30th Sunday, Year A (Gospel: Matthew 22:34-40) Love your neighbor as yourself

 

 

During the week I came across the following quotation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a poet and writer. He was a professor at Harvard and he died in 1882:

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life, sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

 

If we understood people’s background, we would probably see them very differently.

 

One of the issues that we are being faced with at the moment and which I think all of us find disturbing, is immigrants. We don’t like the word and we don’t like the idea. We want ‘them’ pushed away from us, so that we don’t have to deal with them. We feel threatened and we don’t want anyone infringing on our lifestyle.

 

Over the last several years, because of the wars in the Middle East and Africa, there has been the biggest migration of people to Europe since the Second World War. Millions of people have walked for hundreds of miles and crossed the Mediterranean, many of them drowning, in order to have some kind of hope for themselves and their families of a new beginning. We saw the terrible image of a two year old’s body washed up on the beach having drowned, as his family attempted to make their way to Italy. For the countries where they end up, it is a problem, as they don’t know how to cope with so many people. Here we have the continual stream of people making their way from South America hoping to find a better life. We don’t like it and we see them as a problem. They seem to threaten us.

 

I watched a program about this recently where a journalist was travelling with the border patrol, who were trying to catch people coming in illegally. One woman who had been caught was crying. When the journalist asked her about her story, she said that she had given all of her money, $3,000, to a gang who would smuggle her across the border. Now she had been caught, would be deported and she had lost everything. She was desperate to begin with and now she was far worse off than when she started.

 

Many times in my life I have met people who have come through extraordinary suffering and hardship, but who have come out the far side and managed to rebuild a life for themselves and their families. If I hadn’t spoken to them individually, they would just be immigrants, sometimes illegal, sometimes not. But having spoken to them individually they become people, human beings and you see them in a different way. They are people whom you now realize are desperate and in need of help. It would be much easier if they weren’t there and we didn’t have to see them, or deal with them, but they are there and the Lord tells us we have an obligation to help those in need.

Today’s first reading addresses this issue. The Lord says to us:

You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt…You shall not wrong any widow or orphan (Ex 22:20-21).

At that time a widow was completely open to being exploited and abused, as she had no rights and a child even more so. But the Lord warns us to look after them, as He will hear their cry when they are suffering.

From a political point of view the government has to figure out the best way to deal with this issue. I hope and pray that our politicians will be able to do what is right and what is just and not just push people away. As people who try to live the teachings of Jesus, we have to ask what is God asking of us. Where do we get the strength to face difficult issues like this? The Gospel answers that question. Jesus tells us we are to love God above everything else and our neighbor as ourselves. The key to being able to love the people around us, is that we grow in our relationship with God. The deeper that relationship grows, the more we see the world around us in a different light. We no longer see Jews, Muslims and atheists. We see people. Immigrants from other countries are no longer just Mexicans, Irish and Iraqis, but people just like us. Growing in our relationship with God is what gives us the strength to deal with issues we would rather not have to face, but we do have to face them, because God asks us to. That is also why we keep coming back each week to listen to God’s word and what He asks of us and also to receive him in the Eucharist, so that we continually grow closer to him. Our relationship to God is the key to it. Loving God first is the greatest commandment and loving the people around us is the second greatest commandment. To ‘love’ someone in that sense, does not mean we have to like them, but it does mean that we try to treat them as we would hope to be treated if we were in the same situation. Imagine if it was one of your own family in that situation? What would you not do for them?

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind

and your neighbor as yourself.’

29th Sunday Year A (Gospel: Matthew 22:15-21) The Eucharist is the source of our life

The actor and comedian Jim Carey said this: ‘I wish everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of, so they would know that’s not the answer.’ It is always good when we see our economy doing better. I know it doesn’t affect every one of us directly, but it is encouraging and at least it means there are more jobs around. Yet how is it that despite better times economically, we don’t seem to be much happier? There is often more pressure on people to ‘succeed’ and we have less and less time for the ordinary things. Everyone seems to be mad busy trying to get money. Suicide is on the increase and so is the rate of crime. So what is wrong? We thought we finally had it all together.

I believe one of the reasons is that we forget that we are body and spirit, and that we have to look after both sides of ourselves. We are experts at looking after the body, but most people are extremely ignorant when it comes to looking after the spirit, or soul. No amount of money, or work, or the right house, or car, will bring us happiness, because there is an emptiness inside us that material things cannot and will not  ever fulfill. This is the spiritual side of ourselves, which can only be fulfilled by what is spiritual.  Sometimes it takes a death, or serious illness, to make us wake up to this fact.

Sometimes we forget that our life comes from God, and that He is the only one who can keep us alive. We say, ‘God didn’t give me my life, my parents did.’ Our parents gave us our bodies, but not our soul. That comes from God and that’s what will live on when we die. God gives us our life and God is the source of our life. So to fulfill the spiritual side of ourselves we turn to him, because He is the only one who can fulfill us and make any sense of why we are alive in the first place.

When Jesus taught the people about the Eucharist, he said, ‘If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you.’ ‘Whoever eats me, will draw life from me.’ There it is from the mouth of Christ. This is where we will find fulfillment, in Jesus and we receive Jesus in the Eucharist every time we receive Holy Communion. God makes it so easily available to us, so that everyone can receive it if they want to. We won’t find fulfillment anywhere else. God is the only one who can fulfill us and this is why Jesus is constantly inviting us to spend time with him and to receive him often. But you object: ‘I don’t have time!’ Let me tell you a short story.

Mother Teresa, who founded ‘the Missionaries of Charity’, recalls the following experience. Shortly after she had begun her work among the poor and there were only a handful of them working together, they found themselves being overwhelmed because there was a huge amount of work to be done. They were struggling to cope, because the needs were so great. They prayed to God and asked him to show them what they should do. And they felt that the Lord was telling them to spend an extra hour a day in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This didn’t make any sense to them since they felt that they already didn’t have enough time to work, so how could they give an extra hour to prayer? And yet they really felt that this was what God was asking them to do so they decided they would try to be obedient to it. So they began to give an extra hour a day to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and an hour less to work. What happened? After a short time many more people began to join the order soon they had many extra people to help them with the work.

If you give time to God He will make it up to you, because God will never be outdone in generosity. God is inviting us to discover him again, to make time for him again. You won’t find the time, you have to make the time and I guarantee you that for every minute you give to God, He will make it up to you. 

It is important to remember that while Jesus is humble enough to give himself to us in Holy Communion, we should be careful about how we approach him. He has come for sinners; that is true. And we are sinners; that is also true. But if we receive the Eucharist often we should also confess our sins often. God has given us the gift of Holy Communion, but He has also given us the gift of confession, so that we can be free of sin and so that we can approach him as we should, with humility. That is why we begin every mass by acknowledging our sins. This is one place where we cannot demand rights. Before God we have no rights. Everything from him is a gift. So we should confess to a priest, especially if there is something serious that we have done and don’t say that you have no sins. In the first letter of St. John he says: ‘If anyone says they have not sinned they are calling God a liar’ (1 John 1:10). This is God’s word. Would you dare to say the Word of God is wrong? It is a great gift to be able to confess our sins and be free of them. Don’t be afraid to because it is for our benefit. God works through the priest and it doesn’t matter how holy or sinful the priest is. It is God’s forgiveness you receive, his gift to you, so that you can be free. The priest is just the instrument. In the same way, it doesn’t matter how holy or sinful the priest is when it comes to the Eucharist. God will be present just the same, because God would never allow his presence to depend on a priest being holy enough. Hopefully the priest does live the kind of life that God asks of us, but either way, Jesus is present just as much in the Eucharist.

If we have emptiness within us, it is because our spirits are starving and there is only one who can satisfy that hunger. ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I in them.’ 

 

28th Sunday Year A (Gospel: Matthew 22:1-14) Our hope is in the Lord

Not long after I was ordained there was a program on TV, a chat show, which had four young priests talking about their experience of priesthood and the Church today. I was one of the priests. The reason why I mention it, is because I was really struck by the response that I got from people afterwards. Many of the people who wrote to me or phoned me were priests and they nearly all had the same thing to say; they were delighted to hear people being so positive about the Church. They were greatly encouraged. It gave them hope.

This really made me think to myself just how much people are looking for hope at the moment, how much we need hope. We need a reason to get up in the morning. We need a reason to keep going when we are suffering. And our reason is that we believe in God and in what God has promised us. We seem to live in a world of despair, where all we hear is bad news, how many people have been killed, where the latest war is…  Is it any wonder so many young people have committed suicide in the last few years. They have no hope, they think there is nothing to live for and this is very sad.

When you look around you at the moment it would be easy to think that God has lost the battle and that Satan has won. Evil has been victorious and God has been defeated. Could this be possible? Of course not. God cannot be defeated, ever and we must realize this is true. Even if we can’t understand why there is so much evil around at the moment, be sure of this, God is still very much in control. 

One way that we can be sure of this is through the inspired Word of God, the Sacred Scriptures. The Word of God is truth, not just nice ideas, because it comes from God. In many places in the Bible, it says that God will not be defeated. In the beginning of St. John’s Gospel it says, ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not/cannot overcome it.’ (John 1:6)

  

The first reading of the mass today is a reading of great hope. It is a reading that is often used at funerals. It is God’s promise to us his people, that He has great things in store for us. ‘The Lord will prepare a banquet for his people’; party, a feast. This is what God has in store for us.

You might say that it’s fine to quote the Bible, but how does that apply to us in the ordinary things that we do each day? We don’t seem to see any of these promises. Maybe we don’t allow God enough space. It is easy to treat God as though He is there to serve our needs. We ask for what we want and then we complain when we don’t get it the way that suits us, but the closer we come to God the more we see things in a different light. It doesn’t mean that everything is suddenly alright, and all our problems are gone, but it does make us see things differently. We also begin to realize that much of what seemed impossible before is no longer impossible, because we don’t rely on our own strength, but on God’s power to help us.

The Apostles were unstoppable because they had learned to rely completely on God and not on their own strength. If they continually focused on the world around them, which I’m sure had just as many problems, they probably wouldn’t have gotten very far. But their focus was completely on God and that is why their work was so fruitful. There was only twelve of them to start with and yet look what happened.

Our hope is in God and that’s why even if someone is suffering terribly, or sick and even if they die, we don’t despair, because we know that God has not abandoned us. We believe that we will see them again, because this is God’s promise to us. We have hope because we believe.

Through prayer Jesus continually shows us which way to go. He helps us with our decisions and most of all He helps us never to be afraid, but always to have hope in him. So if you wonder how can we have hope for the Church and for the world, the answer is because we rely on God, and not on ourselves.

‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it’ (John 1:6)

27th Sunday Yr A (Gospel: Matthew 21: 33-43) Making sense of tragedy

Last week we had the horrific killing of so many people who were out enjoying themselves at a concert. No one knows why it happened, which itself is so disillusioning and frustrating. For no apparent reason this man Stephen Paddock, carefully planned to murder innocent people. This makes us angry and often we want to lash out at God. From a spiritual point of view, how are we supposed to understand this? Death always brings up far more questions than answers, but especially this kind of murder done for no apparent reason. Why didn’t God stop it? Why does God allow such things?

The reason God allows such things is because God has given us free will and we are responsible for our actions. I was talking about this last week. If we choose to do evil, other people will suffer. The more evil we choose, the more others suffer because of our actions. There is a great amount of evil in the world at the moment because people have rejected God and are choosing to do evil.

In one of the readings from the prophet Ezekiel, which we had last Sunday, God confronts us saying, ‘You say that God’s ways are not fair. Listen house of Israel, is it not your ways that are unfair?’ When we are faced with disasters like this, we become angry because we know it is unjust and we don’t know where to turn. So we often direct our anger towards God. We are usually slower to admit that this has happened because we have been given free will. A big part of our frustration is also that this man killed himself and so he cannot even be brought to justice. However, he most certainly will be brought to justice, as the Lord assures us that we are responsible for our actions. Jesus spoke many times about this, that we are responsible for our actions and we will be judged for how we live.

There is also another way to look at a terrible event like this, or indeed other events like natural disasters. Remember the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004. Approximately 250,000 people were killed! One moment they were alive, getting on with their day to day business, the next moment they were before God. Those who died, just like in a war, have now gone on to the Lord before they expected to and before we expected them to. God knew this would happen. Since the moment they were conceived, God knew the moment their earthly life would be over. But if those who died had tried to live the right kind of life, which most people do, then they are now with God. If that is true, then we can also be grateful to God that their earthly life is over, because it means they will no longer suffer on earth as we will, until we get there ourselves. We are the ones left grieving and in pain. It is also a reminder to us that we do not know how long we will be on this earth and so it is important that we use our time well. If we believe that, then we will live our life differently, because we then have a purpose.

Often when someone dies we talk about them as though their existence is extinguished forever. We say that ‘their memory lives on’ as though that is the only thing that lives on, but as Christians that is not what we believe. We believe that they are even more alive now than we are, because they no longer experience the limitations that we do. They enjoy life with God, if that is what they have chosen. They are now alive in a more intense way than we are, because they no longer have the limitations that we have in this world.

Why don’t people come back to tell us what it’s like? I’m sure it is because they don’t need to. 

Part of our not knowing is part of the journey of our faith. We are asked to believe, but we do not fully understand and we won’t until we die ourselves. Then everything will make sense. For now we have many questions and we ask God to help us not to lose hope. As Christians that should make us different in how we see things. It is normal to grieve and to be angry when something like this happens, because it is wrong, but we don’t despair because we know that all things are in God’s hands and it will make sense to us when we die to.

May their souls and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.