Trust in Him: Homily for Tuesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

 The first reading today offers us very sage advice – do not commit idolatry.  Now, we all know this, since our childhood, since this advice, no this caution, is contained in the very first commandment, “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other God before me.”

And yet, obeying this command is not so simple, since it is so easy to set up altars before other Gods, even when we repudiate idols made of stone and silver – the work of human hands, as the psalm today sings. My dear sisters, the devil is very clever, even when we destroy these graven images, as our ancestors did when we embraced the True Faith, he provides other temptations before which we can set up altars. All too often, we swear our allegiance to Christ, but worship at the altar or family, money, fame, or pleasure.

How do we know we are worshiping at the altar of a false God? It is fairly easy to answer this question if we can be honest with ourselves – we have to ask ourselves, whom do we trust in? Do we trust that our money, our family, our fame, or whatever else will get us out of situations we do not like? Or do we trust that no matter how unpleasant our situation, it is the will of God, and He will take care of us, whether here, or in the hereafter. Indeed, we have no other choice, because the false gods, will get us nowhere.

Sisters, I have to share with you that I am going through a particularly difficult time and I know how difficult it is to trust in God. And yet, even when I am desperately looking for an out of the mess I am, from time to time, I make little acts of confidence, asking for the grace of trust in our God.

Pray for me, as I will pray for you, that we place all our trust in Him. Let us say, therefore together, Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place all my trust in you.

(A version of this homily was first preached on 9 July 2024 to the community at the Convent of St. John of God, Old Goa.

Featured Image: 'Christ Rescuing Peter from Drowning', Lorenzo Veneziano, 1370, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.)

 

 

Grace for the weak and sinners: Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Last week, when preaching I drew from the first reading, from the Book of Wisdom to assert, that:

God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.
For he fashioned all things that they might have being

God does not wish death, or suffering in the world, I had preached, and if at all there is death in the world, once again drawing from the reading from the Book of Wisdom, I had pointed out that death entered the world by the envy of the devil.

And yet, today, in the second reading, we encounter something that seems to be contrary to both my preaching, as well as the Book of Wisdom. St Paul tells us that:

a thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to beat me, to keep me from being too elated.

Here, in the second reading there is a suggestion that the thorn in the flesh, or his sufferings and trials and persecutions, were the result of an angel of Satan, given by God Himself! So, what is going on here? Are God and the Devil working in concert?

Brothers and sisters, what we need to understand is that God does not wish death, nor evil. If there is death and evil in the world it is because of the Devil, and because we cooperate with the Devil and his minions. What is true that God in His infinite wisdom, a wisdom which we cannot hope to fully comprehend, permits evil in the world. But, if He allows evil, it is because He can also draw good out of it.

Dealing with similar questions that may have occurred to the people of his time, St. Augustine, the saintly bishop of Hippo wrote:

"And so," they ask, "is the devil good because he is useful?" On the contrary, he is evil insofar as he is the devil, but God who is good and almighty draws many just and good things out of the devil's malice. For the devil has to his credit only his will by which he tries to do evil, not the providence of God that draws good out of him.

“The Providence of God draws good out of him” him being the devil. So how does God do this? The second reading of the day tells us how God draws good out of evil. He does so, by providing His Grace to the weak and sinners.

What then are the sources of His Grace?

The first of this answer all of you are well aware of, which is why you are here at this Sunday mass. You are not here because you have come to a Sunday social event, or because you have nothing else to do – God knows you have enough and more work, and yet you carve out the time to come to Mass. You come for Mass because you know, as the Catechismof the Catholic Church teaches us, that the sacrifice of the Mass is the source and summit of the Christian life (CCC 1324).

The Eucharist offers us the possibility of incorporating Christ into ourselves, His flesh becomes our flesh, and this give us the strength to avoid sin, and persevere in a holy life.

There is a young man I know, who once said to me and a group of friends: “I don’t need to go for Mass, I am a good person, I know what to do.” It so turns out that this young man, so full of promise and potential is now wasting his life away, precisely because, rely solely on his own powers and capacities, and lacking in a regular supply of Grace, he does not have the capacity to act with Grace and triumph over his troubles.

The other sources of Grace are the rest of the Sacraments, and I would particularly highlight the Grace that we can obtain from the sacrament of confession. I can give you my own example; I had not confessed for years – for one reason or the other – and subsequent to the confession I eventually made, and then became regular at, I realised the value of the Grace that is given to us through this sacrament to persevere on the road of a good Christian life.

Brothers and sisters, I cannot stress enough the importance of a good confession in building up the life of Grace, and more critically, that it is an important pit stop before we receive communion – remember that we cannot, and must not, receive communion if we are not in a state of grace.

In the Gospel of Matthew (26:41), when Our Lord found His disciples sleeping in the Garden of Gethsemane counseled His disciples:

Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

It is because our Lord knows that the Spirit is willing, but the Flesh weak, that – as St. Paul tells us today – He permits, temptation and suffering, to strengthen our flesh, because He knows that His Grace is sufficient to overcome temptation. And therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, even when we fall, when we have given in to temptation, even if we have committed a sin that we think no one could forgive us, we must remember that we are provided with the Grace necessary to get up, dust ourselves off, and continue along the path.

I pray to Our Lord that until we meet next Sunday you persevere in His Love and grow in His Grace.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fatorda on 6 July 2024.

Image: 'Kitchen Maid with the Supper at Emmaus', Diego Velázquez , c.1617-1618, National Gallery of Ireland.)

Love and Life in Salvation History: Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 The Healing of Jairus' Daughter, Flemish, Leuven
ca. 1520–25, The Met, New York.

 

I jumped with delight when I read the lectionary for this thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary time because in these four texts; the first and second readings, the psalm and the Gospel, we can see not only all of salvation history summarised for us, but also this summary we also see some of the essential beliefs of the Catholic faith.

The first reading from the book of Wisdom takes us right back to the beginning, to the time of Creation, to the time in the Garden of Eden and assures us:

God did not make death,

nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.

For he fashioned all things that they might have being;

If there is death in our world, therefore, if there are things that do us harm, it is not because God desires so, but solely because of the Devil, and man’s cooperation with him.

Let us listen to the words from the book of Wisdom again:

by the envy of the devil, death entered the world,

and they who belong to his company experience it.

If there is death in our world, therefore, if there are things that do us harm, it is not because God desires so, but solely because of the Devil, and man’s cooperation with him.

I have a confession to make. Before I entered the seminary, I was like many of my peers. We believed in God, but we did not really believe in the Devil, or there were ways in which we underestimated the Devil. This underestimation of the Devil is, of course, the observe of the domestication of God that we have effected for some decades now; but this is another matter. Over the course of the years in the seminary, in the periods of quiet reflection that the seminary affords, however, I came to realise that if we believe in God and His goodness, we must also believe that there is a force of evil in the world that causes so much pain. The Devil, my dear brothers and sisters, hates man, or as the Book of Wisdom teaches us, he envies man, and above all, he hates life. And he induces us to abandon life, which is life in God, and pulls us to spiral downward toward death.

But, as the Gospel of Saint John tells us, God so loved the world that He gave us his only son so that we may not perish, but have life eternal. And this is what we hear in the Psalm:

O LORD, you brought me up from the netherworld;

you preserved me from among those going down into the pit.

I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.

And how did He rescue us? By giving up His life on the Cross. And what is the Passion and the Cross of Our Lord, but the scene of one great, and indeed final, attempt at temptation? “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” Do not suffer the pain of the Cross, come down!

The Gospel Acclamation today reads:

Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death and brought life to light through the Gospel.

Our Lord did indeed destroy death and the Gospel, or in other words, His good news, is that we too can cheat death, but this destruction of death requires that we too embrace the cross. This is perhaps the great lesson of the Cross, that there is no triumph over sin, without first embracing the Cross in our personal lives: whether it is the disabled child that we have to care for, or the aging parents, an abusive spouse, or knowing that we must not disobey the traffic rules, even though everyone else is, even though it means we will be late for work, for Mass, or wherever else we are going.

I would like to recollect the words of St. Paul to the Colossians (1:24):

in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.

Brothers and sisters, in the precious gift of the Eucharist, Christ gives us His body to eat, so that He may join our flesh with His, so that we may be able to withstand temptation and sin, and embrace the Cross with Him and so triumph over death and have life.

Just one more point before I conclude – I have been warned both by my mother and Pope Francis that I should keep my homily brief – if Christ has rescued us from death, why is it that we still die?

This, dear brothers and sisters, is the consequence of the sin of our first parents. Sin may be forgiven, that is to say, our relationship with God may be restored, but the consequences of sin must still be borne.

But when we say the Christ has triumphed over death, He does not mean merely the physical death of this body! Which is why He says to the mourners in Jairus’s house, she is not dead only asleep. We must remember that the early Christians were unique in the ancient world in their attitude to death; that they knew that the dead were merely asleep (hence our prayer, “May they [the faithful departed] rest in peace”).

The death we must fear is the second death, the death which will come at the time of the Final Judgement and the Resurrection of the physically dead, when the wicked shall have their recompense and not enjoy a relationship with God, which is life, true, everlasting life.

We have this one life, my dear brothers and sisters, to make sure that we lead holy and virtuous lives, so that we may merit from Christ’s sacrifice, so that we may embrace the Cross, and then at the end of time, enjoy life eternal with our God and King.

To help us on this journey, let us turn to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, on this, the last day of June, the month dedicated to thee devotion of this physical heart that burns with love for us and say:

Sacred Heart of Jesus, make our hearts like unto yours.

(A version of this homily was first preached to my home parish of Caranzalem on 30 June 2024.)