Homily for Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time (Year 2).
(Going through some old files, I came upon this reflection from my days studying philosophy at Loyola University Chicago.)
Today’s gospel is a difficult one to hear, frankly, because Jesus is not very nice. Building off of yesterday’s condemnation of the Pharisees as self-serving, Jesus today accuses them of complicity in the murder of the prophets. On the surface of it, his argument is not even particularly fair. Not only are the opponents he addresses guilty of murder, but they are charged “with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world.” One yearns for the moderation of a good old-fashioned political attack ad.
One is tempted to whisper in Jesus’ ear, “Don’t you know you aren’t going to get anywhere by condemning people.” “You can’t just beat people over the head with the truth.” “All this fire and brimstone really isn’t that pastoral.” I could stand up here and try to spin Jesus’ words into something inoffensive, but they are offensive. In fact we know they are offensive because at the end of Jesus’ speech, the scribes and Pharisees plot to kill him. And you don’t try to kill someone for words that while perhaps a tad exaggerated, really are basically calls just to be nice. No one has ever suffered martyrdom over Chicken Soup for the Soul.
The Miracles of St. Ignatius, Peter Paul Rubens 1617-8
Homily for Friday of the Twenty-seventh week in Ordinary Time (Year 2).
Today’s Gospel passage begins with a question of discernment. Where does the power that Jesus manifests in his actions come from? From God or from Beelzebul? Jesus drives out demons, and his response seems to me like a “rule for discernment” that Jesus suggests in another passage: “Every good tree produces good fruit, and every bad tree produces bad fruit… Thus, by their fruits you will recognize them” (Mt 7:16-20).
Faithfulness to Jesus, lived with integrity, gives us a stability and a peace that allows for growth. Jesus creates a peace in which life can flourish. Even if the circumstances surrounding us are marked by disorder and conflict, we must try to maintain that inner peace which is the sign of the Holy Spirit. The final words of the Gospel, however, warn us not to confuse an empty space with the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is not enough to eliminate demons. We must also invite the Lord Jesus to take up residence in our home.
He is the source of life, and the Gospel also contains the most fundamental question for discernment of all: are we with him or against him? “Whoever does not gather with me scatters,” says the Lord. But whoever is with him will find eternal life.
Homily for the twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
St. Ambrose and the Emperor Theodosius, Peter Paul Reubens 1615-6
One of the most important works of Italian literature is a collection of 100 short stories supposedly told by a group of people from Florence who were locked down in a country house during the Black Plague. They didn’t have Netflix, so they told stories. Some of the stories are really just off-color jokes, but since they’re more than 600 years old, now they’re considered literature. One of those stories deals with a problem that’s at the heart of today’s Gospel.
There were two merchants, one Christian, one Jewish, living in Florence, and the Christian was always trying to convince his Jewish friend to convert. One day, the Jewish merchant announced that he had to go to Rome for business, and his Catholic friend despaired. You see, the fourteenth century was the low point of Church corruption, and he knew that if his Jewish friend went to Rome he would see the pope and the cardinals using the Church to enrich themselves, their relatives, and their illegitimate children. And the Catholic merchant thought, “Now he’ll never become a Christian.”
So he was shocked a month later when his friend returned from Rome a devout Catholic. He tried to ask delicately, “But didn’t you see anything wrong in Rome?” And his newly baptized friend said, “Oh, it’s a swamp. But if that is how the Church is run, and it’s still here after 1300 years, it can only be God who is keeping it going.”
Jesus consigning the keys to St. Peter, G. Battista Cassignola, 1569
Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
It’s hard to imagine a better Gospel reading with which to end an Ignatian retreat. We find this episode at the middle point of Matthew’s Gospel, and the question that Jesus poses to his disciples is the hinge on which everything else turns: “Who do you say that I am?”
We have heard the episode before, so perhaps we don’t register what a strange question Jesus asks. When I test my students at the end of the semester, I ask them about the content of the course, not about my own identity. But Jesus asks about himself, not his message. Were he any other teacher, such a question would be pure arrogance. But Jesus is not like anyone else, and everything depends upon our recognizing the difference.
Public opinion, as the disciples tell it, seeks to put Jesus into a recognizable category; he is one of the prophets, like Elijah or Jeremiah. Perhaps he is the reincarnation of John the Baptist. But Jesus does not let such answers go, and the disciples themselves have been with him long enough that they are not satisfied with such an answer, either. There is a right and a wrong answer to the question Jesus asks. It is not a matter of opinion. Jesus is not administering a Rorschach test to prompt the disciples to look more deeply into themselves. The question is not what is inside, but who is standing here before you.
Homily for the twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A).
Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, Annibale Carracci, 1604-5
When I teach my introduction to the sacraments course in Rome, at the end of every sacrament I assign one question and ask my students to write a one-page response. I try come up with unusual questions to keep them on their toes—and to keep myself entertained when I’m grading. This year’s question for the sacrament of marriage was: “Can you marry a chatbot?” Chatbots are essentially AI characters that you can have conversations with; over the past couple of years stories have appeared in the media about people—usually women—becoming emotionally attached to the chatbots they create, to the point where some felt like they had gone through a breakup with a boyfriend when the AI programs they used were discontinued.
There’s not always a right or wrong answer to my questions, but in this case, you will be happy to know that all of my students responded, “No. You cannot marry a chatbot.” And they all passed. There are lots of reasons you can’t marry a chatbot; for one thing, they aren’t actually human, and they don’t have bodies. What a number of my students pointed out, which I found particularly insightful, is that chatbots are designed to give us the answers that we want. An AI program doesn’t have emotions or needs of its own, and it is designed to keep us happy so that we keep using it. This feature is what makes chatbots seem like the perfect boyfriend. The chatbot is programed to always tell you exactly what you want to hear. It never gets impatient. If you wake up at three AM, the chatbot is happy to talk and doesn’t have to go to work in the morning. It feels like the chatbot really understands you because it’s a product of your own design.
My students were right to recognize that conversing with a chatbot is not a real relationship. A relationship means interacting with someone else—someone who is different. Our differences make relationships hard at times, but they are necessary for us to grow. Relationships challenge us to grow because sometimes we don’t get the answer that we want from the other person, and then we have to learn how to respond. This is why marriage is always dynamic, always in progress. In marriage, the fact that men and women are different—physically, emotionally, socially—is what makes the relationship fruitful; the biological difference is necessary for our species to survive.
So why am I bringing up chatbot romance to explain this Sunday’s readings? The reason is because Jesus’ behavior in today’s Gospel story is definitely not what you would expect from a well-programmed chatbot. What Jesus says and does doesn’t quite make sense to anybody. Even for us, reading the Gospel at some distance, his response is jarring because it seems to put a woman seeking help from him in greater difficulty. She comes to him not for anything selfish, but asking for her daughter’s healing. We feel natural sympathy for her, but Jesus, at first, ignores her. An AI boyfriend would never do that.
Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome
Today’s marvelous Gospel story of Jesus walking across a stormy sea shows us how faith grows from fear to true understanding. The disciples move from a superstitious worldview, imagining that the Lord is a ghost, to true faith, confessing to Jesus, “Truly, you are the Son of God.” But since the same reading came up at daily Mass earlier this week and some of you already heard what I had to say about it, I thought today I would step out onto a different kind of stormy sea: the second reading, taken from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The reason this particular passage from Romans means walking on turbulent waters is because it deals with St. Paul’s attitude toward his own people, the Jews. It has implications, therefore, for what attitude Christians should take toward the Jewish people today.
I decided to risk stepping out onto such waters this morning because over the past several years we have seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric and an increase in violence directed against Jews. In March, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan was attacked and, soon after, the FBI thwarted a plot to firebomb synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and Scottsdale, Arizona. The situation in Europe is worse, and it should disturb anyone of good sense and good will that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023—which included murder, rape, and hostage-taking—anti-Semitic rhetoric in the West increased.
Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
Sacristy of San Marco, Rome
We don’t know much about how the Gospels were written. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t leave dustjacket biographies, like you see on book covers, because the point of writing a Gospel is to put the focus on Jesus and not on oneself. But we can tell a few things about the lives of the earliest Christians indirectly from what they wrote. One thing we know, for example, is that before even a word of the New Testament was written, the earliest Christians were already celebrating the sacraments. When you remember this, you begin to notice that symbols referring to the sacraments are all over the New Testament—especially baptism and the Eucharist, the two pillars of Christian life. Today’s Gospel passage, for example, begins with a reference to John the Baptist and ends with miraculous loaves of bread, an obvious symbol of the Eucharist.
The message of the Gospel writers is clear: when we celebrate the sacraments we are coming into contact with the ministry of Jesus. Today’s Gospel passage begins with news about John the Baptist—the tragic news that John had been killed by King Herod. Herod, if you remember, didn’t like the fact that John had accused him of living in an immoral marriage. Herod’s wife Herodias liked it even less and maneuvered to have John beheaded. Reading between the lines in today’s Gospel, it seems that Jesus felt wounded by the news of his cousin John’s execution and withdrew by boat to “a deserted place” to pray and mourn. Jesus, perhaps, also felt some premonition of his own Passion.
Homily for the fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).
“Brothers and sisters,” Saint Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed in us.”
In other words, Saint Paul recognizes that the present time, the world in which we live, is characterized by suffering—pain and weakness, shame and fear, insults and injustices. Human life is not entirely suffering, but suffering is present. Christianity does not promise us a life without it.
But if Saint Paul does not promise to eliminate suffering, what is his message? His message is that suffering can help us obtain a greater glory. In fact, if we read the Gospel with Saint Paul’s words in mind, the meaning of Jesus’ message today becomes clearer.
Jesus uses the image of the seed, and a seed, as we know, must be buried in order to grow. Before taking on its new form, before becoming a plant and blossoming, a seed must lose its old form—it must, in a certain sense, die.
Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist
John the Baptist, Filippo Lippi (ca 1455)
The story of Saint John the Baptist begins in the temple, when an angel announces his miraculous conception to the priest Zechariah while he is offering incense at the altar. The account of Gabriel’s announcement is read during the vigil of this feast, and today we read about the fulfillment of that prophecy.
We probably do not associate John with the temple because most of his prophetic mission takes place in the desert—which is exactly where he heads at the end of today’s Gospel. But I would like to pause for a moment in the temple, where the story begins.
As modern Christians living after Luther, Kant, and the Enlightenment, we are unfortunately accustomed to viewing the temple and all Jewish rituals in a somewhat negative light. We tend to see them as superfluous, rigid, and irrational. We think of ourselves as more enlightened, scientific, progressive, and perhaps even more moral, believing we have no need for such complex and useless rituals.
I must admit, I am grateful that I am not required to observe the entirety of the Jewish ritual law. I, too, enjoy eating prosciutto and calamari. But if we view the Jewish religion in a negative light—as if ritual worship were in itself merely a sign of a primitive mindset that we have finally outgrown—we lose something. The Gospel of Luke begins in the temple but, as all our biblical scholars know, it also ends there: after the resurrection, the disciples “were continually in the temple praising God” (Lk 24:53).
Today, in the Acts of the Apostles, we read about one of the first developments in the most significant controversy in the life of the early Church: the question of whether Christians of non-Jewish origin should be required to observe the Mosaic Law, particularly circumcision.
We know that, in the end, the Church recognized that all Christians are bound to observe the moral law, but not the ritual precepts that were intended to preserve the distinct identity of the Jewish people. Through his perfect and definitive sacrifice on Calvary, Jesus inaugurated a new worship, in which we participate today, and to which all peoples are called to join.
This controversy, resolved centuries ago, might seem of little relevance to us today, but it is not. It is important to remember this historical event because it teaches us at least two fundamental things. First of all, the Christian mission is universal, directed toward every human being. As St. Peter says after Pentecost: “There is no salvation in anyone else; for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we are to be saved.”
