Homily – 13th Sunday In Ordinary Time

Wis 1:13-15; 2:23-24/2 Cor 8:7, 9, 13-15/Mk 5:21-43

Today’s Gospel narrative of the radical healing of the daughter of the synagogue official Jairus is divided into two parts which are separated by the healing of the woman who had lived with a hemorrhage for twelve years. 

The most significant theme that ties these two narratives together is, I believe, the theme of death. As the narrative opens, the young girl is on the point of death. The woman is suffering from a constant discharge of blood. As the Book of Leviticus says, “The life of every creature is its blood” (17:14). Plagued by this hemorrhage, life is perpetually draining away from her, she is enfeebled and always moving toward death. According to mosaic law, she is in a perpetual state of ritual impurity. Everything she touches, lies or sits on becomes unclean. Others avoid contact with her since touching her would make them unclean. If she’s married, sexual relations for her and her husband are forbidden. Worst of all, she is prohibited from entering the temple to worship with the rest of God’s people, and therefore alienated from the sense of belonging and communion inherent in temple worship.

We are told she has spent all her money on remedies, but she is not only not rid of her illness but has become worse. 

Neither Jairus nor the woman turn to Jesus as simply another option offered in the market place of possible healings. Rather, they both come to him in the humility and simplicity of genuine faith, convinced that he can help them. 

Today I would like to focus on the experience of the woman with a hemorrhage.

The woman has heard reports of Jesus. And she has chosen not to let herself be ruled by her sense of discouragement over all her previous attempts at being cured but to go to Jesus. So based on these reports she has made a choice to take up a particular course of action and to follow through on it. 

But to get to Jesus she has to place herself among the crowds pressing upon him. Despite her state of ritual impurity and the restrictions that have been imposed on her by the law, she made her way.

The law is good, it has its origin in the Father. It is given by God as instruction for the sake of the covenant relationship he has established between himself and his people. As coming from God, rightly understood in the light of faith, the divine precepts, each in their own way, ought to point toward Jesus as their fulfillment. They should never be understood in such a way that they would restrain God’s people from coming to his Son. It is clear to us that the woman’s action is a response to the Spirit of God that is pushing her toward Jesus in spite of the letter of the law that might have caused her to stay at home or at least to stand at a distance from the dense crowds and therefore from Jesus himself, so as to avoid making others unclean by coming into contact with her. She, too, sees that she must go to Jesus.

Trusting in the reports she has heard of Jesus, she is confident that to be healed all she needs to do is touch his clothes. She has grasped that the result will be not that she will make him unclean but that he will make her clean. “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.” This confident assurance is an act of faith that aligns her with the Spirit of God. It allows her to overcome all obstacles, even that of a certain understanding and interpretation of divine precepts.  By it she shows that her intention and her deed come from God, take place in God, and are in movement toward him. All of this is her “faith”. As soon as she had fulfilled her intention she knew that she had been healed of her disease. 

She touched his cloak. Immediately, her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she had been healed of her disease. 

Jesus, on his end, at the same moment sensed that power had gone forth from him. Jesus has received power from the Father, from whom he receives all things, but here we see that this power at the same time remains with the Father and belongs to him to bestow in the Holy Spirit upon whom he chooses. In the healing of the woman, we see the Father’s sovereignly free and gracious decision to bestow on this woman the power that was active in Jesus. 

Although the release of the power was an act of the Father, it nevertheless took place in the context of a personal relationship between the woman and Jesus, made living by her faith. The woman touched him in faith, and despite all the people jostling around him, Jesus knew that he had been touched. In this moment, the beginning of a relationship has been established between Jesus and the woman. At the same time Jesus’ words, “Who touched my clothes?” make it clear to the woman that he is not acting on his own but in union with his Father, for it was not explicitly his choice to heal her, but the power of God acting in him. In this way, the way is opened up for the woman in an inchoate way into the mystery of the relationship between Jesus and his Father, for she sees that God himself is acting through him. 

The woman’s experience is important to keep in mind in all the healings we encounter in the gospels. They are all Trinitarian events, engaging all three Persons in an active, living way. Each of the Persons has his role. Jesus never acts on his own. 

But the relationship initiated in this exchange is not enough for Jesus. If the woman were simply to go away healed and that were end of it, it might seem that the object of Jesus healing is, or can be, a generic or anonymous humanity. People he only knows abstractly. But this is not the case, he always heals individual sufferers, persons with whom he wants to draw into a personal and intimate relationship. Up to now, he has had his back to her, but upon recognizing that power has gone out from him, he immediately turns around and asks, “Who has touched my clothes?”, and looks about the crowd to see who had done it. 

Jesus wants her gaze to meet his. She is to behold him and he her. Only in the meeting of their eyes, in this mutual seeing and knowing, will the relationship he desires be established. Going forward, the faith of the woman and her service to others will be nourished by the remembrance of the divine power she experienced in her body and power of this mutual gaze.

Her response of “fear and trembling” is not surprising. On one level, she has breached the rules of ritual impurity. She does not know what the reaction of Jesus, as God’s representative, will be, or that of the crowd. 

More importantly, she has experienced concretely, in her body, a display of divine power, a mighty deed of God. She knows that somehow, in Jesus, she has encountered God himself. She is filled with awe, like the disciples in the boat in last Sunday’s Gospel who exclaimed after Jesus calmed the storm, “Who is this that even wind and sea obey him?” Who is this who has such power to heal? 

More important, however, than the woman’s fear is the courage and gratitude she showed by coming forward and falling before the Lord and telling him the whole truth. He confirms the disposition in her we have seen all along. “Your faith has healed you.”

But there is still more. It is not enough for him that her gaze meets his, nor that she be healed of her affliction. He again deepens the relationship. He calls her “daughter”.  She is a child of God and a daughter of his. He welcomes her into his family. 

He dismisses her with a traditional formula, “Go in Peace”, which in Jesus’s mouth is never simply a wish but is active now and points forward to its fulfillment in his kingdom. The anxiety caused by the burden of her affliction has been erased. She is once again to participate fully in the covenant life of God’s people. 

In the continuation of the narrative, in the raising of Jairus’ daughter, we see that Jesus has much more in mind for his work on earth than the healing of a chronic illness, he has come to destroy death and restore life for all who believe. Jesus does great things for both Jairus and the woman, but he asks of them both the courage of a radical faith. He asks them to take risks. Jairus was confident that if Jesus would come, his daughter’s life would be saved. For this he was ready to risk his reputation as a synagogue official. The woman was confident that if she just touched his cloak she would be healed. For this she was willing to risk the breaching of the laws of ritual impurity.

The same full power of God that was present then is alive and present now in this Eucharist. In it we touch God. The full power of God is alive also in each of us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. May we respond to the gift of this presence with our own radical act of faith. Confident that through it we will he healed, we will have his peace, and granted a share in eternal life with the Lord. 

Solemnity of Saints Peter & Paul

Simon was born in Bethsaida, near the Sea of Galilee. He and his brother Andrew were fishermen, accepting Jesus’ invitation to become His first disciples and “fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). John’s Gospel has Andrew following Jesus first and bringing Simon to Him. Jesus tells Simon, “‘You are Simon the son of John; you will be called Cephas (which is translated Peter)” (John 1:42). In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter when He said to him, “I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:18–19).

Peter emerged as the Church’s central leader after Pentecost. For a decade in Jerusalem, he preached, performed miracles, and converted many. He then traveled to Rome, established the Church there, and became its first bishop. Around AD 64, he was martyred during Emperor Nero’s persecutions. Tradition says that Peter asked to be crucified upside down because he did not deem himself worthy to die the same way that Jesus died. His tomb lies under the main altar of Saint Peter’s Basilica.

Saul was a Roman citizen born in Tarsus, modern-day Turkey. As a young man, he studied at the rabbi Gamaliel’s school in Jerusalem. After Jesus’ ascension, Saul fiercely persecuted the early Church, in part responsible for the proto-martyr Stephen’s death (Acts 7:58). While traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians, Paul was knocked to the ground and struck blind. He heard Jesus say, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4). Jesus directed Saul to a disciple named Ananias who baptized him. Saul spent three years in intense prayer and study, eventually returning to Jerusalem where Barnabas testified to the truth of Paul’s conversion to the other disciples.

Using his Roman name, Paul spent ten years as a missionary throughout the Mediterranean. Imprisoned in Jerusalem for a couple of years, he was sent to Rome for trial and met up with Saint Peter. According to tradition, Paul was beheaded just outside the city. When his head fell, it bounced three times, giving rise to three springs of water, marked today by the Abbey of the Three Fountains.

Saints Peter and Paul are the Church’s foundational pillars. Peter represents the Church’s stability and the office of the Vicar of Christ. Paul represents the Church’s mission of evangelization and is the Church’s first theologian for his epistles that expound on the Gospels. One tradition holds that both died on June 29, making them twin martyrs and reminding us that as the Church remains grounded in the ancient Truth, it must grow and flower in its understanding of the mysteries of faith.

Saint Irenaeus on God's Workmanship

If, then, you are God's workmanship, await the hand of your Maker which creates everything in due time; in due time as far as you are concerned, whose creation is being carried out. Offer to Him your heart in a soft and tractable state, and preserve the form in which the Creator has fashioned you, having moisture in yourself, lest, by becoming hardened, you lose the impressions of His fingers. But by preserving the framework you shall ascend to that which is perfect, for the moist clay which is in you is hidden [there] by the workmanship of God. His hand fashioned your substance; He will cover you over [too] within and without with pure gold and silver, and He will adorn you to such a degree, that even "the King Himself shall have pleasure in your beauty."

 SAINT IRENAEUS

The Peacemakers

“Blessed," he says, "are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God" (Mt 5:9). Consider carefully that it is not the people who call for peace but those who make peace who are commended. For there are those who talk but do nothing (Mt 23:3). For just as it is not the hearers of the law but the doers who are righteous (Rom 2:13), so it is not those who preach peace but the authors of peace who are blessed.”

SAINT BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

Love is the Lure

When the fish takes the hook, the fisherman has it no matter how it twists and turns. So it is with love: when we take hold of it, it holds us like a hook and nothing can take it from us or from You.

MEISTER ECKHART

Visible and the Invisible

Prayer is the search for God, encounter with God, and going beyond the encounter in communion. Thus it is an activity, a state, and also a situation; a situation both with respect to God and to the created world. It arises from the awareness that the world in which we live is not simply two-dimensional, imprisoned in the categories of time and space, a flat world in which we meet only the surface of things, an opaque surface covering emptiness. Prayer is born of the discovery that the world has depths; that we are not only surrounded by visible things but that we are also immersed in and penetrated by invisible things. And this invisible world is both the presence of God, the supreme, sublime reality, and our own deepest truth.

METROPOLITAN ANTHONY Creative Prayer (Darton, Longman & Todd, 1987)

Birth of John The Baptist

All who heard these things took them to heart, saying, “What, then, will this child be?” For surely the hand of the Lord was with him. The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the desert until the day of his manifestation to Israel. (Luke 1:65–66)

John the Baptist was formed by the hand of the Lord. Saint Thomas Aquinas goes so far as to say that John was sanctified in the womb of his mother, Elizabeth, as is written: “He will be filled with the holy Spirit even from his mother’s womb” (Luke 1:15). From the moment that the Blessed Virgin Mary greeted Elizabeth and John leaped for joy, the hand of the Lord was upon John, making him holy and leading him to the fulfillment of God’s holy will.

John’s early life is not recorded for us, other than in the passage quoted above. We are told that he “grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the desert until the day of his manifestation to Israel.” We should see in this passage the truth that John was not only sanctified within the womb of his mother but that, throughout his childhood and on into adulthood, he remained deeply united to God and was filled with the Holy Spirit.

Today we honor one particular aspect of John’s life—his birth. We know that he was blessed to not only be born into the blessed family of Elizabeth and Zechariah but that the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, was also his relative and was present at his birth. Zechariah, his father, gave him the name “John” even though it would have been the custom to call him Zechariah after his father. Zechariah did this in obedience to the Archangel Gabriel, who appeared to him prior to John’s birth and instructed him to do so.

Great mystery and excitement surrounded the birth of John, and there is little doubt that those who were present at his birth would have been caught up in the intrigue and hope of who he would become. And John didn’t disappoint. It was of him that Jesus one day would say, “I tell you, among those born of women, no one is greater than John…” (Luke 7:28).

Homily — 12th Sunday, Year B

How could Jesus sleep so soundly in the midst of this morning’s raging storm? Isn’t it amazing? I think it’s really quite humorous. Raging winds, waves crashing over the boat, so that literally it “was being-filled-to-the-brim.” Jesus has got to be soaking wet, yet he sleeps on peacefully. Of course. After days of going on foot from village to village, preaching and healing crowds of people, the Man must have been completely exhausted. Fortunately, some thoughtful apostle had tossed a pillow into the boat along with the nets, like my mom used to do- throw an old pillow in the back seat of the car for a nap on a long trip. In any event, Jesus is sopping wet; his cushion is soaked. And he just keeps sleeping.

More amazingly, as the apostles wake him in their panic, Jesus is completely unruffled. I imagine him sitting up, wiping his wet face with his broad hand, then pulling both hands over his head and the dripping ringlets of his dark hair. Calmly blinking his eyes, he rises, tells the nervous fishermen not to be afraid, and then commands the wind and waves to pipe down. He scolds the wind for its bluster and tells the waves, “Quiet now. Shhhh. That’s enough.” Majestically, with quiet authority, he commands the wind and sea as he did when exorcising demons: “Peace! Be still.” I bet he didn’t have to yell. Demons, diseases, wind and sea- they all obey. They know they’re done for..

Immediately there is stillness and peace. An epiphany- revealing the beauty of Jesus’ divinity, of his Otherness. So nobly expressing his authority over the winds and the waters of the deep. Jesus is truly Adonai of the Psalms, the Lord of all creation: “Greater than the roar of mighty waters, more glorious than the surging of the sea, the Lord glorious on high.” His voice “resounding on the waters, on the immensity of waters. The voice of the Lord full of splendor.”

Now if the sea was the place of the disciples’ life and their livelihood, it was also believed to be the abode of demons and chaos, and so a place of terror and perhaps of terrifying memories- friends and companions who had drowned, never returning home after a fishing trip because of a sudden storm. Probably none of them could swim; the sea was not a place for holidays. The sea was the place for hard, even dangerous work, often done in the dark of night. The stormy sea represents all that is wobbly and undefined, all that is strange, frightening and uncontrollable, unpredictable; all that is dark and chaotic in their lives, in our lives, in our world; all the danger and precarity, the falling-apart of things, of situations, the chaos which is far too familiar. The good news?  God in Christ has come to immerse himself in the whole soggy mess with us, to conquer all those demonic forces that threaten and would impede God’s desire for the world. Jesus confronts them all- in his healings, his exorcisms, this morning as he calms the sea, and on the cross, in his final confrontation, when he will detoxify the evil and chaos we could never ever have tackled on our own. 

Jesus is always with us- in the same boat. And truly we could say that water is his medium while here on earth. It’s where his life begins floating in the womb of Mary, later on he receives baptism in the Jordan River to express his solidarity with us, then he will make clear water a rich red wine to save a wedding feast, he will calmly walk across water, today he quiets its rambunctiousness, and finally when his heart is gashed open on the cross and blood and water rush out from his pierced heart, then and there he himself will become a fountain of Lifegiving Water to cleanse and heal and console us forever.

My dear sisters and brothers, there are far too many storms in our hearts, in our world. And if Jesus seems to us to be sleeping, all the better, for then we are forced to be desperate and beg him incessantly. Our awareness of the falling-apartness of things is always a hard grace offered to us. All we can do is keep waking Him, “Don’t you care that we’re drowning in this mess?” This desperation is grace. Let him rebuke us for our lack of faith if he wants to. Whenever will we have enough faith anyway? And the needier we are, the more impossible situations may seem, the greater our opportunity.

Jesus has come to heal our “damaged and distorted world,” to restore it to the integrity God dreams for it, so that the beauty of God’s reign may be become more and more palpable. He is the Fountain of Life-giving Water, that is our only Hope. Let us go to him.

God's Mercy

The ultimate sin is to despair of God's mercy. That is to limit it, to make our ego its limit, whereas it is boundless.

OLIVIER CLÉMENT The Roots of Christian Mysticism

The Mercy of God has no limits, nothing is too great for it. That is the reason why anyone who despairs of it is the author of his own death.

JOHN CLIMACUS The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 5th Step

God’s Image

One day a soldier asked an elder whether God grants pardon to sinners. The elder answered, ‘Tell me, my good friend, if your cloak is torn, do you throw it away?’ The soldier replied, ‘No. I mend it and continue to use it.’ The elder concluded, ‘If you take good care of your cloak, will not God be merciful to his own image?’

Sayings of the Desert Fathers

God in his love punishes, not to take revenge, far from it. He seeks the restoration of his own image and does not prolong his anger.

ISAAC OF NINEVEH Ascetic Treatises, 73 

Already In Heaven

We too are already in heaven with Christ, even though what he promised us has not yet been fulfilled in our bodies. Why do we on earth not strive to find rest with him in heaven even now, through the faith, hope, and love that unite us to him? . . . In him, we can be there by love.

SAINT AUGUSTINE

Two Sides To Every Sin

There are two sides to every sin: the turning of the will toward fleeting satisfaction and the turning away from everlasting value. As regards to the first, the principle of all sins can be called lust—lust in its most general sense, namely, the unbridled desire for one's own pleasure. As regards to the second, the principle is pride—pride in its general sense, the lack of submission to God.

SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

The Voyage of a Monk

When a sailor voyages in the midst of the sea, he watches the stars and in relation to them he guides his ship until he reaches harbor. But a monk watches prayer, because it sets him right and directs his course to that harbor toward which his discipline should lead. A monk gazes at prayer at all times, so that it might show him an island where he can anchor his ship and take on provisions; then once more he sets his course for another island. Such is the voyage of a monk in this life: he sales from one island to another, that is, from knowledge to knowledge, and by his successive change of islands, that is, of states of knowledge, he progresses until he emerges from the sea and his journey attains to that true city, whose inhabitants no longer engage in commerce but each rests upon his own riches. Blessed is the man who has not lost his course in this vain world, on this great sea! Blessed is the man whose ship has not broken up and who has reached harbor with joy!

SAINT ISAAC THE SYRIAN Ascetical Homilies, #48

Theology Is Light, Prayer Is Fire

Prayer and theology are inseparable. True theology is the adoration offered by the intellect. The intellect clarifies the movement of prayer, but only prayer can give it the fervour of the Spirit. Theology is light, prayer is fire. Their union expresses the union of the intellect and the heart. But it is the intellect that must 'repose' in the heart, and theology must transcend it in love.

OLIVIER CLÉMENT The Roots of Christian Mysticism

If you are a theologian you will pray truly; and if you pray truly you are a theologian.

EVAGRIUS OF PONTUS On Prayer, 61 (Philokalia I, 182)

The Redeemed in Every Age

Jesus has followers among those who do not know him explicitly: "I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice" (John 10:16). Jesus died, he says, "to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad" (John 11:52) in every age, in every race. In my endeavour to express what believing in Jesus means, I hope it will become clear that there are many "not of this fold" who are listening to his voice though they know it not, who despite this, believe in him. They cannot name him, they may even deny that the Lord of their hearts is Jesus, and this because they have only met his image and his teaching in the garbled version we have given them. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world and his redeemed are in every age, even before his coming in historical time. They are scattered now, unknown to themselves and to any but God.

RUTH BURROWS To Believe In Jesus (Burns & Oates, 2010)

Understanding the Scriptures

Do not approach the words of the mysteries contained in the Divine Scriptures without prayer and beseeching God for help, but say: Lord, Grant me to perceive the power in them! Reckon prayer to be the key to the true understanding of the divine Scriptures.

SAINT ISAAC THE SYRIAN The Ascetical Homilies, #48

Temptation

Do not fear. Jesus is more powerful than all Hell. At the invocation of His Name every knee in heaven, on earth and in hell must bend before Jesus. This is the consolation of the good and terror of the evil ones.

Stop entertaining those vain fears. Remember it is not feeling which constitutes guilt but the consent to such feelings. Only the free will is capable of good or evil. But when the will sighs under the trial of the tempter and does not will what is presented to it, there is not only no fault but there is virtue.

Despise your temptations and do not dwell on them. Imagine you have Jesus Christ crucified in your arms and on your breast and, kissing his side, say: “Behold my hope, behold the living source of my happiness. I will hold you close, oh my Jesus, and I will not leave you until you have put me in a place of safety”.

Walk amid wind and waves, but with Jesus. If fear strongly grips you, exclaim with Saint Peter: “Oh Lord, save me!” He will extend his hand to you. Seize it firmly and walk cheerfully. Let the world turn topsy-turvy, everything be in darkness and Mount Sinai all aflame, covered with lightning, thunder: God is with you. But if God lives in the darkness, and Mount Sinai all aflame, covered with lightning, thunder, and noise, will we not be safe near him?

SAINT PADRE PIO OF PIETRALCINA

Seeing Respectfully

Silence is what surrounds everything… It is the space between letters, words, and paragraphs that makes them decipherable and meaningful. When you can train yourself to reverence the silence around things, you first begin to see things in themselves… This “divine” silence is before, after, and between all events for those who see respectfully (to re-spect is “to see again”).

RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M.

The Inner Indwelling

Go not outside, return into yourself; the Truth dwells in the inner man.

SAINT AUGUSTINE

In the inner man dwells God, the Truth, who cannot be reached by those who seek him in externals—God, whose nature it is to be always and only within and in the most inward place.

MEISTER ECKHART

It is important for us to realize that this fons vivus, this living fountain, pours out the divine life into our being from within our being. The Holy Spirit does not dispense his gifts as a detached station operator might refuel a machine. He is in our profound person center pouring out power, faith, hope, love—infusing his own gifts which render us responsive to the very motions by which he moves us. He is energizing our intellects with light and our wills with love. It is difficult for us to appreciate a cause working from within, since our sense experience speaks to us only of causes that influence and produce effects on things external to them. We see a bat hit a ball and a pen write on paper. But the divine Trinity produces the whole marvelous intricacy of our participated godly life from the inner recesses of our personhood.

Man is an incarnated thirst. The indwelling is the quenching.

FR. THOMAS DUBAY, S.M. God Dwells Within Us

Homily – God's Order Our Disorder

Over a century ago, the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy observed that “in the eyes of God all human order is a disorder”, all human peace a barely concealed chaos. As a convert who had struggled mightily with issues of faith and despair, he knew in his flesh of what he spoke. Today’s gospel passage from Mark is a textbook illustration of Péguy’s aphorism, enacted in shocking proportions in the life of the Lord Jesus. The scene challenges us to reflection about the historical opposition to Jesus in his day, as well as to reflection about ourselves and our attitudes. Only by first pondering this severe state of conflict which Mark holds out to our consideration as part of his “Good News” may we later be strengthened inwardly by the life-giving truths here communicated. 

The gospel just proclaimed culminates in the teaching toward which Jesus is leading us as the upshot of all the conflict he himself has had to face. As he sits in the middle of those who are intently listening to his word, someone comes to tell him that his Mother and his brothers are waiting for him outside. To that Jesus responds cuttingly: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking around at those seated in the circle, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ It is toward this revelation that the whole passage is going. In this light, it would appear that the only question that ultimately matters in my life as a Christian disciple is the following: How can I most effectively respond to Jesus’ invitation that I, too, should enter into an intimate spiritual kinship with him by fulfilling the will of his Father? 

What a beautiful teaching, we exclaim. What an enticing proposition! Who could be upset by it? From where, then, does all the loud cacophony and ugly conflict in this gospel scene come? It comes, I think, from the fact that the incarnate Word has come into our world not to put God’s stamp of approval on what he finds there, but to establish among us the Kingdom of God, a society reflecting the interior life of Our Lord’s native home, the Blessed Trinity. Trinitarian life, which is what Jesus wants to introduce into the world, is utterly simple: its order consists of nothing other than an incessant circulation of love which bestows life on everything it touches. Every society created by human beings, by glaring contrast, enforces its own so-called “order” proceeding from principles of greed, hunger for power and domination, and a passion to exalt the strong and exploit the weak. This enterprise is, by definition, a complex, corrupt and destructive social operation. In Jesus’ person the Kingdom itself approaches, and in him these two competing orders must unavoidably clash. 

In the readings we witness dramatic situations of enmity, denunciation, and intense opposition. Satan insinuates himself into Eden in the form of a poisonous snake who seeks to destroy the natural trust existing between Adam and Eve and the God who had created them with such loving care. With the weapons of lies and seduction, Satan intends to subvert the divine order reigning in our first parents’ souls. He infuses them with the preposterous desire to become like God, feeding them the poison of a spurious freedom which pretends to be more divine and desirable than humble, life-giving obedience. 

This strategy by the serpent results in Adam and Eve becoming submerged in fear and distrust as they now see God not as their generous Creator and Giver of life but as the massively threatening Other who is an enemy and must, as such, be hated. The plain evidence that Adam and Eve are sadly deluded, however, is their shame at their nakedness, which drives them to hide from God. Rebellion against God destroys the beatific harmony of creation and thus alienates us not only from God himself but also from our own persons, from each other and from nature. We now exist in a shattered world of rivalry, recrimination and mutual exploitation for sheer survival. 

In the gospel, Jesus is the target of condemnation and violence, first of all by his own kin: They set out to grab a hold of him, Mark writes. Simultaneously, he is the victim of aggressive hostility from the religious authorities. The charges from either group are truly shocking when attached to the holy Name of Jesus. While his family members accuse him of being insane, the scribes declare him to be possessed. It appears that the same revolt against the divine order we have witnessed in Eden is now occurring with a vengeance in the streets of sleepy Capernaum, no longer now in a mythological mode but with a blunt historical harshness that already points to the Cross. No, the sufferings of Jesus’ Sacred Heart did not begin with the Passion. 

How mind-boggling, this concerted opposition to Jesus, this conclusion that Jesus is both insane and possessed, a conclusion drawn according to impeccable human logic by both relatives and political enemies. On what evidence? On his universally acknowledged record of going about indiscriminately doing good, teaching God’s truth, and healing the sick and the demoniacs—all of which actions are judged dangerous because they disrupt the so-called “natural” order of things! Rebelliousness, the will-to-power, and above all fear of losing autonomy, must indeed be ruling the day in Judea for the human conscience to invert the categories of good and evil with such self-assured rage. God’s incarnate Wisdom is declared by men to be insane, and God’s incarnate Holiness is declared by men to be demonically possessed! Such is the attitude and behavior of the “seed” of the serpent down through the ages. And, certainly, calling Jesus by deceptive and wounding names that express the precise opposite of his true nature surely is an instance of the “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit that has no forgiveness”, according to Jesus himself.

Now, what could be the conscious motivations driving the minds of both Jesus’ relatives and the scribes? How can the order of God be so violently attacked on the basis of what appears to be very sensible human reasoning? The kind of public life Jesus has been leading is worrisome to many. By his radical teachings, and especially by his alleged violation of the Sabbath and the forgiving of sins, Jesus is wildly encroaching on the proper doctrinal and juridical territory of the religious authorities. Their rash judgment of what they do not understand is no doubt a measure of self-defense against a phenomenon that might force them to rethink their set ideas, question their own principles and motivations, or look in a radically new way at someone they believe they already know like an open book. And let us not forget that these scribes are hurling their accusations at Jesus in the name of God. In their conscience they are acting piously, their very piety blinding them to the sacrilege they are committing.

As for Jesus’ relatives: they declare him to be “out of his mind”! This outrageous judgment on the part of his family members most probably comes from the fact that they view his itinerant and celibate lifestyle, in the company of a small band of ragtag disciples, as being financially and socially disastrous for the whole family, especially in such a tight-knit, clannish society. To them Jesus is a scandalous maverick, behaving in a woefully irresponsible manner. He is the nonconforming relative who has deliberately deprived the family not only of one of its working members but also of the economic benefits and social prestige that would have accrued from an alliance with another family group, sealed by a respectable marriage. Imagine the enormous pressure the whole clan must be putting on Mary to bring her wayward offspring back in line! And yet, in her ever-mindful heart she must be hearing even now the echo of the twelve-year-old Jesus’ words to her and Joseph in the temple: Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business? (Lk 2:49, DRA).

Yes, revolt against the divine Will can take extremely subtle and very reasonable-seeming forms. One of the greatest dangers to conventional human security comes from anything that threatens to overturn whatever status quo happens to dominate a particular society at a given moment in matters of religion, economics and sexuality. At every level of society, the life-giving divine order (based on the primacy of love alone), which Jesus is trying to establish on earth, clearly threatens the majority of people as a catastrophic human disorder. 

At the height of his divine foolishness, Jesus states that in the new family he is creating in the community of believers that is the Church, the criterion of close kinship to him is no longer given by bonds of blood, but from doing the will of God. This means that no one in the Church is a member by right, or by somehow acquiring a place in it once and for all. Belonging to the community of God’s family is a privilege that comes solely by listening to the Word of God and by a fidelity to the Father’s will that must be renewed every day. This absolute spiritual criterion of membership means that we cannot judge infallibly who is “inside” and who is “outside” the Church as Body of Christ. To belong to the visible Church does not necessarily go hand in hand with genuineness of faith and the doing of God’s will. Only the Final Judgment will reveal what must remain opaque and hidden throughout earthly history.

In his commentary on today’s gospel St Augustine says that “Mary was more blessed in accepting faith in Christ than in conceiving the body of Christ... Even the fact of being [Jesus’ physical] mother would have been of no use to Mary if she had not carried Christ more thankfully in her heart than in the flesh” (On Holy Virginity, 2, 2-3). Jesus’ words about his Mother today in Mark, far from being in any way a putdown of Our Lady, are on the contrary a profound proclamation of both her spiritual and her maternal pre-eminence in the history of salvation and in the Church. 

Jesus no more distances himself from his Mother than he does from his own sacred humanity, which he received from her, as necessary instrument of salvation. Indeed, Mary’s whole-hearted fiat to the Will of God (Lk 1:38)completely harmonized her whole being and existence with the Father’s salvific “order”—God’s plan to save the world by the blood of his and her Son (cf Eph 1:7,10).

Mary’s spiritual obedience to God’s Will and her physical conception of Jesus cannot be separated, since they are intimately united in her person as cause and effect. Mary is thus the archetype and first instance of the redeemed Christian. Indeed, her immaculate heart and soul would in due course be truly pierced, spiritually and psychologically, by the same spear of human rejection that tore open her Son’s Heart on Calvary, as she stood at the foot of the Cross gazing at the flood of water and blood flowing forth from Jesus’ open side (cf Lk 2:5; Jn 19:34). Her motherhood drank deeply of the cup of her Son’s suffering precisely because her whole being was surrendered so thoroughly to the Will of God. She could not surrender to God’s Will without the consequence of sharing in the Son’s Passion. In this way Mary is, for all time, the Woman par excellence, the New Eve who, as the Mother of the Redeemer, became the mother of all those living by grace. 

Together with her Son, she crushed the head of the ancient serpent, as we see in Caravaggio’s marvelous Madonna dei Palafrenieri of 1606. It is a scene in which two wise and devoted women mentor the Savior of the world in his redeeming task, which both of them had had a major share in preparing. As St Anne watches from the right side, still wrapped in Old Testament chiaroscuro, Our Lady stand at the center behind a very young Jesus and holds him gently by his chest as they both lean forward elegantly. Mary fearlessly, and yet with a kind of immaculate delicacy, bears down her firm and naked left foot onto the head of a repulsive black snake, coiling grossly on the floor before them; and the naked infant Jesus obligingly places his tender left foot on top of his Mother’s adult foot, as together they press down on the hideously contorted head. Surely, by means of the child Jesus’ innocent nakedness, the artist is proclaiming him to be the New Adam who knows no guilt because he knows no revolt. And the careful but undaunted gaze of Jesus and Mary as they accomplish this gruesome task must reflect the harmonious grace that fills them conjointly and infuses fortitude in the face of the vanquished horror beneath them. No, there is never any enmity between Jesus and Mary. Everything between them is concerted effort as they, together, carry out the divine Will of redemption. Their shared enmity is only against the Seducer of humankind.

Jesus and Mary together, brothers and sisters, show us what it means to live already now in the Kingdom of God. They invite us to go with them beyond the chaos and disintegration of what St Paul today calls “our earthly dwelling”, that is, the clownish circus tent of every human pseudo-order. Our Lord and our blessed Lady together beckon us to follow them so as to come to dwell with them in “the building we have from God, a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in heaven”, where we have been promised “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison”. And of this very glory we will now have a foretaste in this Eucharist.

Mary’s Pure and Contemplative Heart

Mary is called the Queen of contemplatives…. But what does this mean? To live a contemplative life is to live at depth; to live below the surface in the world of faith, the world of reality and not appearances.

We do not know how Our Lady spent her days; the details are unimportant. We are told the only things that matter and which must be true of all who belong to Christ. Contemplative living has written into it this Marian attitude or mode of being. We are to be contemplatives living in the depths of reality. Our fantasy can take us into excitements, the lights, satisfactions. Faith keeps us in the here and now: in this moment and no other, in this situation and no other. Here is my Jesus, here in this moment, this duty, this set of circumstances. What a test of faith is this daily round, this pressure of seeming trivialities! What a test of faith in the dull, wearing pain, lacking all glamour and grandeur! All the time, the heart of the contemplative is racing out beyond appearances to embrace the Beloved who cannot be seen, cannot be felt. It means being drawn secretly to God…. Mary has allowed herself to be transformed by love into what she was called to be.

RUTH BURROWS, OCD

Sacred Heart of Jesus

The Heart of Christ! His "Sacred Heart" has given men everything: redemption, salvation, sanctification. St Faustina Kowalska saw coming from this Heart that was overflowing with generous love, two rays of light which illuminated the world. "The two rays", according to what Jesus himself told her, "represent the blood and the water" (Diary, p. 132). The blood recalls the sacrifice of Golgotha and the mystery of the Eucharist; the water, according to the rich symbolism of the Evangelist John, makes us think of Baptism and the Gift of the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 3: 5; 4: 14). 
 
Through the mystery of this wounded heart, the restorative tide of God's merciful love continues to spread over the men and women of our time. Here alone can those who long for true and lasting happiness find its secret.

POPE SAINT JOHN PAUL II, excerpt from the Homily for the First Celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday given on April 22, 2001
 

God Is Rich In Mercy

Jesus Christ is the face of the Father's mercy. These words might well sum up the mystery of the Christian faith. Mercy has become living and visible in Jesus of Nazareth, reaching its culmination in him. The Father, “rich and mercy”, after having revealed his name to Moses as “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6), has never ceased to show, in various ways throughout history, his divine nature. In the “fullness of time” (Gal.4:4), when everything had been arranged according to his plan of salvation, he sent his only Son into the world, born of the Virgin Mary, to reveal his love for us in a definitive way. Whoever sees Jesus sees the Father (see John 14:9). Jesus of Nazareth, by his words, his actions, and his entire person reveals the mercy of God.

We need constantly to contemplate the mystery of mercy. It is a wellspring of joy, serenity, and peace. Our salvation depends on it. Mercy: the word reveals the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. Mercy: the ultimate and supreme act by which God comes to meet us. Mercy: the fundamental law that dwells in the heart of every person who looks sincerely into the eyes of his brothers and sisters on the path of life. Mercy: the bridge that connects God and man opening our hearts to the hope of being loved forever despite our sinfulness….

POPE FRANCIS Misericordia Vultus

Alone With God

As soon as a man is fully disposed to be alone with God, he is alone with God no matter where he may be—in the country, the monastery, the woods, or the city. The lightning flashes from east to west, illuminating the whole horizon and striking where it pleases, and at the same instant the infinite liberty of God flashes in the depths of the man's soul and he is illumined. At that moment he sees that though he seems to be in the middle of his journey, he has already arrived at the end. For the life of grace on earth is the beginning of the life of glory. Although he is a traveler in time, he has opened his eyes for a moment, in eternity.

THOMAS MERTON Thoughts In Solitude

Docile To The Divine Graces

My beloved, may every fall, even if it is serious and habitual sin, always become for us a small step toward a higher degree of perfection. In fact, the only reason why the Immaculate permits us to fall is to cure us from our self-conceit, from our pride, to make us humble and thus make us docile to the divine graces. The devil, instead, tries to inject in us discouragement and internal depression in those circumstances, which is, in fact, nothing else than our pride surfacing again. if we knew the depth of our poverty, we would not be at all surprised by our falls, but rather astonished, and we would thank God, after sinning, for not allowing us to fall even deeper and still more frequently.

ST. MAXIMILLIAN KOLBE

Love of God

Delight in prayer is no measure of our love of God. But if we bear difficulties patiently, resist the urgings of self-love resolutely; and fulfill our duties in life willingly, if we live trusting in Providence and desiring to be known only by God—then we will show that we truly love God! Such deeds are unmistakable signs of love. Let us always be faithful in doing God's will because all else is unworthy of the name of love.

ST. JANE FRANCES DE CHANTAL

Homily: Feast of Corpus Christi

This Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ is so rich that it is difficult to know where to start. Today I would like to follow the theme of consecration, which is at the heart of this feast. The Israelites were consecrated to become the holy people of God. Jesus consecrates the bread and wine to be his own body and blood. The act of consecration devotes something or someone to divine worship. It is the privilege of all Christians in whatever state of life, for we are all consecrated to offer divine worship to God. But it is especially true for monks, since our whole life is devoted to divine worship. 

When God desired to make a covenant with his people, he consecrated them. They were set apart for a divine purpose. You just heard how Moses sent out young men to offer holocausts and sacrifices and bring the blood to him. The animals were totally given to God, and their blood was a sign of this. When Moses read out the words of God which indicated how the people were to live, they responded, “All that the Lord has said, we will hear and do.” Then Moses sprinkled the blood on the people. This united them with the total consecration of the animals. As the animals had been totally given to God, now the people would share in that consecration. If they did not do as they had said, the blood of the covenant would be a witness against them. 

This scene was deeply imprinted on Jesus’ soul, and he incorporated elements into his consecration at the last supper. He used Moses’ words with a slight change: “This is the blood of my covenant which will be shed for many.” Jesus is concluding a new covenant with his disciples. The blood is no longer from bulls and goats, but Jesus is dedicating his own life’s blood on behalf of his disciples. As Moses sealed the covenant between God and his people by sprinkling them with the blood of the sacrifices, Jesus will seal his new covenant by allowing his disciples to partake of his blood under the appearance of wine. Jesus consecrated himself so that we could be totally consecrated to God as he was.

This image comes to my mind when I think about all these consecrations. It is the moment when each of us stands before the altar at our solemn profession. The Lord is inviting us to be united with his consecration to the Father with very clear directives of how we are to live this covenant out. We solemnly accept the invitation by reading out our profession, signing it with our own hand, and placing it on the altar. It seems to me is as if we were sprinkled with the consecratory blood of Jesus. We prostrate before God and ask to be received by all the brothers, and then partake of the body and blood of Christ as the seal of our consecration. It is the body and blood of Christ, offered for us, that makes our consecration possible. This is at the heart of the solemnity we celebrate today.

Corpus Christi

The origin of the Feast of Corpus Christi began with a Eucharistic miracle, which is a moment of divine intervention aimed at confirming the faith in the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist. Here is a description of the event in 1263:

    In 1263 a German priest, Peter of Prague, stopped at Bolsena [Italy] while on a pilgrimage to Rome. He... [was] a pious priest, but one who found it difficult to believe that Christ was actually present in the consecrated Host. While celebrating Holy Mass above the tomb of St. Christina (located in the church named for this martyr), he had barely spoken the words of Consecration when blood started to seep from the consecrated Host and trickle over his hands onto the altar and the corporal. The priest was immediately confused. At first, he attempted to hide the blood, but then he interrupted the Mass and asked to be taken to the neighboring city of Orvieto, where Pope Urban IV resided. The Pope listened to the priest's account and absolved him. He then sent emissaries for an immediate investigation. When all the facts were ascertained, he ordered the Bishop of the diocese to bring the Host and the linen cloth bearing the stains of blood to Orvieto. With archbishops, cardinals and other Church dignitaries in attendance, the Pope met the procession and, amid great pomp, had the relics placed in the cathedral. The linen corporal bearing the spots of blood is still reverently enshrined and exhibited in the Cathedral of Orvieto. It is said that Pope Urban IV was prompted by this miracle to commission St. Thomas Aquinas to compose the Proper for a Mass and an Office honoring the Holy Eucharist as the Body of Christ. One year after the miracle, in August of 1264, Pope Urban IV introduced the saint's composition, and by means of a papal bull instituted the feast of Corpus Christi.

This was when St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the hymn containing the verses of Tantum Ergo. The papal bull, Transiturus, ordered Corpus Christi be celebrated annually on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday throughout the Latin Church. In modern times, this feast is commonly transferred to the following Sunday to accommodate the faithful.

In August of 1964, on the 700th anniversary of the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi, Pope Saint Paul VI celebrated Holy Mass at the altar where the holy corporal is kept in its golden shrine in the Cathedral of Orvieto.

Video Link: Eucharistic Miracle: Chapel of the Miracle, Orvieto, Italy

https://youtu.be/OEq2JAszRWA?si=-gIHpbwhATTUAUVw

https://youtu.be/OEq2JAszRWA?si=I0fSvCDzl3JYRluPhttps://youtu.be/OEq2JAszRWA?si=I0fSvCDzl3JYRluP