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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes
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“THE GIFTS AND CALL OF GOD ARE IRREVOCABLE”
20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Is. 56:1, 6-7; Rom.11:13-15, 29-32; Mt. 15:21-28.
AIM: To counter anti-Semitism by showing the role of the Jews in God’s plan.
Some of you may recall the enormous flap some years ago occasioned by the statement of a Baptist minister in Texas that God does not hear Jewish prayers because Jews do not accept Jesus as God’s Son. During most of Christian history this remark would not have been controversial at all. Hadn’t the Jews demanded that Christ be crucified? When the Roman governor Pontius Pilate tried to evade responsibility for Jesus’ death, didn’t the Jewish leaders respond: “His blood be on us and on our children”? (Mt. 27:25). For the better part of twenty centuries most Christians believed that the sufferings of the Jews were God’s answer to that cry, divine revenge for the crime of killing God’s Son.
Moreover, there is a long and too little known history of Christian persecution of Jews. This culminated during World War II in the slaughter of some six million Jews by Adolf Hitler, for twelve years ruler of a nominally Christian country, Germany. Most of the killing was done in the Catholic country of Poland. Other supposedly Christian countries, including our own, did shockingly little to halt the Holocaust, and must thus share some of the guilt. Hitler justified his persecution of Jews by the false, but widely believed, claim that he was merely putting into practice what the Church had taught for centuries: that the Jews were enemies of God because they crucified God’s Son, Jesus Christ.
We need to consider this painful subject of anti-Semitism from time to time. This Sunday is a particularly good time to do so. All three readings concern the special role of Jesus’ own people, the Jews, in God’s plan. In the first reading Isaiah prophecies a time when the Temple at Jerusalem will become a house of prayer not just for his own people, but “for all peoples.” In the gospel Jesus initially rejects the request of a Gentile woman for healing because she is not a Jew. He grants her request because of her courage and persistence. She refuses to give up despite her double handicap: first, as a woman in a man’s world; and second as an outsider in the Jewish world of Jesus. Finally, in our second reading, Paul confronts the problem which tormented him, as a devout Jew: how was it possible that God’s own people rejected God’s Son, their long awaited Messiah, when he finally came.
Paul’s answers this question in three ways. First, he says, Israel’s rejection of Jesus is only partial: many Jews have accepted Jesus (Rom. 11:7). Second, even this partial rejection of Jesus is only temporary (11:22-24, 31-32). In the end, Paul says, all Israel will accept Jesus because — and this is the third part of Paul’s answer — “the gifts and call of God are irrevocable.”
What does this mean? It means that God has not rejected the people he first chose for his own just because some of them did not recognize God’s Son when he came. In Jesus’ day Jews were already scattered throughout the Mediterranean world. Many never even heard of Jesus Christ during his lifetime. Of those who lived in Palestine and knew Jesus, many did accept him. Jesus’ mother, his apostles, and Paul himself were all Jews. Jesus’ condemnation was the work of small group of religious and political leaders. And both Jesus himself, and his first followers, said that they acted in ignorance (Lk 23:34; Acts. 3:17; 1 Cor. 2:8).
This background helps us understand the statement of the Second Vatican Council: “Neither all Jews indiscriminately at [Jesus’] time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crime committed during his passion. … The Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy Scripture. … The Church deplores all hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews. The Church always held, and continues to hold, that Christ out of infinite love freely underwent suffering and death because of the sins of all men, so that all might attain salvation” (Nostra aetate 4, emphasis supplied).
How will God’s plan be fulfilled, that all of Jesus’ own people come to accept him as God’s Son? And when will this happen? We do not know. We do know, however, that every kind of Christian anti-Semitism is an obstacle to God’s plan, and a sin. It is a monstrous perversion of our holy faith to say that God does not hear Jewish prayers. The Council, commenting on Paul’s statement in our second reading, that God’s call is irrevocable, says: “The Jews remain very dear to God for the sake of the patriarchs, since God does not take back the gifts he bestowed or the choice he made” (loc. cit.) The first of the patriarchs is Abraham. Our first Eucharistic prayer calls Abraham “our father in faith.” Every year, on Good Friday, Catholics all over the world pray, in the Church’s public liturgy, “For the Jewish people, the first to hear the world of God, that they may continue to grow in the love of his name, and in faithfulness to his covenant.”
That prayer expresses the Council’s teaching, “The Jews remain very dear to God.” We need to take that statement to heart. There are a number of synagogues within our parish boundaries. On Friday evening and Saturday morning, the Jewish Sabbath, we see many people walking: Orthodox Jews observing the strict Sabbath rule which forbids riding in a car. How many Catholics would come to Mass on Sunday, if we were required to walk?
Let me conclude by reading to you the conclusion of an address given to a group of rabbis in Jerusalem eleven years ago by the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.
“Already as a child … I could not understand how some people wanted to derive a condemnation of Jews from the death of Jesus, because the following thought had penetrated my soul as something profoundly consoling: Jesus’ blood raises no calls for retaliation but calls all to reconciliation. It has become, as the letter to the Hebrews shows, itself a permanent Day of Atonement of God. …
“Jews and Christians should accept each other in profound inner reconciliation, neither in disregard of their faith nor in its denial but out of the depth of faith itself. In their mutual reconciliation they should become a force for peace in and for the world. Through their witness to the one God, who cannot be adored apart from the unity of love of God and neighbor, they should open the door into the world for this God so that his will be done, and so that it becomes on earth ‘as it is in heaven’; so that ‘his kingdom come.’”
Filed under "Catholic Homilies" by jhughes
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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes
Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables
MARY, WOMAN OF FAITH
The Assumption, August 15th. 1 Cor. 15: 20-27.
AIM: To present Mary as the model of faith and our intercessor before God.
Mary, the Second Vatican Council says, “shines forth on earth, until the day of the Lord shall come, a sign of certain hope and comfort to the pilgrim People of God” (LG 68). The Council spoke often about God’s “pilgrim people.” The phrase expresses the awareness we have today that in the Church we are underway to a goal we have not yet reached. Our pilgrim way is beset with difficulties. We are reminded of them each time we read the morning headlines, or watch the news on television.
On this feast of Mary’s Assumption we are reminded that Mary also confronted difficulties on her own pilgrim way. We know remarkably little about Mary’s life. What we do know, however, shows that she had to walk often in darkness. There were many things which, as Luke tells us, Mary “did not understand” (Lk 2:50) and could not understand.
What did Mary understand about the angel’s message that even before her marriage to Joseph she was to become the mother of God’s Son? She understood at least this: that in a tiny village where everyone knew everyone else and gossip was rife, she was to be an unmarried mother. Yet Mary responded without hesitation in trusting faith: “I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me as you say” (Lk 1:38)
That act of trusting faith was not blind. Young as Mary was – and the Scripture scholars think she may have been only fifteen – she asked what any girl in her position would have asked: “How can this be, since I do not know man?” (Lk 1:34) Even this question, however, reflects faith. Mary was questioning not so much God and his ways as her own ability to understand God’s ways.
Nor was Mary’s faith a once-for-all thing. It needed to be constantly renewed. Before her Son’s birth, Joseph wanted to break their engagement. When the couple presented their newborn child to the Lord in the Jerusalem temple, Mary heard the aged Simeon prophesy the child’s rejection and his mother’s suffering (Lk 2:34f). Three decades later, after Jesus left home, he seemed on more than one occasion to be fulfilling his command to his disciples about turning one’s back on parents and other relatives (cf. Lk 14:26). At the marriage at Cana Jesus seemed to speak coldly to his mother. She seems not to have been present at the Last Supper. Only at Calvary was Mary permitted to stand beside her now dying Son, along with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 19:26); deliberately unnamed, many Scripture scholars believe, to represent the ideal follower of Jesus Christ in every time and place.
The last glimpse we have of Mary in Scripture is immediately before Pentecost. With the apostles and Jesus’ other relatives, she is praying for the descent of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:14). Thereafter Mary disappears. Her work of bringing Christ to the world was taken over by the Church.
How did Mary’s life end? We do not know. In defining Mary’s Assumption on All Saints Day 1950, Pope Pius XII said simply: “When the course of [Mary’s] early life had ended, she was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.” The body the Pope referred to is Mary’s new resurrection body: the body with which Jesus rose from the dead – the heavenly and spiritual body which, as St. Paul says, each one of us will receive in heaven (cf.1 Cor. 15:35-53). There Mary continues to pray for us on our pilgrim way. As the Catechism says: “The Church loves to pray in communion with the Virgin Mary … and to entrust supplications and praises to her.” (No. 2682).
For many Christians, however, and for almost all Protestants, Catholic teaching about Mary, and our devotion to her, are troubling. Especially troubling is the Catholic practice of praying to Mary. Surely, Protestants say, we can pray only to God. Strictly speaking, they are right. When we Catholics pray to Mary, or to any of the other saints, what we are really doing is asking them to pray for us and with us. The conclusion of the classic Marian prayer, the Hail Mary, makes this explicit: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.”
If it makes sense to ask our friends on earth to pray for us, doesn’t it also make sense to ask the prayers of our friends in heaven, the saints? The Catechism says it does: “Being more closely united to Christ, those who dwell in heaven … do not cease to intercede with the Father for us. … We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world.” (No. 956 & 2683) Without Mary’s prayers, I would not be a Catholic priest today. Let me tell you how I know this.
I had the great privilege of serving for six years, like my father and grandfather before me, as a priest of the Anglican Church, called in our country the Episcopal Church. Leaving the church which had taken me from the font to the altar, and taught me almost all the Catholic truth I know, even today, was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Starting in 1959 and for almost a year, the questions of the church, and of my conscientious duty before God, were not out of my waking thoughts for two hours together.
One of the many obstacles to my decision was the need to abandon, possibly forever, the priesthood to which I had aspired from age twelve, and which had brought me great happiness, with no guarantee that it would ever be given back to me. In Holy Week 1960 a Trappist monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, himself a convert from Judaism, who was helping me along the last stretch of my spiritual journey, said to me: “Why don’t you give your priesthood to Our Lady, asking her to keep it for you, and to give it back to you when the time is right?” With his help I did this.
Had I known then that it would be eight years before I could once again stand at the altar as a priest, I should never have had the courage to go through with it. During those years I had many difficulties – so many that well meaning priest-advisers told me I should forget any idea of priesthood and embrace a lay vocation. This I was never willing to do. I knew that Our Lady was keeping my priesthood for me, and I was confident that she would give it back to me one day.
After eight years, on January 27th 1968, I knelt before the bishop of Münster in northern Germany, where I was then living, to receive the Church’s commission to stand at the altar once again, as a Catholic priest. I had never told the bishop about entrusting my priesthood to Our Lady. You can imagine my joy, therefore, when, at the end of the ninety-five minute ceremony in his private chapel, the bishop turned to the altar and intoned the Church’s ancient Marian hymn: Salve regina, “Hail, Holy Queen.” **
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** For details of this story, see John Jay Hughes, No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace (Tate Publishing and Enterprises, 2008; 344 pages, soft cover; $19.99) to be published Sept. 2nd.
Filed under "Catholic Homilies" by jhughes
