is not all there is, and that heaven is what God wants for us, but we have to accept that gift of eternal life by the daily decisions that we make.  We tell others about Jesus’ Resurrection, and how that ensures for us the possibility of eternal life, where we will eternally worship God in the wedding feast of the Lamb. 
    When we were baptized, we were anointed with the Sacred Chrism which made us little christs, little anointed ones.  At that moment, the mission that Isaiah proclaimed, and that Jesus said was fulfilled in the hearing in the synagogue, became our mission, too.  Today, the Lord invites us to recommit ourselves to the mission: “to bring glad tidings to the poor,…to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,…and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

Drawing Closer to Jesus

Third Sunday of Lent

We are a month away from Easter Sunday.  Those words might sound exciting and comforting to you, as your Lenten penances only have 4 more weeks, but as a priest, four weeks to Easter is the busiest time of the year.  In addition to the usual busyness, I am one of the assistant Masters of Ceremonies for the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday morning, so I’m assisting with a lot of the behind the scenes work.  And, this is my first Easter here, so I’m learning how things have been done here before, and feeling my way through the liturgical celebrations as we enter into them.  This is my favorite time of year in the Church calendar, but it’s also the most intense, and, if we let it be, the most powerful.

Today we hear our first long Gospel, prepping us for Holy Week.  That’s not really why we have these long Gospels over the next three weeks, but it seems to work out that we have three long Gospels to prepare us for the Passion Narrative (a super long Gospel) that we will hear on Palm Sunday and Good Friday.  Today’s Gospel and the next two weeks’ Gospels are passages which deal with conversion, our major theme during Lent.  

Today’s conversion story is about a woman of Samaria.  And in her conversion, she comes to know Jesus more and more as the story continues.  She starts out by referring to Jesus simply as “a Jew.”  There’s no personal interaction, only referencing his religion.  But Jesus draws her in more closely, as he offers her living water.

That encounter with Jesus leads to a change in tone.  No longer is Jesus simply “you, a Jew,” but is now “Sir.”  Jesus offers her something, and she’s interested in this “living water” she is speaking about.  She likes the idea of never having to draw water again, because she is drawing water, alone, at the hottest part of the day.  We’ll learn why later in this story.

Then Jesus changes the subject.  And it is probably not the subject that modern, polite people would talk about.  Jesus says, “‘Go call your husband,’” knowing full well what her situation is.  This woman at the well is an adulteress, which is why she’s drawing water alone at the hottest part of the day.  She has been married five times before, and the man she is living with currently is not her husband.  She, of course, doesn’t want to admit this (who would?), and coyly says, “‘I do not have a husband.’”  But Jesus reveals to her a part of her life that is not in order.  This leads her to acknowledge Jesus in a different way; she comes to know Him more.  He is not, “you, a Jew,” and he is no longer just “Sir.”  He is, she says, a prophet.  

But feeling a little uneasy about the trajectory of this conversation about her love life, she changes it to something she knows will divert attention away from her personal life: how to worship.  Not much has changed today: if you want to get someone in a heated conversation, talk about how you think Mass should be celebrated.  But Jesus doesn’t rebuff her question.  He answers by stating that true worshippers will worship God the Father in Spirit and truth. 

After talking to her about worshipping well, she is drawn to talk about the Messiah.  And Jesus says to her, “‘I am he, the one speaking with you.’”  Jesus reveals Himself and His mission.  When she first started, she did not recognize Him as anything but a foreigner.  Now she is led to think of Him as the Messiah, which in Greek, is translated 𝛸𝜌𝜄𝜎𝜏𝜊𝜍, which we translate as Christ.  From there she tells everybody about Jesus, and they come to believe as well.

This process of conversion is present in our own lives, as well.  It is present in the life of our Elect, Alexis, who is preparing for the Sacraments of Initiation.  It is present in Chris, our Candidate, preparing to be received into the Church and receive the Sacraments of Confirmation and the Eucharist.  But it is, or should be, present in each one of us.  All of us have opportunities to grow closer to Jesus.

Some of us, honestly, don’t know Jesus that well.  He is, we might say, only “you, a Jew.”  He is a stranger to us.  Some of us know about Jesus.  Maybe we come to Mass every week, we do our duty, or we come because that’s what we’ve always done on Sundays.  But Jesus still isn’t known well to us.  He is simply a respected person.  But we keep him at arm’s length, because we like the way we live, and we don’t want to have to change.

Some of us recognize Jesus as a good guy, a religious leader, someone who speaks for God (in other words, a prophet).  We feel that tug at our soul for God, and maybe we’ve even had some religious experiences in our lives when we felt really close to God.  But we still don’t recognize who Jesus fully is.  Some of us recognize Jesus as the Messiah.  We’re very active in our faith, but there are still some areas of our life that we don’t want Jesus to see, and we’re not sure we want to tell others about Jesus.  That seems a bit pushy to tell others about Jesus.  

No matter where we are in our faith, Jesus calls us to a deeper relationship with Him.  Sometimes, as we grow closer to Him, He reveals our need for Him, a need that only He can satisfy, no matter how much we try to fill that need with other, passing things.  Sometimes Jesus even points out our sins to us, in order to reject our sins and choose Him.  But Jesus always wants us to grow close to Him, especially through our worship of the Trinity in Mass.  And then He wants us to tell others about Him.  Where are we in our conversion?  We are never done; we can always grow closer to God.  Are we open to letting God change our lives?

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.

Do We Truly Love Jesus?

Third Sunday of Advent

           

Think of the last person you fell in love with (if you’re married, I hope it’s your spouse sitting next to you!).  And, if you’re a teen, maybe it’s just the last person you had a crush on.  I bet you could talk about that person for a long time.  I bet that you would try to put into words what exactly it is that you like or love about the person.  You would try to describe your love.  And yet, you probably wouldn’t be able to exactly point to the thing that made you like or love that person.  You could probably talk for hours on end without being able to really explain your love.  And the person listening would probably be bored to tears, and never really get it, though they might pretend to be interested out of politeness.

            For me, that person is the Bride of Christ.  I don’t really want to get started about what I find so beautiful in Her, because if I get going, I might not be able to stop!  And Lord knows the bishop doesn’t need to get letters from all of you about how I preached for 2 hours and only stopped because I needed water.  But she is the perfect one for me.

            Or maybe you’re an enthusiast for the arts.  Maybe there’s just one performance or one play or musical about which you could talk for days!  Or maybe it’s a sports team, or an athlete.  We probably all have something that we love so much, and we treasure so much, that once we get going, we’re like the Energizer Bunny, and we don’t stop, no matter how much the other people around us lose interest.

            Today’s first reading is usually connected with Jesus in the Synagogue.  Jesus reads this passage and says that it is fulfilled in their hearing.  We have all heard it before.  And we’re all quite comfortable with knowing that Jesus is the one who is anointed by God, who was sent to bring glad tidings to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives and release to prisoners, and announce a year of favor and a day of vindication by God.  We’re probably all sold on that.  And Jesus could say that because He was (and still is) madly in love with His Bride, the Church, and wants to give Her every good thing.  He wants to clothe her with the robe of salvation, wrap Her in a mantle of justice, and adorn Her with jewels.  The whole account of Jesus, and the whole Bible, is a love story about God and His People.  It is the account of one who is so madly in love that He can never abandon Her, even when She abandons Him.

            But today’s first reading is not just about Jesus.  Hence our Gospel passage about St. John the Baptist from St. John the Evangelist’s account.  The Evangelist talks about how the Baptist testifies to the light.  The Baptist cannot stop speaking about Jesus.  He is not the Bridegroom, but He is the Bride waiting for the Lover of His soul.  And He preaches to make people ready, to help them understand why they should be so madly in love with Him.  But the Baptist’s work is only to prepare the way.  He is only a messenger, while Jesus is the Message; he the voice, while Jesus is the Word.

            Wonderful!  Very information!  Glad we now know that John the Baptist is the one who prepares for Jesus, and Jesus is the one who sets Israel free and blesses her!  But that’s only half the story.  “And now,” to quote Paul Harvey, “the rest of the story.”

            You are anointed by God!  You are sent to bring glad tidings to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, proclaim liberty to captives and release to prisoners, and announce a year of favor and a day of vindication by our God!  The call of Jesus is your call!!  No, that’s not blasphemy, that’s sacramental theology!  When you were baptized, you became a part of Jesus’ Mystical Body.  You were joined to Jesus.  After you were baptized with water, you were anointed with Sacred Chrism, a perfumed oil, and were made to be a christ.  You were not made to be the Christ, but were made to be  a christ, an anointed one (which is what Christ means).  When your parents (if you were an infant) or you (if you were over the age of seven) said yes to being baptized, you were given that same mission as Jesus, because you were made a part of Jesus.  His life became your life.  His mission became your mission.

            “But,” you might say, “I don’t want to talk about Jesus.”  If that is the case, we have to ask ourselves if we truly love Jesus as much as we should.  When we truly love someone we cannot help but speak about that person.  “Isn’t she gorgeous!  She’s so kind!  I just want to be around her.  She brings out the best in me.  I feel happier when she’s around me.”  We can talk for hours, even if we only have a crush on a person. 

“But I don’t know how to talk about Jesus!”  When we’re truly in love, we don’t care if we have the right words; all we care about is telling someone just how great that person is.  “She does this thing with her face when she gets annoyed and she just scrunches up her face in just a way like this, but not like this because I can’t do it right, but it’s just so, I mean it makes me feel so, it’s kinda like, I don’t even know how to describe it!”  When we love someone truly, madly, deeply, we can’t hold it in, just like St. John the Baptist couldn’t hold it in.  Maybe the way we talk about Jesus won’t be in the same way as we talk about our spouse or our crush.  But let’s at least talk about Jesus in these last few days of Advent, so that we, too, can prepare the way for the Lord and make straight a path into others’ hearts to receive the love that we have received from God.