Saturday, August 9, 2025

Know Your Master: Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

On previous Sundays I have preached differently from the conventional focus on loving our neighbours. Too often this love has been erroneously elevated to a supreme objective of Catholics. However, one simply cannot love one’s neighbours properly, if one does not first love God. It is only after we love God, and love him properly, that we can then love our neighbour as we should. Indeed, it is the love for God that overflow from our hearts that is then directed towards our neighbours.

Gird your loins and light your lamps
and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.  

My dear brothers and sisters, our relationship between Our Lord and ourselves is clear and explicit from this verse from today's Gospel. We are his servants and we are here to do his work. Recollect the words from the first letter of St. Peter (1:18):             

Do not forget that you were purchased from the foolish ways of your ancestors … with the precious blood of the Lamb

My dear brothers and sisters, it is important to remember that we were redeemed, or purchased, or liberated, from two associated masters. The first, is the Devil who is the Prince of this world, the other is the way of our ancestors. To be liberated from the foolish ways of our ancestors is to understand that it refers to our ancestors who were not Catholic, immured in practices that did not recognize the truth of God, and consequently the dignity of the human person. In other words, prior to their baptism, our ancestors were in the thrall of the Devil.

And in some way, our families may continue to be so. Which is why, at baptism, we are also liberated from following the narrow agendas and petty battles of our natal families – the families we were born into.  We belong first to Christ, who redeemed us, to His Holy Mother whose care he gave us to, and to His Saints who intercede for us, night and day before His Throne. It is only after this that we belong to the mothers who birthed us, and the families, and communities that raise us.

Too often one is witness to the way in which we are forced to follow not the agenda of Christ, but the petty battles of our families; emotionally blackmailed through our families and friends to commit to the Prince of the World, rather than to Christ. “Remember the fourth commandment,” our parents and elders threaten us! Recall, however, my dear brothers and sisters, the words of our Lord:

Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. (Mt 10: 34-36)

In other words, love God first! It is not our neighbour – whether family, or friends – that we are called to worship, but God, and God alone! Let us not make family and friendships our gods instead of God.

My dear brothers and sisters, if, for the sake of Christ you leave your “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands”, then I have no doubt that you are a martyr and will receive the promised reward. For listen to the words of Our Lord this Sunday:

Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.  
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.

The rewards of heaven, my dear brothers and sisters, the communion with the saints, will be our reward.

My dear brothers and sisters, we should bear in mind the words of Our Lord this Sunday, when we contemplate the scenario I have laid before you:

Much will be required of the person entrusted with much,
and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.

We have been entrusted with just one task, and that is to preach the Good News of our Lord Jesus Christ. Woe to us, if we do not fulfill that task. Let us pray, therefore, in the words of the Collect this morning:

Almighty ever-living God, whom, taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call our Father, bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters, that we may merit to enter into the inheritance which you have promised. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa.)

(image reference: Christ Washing the Feet of the Disciples, Paolo Veronese, 1580s, National Gallery, Prague.)


Saturday, August 2, 2025

Opus Dei: Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Just a few weeks ago, in the episode from the Gospel where He was in the holy house of Bethany, the home of his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus, Our Lord chastised Martha, and by extension he chastised us, not to be obsessed with work. The better part of our life, he taught, lay in listening toHim.

Today, in the lectionary that She provides to us, our Holy Mother Church, seeks to deepen that lesson. Every single reading offers us a lesson about the true worth, or value, of work. Vanity, or pointless, is the work that we put in through the entirety of our lives, only to hand over to another – very often our children – who have not laboured. And do we not know the script? Bereft of values, but flush with possessions, rather than build on the wealth their parents leave behind, all too often children squander away the resources they have inherited. All our sorrow, our grief, our anxiety and toil, turn out, in the end, to be pointless.

In the Gospel Our Lord warns us that all the plans we have, the plans towards which we may work, may all in one shot come to nothing, because the angel of death visits us, or some misfortune levels all our plans to the ground – revealing them to be merely castles built on sandy soil, or indeed the quicksand of worldly desire!

So, then, what are we to do?

I do not believe that Our Lord is asking us not to work, not to strive for excellence, or not to build up surplus that we can save away for a rainy day, or indeed for future generations. All of these are good things. However, Our Lord is asking us to ensure that all these activities are motivated by a poverty of spirit – i.e. a recognition that we are poor and we need God, and Godliness. In other words, recognize that all the work we do ought to be motivated only by a desire to inherit the kingdom of heaven, for otherwise we will be consigned the fire of hell for all eternity.

As Our Lord teaches:

Do not work for food that perishes, but for food that endures to eternal life (Jn 6:27)

Echoing his Master, Saint Paul cautions us in his letter to the Colossians that we read today,

              If you were raised with Christ, seek what is above

              Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.

He continues,

            Put to death…the part of you that are earthly:

Immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire,

And perhaps the most important lesson we should take away:

              And the greed that is idolatry

My dear brothers and sisters, work is good, and profit is good, but only if this work, this profit, is directed towards the heavenly, and not towards the earthly.

Let me reframe this for you in terms that may perhaps be more comprehensible. Let everything that you do, be for the glory of God, even when it is making profit. In other words, there is such a thing as a just profit. The rightful reward for your hard work and innovation. A profit wrung by squeezing those who work for you, or cheating your clients or customers, through the giving or taking of bribes, is not the work of God. As Our Lord teaches us:

let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven (Mt 5:16).

St. Ignatius of Loyola, whose feast we celebrated a few days ago, instructs us to do everything for the greater glory of God. And St. José Maria Escriva teaches us that our work should sanctify the world. In other words, we should walk the path of holiness even as we do our daily work and indeed lay up some resources for our children to get a head start in life.

My dear brothers and sisters, the path of holiness is not necessarily a difficult path. On the contrary, the path of holiness is within the grasp of every single Catholic. Holiness is possible in our daily lives, if only we do not commit the sin of worshiping money and work – sins that are all too common in contemporary life.

But do not fear! The teaching of our Holy Mother Church is the voice of Christ. Listen to it carefully, so that you can educate your conscience, and let the conscience guide your actions. When you swerve from the path of holiness, confess and get right back on that royal road. As the response to the psalm this Sunday teaches us;

              If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.

May Our Lord bless and keep you this week on the straight and narrow path of holiness.

(This homily was written to be preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 3 Aug 2025.)

(Image reference: “St. Joseph the worker,” Pietro Annigoni, 1964, Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence.)

Saturday, July 26, 2025

The Friendship of the Saints: Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

I recently heard a person comment; “People nowadays give more importance to the saints than Jesus Himself.” This is not the first time I have heard this kind of comment, having heard this often during the Exposition of the Sacred Relics of St. Francis Xavier, where there was an opinion circulating that we seem to be giving more importance to St. Francis than to Jesus.

But could our Lord be jealous of His saints? Could His saints lead people anywhere else other than to Our Lord? These opinions are, in fact, profoundly uncatholic, and the lectionary this Sunday offers us multiple examples of how recourse to the intercessory power, and prayer, of the saints is deeply rooted in Catholic tradition and teaching.

In the first reading we read of the awesome encounter between Abraham and God, where Abraham, quite literally bargains with God to ensure that should there be only ten innocent people, God would not destroy the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. While there is a tendency when reading this episode to focus on the merciful nature of God, when saint Ambrose commented on this episode, he also saw in it the value of saintly people, teaching that:

from this we should understand what a powerful bulwark a just person can be for the country and how we should not be jealous of saintly persons or criticize them with temerity. In fact, their faith saves us, their rectitude preserves us from destruction.

My dear brothers and sisters, these words of St. Ambrose should remind us of not just the nature of the relationship with the saints, on which I will reflect in just a while, but also the power of the relics of the saints. The physical presence of the saints preserves us from destruction. We should remember that no matter how bad things are in Goa, the fact that we have the relics of St. Francis Xavier, and so many other saints in altars across Goa, keeps our land safe from the even greater destruction that the powers and principalities of the world would seek to wreak on our land.

This teaching should not be seen as merely some innovation introduced by St. Ambrose. If we pay attention to the day’s Gospel, we see that Our Lord Himself sets up a culture of intercessory prayer. Indeed, as the Catechism teaches us (CCC 2634-2636), Our Lord himself intercedes for us before the Father, and no matter whom we pray to, it is eventually the Father, our Father in heaven, who heeds and answers our prayers.

In the Gospel today we hear Our Lord telling us a parable of a man who wakes up a neighbour at midnight, so that he can host visitor who had just arrived. The neighbour refuses to extend his hospitality, but Our Lord recommends persistence, because:

I tell you,
if he does not get up to give the visitor the loaves
because of their friendship,
he will get up to give him whatever he needs
because of his persistence.

Our prayers to the saints are often insistent, and persistent. We keep turning to them and asking them for the favours we require. And Our Lord assures us, and not just in this parable, but in other parables as well (Lk 18: 1-8), that if we are persistent, our prayers will be answered.

Our Lord does more than recommend intercessions. He also indicates to us the nature of the relationship between the saints and ourselves.

"Suppose one of you has a friend”

Just as He teaches us that the Almighty God in heaven is our Father, He teaches us that the saints are our friends in heaven. And because they are our friends, we can be sure that they want to help us, and are in fact, waiting to help us. All we need to do is petition them.

And how should we be asking? And what should we be asking for? Once again, Our Lord offers instruction in the parable about the good father. Contrasting our Father in heaven with good earthly fathers, He asks us

how much more will the Father in heaven
give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?"

In other words, petition like we were children, that is with full trust and confidence; and petition, not necessarily for this, or that, but for the Holy Spirit, for the grace that “thy will be done”. Our prayer must ideally, “this is what I want, but thy will be done,” because the child trusts that their father will give them what is good for them. And this prayer should not be difficult because, as the Gospel acclamation echoes:

You have received a Spirit of adoption,
through which we cry, Abba, Father.

May God bless you all, and may all His holy angels and saints intercede for you. 

(A version of this homily will be preached to the faithful in Concanim on 27 July 2025 at the Sé Catedral, Old Goa.)

(Image reference: Adoration of the Trinity, Albrecht Dürer, 1511, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.)