Meekness as power

          Thank you to all who continue to read these and thanks be to God who inspires and provides for any good that is contained within them.  I'm posting this even before I preach it this week because I am leaving for retreat immediately after Masses this Sunday.  Please pray for me!  Know of my prayers for you.

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Homily: 7^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A

          In today’s First Reading we’re reminded of God’s command that we must strive to be holy as he is holy and that an essential characteristic of holiness is a heart that does not harbor anger within it.

          The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines anger as “An emotion which is not in itself wrong, but which, when it is not controlled by reason or hardens into resentment and hate, becomes one of the seven capital sins.”  Now each of the seven capital sins is a mortal sin; and a mortal sin is a sin that definitively severs our bond with God; and severing our bond with God is like a space station astronaut who goes out for a spacewalk and then cuts off his tether from the station: it is an act that means certain death.  Anger, therefore, that hardens into resentment and hate, not only hurts the person who is the object of our resentment and hate, but it also means certain spiritual death for us.  In other words, it’s a situation in which everyone loses.  Meekness, however, is a powerful remedy for the negative effects of anger.

          Although it is often portrayed as a weakness, meekness is actually a very powerful characteristic to possess.  This is because it involves a very virtuous effort not to strike, or even to dislike, the one who’s struck you, and effort that requires a very powerful discipline over the will.  We all know that true power is to be in control of powerful forces.  Since the human will is a powerful force that can bring great flourishing of life as well as widespread destruction and death, to have great discipline over one’s will is to have great power.  On the contrary, to be able to be provoked into action is actually to give your power to someone else.  Thus meekness, the virtue to resist provocation to resentment and hatred, is not a weakness, but rather a strength.  Genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza is a great example of the power of meekness.

          Immaculee was born in a small village in Rwanda, Africa. In 1994, when she was home on spring break, the president of Rwanda, who was of the Hutu tribe, was assassinated.  The Hutus assumed that it was a member of Tutsi tribe who had committed the crime and, in a vengeful fit of anger, took up arms against the Tutsis, to which Immaculée’s family belonged.  This response was widespread and armed Hutu men went from house to house, killing every Tutsi they found.

          Immaculée fled to the local pastor’s house; and, to avoid being murdered, she had to hide in a 3-foot x 4-foot bathroom for 91 days with seven other women.  As she endured this, she felt anger and resentment beginning to destroy her heart and so she started praying the rosary.  “I said the Lord's Prayer hundreds of times, hoping to forgive the killers who were murdering all around me”, she wrote.  “It was no use: every time I got to the part asking God to ‘forgive those who trespass against us,’ my mouth went dry. I couldn't say the words because I didn't truly embrace the feeling behind them. My inability to forgive”, she wrote, “caused me even greater pain than the anguish I felt in being separated from my family, and it was worse than the physical torment of being constantly hunted.”  When she finally left that bathroom, she learned that all her family, with the exception of one brother studying abroad, had been murdered. In total, one million people had been massacred.

          After the genocide, Immaculée was led to the man, now in prison, who had murdered her mother and her brother.  This man had been one of her neighbors and the prison staff was prepared to kill him on her behalf.  She remembered how often she had imagined killing the Hutus who had done so much evil while she hid in that bathroom.  Despite all that she had suffered, however, when confronted with her family’s murderer, she simply said, “I forgive you,” and walked away.  Through her prayer she developed the virtue of meekness, in which she found the power to overcome her anger and resentment (and thus to preserve God’s grace within her) while demonstrating the power of God’s merciful love to someone who desperately needed to encounter it.

          When it comes to meekness, however, it is truly Our Lord who has set the standard for us.  Time and again in the Old Testament, God’s loving kindness was rejected by the Israelite people.  At times, he corrected them by letting them suffer—like when the serpents attacked them in the desert or when he allowed them to be driven into exile by the Babylonians—but he never allowed his anger to turn into resentment and hatred, thus demonstrating his superior power.

          Then, when God took on human skin and walked among us, he suffered an equal number of insults, yet remained meek: not allowing the anger he most assuredly felt to seep into his heart and lead him to hatred.  Rather, in his meekness, he was led to the crucifixion—a perfectly innocent man, murdered because of our hatred—and thus demonstrated the power of being meek: for by allowing himself to be murdered—even though it was in his power to avoid it—he accomplished what no man (or even mankind as a whole) could have ever accomplished on his own: the redemption of mankind from sin.

          And so Jesus, knowing well the command that he himself gave to Moses that the people must strive to be holy as he is holy, teaches his disciples that, in order for their righteousness to exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, they must live meekness in its fullness and forgive, even when they have suffered injustice, submitting themselves to even greater injustices.  And why?  Because he wants a Church full of wimps who can’t defend themselves?  No!  Of course not!  Rather, he teaches us to “turn the other cheek” because he knows that, in doing so, we will keep anger (righteous as it may be) from seeping into our hearts and, thus, turning into hatred, which not only separates us from one another, but which also separates us from God and his saving grace.

          My brothers and sisters, in today’s on-edge, thin-skinned, and irritable society, the command to “turn the other cheek” is a tall order and it’s not something that we can accomplish overnight.  But it is something that we can accomplish; and we can begin today.  The best way that I have found to accomplish it is to contemplate Christ crucified whenever anger strikes.  None of us have been mistreated as badly as he was.  And so, when we contemplate how he was able not only to bear those injustices, but also to forgive those who hurt him, we begin to see that it is possible for us to overcome our anger before it becomes resentment and hatred; and, thus, to choose the path of grace: the path by which we become perfect, just as our heavenly Father is perfect.

          As we not only contemplate, but also encounter the great sacrifice of Christ here at this altar, let us ask for the grace to be meek, as our Lord is meek, so that our holiness might increase and become a light of hope that draws all those around us to be united with us in God’s heavenly kingdom.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – February 19^th, 2017

A time of mercy

Homily: 24^th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C

          Yesterday, I celebrated a wedding for a young couple from our parish.  On Friday evening the couple invited me to the dinner after the rehearsal.  After the dinner the groom’s father sat down next to me and wanted to talk.  He’s not Catholic and he recently had a similar conversation with his Lutheran pastor (whom he surmised was similar in age to me), and so he wanted to take the opportunity to get my opinion on the same question.

          It was a very earnest question: “Taking a look at everything that is going on in the world, is there any hope,” he asked, “or have we already lost the world?”  My first answer, of course, was “Yes, of course there is hope!  God hasn’t changed.  He is still the all-powerful Lord of the universe.  And nothing has changed about Jesus, his Son, who saved us from sin and death by his own death and resurrection.”  To this he nodded in agreement as if he already knew the answer.  Thus, it was the second part of that question to which he seemed to need an answer.  “Doesn’t it seem as if we have lost the world to the forces of darkness and evil?”  To this, I tried to be a little more nuanced.

          I wondered, perhaps, if he was worried about the final judgment and about being caught up in the final unleashing of God’s wrath on the human race because of its increasing disregard for his commandments.  I tried to assure him that his feelings were a sign that this is a time of action: a time when people of faith must be intentional about sharing the Good News of Jesus in both word and in action.  I assured him that now is a time of mercy, but only if we take action.

          It’s true, isn’t it, that God’s anger should be blazing against us because of rampant sin in our world, especially by those who call themselves “Christians”?  We’ve offended him, time and again.  But look around; it doesn’t seem like anything resembling God’s anger is working around us, does it?  Rather, what we’ve been given is a time of mercy, instead.  Our scriptures today reveal to us that this has been God’s pattern from the beginning.

          In the first reading, we hear about Moses, acting as a type of Christ, who intercedes before God on behalf of the Israelite people to turn away God’s anger from them.  The people have fashioned an idol which they have been worshiping: an offense so grave that God wants to put them to death immediately.  Moses, resisting the offer from God to have a nation of people made for himself, invokes the promises that God made to the people’s righteous forefathers, saying, in effect, “Although these people don’t deserve your mercy, please give it to them for the sake of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.”  To this God relents and bestows his mercy on the people who deserved his righteous judgment.

          In the second reading, we heard Saint Paul who wrote of his gratitude that he had been “considered trustworthy” to be a minister of the Gospel.  He acknowledged that, because of his actions as a persecutor of Christians, he deserved the full wrath of God; but that he had been “mercifully treated” by God; and not for his benefit alone, but rather for the benefit of the Gospel: that, in treating Paul mercifully, God would prove that no sin is too big for his mercy.

          Then, in the Gospel, we heard three parables that Jesus used to illustrate how extensive God’s mercy is towards us.  In them, Jesus teaches us that God refuses to let us be lost.  The shepherd, who risks his own life (and the life of the ninety-nine sheep who didn’t stray) in order to find the one sheep who was lost, and the woman, who turns over her whole house to find the one coin even though she had nine others, are illustrations of how God doggedly pursues any of us who have turned away from him.  The father who daily waits with anxious anticipation for his prodigal son to return home, and who receives him with joy and celebration when he does, is an illustration of God’s “prodigal” willingness to ignore our past when we turn away from it and back towards him so that we might not be lost forever to darkness, but rather live forever with him in the light of grace.

          But it is not just the scriptures that confirm that this is a time of mercy from God.  Rather, there have been many events in the last century that demonstrate this as well.  The apparitions of Mary at Fatima in Portugal in which she called the world to repentance and acts of reparation for sins so as to avert tragedies that were to come.  The mystical revelations of Jesus to Sr. Faustina Kowalska in Poland in which he gave her the task to foster a renewed devotion to Divine Mercy.  The election of Pope John Paul II, which made it possible for St. Faustina’s message to be spread throughout the world.  And now, this Jubilee Year of Mercy, which calls us both to open ourselves to an experience of God’s mercy and to share God’s mercy with those around us.  All of these (and more) point to this time as being our chance (perhaps our last chance) to repent and to plead for God’s mercy before God’s final judgment takes place.

          The events of September 11th, 2001, which we also remember today, are a sign that the time of mercy is now: because when violence like this increases in our world, so the need to proclaim God’s mercy to the world increases as well.  As we remember these tragic events, let us not allow them to remain in the realm of lamentation.  Rather, let us use them to remind us of our need to act: first to convert ourselves so that we are not objects of the just judgment of God, and then to go out and to call others to conversion and thus transform the world.

          My brothers and sisters, our world has gone far astray from God, but it is never too late to return.  This is because God's mercies are not exhausted; rather, they are renewed every morning.  Particularly here, on this altar of sacrifice, God's mercies are renewed as Jesus becomes truly present to us.  With confidence, then, let us approach this throne of grace and receive God's mercy: Jesus, our Savior.  Then, let us go forth from here to be instruments of God's mercy, that the day of judgment might be a day of joy in which we all will be united with God our Father forever.

Given at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN – September 11^th, 2016