"Go and do likewise"

I've often thought there are few things more exasperating than asking a question and not getting a real answer – whether what one gets is no answer at all or an evasive kind of answer or (worst of all) instead of an answer another question throwing it all back at you. So I suspect the lawyer in today’s Gospel [Luke 10:25-37] may well have been very exasperated indeed!

After all, the question he’d asked was a perfectly legitimate one to ask of a religious authority figure: Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus, however, had answered him with a question of his own, putting all the onus back on him: What is written in the law? How do you read it?

Now the lawyer certainly knew his subject. Having had the ball thrown back at him, he took it and (as they say) ran with it – and ran rather well, judging from Jesus’ approving reply, You have answered correctly; do this and you will live.

Not a bad answer top get from Jesus anytime!

But, of course, the lawyer had answered correctly because he had been properly taught in the first place. Properly instructed in the Jewish law, he could quote it correctly and well. But the Gospel says he wished to justify himself, and so he demanded further clarification. The law says to love my neighbor as myself. OK then, exactly who is my neighbor.

This time, Jesus replied at length, but with a story, a parable, the one we call the “Parable of the Good Samaritan.”

At this distance of some 2000 years almost, we’ve all heard it so many times, that we already know the story. So we are not surprised when a Samaritan appears as the good guy in the story. So we call it the “Parable of the Good Samaritan,” conveniently forgetting or ignoring what a complete contradiction in terms a “Good Samaritan” would have seemed to Jesus’s audience.

Of course, our only experience of Samaritans is this parable and others like it. We haven’t experienced the way the lawyer and the rest of Jesus’s audience would have experienced them – as permanent ethnic and religious enemies (something like the way Sunnis and Shiites see each other today).

And so we miss the surprise in the story – and so miss the parable’s point, its invitation to think about things in a very new way.

And, as the title we give it suggests, we also see the story from the Samaritan’s perspective – forgetting that Jesus’ hearers would not have known in advance who the hero was going to be and would have heard the story from the victim’s perspective.

Let’s remember the point at issue. It’s a discussion about the law, the Old Testament law of love for God and neighbor. Jesus never answered the lawyer’s original question. He let the lawyer himself do that. We don’t need Jesus to quote the Bible to us. We can do that ourselves. But we do need Jesus to make the commandments come alive in our world – to tell us who is our neighbor.

The problem is that, like the lawyer, when we ask that question, we mean “To whom am I obligated in some way?” The ordinary logic of our ordinary world asks: “Is this man left on the road my neighbor? Do I have to help him? Is that something he’s owed – by me? In other words, what is the moral minimum that I as a conscientious person am obliged to do?

But, if you look at it from a different angle, if you look at it from the perspective of the man left on the road, then your question will be a very different one. Jesus has subtly shifted the focus from neighbor as an object of obligation, someone to whom something may be owed, if perhaps grudgingly, to neighbor as someone who acts on your behalf, someone who intervenes and saves, someone who comes close enough to touch me and become my friend.

As everyone listening would have understood, in an ordinary world both the priest and the Levite had legitimate reasons to pass by and stay on the opposite side. To do their jobs,  they had to be ritually pure, which precluded contact with corpses ( a real danger since the victim, we’re told, was left half-dead). The Samaritan, however, was already impure – just by being a Samaritan. So he had nothing to lose by touching the wounded man – nothing, that is, except his right to remain free and aloof.

But the point of the parable, of course, is that he did not remain free and aloof! The stranger became a neighbor!

Jesus’ parable portrays otherwise ordinary people in an otherwise ordinary world – in which nothing is ordinary anymore. It gives us a glimpse of how God acts – as seen in the actions of Jesus. The question for us is whether we want to be part of that new world.

To ask, as the lawyer did, what my minimum obligation is to another presumes we see ourselves as free individuals for whom the connections involved in community with others are a burdensome obligation to be kept to a minimum. That is the logic of our ordinary world – very much so in our contemporary world in which social networks and community connections are increasingly damaged and in decline. It was to counter that logic that this past Monday Pope Francis made his first pastoral visit outside of Rome, a pastoral visit of great symbolic and social significance to a Mediterranean island which serves as one of the primary European entry points for immigrants from North Africa, a site associated with the sorts of human tragedies that often threaten immigrants, where hundreds of migrants have drowned or gone missing in this past year alone. Celebrating Mass there on an altar built from an old fishing boat, the Pope lamented: "We have become used to other people's suffering, it doesn't concern us, it doesn't interest us, it's none of our business!"

Such is the moral logic of our ordinary world.

But the God who is no longer a stranger, because he has made himself our neighbor in Jesus, has given us – in Jesus – a glimpse of God’s logic in God’s kingdom.

And so, says Jesus, finally answering the question: Go and do likewise.

 

Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, July 14, 2013.

Utopia Reconsidered

Last week on July 6, there came and went the anniversary of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas More (1478-1535) . His stalwart defense of the papal primacy and the indissolubility of marriage are what made More a saint and what he may be most remembered for now. But before his martyrdom in his own lifetime, he was widely known in Europe as a scholar and the author, most famously, of Utopia - a title which has since given its name to a whole genre of literature.

Now few things could be more obvious about Utopia than its central and animating symbol - poverty.Every 10 years, the Utopians change houses by lot, but without any of the economic profit usually attached to selling one's house in our even more mobile society. Everyone on the island wears the same style of clothing - rough work clothes made with long-term durability in mind and a cloak the color of natural wool - and each household produces its own clothes. Possession of precious metals provide no tangible economic benefits. And the Utopians are attracted to Christianity because of Jesus' attitude toward possessions and because of the practices in regard to possessions traditionally associated with those considered the truest Christians.

Of course, there is a considerable difference between the poverty of the Utopians and the degrading poverty experienced by so many poor people in the real world. Indeed, Utopia itself may have been a protest against the economic plight of many in Renaissance England. Thus, R.W. Chambers, author of a prize-winning More biography (Thomas More, 1936), saw in Utopia a protest against economic and political emancipation from medieval tradition and an appeal to the king "To turn a deaf ear to the counsellors who would make him all-powerful" and to the landlords not to subject their tenants "to economic progress and the law of supply and demand in the wool market" (p. 131).

Of course, that early modern process of economic liberalization was a prerequisite for the development of our modern free-market, capitalist model. The specific issue so troubling to More in his time was the increasing enclosure of once common land. In The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958), Hannah Arendt called attention to the irony that the enormous accumulation of wealth in a society supposedly based on the sanctity of property had its inception in the expropriation of the peasants.

In the ancient world, Plato had organized his philosophy around the symbol of knowledge as an alternative to opinion, the Socratic symbol for the inadequate basis for conventional politics. Similarly, Saint Thomas More's early modern utopian construct was structured around the symbol of poverty, which he put in place of greed, the capital sin which would serve as the engine for modern free-market economics.

A  essential feature of More's Utopia is that his imaginary Utopians were not in actual want - however hard their workaday lives and however simple its material rewards. They suffered no noticeable lack of genuine necessities. They were, however, relatively poor in comparison with what might have been the case had they focused completely on developing their full productive capacities, in other words, if the production and accumulation of abundance animated their institutional philosophy instead of poverty.

More had no animus against work and productivity per se. Yet the symbolism of the six-hour work-day was obvious.

It seems Saint Thomas More took to heart the widespread human experience that abundance for some entails misery for many and spiritual scarcity for all.

Saint John XXIII

It was announced last week that final approval has been given to the canonization cause of Blessed Pope John XXIII (1881-1963), and that we can expect to celebrate Pope John's canonization sometime before the end of this year (along with that of one of his more recent successors Blessed Pope John Paul II). 

The pace of Pope John's cause may perhaps seem somewhat slow in comparison with that of John Paul II and some other modern-era celebrity superstars like Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, but it is they who are the exceptions. In fact, in comparison with most causes, 50 years may seem a rather short interval between death and canonization. 

Even more surprising than the relatively rapid pace of John's cause, however, is the fact that the Holy Father has dispensed with the requirement for a further post-beatification miracle in John's case. Even that, however, is not completely unprecedented even in this modern era. If I recall correctly, the first native-born US saint, Elizabeth Seton (1774-1821) was canonized in 1975 with only three miracles to her credit - two for her beatification, but only one for her canonization (at a time when two were still routinely required). 

Miracles serve as a kind of external validation for the widespread popular devotion and reputation for heroic sanctity that cause a person's cause to advance in the first place. Through the recognition of a miracle the Church seeks external evidence that her judgment of a person's sanctity is correct. It is a good reminder that it is God who makes saints not we! And, while it is tempting, especially in the case of a pope, to focus on how he acted on the world stage and left a legacy of historical significance, the confirmation by miracle of a saint's intercession also serves to remind us that sanctity is primarily about the transforming power of God's grace at work in someone more than it is about noteworthy accomplishments during one's lifetime.

That said, I am very happy that John XXIII is set to be canonized. I am old enough to remember his reign on the papal throne and to have read his Journal of a Soul shortly after its publication after his death. His reputation for holiness has remained alive in the Church, in spite of the turbulent times and tragic divisions in the Church which began in the years following his death.

Unlike his more aristocratic predecessors, John was of humble peasant background. Having entered seminary at an early age, however, he rose rapidly in the Church's ranks, beginning his priestly career as a Bishop's secretary. A Northern Italian and a keen student of history, which he called "the greatest of teachers," he saw in the great 16th-century reforming Council of Trent and  in its implementation by the likes of St. Charles Borromeo (whose heart he went to venerate in preparation for the Second VaticanCouncil) an example to be imitated in response to the challenges facing the global Church of the 20th century. He was a man of very traditional popular piety and pastoral sensitivity, who derived spiritual sustenance from traditional devotional classics like The Imitation of Christ and from the traditional liturgy he inherited and celebrated devoutly every day. He was open to learning from experience - such as his military service in the Royal Italian army as a seminarian conscript and again during World War I, and his diplomatic service among Eastern Orthodox Christians and non-Christians in Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey and among modern secularists in post-World War II France. He enjoyed people and preferred community to solitude (even ending the tradition of popes eating alone). And, in a way that was obviously both very Italian  and very Christ-like, he showed how loved the world he was a part of and how he sought its salvation.

He seemed to love and genuinely enjoy the Baroque grandeur and pomp surrounding the papacy and had no trouble deriving suitable human and spiritual lessons from it. For example, when being carried on the sedia gestatoria for the first time in 1958, he recalled being a child carried on his father’s shoulders and connected that universal human experience with his spiritual mission: “More than seventy years ago I was carried on the shoulders of my father at Ponte San Pietro. The secret of everything is to let oneself be carried by God, and so to carry him to others.”

Lampedusa

Today, Monday, July 8, Pope Francis made his first major pastoral visit outside of Rome - a pastoral vist of great symbolic and social significance to the Italian island of Lampedusa. Lampedusa is one of the Pelagie Islands in the Mediterranean. Governmentally it is a part of Sicily, but geographically it is closer closer to Africa than to Europe. Tourists may know Lampedusa as the site of some of Europe's finest beaches, but Lampedusa is also widely known now as one of the primary European entry points for immigrants from Africa (especially during and after the Libyan civil war). As such, sadly, it has also been associated with the sorts of human tragedies that often threaten immigrants - notably last month's sinking of an overcrowded boat bearing immigrants from Africa and the death of some eight of them. According to the UN, some 500 migrants were reported as dead or missing in 2012, and some 40 more are known to have died crossing from Tunisia to Italy this year.The Sant’Egidio Community has estimated that 19,000 migrants have died the past 15 years.

The Holy See's statement announcing the visit said that Pope Francis was “deeply touched” by the shipwreck, which it called “the latest in a series of analogous tragedies.” It announced that the Pope proposed “to pray for those who lost their lives at sea, to visit the survivors and refugees present, to encourage the residents of the island, and to appeal to everyone’s responsibility to take care of these brothers and sisters in extreme need.”

At Lampedusa, the Pope boarded one of the Coast Guard vessels used to rescue migrants in order to toss a wreath into the water in memory of those who died. He then returned to the island to meet with refugees and to celebrate Mass on an altar built from an old fishing boat and painted in Italy's national colors. In his homily during the Mass, the Pope said: "We have become used to other people's suffering, it doesn't concern us, it doesn't interest us, it's none of our business!"

That is obviously an important message at any time - but especially in this era when economic policies and ideologies are everywhere dramatically damaging traditional social structures and community networks and where even in our own affluent society we see a steady increase in economic inequality. It's an especially important message in the United States right now when sensible and humane immigration reform is being considered in Congress for the first time in years.

The Kingdom is at Hand

Exactly 155 years ago today, on July 7, 1858, Father Isaac Hecker and three other priests founded  the “Society of Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle,” known ever since as “The Paulist Fathers”– the first men’s religious community founded in the United States.  Three days later, the Archbishop of New York assigned them the care of a new parish on Manhattan’s west side – placed, like the Paulist Fathers themselves, under the patronage of Saint Paul the Apostle. In addition to serving as Superior of the new missionary community, Father Hecker also became the first pastor of the new parish, which gave him the opportunity immediately to start implementing his vision for the Paulists in a pastoral context.  Hecker’s vision of the mission of The Paulist Fathers was a monumental one – the conversion of America to the truth of the Catholic Faith.  He envisioned his Paulist parish as simultaneously a vibrant Catholic parish reaching out to evangelize locally and a center from which the Paulists would reach out in mission to the entire country.

Jesus’ action in today’s Gospel [Luke 10:1-12, 17-20] in sending the 72 disciples on a kind of practice run for what they would later be doing full-time after his ascension reminds us that evangelizing (as Pope Paul VI expressed it so well) “constitutes the essential mission of the Church” – in every age and in every society, in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries no less than in the 1st, in Hecker's America and today's East Tennessee no less than in the ancient Roman Empire.

Jesus, we are told, sent the 72 in pairs – not as solitary individuals, but in pairs. Ours is a culture which places a lot of emphasis on our private individual lives and freedoms. But the Gospel reminds us that we are not isolated, solitary selves, but a community of faithful people, formed by the Holy Spirit into one Church, the body of the Risen Christ, to continue his mission in every town and place. Jesus commanded his disciples tp make a difference in their world. So, if we really mean what we say we believe, then what we do in our many relationships and multiple commitments – in our families and among friends, at work or at school, in our society and in the wider world – must make a difference and be recognizable as such. Jesus expects us to be on the same side with him – on the side of God’s kingdom. Being on God’s side, having our names written in heaven (as Jesus says), frees us to join Jesus in making a real, recognizable difference in an always challenging, sometimes very welcoming, but also sometimes sadly inhospitable world. It frees us to tell – and retell –the story of Jesus, to speak his word to any and all, so we too can say to this world we love: “The kingdom of God is at hand for you.”

I’ve long been especially fond of this Gospel which was read at my ordination as a priest at the Paulist parish in Toronto, Canada, one of the many places Isaac Hecker’s community has sought to imitate the 72 disciples in the Gospel in  announcing : “The kingdom of God is at hand for you.”

From 1900 through 1954, for example, the Paulists undertook extensive missionary work in Tennessee. And, in 1973, the Paulists came to Knoxville. So summer marks the 40th anniversary of Paulist ministry here at Immaculate Conception University Parish. 

As a result, all of us at Immaculate Conception now share the mission of the Paulist Fathers in the mission of the Church. This includes a commitment to evangelization in all its forms, a mission both within and beyond the parish community to draw people of all ages and backgrounds to Christ and his Church, especially those without faith or without a consistent place of worship, or with fragile or minimal identity or connection with Church, or who have withdrawn from the community of the Church – all of whom need to hear Jesus’ message: “The kingdom of God is at hand for you.”

 

Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate conception Church, Knoxville, TN,

July 7, 2013.