The books of Maccabees can be confusing and have been very controversial over the centuries. Luther and the other reformers banished both books from the Bible because of praying for the dead and thus providing an opening for Purgatory (2 Mac. 12:38–46). Its clear statement on the resurrection of the body, not merely immortality, has made some Jews very uneasy as well. The seeming passivity applauded in 2 Maccabees has annoyed those of a more activist bent who fully endorse 1 Maccabees. Yet there is great wisdom to be found in them both.
Today, we read from 2 Maccabees and the first confusion is that it was completed before 1 Maccabees by a different author with a different theology about persecution and resistance. They do however share a common origin in the relentless assault on Jewish customs and worship by King Antiochus IV. This began around 200 BC with educational “reform” and culminated with his demand that Greek gods be worshiped in the temple at Jerusalem. We have looked at this historical situation previously in some detail, but will now look at its spiritual dimension.
Continuing this false worship would have ended Judaism. Some people, mostly the rich and powerful who did not wish to lose their positions, consented, sometimes indeed enthusiastically. Others however resisted. There were thus, as always, two principal options. The first was armed resistance. These books take their name from Judas Maccabaeus who led the eventually successful guerrilla movement. The story of his family is related in 1 Maccabees. However, there is the opposite approach of prayer and martyrdom. This is the approach proclaimed in 2 Maccabees. The tone of the book is set in the chapter before this with the martyrdom of Eleazar, an elderly and highly respected scribe. He was told that he had to publicly eat pork, for him a grave sin. When he objected his friends, who had previously capitulated, told him that he could bring food of his own choosing escaping the death penalty (2 Mac 6:22).
We celebrate today the feast of our Patron Saint, Charles Borromeo. To list even the most basic facts of his life, much less his accomplishments, would be an impossible task for a brief homily. Even more amazing is that he was only 46 when he died in 1584.
High points are found in the main window above the main altar. The principal scene is St. Charles distributing communion to a sick person on a stretcher. This commemorates his distribution of the Eucharist to the sick during a plague and for having Mass said in the open air, allowing the afflicted to more easily attend. If you look above the main window there are three windows with angels: the one on the left shows a scroll referring to his institution of religious education in his Diocese of Milan. He is considered the founder of both Catholic schools and Sunday school. On the right, the window reflects his emphasis on the Sacrament of Penance. In the central window, two angels bear a crown which foretells his canonization after his death. Not on our window is the clearest sign that he was a reformer: one of his priests who did not want to be reformed tried to assassinate him.
We could say much more about St Charles, but more relevant for us today is his cousin and successor Federico Borromeo. Like Charles, he was born a rich man destined for effortless success. He originally wanted to become a Jesuit, but although he did not, he was nonetheless claimed by the Church and named a cardinal at the age of 23. A most cultured man, he was dedicated to scholarship and moved by beauty. He created leaned societies and the first truly public library on the European continent. He wrote over 100 books and monographs on many subjects and, why we remember him especially today, can be credited as publishing the first hymnal for lay people. He also renovated the Cathedral in Milan, shoring up its foundations and beautifying its interior.
Now I do not mean to suggest that he was a mere aesthete. During the great famine of 1627-1628 he fed 2,000 poor people daily at the gates of his residence from his own income. He was an example of such absolute heroism that nearly one hundred of his clergy died caring for their flocks in the famine and resulting plague. This is beautifully told in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel “The Betrothed”. I should note that this is Pope Francis’ second favorite novel; coming after only the Brothers Karamazov. In it, Federico is portrayed as the model priest, and I must admit that I give it to young priests particularly to read his admonition to a well-meaning but cowardly pastor. I have no reason to believe that this did not reflect his actual beliefs and actions. After his death, the citizens of Milan erected a statue in his honor and wrote on the pedestal: “He was one of those men rare in every age, who employed extraordinary intelligence, the resources of an opulent condition, the advantages of privileged station, and an unflinching will, in the search and practice of higher and better things.”
He demonstrates the connection between beauty, worship and charity. Much of our efforts as a parish for at least the next 3 years will be to renovate the fabric of the Church building. There will be no major changes in the sanctuary or nave – the major visible changes will be decent bathrooms and a usable basement. Through it all, we must seek not to lose the forest for the trees and must remember that this building exists for worship: turning our minds and hearts to God. Beauty has always been the handmaid of worship, and a church needs to be a place where we recognize that we are doing something different. A church such as ours can literally stop us in our footsteps, slow us down and center us on the most important things. Given the distractions of our times, this is more important and needed than ever
Although I hope that people leave here feeling blessed and holy, worship is ultimately judged not by what we feel on Sunday but what we do the rest of the week. Who is better off among your family and friends or in our community because you went to Mass today? Did you help someone at work, did you show kindness to an annoying person, did you take time to offer your services to someone who needs them? The needs are endless, the opportunities without limit, and the power that comes from true worship beyond comprehension. Yet, how much of Jesus do we see in a country in which most people call themselves Christian, and more to the point what does St Charles add to this community? Who outside these walls would know or care if we disappeared tomorrow?
Today we will add another aid to our worship with our new hymnals.
We are bodily creatures and the more senses we can engage in our worship, the more effective it will be. Philosophers (eg. Suzanne Langer) tell us that each art form allows our bodies to connect with a dimension in the real world. Buildings engage us in space. A grand church building can be literally awesome and an intimate one engenders a serenity that no other structure can provide.
Music in this theory connects and develops our sense of time. Many of us seem dominated by time and trying to make each second effective. No wonder time itself may seem exhausting. Great music can suspend time and give us a taste of the infinite and a moment’s peace to gather ourselves together to praise and worship God
Please embrace this opportunity. We bless not so much the hymn books as ourselves, and desire to offer not only everything to God, but every moment. Unlike Federico Borromeo, we may not have extraordinary intelligence to display, nor either the resources of an opulent condition nor privileged station, but we can ask for an unflinching will to – by our worship – search for and practice higher and better things.
Transcript:
Good evening, everyone, and happy All Saints. Glad that you are able to come here to rejoice, and all of those of us who have gone before us who are gazing upon God for all eternity in Heaven, and I’m glad that you got here to Mass at the last minute here, too. This is a holy day. So very blessed that we’re all here together, and also that you’ve had a very nice Halloween yesterday as well, and that you’re enjoying all your candy.
One thing I have to say is that every All Saints Day, it’s hard for me not to think about a very, very interesting conversation that took place between Thomas Merton, the famous Catholic monk of the 20th Century, and his professor in college named Robert Lax.
Robert Lax was himself a convert to the Faith, just as Thomas Merton was, and Lax played a very instrumental role in helping Merton discover his faith in Jesus and eventually becoming a Catholic. And after Merton became a Catholic, he and Lax were talking, and Robert Lax asked him saying, “Well now that you’re a Catholic, what do you hope to do?”
And Merton very much admired Lax, and he wants to impress him with some type of really sophisticated answer, now that he was a Catholic. So he kind of just thought it over and then he just kind of resort to saying,”well I hope to be a very, very devout Catholic and learn more and more about the Faith”. And Robert Lax looked at him with almost disappointment in his eyes, and he said, “You know, there’s only one thing you should hope to do now that you’re a Catholic, and that is to become a saint.” To become a saint – that it’s not necessarily about becoming part of a tribe and finding joy in becoming just Catholic for the sake of finding some sense of truth and meaning and what it means to be Catholic, but to look beyond what this world is and offers to where we are bound to go, and that is Heaven, right? That is what the Saints desire. Saints desire Heaven.
You know, it’s always profound for me thinking about that, because I have to ask myself the question: you know here as a Catholic priest; you know being in the world of Catholicism, so to speak: do I ever really think about the fact that fundamentally why I do all these things? Why I participate in the sacramental life of the Church? It is for the reason that I desire union with God: intimate union with God, and not just because I think that’s a nice thing, but because to be with He who has created and willed me into existence from the very beginning knows exactly what I need, how I need it, and desires me to want to be with him for all eternity. That is ultimately what a relationship with God looks like, right?
So this very famous encounter between Thomas Merton and Robert Lax is something that we can kind of take away and ask ourselves, “what is it that we really desire?”
Everyday or every year on All Saints Day, we hear the Beatitudes, and of course the Beatitudes we hear very often. We all know that in some way that this is the new teaching of Jesus, in a way to augment the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament that were given to Moses. And just on the surface level, we can always say that the Beatitudes always seem to have this, more of this positive tone, because it’s talking about blessed are you when you do these things, because then you receive these things as a result. Whereas the Ten Commandments are all about not doing certain things – prohibitions.
In our spiritual journey, we kind of need both. There are times where we need to really have a clear understanding what not to do. There’s going to be times for us know exactly what to do. We understand that just by the basic nature – for who we are are human beings, right? – I mean when you’re young, you’re a child, it’s better to be told what not to do than what to do, because when you’re told what to do, you end up doing the opposite.
So perhaps it is better as a rule to just understand what I should not do, because that is ultimately going to be at the problems if I do end up touching the burner when it’s hot, so to speak, right?
Yet I often find it that as well, as positive as the Beatitudes may sound, they can also have a tinge of legalism intertwined – the same type of legalism which is all too often associated with the Ten Commandments. What I mean by that is that there’s this understanding that could arrive that the Beatitudes are all about us, and our activity, and how we do things, and so we can go through them. If you just think, well okay, if I’m poor, if I try to detach myself more from the things of the world, I’m going to be blessed. Or if I really work for peace and I really try my best to mitigate peace in different relationships within my life, in the monks, the people I know, then I will be blessed, I will be a child of God.
And even the Beatitudes then become a source of obligation, a source of measuring ourselves up to see how well we’re doing. Going through them can often make us feel almost guilty because we’re not working hard enough at being detached from things. We’re not working hard enough at being humble, or we’re not working hard enough being a peacemaker. We’re not working hard enough and just allowing persecutions to hit us and being okay with that.
Yet, the Gospel of Jesus is not about us working harder in order to earn something. The Gospel – the good news of Jesus – is all about revealing the profound love that God has for us, despite our failures, despite our sin.
So just as Robert Lax challenges Merton to desire to become a saint, perhaps the best way for us to engage the Beatitudes is not thinking about what we need to do, but what we need to desire. And the way to know what we need to desire is to always go to the latter portion of the answer: if we desire the Kingdom of Heaven, the result will be for us to naturally want to be detached from the things of the world. If we desire to be confident, you’ll be okay when we mourn, because we know that God is with us. If we desire to inherit the land, you will know that God will give us everything that we need in order to not just survive, but to thrive and find a joyful life.
The Beatitudes aren’t caught up in us trying to live a more virtuous, moral life. They get to the very heart of speaking to our desires. What do we desire? I think in one word you could say that we all desire happiness, who desire a life – whether we are free of suffering, of pain, of anxiety – we desire a world where there’s justice. We desire a world where there’s peace. Because we know that these things resonate with how we are hardwired, because we’re hardwired not to live in a broken existence, but a whole existence.
If we take that one step further, we realize that what we ultimately desire is Heaven. Yet, we often think that Heaven is something that sounds better than Hell, but it’s not necessary something that can bring us happiness.
I was often taken from my first assignment as a priest saying daily masses, and most daily Masses are early in the morning. Especially there’s lots of older people, retired people – and there was someone who I think celebrated like an 86th birthday. I said, “Oh, happy birthday”. I said, “You’re one year now closer to Heaven.” And you think I was sentencing him to prison when I said that.
”Don’t wish on that me now, Father. Don’t talk about that.”
Don’t talk about that?! Why do you show up at Mass if you’re not thinking about Heaven?
We come here today on this holy day of obligation not just so that we can become good Catholics like Thomas Merton and what he thought he was supposed to be. We come here because we are obligated in our very being for complete union with God in Heaven. And in that sense, it’s not a burden, nor is it something that we wish to just kind of push off and one day, we’ll think about it, but it’s something that happens to us now. Because the desire for Heaven means to live life now, in its fullness, so that we can live in Heaven on Earth. And while it’s not Heaven in its fullness, it gets us more and more yearning and desiring what we are ultimately made for.
So today, on this Feast of All Saints, let’s look at our brothers and sisters who have gone before us and have reached the final goal of their life as being an inspiration for all of us who still journey and are distracted by the things of this world, thinking that they can possibly serve us, when we are made to be served by an infinite love that no finite person or thing could ever match.
The Book of Wisdom, often called the Wisdom of Solomon, is very similar to the writing of Ben Sirach whom we read last week. Both taught the sons of rich Jewish families and based their teachings firmly in traditional Judaism. Ben Sirach wrote in Jerusalem around 200 BC at a time immediately before active persecution. He was primarily concerned with practical questions of contemporary life. Despite its attribution to Solomon, the Book of Wisdom might very well be the last written book of the Old Testament. It was most likely composed in Alexandria Egypt, perhaps as late as 30 BC. Alexandria was a great intellectual center in the Roman world and the author examined the philosophical teachings of the day. He also used to his advantage the relationship between the Egyptians and the Jews.
The Exodus is never far from the author’s mind. He returns in today’s chapter to the plagues sent upon Egyptian. For all their power, the Egyptians were foolish, because they worshiped the animal, indeed, insect world: Continue reading “31st Sunday Ordinary Time – The Lover of Our Souls”→
Dear Friends, & Families,
We wish you all a great Halloween celebration on Thursday! Once again this year we will be collecting excess Halloween candies to send to our troops.
Our collection will take place on this Sunday only, November 3rd. Receptacles for donations will be located in the back of the church and in the school lobby.
Please see the flyer below for more details.
If you would like to make a small donation to help defray the shipping costs, that would be most appreciated. You may give your donation for shipping either to me or to Dyanne.
Much thanks to Dyanne Rosado for this great initiative.
Happy Halloween!
Pope Francis’ recognition that the only God we experience is the God of Mercy has caused some in the Church including a few leaders to feel an impulse to water down what is essentially a statement of fact or try to explain it away. Who would have thought that we would ever reach the stage when Mercy would be controversial?
St Luke did.
He saw that recognizing the universal need for mercy threatened many within the church from the very beginning.
Today’s gospel is the clearest statement. Jesus begins by directly addressing those who were convinced of their own righteousness.
St Luke has however prepared his way carefully. In the previous chapter, which we read several weeks ago, Jesus told the leaders of the church that they had not the faith of the tiniest seed because they thought that they deserved to be rewarded. Not to coin a phrase “quid pro quo”. They accepted a strict moral code and expected God to reward them. Transactional religion.
They are literally self- righteous. They defined the terms and extent of their relationship with God. There were many groups which would have considered themselves holy and found others profane but for literary convenience Luke pairs off Pharisees with Tax collectors. On the surface the Pharisees were the most observant Jews and the Tax collectors, even if not ostentatiously crooked, were completely indebted to Rome the occupying power. The Pharisees believed they became righteous because of their obedience to the law and needed God only to keep score, a tax collector would never have been able to persuade himself of that.
As Jesus said: When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’” (Lk 17:10)
Jesus was often in conflict with the Pharisees and this was usually at a meal. Meals are a sign and means of building community. Who you eat with and under what terms will reveal what is your community.The Pharisees showed their skepticism about Jesus from the very beginning of the Gospel. That he welcomed sinners and dined with them was a constant complaint from them (Luke 15:1) They could not conceive of a community with such people and Jesus could not conceive of one without them.
The Pharisees dreamed of the messianic banquet when the messiah would bring all people like themselves together to feast in the presence of their enemies: basically, anyone who was not one of them. Yet Jesus will tell those who believe that they can be a part of the banquet by their own efforts or more directly for being part of the right group that they will be cast out and that ”people will come from the east and the west and from the north and the south and will recline at table in the kingdom of God.” (Lk 13:29).
For Luke and other writers of scripture how people behaved at meals reveal if they built up or tore down the community of the church. When Luke spoke of the great banquet, he noted that everyone fought for the best seats. This is inherently destructive, and he calls them to task with: “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Lk 14:11
Mercy both humbles and exalts everyone and that is profoundly disturbing. The most ancient word for mercy is “rechem“,It is the plural of womb. It is also the word in Aramaic for mercy, the language Jesus spoke daily. A love that is based on the womb shows intimate physical and familial relationships. To even think of difference of degree is ridiculouswhenwe are all brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Mercy for people of our time and place usually means that someone who has done something wrong is forgiven by a superior andis thus a matter of choice. A modern judge may show mercy to a criminal if he or she finds him worthy of forgiveness but does not have to. Any mother will show mercy because she is a mother and it is her son or daughter. Mercy is shown in a community when each seeks the good of the other which usually includes forgiveness but is not exhausted by it. The social climbers who all the gospel writers satirize would have to change their lives completely.
That everyone who exaltshimself will be humbled but he who humbles himself will be exalted appears again in this week’s gospel in the context of prayer.
Luke has a profound if disconcerting insight here and expresses it very skillfully.
Pharisee means “separated one”and this man proves it. He first separates himself from God: “he spoke this prayer to himself” Then he separates himself from other people “I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous—or even like this tax collector”(Lk 18:11).For him to accept mercy –womb love, love that breaks boundaries and walls – would require him to change the way he approached not only other people but God himself. This we can plainly see is unlikely for him, what about us.
As always in Luke we are asked to look at Our Blessed Lady for the model. In the Magnificat she sings:
His mercy is from age to age
to those who fear him.
51 He has shown might with his arm,
dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart (Lk 1:50–51).
His mercy is real and is experienced by those who seek power and position as destructive. The next line is:
He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones
but lifted up the lowly.(Lk 1:52).
Mercy as womb love should be feared but we should be like the tax collector today and seek it and pray, that like Mary, we will be embrace it.
There is however one more step and it is a difficult one. One of the beatitudes in Luke is:
Be merciful as your Father is merciful(Lk 6:36)
Those who receive mercy are meant to show it as well. Bring it to the world around them. So much of the world we see is the product of the merciless. Its power is all around us, but we are assured that mercy is of God and more powerful than anything the world can produce. Be powerful, set the world aright, be merciful.
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