Sunday Readings

I am off to Lourdes as a chaplain with the Knights of Malta Youth Pilgrimage.
I will be back the evening of 29 July.
I will make a general intention for all the readers of this website at the Grotto.

Sunday Readings

Roadside Assistance

In our world today, if there is a problem the solution is to pass a new law. And if that law doesn’t work, write another new one. It has gotten to such a point that any decent human endeavor is matched with the phrase ‘legal battle.’ And while that may be exactly what is needed in some cases, I think we’ve taken it too far. In truth, this is nothing new. Laws were written to prevent crime and soon began to be written to promote virtue. We all understand that murder is wrong and so we have laws to prevent it. We also agree that kindness is good and we have laws to allow it. And this is where we started a very old legal battle: who gets kindness and who does not?

We hear an echo of that conflict in today’s Gospel. Everyone agreed that loving God was a good thing. But when it came to human beings, well that was another story. The priest and Levite did nothing wrong because they would have become impure by touching the crime victim. Remember this is a world without soap and hand sanitizers. Literally, it was not their job to do this so no one was surprised. The Samaritan actually made the situation worse because now the victim was made impure with that ‘foreign’ oil and wine he used to disinfect his wounds. This is a real legal quandary and the questioner was looking for a law or protocol to solve it. That was the one thing he did not get. What Jesus Christ, the Word of God and giver of the Law to Moses on Sinai, did was nothing less than revolutionary. He took all the customs and legal tid-bits and re-wrote them all. He went back to the foundation of human activity and set up the only standard by which His kingdom could be known. Mercy was now the law and not the exception to it.

The key to this new commandment was the mercy of God, not the charity of man. ‘Neighbor’ was not a title won by our fellow human beings but a vision coming from the heart of God Himself. No law could contradict it and no reason could exclude us from it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said that “Neighborliness is not a quality in other people, it is simply their claim on ourselves. We have literally no time to sit down and ask ourselves whether so-and-so is our neighbor or not. We must get into action and obey; we must behave like a neighbor to him.”

And this is the only law that counts. “We must behave” is about rules and choices and morality. Being a good neighbor is active. Charity is not passive. Our good thoughts are insufficient and our fine intentions are defective if they do not lead to action. There is no mystery here, this is not some remote thing that is up in the sky, or is across the sea. It is as close as the person in need we see with our own eyes. And because we see them, because we see that need, we see the law and the will of God. The will of God is revealed in mercy and His Providence in front of us. This is a truth that has led saints to see God. As they sang at the end of Les Miz, ‘to love another person is to see the face of God.’ This is what Blessed Jeanne Jugan saw, Blessed Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Peter Claver and so many lived. If it is the Presence of God that we seek, we will find it as we discover the needs of each other.

How do you make a law about that? How do you order and cajole people into mercy? You can’t. This begins elsewhere. It begins by seeing ourselves as that traveler laying on the road, injured and broken. It starts by first experiencing mercy ourselves from the Good Samaritan who took care of us when we were helpless. We pattern charity and we do not invent it. Charity is an action to the other and not just for the self. Yes, it does ‘make us feel good’ to reach out to a human need – but that cannot be the only motivation. If it is, it will stop when it no longer feels good. We have to reach deeper than a rule and go to places beyond regulations. We go to mercy itself and, in doing so, we go to the heart of God.

Sunday Readings

It Works!

The night before the big farewell Mass at St. Augustine’s, I did something radical. After all those years of being told to ‘get a good night’s sleep’ before something major, I actually did. And after 91/2 hours of sleep, it was a great day I got through rather well. In other words, ‘it worked.’ Like a car that does what the ads say it can or a computer that does what it is supposed to, we receive a contented thrill when things go right. It is one of the
most wonderful things we humans can experience.

That was the same experience of these first missionaries sent by Jesus. They were given a list of instructions and the content of a message. They were to act in a certain way and do certain things to promote the message of the Gospel. And the real kicker for them was that it actually happened, it really worked. They were excited and enthused. And Jesus was clearly pleased by it all. He offers them something even bigger than their momentary feelings of satisfaction. He tells them that what they did in fulfilling the Father’s will, was to touch eternity itself.

But why bring this up to people whose mission will not ordinarily involve expelling demons in the name of Jesus?

Actually, that is precisely what we are called to do. Sure it may be without the Hollywood special effects, but there is a demon lurking at the door of every soul. And the proof that it has been defeated is found in the joy of these early evangelists. This is the joy of operational hope.

Hope today is usually a passive and even an assumed thing. We hope for the ‘best’ without the need to define what the ‘best’ means. We hope in the promise of young graduates even if we have a pretty good idea of a general life trajectory. We exercise wishful thinking in the face of overwhelming reality. For us, especially in today’s world, this is automatic – like a reflex. Even if we do not necessarily agree, we never want to be ‘negative’ or a killjoy so we keep silent or mumble a happy thought.

This is most certainly not the hope of the Gospel today nor of the Christian faith. Hope is active and concrete. It is operational because ‘it works.’ The Gospel brings healing and grace renovates the soul. The Sacraments cause quiet wonders and mercy changes lives. That is the content of the message Jesus gave those 72 and – yes – it works. And it is our faith today to say that it still does.

Discouragement is the loss of real hope. It is a blindness to the operation of God in the present moment. It is the whispered suggestion that the message of Christ doesn’t really work. Strange how the more ‘reasonable’ some folks are, the more bleak the world becomes to them. The teenager clad in black or the intellectual perpetually angry have given in and thrown out hope. They have not discovered, in the only way that matters, the hope of cooperating with God.

Our mission is to hope in mercy and see it through in grace. We have been given both already. The Eucharist we celebrate here says that if God can do this with bread and wine, imagine what He can do with us.

No, don’t imagine that. Hope in it. Hope, because it works!