Homily for the Most Holy Trinity

Deuteronomy 4:32-34

Romans 8:14-17

Matthew 28:16-20

The mystery of the Holy Trinity is one that many preachers and many theologians have tried to explain through the centuries, many well-intentioned and fine teachers of the faith have attempted to explain to us this mystery of the nature of God, and when a great many of them attempt to do this, a good number of them of them through the centuries (perhaps the majority) have lapsed into heresy. This is usually because when people try to explain the Trinity, a reality which is the very nature of God himself, they often try to explain in a way that is simple to understand, and they are explaining something that is not to be fully explained on this side of Eternity.

The bishop Arius tried to explain the nature of God by explaining away the Divinity of Christ. He got a wide following, too. Indeed, so wide was the following that Arius had that years after the Arian controversy, St Jerome commented that "the whole world groaned, waking up one morning to find itself Arian." It took the persistence of Saint Athanasius, who actually held the minority view in those days that our Lord Jesus is one in being with the Father, to ensure that the orthodox position as we know it today remained the teaching of the Church. 

Nestorius, who was the Patriarch of Constantinople, attempted to explain the complex nature of God in the person of Christ by trying to say that Christ had two persons, one human and one divine. Of course the Church holds that Christ is the second person of the Trinity and that he is both human and divine, and that he is only one person, and The Trinity is made up of three persons with one divine nature.

A lot of people know the old story that Saint Patrick evangelized the people of Ireland by explaining the Trinity with a shamrock. Truth be told, that's kind of an apocryphal story. We don't know if Saint Patrick used a shamrock to explain the Trinity, but the story became so widely circulated and accepted that the shamrock became one of the national symbols of Ireland, and one of the best known Christian symbols of the Trinity. We have to be careful, however, when using the shamrock or any other such symbol to try and explain the Trinity because very often people lapse into another heresy called sabelianism or "modalism" when they do so. This is the idea, widely circulated even in some Protestant sects today, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are merely three modes or aspects of the Divine Revelation, rather than three distinct persons which coexist in the Divine Nature.

An Arabian tribesman called Muhammed in the 7th century couldn't explain this critical understanding of God's nature at a time when much of the known world had become Christian. His solution was to reject this teaching, to deny that Christ was divine or even that Christ was sacrificed for our sins, but merely to say that Jesus was the greatest of all the prophets… until Muhammad came along, of course. A lot of people followed Muhammad's teaching, many of them willingly, some of them by force.

All of these attempts to explain- or to explain away- the Trinitarian understanding of God's nature forget the reality that Sacred Scripture is clear… Jesus himself said that the Father and he were one. He told the Pharisees "before Abraham was, I AM." That declaration caused many of the Pharisees to take up stones to stone Jesus, because if he wasn't God, he had just committed blasphemy. 

Jesus used the Divine Name to identify himself. He even did it in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night he was betrayed, this was why the Gospel accounts tell us that the soldiers- members of the Temple guard- who came to arrest Jesus fell back when after asking for Jesus of Nazareth, he replied "I AM." Jesus makes it clear that he is one with the Father, that He is equal to God and He is God, something no mere human could ever say.

The nature of God is unchanging, God says Himself in the Scriptures that "I am the LORD, I change not." (cf. Malachi 3:6) This means that God has always been one Divine Nature, but Three Persons in one Divine Nature. The unchanging nature of God also means that God has always been all merciful, all loving, but also all holy, and all just. If anyone ever tells you that the God of the Old Testament was vengeful and full of wrath but the God of the New Testament is loving and merciful, you should know immediately that that kind of teaching is complete and utter nonsense. God was not any less loving or merciful in the Old Testament. We know this because just as soon as Adam and Eve committed the first sin, God promised them a Savior for the human race (cf. Genesis 3:15), and that meant that immediately God was letting humanity know that even though we had to live with the consequences of our sin, He loves us enough that he will never give up on us as long as this world tarries. 

Conversely, there are lots of people who want to preach the love and compassion of Jesus and the apostles, but they are not interested in the moral pronouncements of Jesus and the apostles because the merciful and loving Jesus was also the perfectly just Jesus. The Jesus who loved us enough to save us and make himself a slave so that we could be free loved us enough not to keep us in our sin. Jesus and his earliest followers gave us a clear picture of the moral life that we are supposed to live as followers of Jesus Christ. This was so important to the earliest followers of Jesus that it was made repeatedly clear that those who did not repent from sin could be and should be cut off from God's people.  Today we call that excommunication… Are we supposed to believe that Jesus and the apostles were unloving people? No, Jesus was the most compassionate person who ever lived and the apostles certainly followed in his footsteps. But God is both merciful and just. 

The Holy Trinity is something that we were not meant to completely understand in this life, but it is a reality because the persons of the Trinity are real, we can really experience them, and they are really God, and really one God. Rather than trying too hard to explain something we will only fully understand when - by God's grace and mercy- we are with God for Eternity, it might do us all well to remember God's Word to the prophet Isaiah, that God's ways are so far above our ways as the Heavens are above the Earth. (cf. Isaiah 55:8-9)

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

 

Acts 9:26-31

1 John 3:18-24

John 15:1-8

Jesus uses the analogy of grapes on a vine to describe the relationship between the believer and Christ, and indeed the believer and Christ's body. Anyone who may grow any kind of fruit on a vine knows that the branches or parts of the vine, if cut off from the vine, will not continue to bear fruit or be part of the vine. The vine may continue to be productive, it may grow new branches that produce new fruit to replace the branches that are cut off.

"A branch cannot bear fruit unless it remains on the vine," Jesus tells us, "neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me." Following Jesus Christ is, for each and every one of us, a choice. It is a choice that we make daily, but increasingly in our society following Jesus Christ is being openly rejected by people, including those who should know better. Several times in the New Testament Jesus uses the agricultural understanding that his listeners would have known in his own time, since he lived in an overwhelmingly agricultural society. Jesus uses this understanding as a way to explain to his listeners and to his followers and to his apostles the reality of Heaven and Hell.

This is the reality that Jesus deals with in the parable of the wheat and the tares (cf. Matthew 13:24-30) and we see it again here in the parable of the vine and the branches, the branches that are cut off from the vine will be thrown into a fire and burned, just as in the parable of the wheat and the tares, Jesus explains that the tares and the wheat grow together until the harvest when the tares are separated out and burned while the wheat is gathered in to the Master's barn.

The reality of Hell is not something that we often choose to talk about, but Jesus talked about it a whole lot. Considering how much Jesus discussed the matter, I have to admit that I don't quite understand why it is that some theologians come up with the notion that everyone is going to be saved (something that none of us can possibly know). Jesus made it pretty clear that few people would choose to follow him of their own accord. (cf. Matthew 7:13-14) The reason is because the way of Christ isn't always easy, and we know that it often isn't easy at all. The benefits, however, are truly out of this world.

We also learn something else that's key in this parable of the vine and the branches. The Father is the vine grower and he will take away every branch that does not bear fruit, and he will prune the branches that do bear fruit so that they bear more fruit. This can be particularly critical, because pruning sometimes involves cutting away a non-productive part of the vine, it might even mean that we have to cut off some part of a plant that we might otherwise choose not to, so that the rest of the plant might be productive and bear the best fruit. Pruning isn't always an easy process. But God's way of pruning the vine often means exposing what is wrong with the vine so that it can be cut away from the productive part of the vine of the Church.

In recent days, months, and years, we have seen a series of scandals involving the sinfulness of high ranking clergy and the abuse of children and young adults. This is an addition to other scandals which have often exposed the willingness of many in the clergy to tolerate and even promote social, political, and moral ideas which are completely contrary to the teachings of Holy Mother Church. Many of these public clergy who have promoted or continue to engage in promoting things which are contrary to what the Church teaches in matters of faith and morals have been allowed to continue to pedal their confusion to the masses in the Catholic press, in social media, and in society at large. These realities have led some people to judge that orthodoxy- that is Catholic belief that is right and correct- is often seen as outdated and old fashioned, while those who follow the latest modern ideas about what is morally acceptable are given pride of place in the public square, with some of these folks being promoted by the mainstream media as authentic Catholic voices.

Let us not be deceived. God is not mocked. (cf. Galatians 6:7) The moral teachings of the Church have not changed, and the seven deadly sins are still deadly. If something was wrong a hundred years ago or 70 years ago or 50 years ago, it is still wrong today, it will be wrong next week, next month, next year, and next century. Conversely, if something was good and holy 100 years ago or 70 years ago or 50 years ago, be assured that it remains good and holy today, it'll be good and holy tomorrow, good and holy next week, next month, next year, and next century. The Lord changes not… now there is a difference between dogma, doctrine and discipline. We don't have time to get into all of those differences this morning, but disciplines of the church can change because these disciplines are here to help us carry out the dogmas and the doctrines we believe in, they are not those dogmas and doctrines themselves.

These are important reminders because we are living in an age when many people look at our Church, and it appears that the bad parts of the branches and being allowed to run rampant and the plant has not been pruned. But I would humbly submit to anyone who feels discouraged about the state of the Church that when you hear things which are discouraging about the situation in the Catholic world today, know and understand that God is working his purpose out. So much of what we see and hear in our Church today is really a part of this pruning process which God has set forth to purify His people. As Saint Paul reminds us, the Lord seeks "a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle or any such thing." (cf. Ephesians 5:25-27) We don't have the ability to make the Church that way, but the Lord does. We need to allow the Lord the opportunity to prune the branches so that we can all bear the very best fruit, and the Church can do what the Lord ordained her to do, preach the Gospel and work for the salvation of many souls.

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

Exodus 20:1-17

1 Corinthians 1:22-25

John 2:13-25

Our Gospel today comes very early in St. John's Gospel and shares with us John's account of something that the other Gospels tell us happened during (or very near to) Holy Week-Jesus' righteous anger at the money changers in the temple and his overturning of their tables of business. It is important to ask, then, what were the money changers doing at the Jerusalem Temple, the place where any observant first century Jew understood was the dwelling place of Almighty God on this Earth. The one place where legitimate sacrifices to the Lord could take place, and they did- on a daily basis.

Prayer and sacrifice took place in the Jerusalem Temple in those days every day. Just as in our day all clergy in the Church celebrate the Liturgy of the Hours and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass each day, public prayers, usually centered around the Psalms of David, occurred daily in the Temple. Daily sacrifices took place there too, of various kinds. The priests who had their rotation in the Temple had to offer sacrifices to God as part of their daily and Sabbath worship. And if anyone came to the Temple to offer a sacrifice, whether for the circumcision and dedication of a child, in prayer for or in Thanksgiving for a bountiful harvest, for one of the feast days, or simply as a grateful act of worship, the Law required that people should bring their best to God, sacrifices without blemish. There was also another kind of sacrifice that took place at the Temple, it was called the todah, or sacrifice of Thanksgiving. This sacrifice was an offering of special sacrificial bread, often called the showbread, and the very best wine from the vineyards of God's people.

Because the temple was the only place where the fullness of the worship of God could occur, when many people went there to worship, they came from a long way and often they couldn't carry their sacrifices with them, they had to find animals or other sacrificial materials the closer they got to Jerusalem. Eventually the scribes and major priests of the temple figured out that it might be a good idea to allow those selling such wares to do so right on the temple grounds, right outside the building. What this eventually became in the time of Jesus was a lucrative racket, people would have to pay a premium for the best sacrificial animals, that they were then going to buy with Temple coinage which they would get when they exchange their Roman currency on the temple grounds… because Caesar's money couldn't officially be used at the temple.

Jesus saw this currency racket and crony capitalism for what it was, and he saw that the Temple authorities were taking advantage of the people, or they were openly allowing others to do so right under their noses. In the very House of God, in the place where God dwelt in the world and where sacrifices to God were offered, the clergy who ministered in the Holy of Holies were filled with corruption, and what Jesus would call in his famous discourse in Matthew 23, "dead men's bones." He said that these people appeared outwardly to be Holy, but he saw that this wasn't Holiness at all, this wasn't fulfilling the law of God. Jesus, we read, turned over the tables of the money changers and the userers and those who were selling sacrifice to the Almighty. 

There is a great lesson to be learned by what Jesus did in the Gospel. We live in an age when the statistics tell us that many people right across the country and the world are leaving the Church, at least they are saying that they are. If you talk to anyone who has left the church, the most common complaint, other than the general hypocrisy of people, (which will always occur in any group of people because of our humanity), is the corruption and sin of so many of our clergy, and the apparent toleration of such corruption and sin by our leaders. There was all kinds of corruption going on, both spoken of in the scriptures and not spoken of, when Jesus showed up at the Temple in Jerusalem. The holy men of Israel had become corrupted to the point where they did not even recognize the Anointed of God. The Lord, in his righteous anger, had enough and turned over the tables, and reminded them that the House of God was to be a House of Prayer and not a den of thieves-or worse! (cf. Luke 19:46)

God sees our frustration and anger with the sins and evil and hypocrisy which occur in the church even in our own time. He sees these things to a degree which we cannot. He shares our frustration and our righteous anger at wrongdoing or wrong action, but he doesn't invite us to leave God's house. Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers is a reminder to all of us, and should especially serve as a warning to any of us who have received the gift of Holy Orders at any level, that wrongdoing may go unseen by others, but it does not go unseen by the Lord, and your sins will find you out. The Gospel serves as a reminder to anyone who might have been wronged, abused, or scandalized by someone using an office of the Church that the Lord sees the Injustice that was done to them, and that the wheels of God's justice may slowly turn, but they do turn and grind fine. The Lord sees injustice, and if no one in this world will remedy that injustice, the Lord is keeping a tally. And when it comes time for judgment of injustices and wrongs and evils, the Scriptures are clear that judgment begins at the House of the Lord.

If you're discouraged by things that you might see or hear about what's going on in the Church today, rest assured that God sees wrongs and injustices also, and the day will come when all is brought to light and the truth will set us free, just as the uncomfortable truth set a lot of people free the day Jesus turned over those tables. The Church needs people who will worship in spirit and in truth and believe in Jesus Christ and his Word today more than ever before, so stand fast in Jesus Christ and his Church and the day will come when he makes all things new.

And that Thanksgiving sacrifice, the todah… Some of the ancient rabbis just happened to predict that in the time of the Messiah, all sacrifices would cease… except for the todah, the sacrifice of Thanksgiving. It is said that this sacrifice will go on until the end of time.

Church Bulletin Column for the week of March 4th

 

As we continue our Lenten journey together, our Holy Trinity family is finding new ways to adapt our ministry and outreach so that people can continue to participate, as much as possible in parish life. We can be thankful to God that unlike this same period on the liturgical calendar last year, we are not actively being encouraged to stay away from our Parish church, from the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or from a proper Catholic devotional life. Just as I wrote in this space some months ago, we are not yet back to normal, and all you have to do to understand that is look around on any given Sunday or other day. 

We are striving as a community to make things as normal as possible, however. I was heartened a couple of weeks ago when my turn in the rotation came to lead the Stations of the Cross, and I was assisted by Deacon Jim. The women's group from Holy Ghost in Knoxville was sponsoring a silent retreat hosted here at Holy Trinity. Not only did so many ladies come from parishes all over the diocese (I recognized a few of them!), but they added to our own home crowd and the church looked as close to normal as I've seen it in a while. May many others come to devotions and Holy Mass at church in the weeks to come.

Despite the fact that Catholic people in East Tennessee and elsewhere are attempting to return to some semblance of a regular spiritual life (as evidenced by our Parish mission this past week at Holy Trinity, for example), both we and Catholics in other parts of the country remain under restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Families have to keep socially distanced within the church, at least six feet apart. Masks have to be worn in the nave of the church and the clergy must wear masks when distributing Holy Communion. A few bishops around the country have been bold and brave enough to restore the Holy Precept to attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation within their dioceses. However, those bishops who have done so have added a number of caveats and exceptions to their decrees. Most dioceses, including the Diocese of Knoxville, have not restored the Sunday obligation largely because of the very restrictions under which we must labor, understanding that these restrictions make it impossible for some people to attend Mass every single week, while others are already homebound or find themselves to be highly at risk, and many are recovering from the disease themselves. 

There is no substitute in the Church's liturgical and spiritual life for the real and physical attendance of an individual or a family at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or any other act of public devotion or worship. Nothing that the Church can do, or that our Parish could possibly do, will ever change that, and so we continue to encourage anyone who can attend the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation, even if under restriction, to do so for the sake of themselves, their families, and their souls. However, we recognize that some people will not be able to join us each week because of the present situation. As a result, we have responded to the request of Bishop Stika for each Parish in the diocese to make live streamed Sunday Mass available to parishioners. 

Deacon Jim Prosak has very graciously set up a YouTube page for Holy Trinity Parish at https://youtube.com/channel/UCY_BPZLO6JGDlK8ijLrn3hw. If the link seems a bit long to remember, just do a YouTube search for "Holy Trinity Jefferson City" and our page will come right up. As you'll see if you visit our YouTube page, we already have some Masses and the recent parish mission archived there. If any parishioners happen to have a Google Chromecast or Roku device, you can even stream the Mass right on a digital television.

For now, the Sunday 10:00 a.m. Mass has been selected as the regular weekly Mass which will be live streamed. In addition, Holy Days and special events, such as Parish missions, will also be live streamed. In addition to being found on the above mentioned Parish YouTube page, each live stream event can be found on a special page on our Parish website: https://htjctn.org/masses-online 

It is our prayer that most parishioners are able to return to the sacramental life of the Church, and that if you've been away, you'll return and we'll see you soon. Our live stream is another way that we can help bring the prayer of the Church to everyone, and that both those who are able to be with us and those who can't (through no fault of their own) will be blessed by this new ministry to bring our local church even into our digital life.

Note: This is the unedited version my column in the parish bulletin for the week of March 4th. The bulletin is up on the Holy Trinity Parish website.

Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 

Leviticus 13:1-2

1 Corinthians 10:31-11:1

Mark 1:40-45

"If you wish, you can make me clean." That's what the leper said to Jesus at the beginning of the Gospel today. Some translations render it-I think more accurately- "if you will it, you can make me clean." In this singular moment the leper approached Jesus and completely submitted himself to the will of God, seeming to understand that Jesus could just as well have told him no. We can even see that Jesus had every reason to decide not to heal the man, after all he asked the fellow not to say anything to anyone about what Jesus had done but to show himself to the priest as Moses had prescribed. Of course this man didn't bother to listen to Jesus on that score, the Gospel tells us that he went out and publicized the whole matter.

It's important to remember that by the standards of that day, what Jesus did was remarkable, and not merely because he healed the leper. As we heard in the first reading today from the book of Leviticus, the law as given to Moses was very clear that any person who came down with leprosy-or what we might know today as Hansen's disease- was to be considered unclean, and separated out from the people of God as a whole. 

This seems like a punishment and it seems very harsh, but there was a reason for it. The biblical injunction to separate someone with leprosy away from the children of Israel was a kind of quarantine. In ancient times, they didn't have the more advanced knowledge of germ theory or how disease was transmitted, but they did figure out that it was possible for more people to get leprosy if there was a person with leprosy among them. They were not wrong, because leprosy is a bacterial infection and it can spread from person to person, although we know today that you're more likely to catch leprosy from another leper if you have extensive close contact with them. The ancients were simply aware that this could spread from person to person and they did understand how dangerous that it was. You might remember the story of Saint Damian of Molokai, who was called to care for the lepers in Hawaii and eventually caught the disease himself…

Jesus, however, let it be seen that he touched a leper and healed him. Jesus showed that it is his will to make people whole. Oftentimes this does not necessarily mean physical healing, although it can. More often than not, Jesus seeks to make our souls whole. Sin, along with the emotional scars and daily wear and tear of life in this world can cause our hearts- our souls- to be infected with a kind of spiritual leprosy. In the sight of God- and even sometimes in the sight of the people around us- we are unclean, and if no one else knows it, we do. Just like healing the leper in the Gospel, Jesus wills us to be made clean and he's willing to make it happen if we are willing to come to him.

These preceding months that we have all lived through have helped me understand this story in a way in which we might perhaps not otherwise be able to. We are living in a time when we are told that so many of our neighbors could be unclean and that we need to distance ourselves from them, just as lepers had to do in our Old Testament reading. We can better imagine how the leper who Jesus healed must have felt because now he was free and he was clean and he could be a part of the community again, and the community could embrace him. 

God gives us opportunity to be healed of our spiritual leprosy as well. The first way to do this is to present ourselves for the Sacrament of Confession or Reconciliation. The second way that we can do this is to begin to examine our lives and find out where our weaknesses are, what are the problems in our spiritual immune system that leave us weak and susceptible to the diseases that are sin and spiritual sloth? We can do a daily such examination, and we could commit ourselves to greater prayer, such as time for the Rosary, or the Angelus, or the Liturgy of the Hours. I can speak from both personal experience and the experience of working with others to help them in their faith… If we constantly commit ourselves to improving our prayer life and our personal devotion, these things are the ultimate weapons against sin and sloth, for idle time is the playhouse of the Devil. Rather than have idle time, give it to God. We can all stand to turn off the television or the smartphone and take time to call on the Lord.

Some of us have very busy daily schedules, sometimes things come up that we don't expect and weren't planning on. There are many days when we set aside time for prayer, but things don't work out the way we had planned, and we might think to ourselves "what am I supposed to do?" Even in the most dire and time squeezed-circumstances, most of us can usually make time for the Angelus (or the Regina Caeli in the Easter season), and if all else fails and we're so pressed for time that we can't even take 3 minutes for the Angelus, perhaps we can at least say that beautiful Jesus Prayer every day that is a part of Eastern tradition. "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner."

Father Patrick, Father Andres, and I and the other deacons are somewhat fortunate in that we are made to go on a retreat every year. This is often a time to rest, but it's also a time to take stock of where our relationship with Christ is in our life and how we can improve it. I know it is that way for me. Not everyone can afford to drop what they're doing and go on retreat, so every year the Church brings the retreat to us. The Holy Season of Lent begins this coming Wednesday. The principles of this great season are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Those three principles should apply to our lives all the time, not just for around 40 days every year. However, there is likely not a single one of us who is perfectly living out those pillars of Christian example, so each year the Church gives us an opportunity to step back and be reminded of how we are supposed to live, and ultimately that we are supposed to live for others. We will begin on Ash Wednesday and journey with the Lord to Calvary during that time. The discipline of Lent should be a reminder to us that there is no reward of Heaven without the Cross, and that our sufferings are a part of the life we live for God.

Lent is also an opportunity for us to do as the leper did in the Gospel today, it is a chance for us to stretch out our hands to the Lord Jesus and to request of him "Lord, if you will, make me clean." The difference is that now Jesus won't ask us to keep it a secret, he wants us to tell the whole world so that they will ask him to do the same for them.

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family

 Sirach 3:2-6, 13-14

Colossians 3:12-21

Luke 2:22-40

Merry Christmas! I have to say that I have always found it to be a great shame when some people exercise the option to shorten our second reading today, as well as the shortened other readings involving the Sacrament of Matrimony, such as Ephesians 5:22-33 when that comes up in the Lectionary. Sometimes this is done out of defference to the modern feminist movement, because an important explanation of the sacramental theology of marriage is deemed by some not to be politically correct in this day and age. 

Still others prefer to exclude these important readings because they fear that it may give license to abusive spouses to "lord it over" their wives and simply order them around and you ladies are supposed to do whatever we say. St Paul would have understood that if that was what he meant, it was going to go over like a lead balloon even in the ancient world. Remember that he is writing to a lot of people who are former pagans, and the wives in that cultural milieu likely would not have taken very well to simply being ordered around. What Saint Paul was telling the Colossians and the Ephesians and us today is that Christian matrimony is to be patterned after Christ's relationship with the Church, we are the bride and Christ is the bridegroom. 

What that means in practical application is that our homes are to be a domestic Church, and husbands and wives can be Christ to one another, but in a family context, the husband should be the one to have spiritual leadership in a home, just as Christ has spiritual leadership over the Church.

We see the ultimate clear example of that in the story of the flight into Egypt.. When the time came to follow the spiritual guidance of the Lord and to leave Israel and go to Egypt, there is no way that this could have been an easy decision. Joseph already had to take his espoused wife from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census ordered by Caesar Augustus. Now he was being told that Herod and the authorities in Jerusalem were threatening Jesus' life, and Joseph took the lead, following the direction of the Lord as told him by the angel, heeding God's command, and taking the lead over his family when it counted. Similarly, when Herod died, the angel made it known to Joseph, and Joseph followed the Divine directive. St. Joseph exercised spiritual leadership, because he took charge not only of Jesus physical protection, but the spiritual welfare of his family.

Similarly, in the Gospel today we see Mary and Joseph going together as a family to the temple to present Jesus. When this happened, Jesus would have been identified as Joseph's son before the priests and the rabbis of the Temple. We see the declarations of who Jesus is from Simeon the holy man, and Anna the prophetess, but probably the most important passage of the Gospel is what we see near the end when it tells us that the Holy family returned to Nazareth, and that "Jesus became strong and filled with wisdom and the favor of God was upon him." Even Jesus had the example of holy people around him. What we are left to presume is that Jesus grew up not unlike any other child of his day, we don't hear from his childhood except for the finding in the temple at the age of 12. After that incident, we don't hear from St Joseph in Sacred Scripture at all, but we know that he was the leader in the family when it counted. Early on in Our Lord's life, Joseph is seen making the difficult decisions under God's direction.

Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Trinity, is the Son of God and He is God. He could have come into the world in any way that he chose in order to carry out his mission to redeem humanity, but from the foundation of the world it was chosen that he would come into the world as part of an ordinary household and a family with a mother and a father, in part to show us that this is the normative way in which children should be raised.

For a very long time in our society today, it seems that if children are to have any religious upbringing at all, it is often the lady of the house who does the hard work to ensure that the children know something about God. I've known of a few cases where it's even the grandparents who take that responsibility unto themselves. Sacred Scripture is quite clear, however, that Holy Matrimony is a type, or a living example, of the relationship between Christ and the Church. While spouses are to be Christ to each other in their personal relationship (and I don't know about you, but I can think of plenty of times when my spouse has truly been Christ to me), it is the man of the house who stands in the place of Christ as bridegroom in the Sacrament of Matrimony. Just as Christ is the spiritual leader of the Church, the man of the house is supposed to be the spiritual leader of the home. We know that there are often negative spiritual consequences if things don't happen that way.

A few years back, Touchstone magazine published a study from Switzerland that was undertaken throughout Europe and recorded by the European Union. The study found that if both the father and mother of a family attended church regularly, 33% of their children will be regular churchgoers, and another 41% will be irregular churchgoers but consider themselves practicing. only about a quarter of the children of faith-filled marriages end up not practicing their faith in any way at all. Conversely, if mother practices her faith but father doesn't practice his at all, only about 2% of those children become regular churchgoers. Another 37% of those children will attend church on an irregular basis, and 60% of those children will not practice their faith at all. Interestingly, if Dad is the regular churchgoer and Mom is not, the same study showed that far more children were likely to be loyal to their faith, between 38 and 44% of them depending on the circumstances. Some American studies have shown that practicing Dads yield children that are as much as two-thirds more likely to remain loyal to their faith. Some U.S. studies show the number when Dad is active in church to be as high as 93% of children who remain in the practice of Christianity.

Men matter, fathers matter, and we live in an age when masculinity and fatherhood are both under terrible attack. St. Joseph is given to us as an example and a model of manhood, of leadership, of fatherhood. It is time for men to reclaim the example of St. Joseph and reclaim spiritual leadership of their homes and families. The model of the Holy Family can show us the way.

Homily for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sirach 27:30-28:7

Romans 14:7-9

Matthew 18:21-35

There are great many truths taught by Our Lord or by the Holy Apostles which are difficult for the world to accept. We can sometimes tell which truths these are because they're the ones that people like to avoid discussing whenever the topic of Christianity or Jesus Christ happens to come up. There are a lot of people in this world who will more or less say that Jesus was a great moral teacher, but either in their words or their actions they will deny that Christ is who he claims to be. The world will make that denial because they do not wish to live in the way that we are called to live, because so much of what the world today calls good, God calls evil. So much of what the Lord God calls evil, the world says it's good, even praiseworthy. (cf. Isaiah 5:20, 2 Timothy 3:1-13)

There is perhaps no greater commandment of Christ that is more difficult to live out, however, than the one we find illustrated in the Gospel today, the command that we are to forgive in the same way that we are asking God to forgive us. We want God to forgive us our sins, to pardon our sins, to overlook our sins. In many, if not most cases, the sins we are asking forgiveness for are the sins that will send us straight to Hell because of the choices we have made. Yet Jesus repeatedly tells us that these sins will be forgiven, that we will be received by the Lord if we repent of our sins. The only catch is that we have to forgive others in the same way that we have been forgiven. We get a glimpse of just how unconditional God's love is for us, and we come to understand how difficult it is to give truly unconditional love to others, especially those who would wish us harm or do us harm.

When we think about how difficult that truly is, we realize that living the Christian Life isn't so easy, because we have to be like Christ, and that means to forgive others as we have been forgiven. Jesus's illustration of the servant who asked forgiveness of his master while refusing to extend forgiveness to a fellow servant who owed a much smaller amount shows us the reality that God is willing to forgive us the debt of our sins if we confess our sins, and the weight of our sins is far greater than any debt to be understood in this world. Therefore, Jesus is explaining to us that we should be ready and willing to forgive others, because their offenses to us are far less than anything we may have done in this life to offend God.

In living the life of a Christian we are called to be like Christ. Jesus Christ is the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He is God, and so his nature is the nature of God. What are we told is God's ultimate nature? When the Lord God made himself visible to Moses, telling him that he would pass by on Mount Sinai and allow Moses to see the back of Him and He would say His name. When the Lord did say his name to Moses, the name itself is not actually mentioned in most English translations (we say "the LORD"), but it is immediately followed by an important suffix. God makes Himself known to Moses in this way… "the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."  (Exodus 34:5-6) Mercy and love and fidelity are so important to God's nature that He includes them in His very name. We hear these attributes of God in today's responsorial Psalm, which are verses from Psalm 103.

Our first reading from the book of Sirach invites us to do a very difficult thing for a lot of us (and any of us who have a real temper know how hard it is), and that is to let go of our anger, even forgiving the injustices our neighbor might commit upon us.

In the Gospel parable, the servant was not seen as wicked for asking his master to forgive his debt (something that we should be doing regularly when we ask for our sins to be forgiven in Reconciliation), but it was seen as most evil that he would not forgive a fellow servant a much smaller debt. The Master's reaction when he had heard what the servant had demanded of his fellow servant was to throw the wicked servant in prison until the debt was paid off.

Jesus tells his disciples that God the Father will treat all of us the same way if we do not learn to forgive our enemies from our heart. The big difference will be that if we die in our sins, it is our choice, not the larger society. We can ask forgiveness of God and our neighbor, but if we are not truly willing to forgive others, the faith is hollow within us.

Neither our Lord, nor any of the Apostles or the apostolic Fathers who have preached forgiveness have said that forgiving our neighbors who slight us, or do great injustice to us is easy. Jesus understands very well how very difficult and how very contrary it is to our human nature to extend the hand of forgiveness to those who have done us wrong, or even to those who wish us harm. That kind of forgiveness is completely contrary to our human nature, and God understands that. This is exactly why being able to extend forgiveness in the radical way that Jesus asks of us is something that takes great Grace, and is a sign before the world that the person who can forgive in the radical fashion which Christ asks of us manifests a sign of tremendous holiness of life, and they are showing that they can live out their Christian faith not only in word, but in action.

We are living in a time of tremendous upheaval in our nation. Not only have we been faced in recent months with a global pandemic which has seriously constricted our way of life and cost many their jobs or their livelihoods, but we have also recently seen protests, and in many places riots, over both the real and perceived abuses directed toward African Americans and other minorities by certain members of local police forces around the country. The resulting protests and riots have caused much disorder, they have also forced many Americans to take a hard look at our past as a nation.

One of the real difficulties, however, with the present moment in which we find ourselves is that the one thing you don't hear from all sides in these ongoing debates, discussions, and public disorder is the need for- and the willingness of-all sides to extend forgiveness to one another. Instead, because of the lack of an attitude of forgiveness, we see continuing disorder and riots in many cities, including the desecration of many public monuments. There is an utter unwillingness to forgive our neighbors.

We also would do well to remember that extending forgiveness does not mean forgetting injustices and wrongs done to us by others, forgiveness doesn't always equate to trust, and nowhere does Jesus ask that. But if we can truly learn to forgive, and leave the final judgment of others to God, our community, our country, our world would look a lot more like Jesus intended. As Christ forgives us, let us extend that forgiveness to one another.