This is the Day

It happened early in the morning on the first day of the week [John 20:1].

Every morning is, in a sense, a new beginning, a chance to start over, In the normal course of events, however, the Sabbath day of rest would have been followed in the morning on the first day of the week by business as usual – both for the living, who would go back to their regular daily work, and even more so for the dead, decaying in their graves, who (then as snow) were expected to stay dead. Presumably, those who went to visit Jesus’ tomb early in the morning on the first day of the week also shared those same general expectations. John’s Gospel mentions Mary Magdalene only and just says that she came to the tomb early in the morning. The other Gospel writers, however, tell us that Mary was accompanied other women, and that their purpose in visiting the tomb was to anoint Jesus’ body. However many they were and whatever they expected to do, it seems safe to suggest that their expectations that morning were well within the range of the normal.

Instead, however, they found something surprising and unexpected. For this morning, this 1^st day of the week, this Super-Sunday, the world awakens not to business as usual, but to something totally new – to, of all the things that God has ever done, the greatest of them all. And so we say today: This is the day the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and be glad! [Psalm 118:24]

Jesus’ resurrection was a historical event of the most monumental importance – more important even than our travelling roadshow of presidential primaries – the most important event in all of human history. And yet, however hard it may be for us to imagine (in this age of omnipresent media and the 24-hour news cycle), the resurrection was hardly even noticed at first. It is the resurrection’s long-term effects which we actually experience and which bring us here today – as Jesus’ body that lived and died and still forever bears the marks of his passion emerges from the tomb to transform our world, starting right here and now with us.

Even so, as we just heard, the first few to be made aware of this momentous news left the empty tomb more confused than elated: For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead [John 20:9..

Nor would we, if that were all we had of the story.

In a world which seems permanently stuck in the dark, pre-dawn position, where death always seems to have the final say, the disciples needed to experience the kind of change that could only come from the Risen Lord’s living presence among them. And so do we, which is why we are here, where the Risen Lord brings us together as no one else can.

So, instead of the 1^st day of the week condemning the world back to business as usual, this 1^st day after the Sabbath is starting something new – not just a new week, but a new world, where death no longer has the final say. And we are here, in this holy place today, because God did not stop for good on the 7^th day, because there is now a new day, on which God has, so to speak, re-created the world in his Son, Jesus Christ, crucified, dead, and buried, but now risen from the dead. That new day is today – and every day from now on, until we too will appear with him in glory [Colossians 3:4].

That is why we have to come back, Sunday after Sunday, to be filled in on what happened next and thus experience the effects of the resurrection ourselves. Like the disciples in the Gospel, some of us run fast. Others, beset perhaps by doubts or daily difficulties, run much more slowly. What matters most, however, is where we finally end up. So whether we are runners or walkers, we must accompany the disciples to the tomb, which in a business-as-usual world would have remained dark, but from which the stone has been removed – so we can see and believe.

Easter invites us put ourselves in the position of the disciples – and allow ourselves to experience something wonderfully and completely new in a world which seems so ordinary and old. Easter invites us to start living in the present that new and different future to which the Risen Lord is leading us.

Homily for Easter Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 8, 2012.

This Is the Night

This is the night, when once you led our forefathers, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.

So sang our deacon a short while ago in the stirring words of the ancient Praeconium Paschale, more commonly called the Exsultet (its opening word in the Latin original). As a deacon myself back in 1987, I prepared myself to sing the Exsultet by listening to a recording of it every day of Lent, listening and repeating it until I somehow had every note and every up-and-down of the melody memorized so as to fulfill that challenging chore to – as the celebrant says to the deacon when blessing him beforehand – proclaim his paschal praise worthily and well.

Both in its antiquity and in its solemnity, the Exsultet testifies in sublimely beautiful language to the specialness of this sacred night, the Passover feast - the night when once God led our forefathers, Israel’s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them pass dry-shod through the Red Sea – fulfilled for all and forever in this night when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld.

In the centuries-old ritual for the Passover seder, it is said that “in every generation” every person should view him or herself as having personally come out of Egypt. Passover isn’t just some historical anniversary. It is something that happens in the lives of God’s People here and now. And so this Passover feast of the Church, as the Exsultet tells us, is the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones.

And so, in times past, the faithful of Rome assembled at nightfall at the Basilica of St. John in the Lateran, the Mother Church of both the City and the world, for an all-night vigil, while next-door in the Baptistery the newest members of the Church, solemnly renouncing Satan and all his works and empty show, passed through the saving waters of baptism, an experience meant to be every bit as transformative for them as passing through the Red Sea was for the Israelites. The Exsultet expresses how they undoubtedly would have experienced their emergence from that Baptistery in the dawning light of Easter morning: The night shall be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness.

And so it must be for all of us. Whether we are being baptized or confirmed tonight or were baptized and confirmed many decades ago. As at a seder, so on this most holy Passover night, we must each of us experience coming out of Egypt. As the Church, on this most holy Easter night, we must each of us experience Christ breaking the prison-bars of death and rising victorious from the underworld. As his Church, on this most holy Easter night, we must each of us solemnly renounce Satan and all his works and empty show. Then, indeed, this night shall be as bright as day, dazzling and full of gladness.

Homily for the Easter Vigil, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 7, 2012

Rigorism or Laxism?

"Is the alternative in pastoral ministry rigorism or laxism? Everything goes - or nothing goes?"

That was how Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn framed the question in his Chrism Mass homily in vienna's historic St. Stephen's Cathedral this past Monday. Lest he be thought - eminent scholar that he is - to be speaking about the challenges of pastoral ministry in an abstract way detached from those neuralgic situations we increasingly encounter in Western societies, situations in which "the order of creation and its binding interpretation by Jesus himself" seem increasingly incomprehensible to more and more people in a world which seems to suffer from a "lack of awareness of the need for salvation," Schoenborn specifically cites three such situations in his homily.

Anyone actively involved in pastoring readi;y recognizes the reality to which Vienna's aristocratic Archbishop refers. Where some respond with rigorism, others appear dangerously lax. At a Chrism Mass, a bishop gets to speak directly to his priests. So the Cardinal pointedly asked: "Are we ourselves, the shepherds, or in other words, is everyone of us convinced that this Biblical perspective is the true perspective, not some distant, abstract ideal but something magnificent, life-affirming, life-giving? If we ourselves regard all of this as an illusion, then we can't help others to 'come to know the truth'."

(It was just this challenge that motivated my 2005 study project at St. George's House, Windsor Castle. Building on an idea from a contemporary Jesuit moral theologian [James T. Bretzke, A Morally complex World: engaging Contemporary Moral Theology, The Liturgical Press, 2004], I considered the increasingly widespread contemporary reality of a kind of "cultural invincible ignorance" to examine what range of responses might be beneficial in such circumstances).

Cardinal Shoenborn's homily deserves to be read in full. It can be found in English at:

http://www.erzdioezese-wien.at/edw/erzbischof/predigten/0/articles/2012/04/05/

It should be read together with yesterday's beautiful Chrism Mass homily given by the Holy Father (Schoenborn's former Professor), speaking to some 1600 priests concelebrating with him in St. Peter's Basilica:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20120405_messa-crismale_en.html

I've attended numerous Chrism Masses over the years and heard and read lots of homilies composed for that occasion. these two are undoubtedly among the very best - a fitting introduction to the upcoming "Year of Faith."

At the Lord's Supper

This day we popularly call Holy Thursday uniquely straddles the border between Lent and Easter. Already in the 4^th century, Pope St. Sylvester I is supposed to have said: “On this day the sacrifice of the sacred Body and Blood of the Lord was initiated as a celebration by the Lord himself. On this day the holy chrism is consecrated throughout the world; on this day too pardon is granted to penitents, those at enmity are reconciled, those who are aggrieved are pacified.”

These three themes have historically characterized this day – with different emphases at different times. In the ancient Roman titular churches, the reconciliation of those doing public penance took place at an end-of-Lent morning Mass, while the institution of the Lord’s Supper was recalled at another Mass in the late afternoon. In between, the priests from all the titular churches assembled for a single mid-day Mass at the Lateran Basilica at which the Pope consecrated the sacred chrism and blessed the other holy oils.

The elaborate ancient ritual for the Reconciliation of Public Penitents continued to be printed in the liturgical books up until the 1960s, even though it hadn’t been used in that form for over 1000 years. The blessing of the oils has continued uninterrupted to this very day, although the special Mass for that was only revived in the 1950s, at the same time that the Mass of the Lord’s Supper was moved to its present evening hour.

Yet, while all these ceremonies have evolved and been changed over time, those three basic elements so long connected with this day remain still very much at the heart of our Easter experience – this year and every year – and they all come together in the Eucharist we celebrate at this altar. For tonight, we don’t just remember the Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, as some interesting thing that happened in a faraway place a long time ago. Rather we remember and celebrate the how Jesus’ special Last Supper continues now in his Church as the Lord’s Supper.

St. Paul’s letters are among the oldest New Testament writings, and so his 1^st letter to the Corinthians, from which we just heard, was the earliest written account of Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples on the day before the Passover holiday. It’s safe to suggest that none of those disciples, as they sat down to supper, suspected that by the time Passover began, some 24 hours later, Jesus would be dead, and buried in a stranger’s tomb, and that they would all be in hiding. Certainly, none of them yet realized how this otherwise ordinary meal would be dramatically transformed by Jesus’ own words and actions into the Church’s central sacrament - as, offering his body and blood to his Father, Jesus would give them to his Apostles to eat and drink, and then direct them and their successors in the priesthood to offer them in turn.

The New Testament tells us how, from the very beginning, Christian communities devoted themselves to the breaking of bread and prayers [Acts 2:42]. As the Church grew in size and expanded in influence, the Church’s worship, centered on the regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper as Christ’s priestly sacrifice of reconciliation, would in time transform first the Roman empire and then the ever wider world – as it must still continue to transform each and every one of us, caught up in the priestly embrace of Christ’s reconciling sacrifice.

For Christ himself is the Anointed One to whom those blessed oils point us. He is - in the words of a famous 6^th-century African Bishop [St. Fulgentius of Ruspe] - “the priest through whom we have been reconciled, the sacrifice by which we have been reconciled, the temple in which we have been reconciled, the God with whom we have been reconciled. He alone is priest, sacrifice, and temple because he is all these things as God in the form of a servant.”

So it is only fitting that we begin the first day of our Easter celebration, the day on which we commemorate Christ’s passion and death, in this supremely priestly act of reconciliation, this Eucharistic sacrifice which sums up in itself what Christ’s death and resurrection are about and everything the Church is about.

By giving his body to be eaten and his blood to be drunk, Jesus expressed the deepest truth about what he would do on the Cross. The Eucharist we celebrate tonight – and all year long - makes really present that very same body once offered on the Cross, then buried in the tomb, and now risen from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father. The mystery of the Eucharist, which proclaims the death and resurrection of the Lord until he comes again, is at the very heart of the Church’s life. It is, as we say, the sacrament that makes the Church.

In the vestibule of our church is a photograph taken last Fall at the celebration of our parish church’s 125^th anniversary. When I look at that picture, side-by-side with the earlier one which was taken 125 years previously, I think of all the wonderful church activity that has gone on in this beautiful building and all the wonderful church life that, like the crowd in that picture, has spilled out from this building, beginning at this altar.

Our life together as Christ’s Body, the Church, centered on the sacraments we celebrate here is a great inheritance – an inheritance which goes all the way back to that famous Last Supper, which we have received from the apostles, passed on to us through countless generations of people like us. Whether amid the splendor of a papal basilica or in the simplicity of a missionary outpost, whether with the Bishop in his cathedral or with friends and neighbors in a local parish church, this same Lord’s Supper has been celebrated generation after generation and treasured by every generation as its precious inheritance. As Pope Benedict has recently reminded us, however, during his visit last year to San Marino, “the best way to appreciate an inheritance is to cultivate and enrich it.”

As we do that, then who we are becoming here around this altar will overflow from this building and fill our world, as that congregation last autumn spilled out of this church and filled up that photo.

Homily for the Mass of the Lord's Supper, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 5, 2012

The Last Word

19 years ago this coming June, on what was my second day in Israel, my former novice director took me to a village in Samaria for the 1^st Mass of a newly ordained local priest. We all gathered at the village boundary around an arch of palm branches and balloons and waited there for the new priest’s entry into his hometown. As the procession began and all the villagers started shouting and waving palms in the air, my former novice director smiled and said: now you see what Palm Sunday looked like!

The Gospel [Mark 11:1-10] read before the Procession a short while ago tells us about Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem for the Passover holiday and his truly triumphal entry – minus the balloons but full of messianic symbolism – into the Holy City. The rest of the story, which we have just heard, [Mark 14, 15] reveals the next phase of that journey – to the cross and to the tomb.

The cross stands as the central symbol of Christianity because the cross is precisely where we meet God in our world, just as the tomb – the eventually empty tomb – shows where he is taking us, where we now watch and wait with Mary Magdalene and the other disciples.

Meeting Christ on the cross we somehow sense a new connection with God that we would hardly have felt if he himself had not done what we all have to do – and are all so afraid to do – die.

Jesus is God’s way of participating in our human world, God’s great act of solidarity with us in our day-to-day suffering and our final mortality.

In his Passion, Jesus confronted the power of evil in the world. Having done so, he invites us this week to accompany him to the cross and to the tomb – because, thanks to the cross of Christ, death no longer has the final word in our world.

Homily for Palm Sunday, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, April 1, 2012