Second Sunday in Advent, Year B. Is. 40: 1-5, 9-11; Mark 1:1-8.
AIM: To help the hearers repent, and to show the Spirit’s role in repentance.
“John was clothed in camel’s hair … He fed on locusts and wild honey.”
Not exactly the kind of character we’d care to meet socially — let alone invite into our homes. Today we’d call someone like that a drop-out, a hippie perhaps; certainly a food nut. Can someone so bizarre really have anything to say to us at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Let’s look at what John did say. His message has two parts. John proclaimed:
— “A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins;” and —
— the coming of one mightier than himself, who would baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit.
In placing this message before us on this second Advent Sunday, the Church is saying that it is relevant — and important. Let’s see why.
Repentance means “turning around,” reversing the direction of our lives. We come into this world turned in on ourselves. In infancy and early childhood, what I want, right now, is more important than anything else. Some of you will surely remember celebrated baby doctor of an early generation, Dr. Spock. Like some of you, perhaps, I was raised on Dr. Spock’s principles. That may explain why I’ve turned out so badly. In one of his books Spock tells about a two-year old who was a little angel, until he was put down to sleep. Then he screamed his lungs out. Up to a certain age, we can’t do anything about this self-centeredness. It is inborn. We can’t even hide it. It is there for the whole world to see.
Part of growing up is learning to overcome our self-centeredness. To do that we must admit that is there: that I am not the person I ought to be and want to be; that I fall short of what God wanted me to be when, through my parents, he gave me the precious gift of life.
The people who came to John to be baptized in the Jordan river were making that fundamental admission: “They acknowledged their sins,” Mark’s gospel tells us. That meant — as acknowledgment of sin must always mean — facing up to their brokenness; admitting that their lives were a tangle of loose ends and failed resolutions. That is the first step in repentance: admitting that we fall short, that our lives are disordered.
Many people get that far. But then they think that is up to them to mend their brokenness. By trying harder they think they can clean up their act, get it all together, as we sometimes say today. The second part of John’s message demolishes such optimistic ideas about repairing our disordered lives through our own willpower. “One mightier than I is coming after me,” John said. “I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Acknowledging our sins, admitting our self-centeredness, is only the first step, John is saying. We need to acknowledge something more: that the disorder in our lives can be put right only by a power greater than our own; a power from outside ourselves. This is the power of God’s Holy Spirit.
Are you completely satisfied with your life? If you knew that you were to stand before the Lord in judgment tonight, is there nothing you would regret, nothing that you would want changed? If there really is nothing, then the gospel of Jesus Christ is not for you. For this gospel is good news: the almost unbelievably good news that God loves people who are not satisfied with their lives; who — when they remember that they must stand before the Lord in judgment one day — are weighed down by all the things they wish they had done differently. Only for such people does John’s Advent message of repentance make any sense at all.
And for such people — for all of us who are not completely satisfied with our lives, the second half of John’s message – about a power greater than our own – is as important as the first part: the call to repentance. The changes that need to take place in our lives will not occur without our best effort — true. But our best effort alone is insufficient. Thinking that we must first get our act together before God will love us and bless us leads either to pride, or to despair. Either we persuade ourselves that we have got our act together, and now it is time for God to reward us for our efforts — which is pride. Or we grow so discouraged at constantly falling short that we fall into despair.
The gospel message, Christ’s good news of God’s freely given love, is for those who know that they don’t have their act together; who have tried and tried again to get it together, and failed time after time; but who recognize that there is One and One alone who can do for them what they never do for themselves: make straight in the wasteland of their lives a highway for Himself.
To accomplish this, Christ has given us a special sacrament: the sacrament of reconciliation or penance. Here is what the Catechism says about this sacrament: “Christ is at work in each of the sacraments. He personally addresses every sinner: ‘My son, your sins are forgiven.’ He is the physician tending each one of the sick who need him to cure them. He raises them up and reintegrates them into fraternal communion. Personal confession is thus the form most expressive of reconciliation with God and with the Church.” (1484)
I finished my Christmas shopping this week and got my gifts in the mail. There is still one more thing I need to do, however. I must go to confession. I hope you will too. If you recognize the need for the healing, purifying touch of God’s Holy Spirit; if you are able to admit that your own efforts alone will always be doomed to failure until you allow God to be at the center of your life — then, like me, you will want to receive this beautiful sacrament. Then, and only then, will your preparation for Christmas be complete. Then you will really be ready for the coming at Christmas of God’s Son: your savior, you redeemer; but also your brother, your lover, and your best friend.
The following is a brief Advent article, requested by the St. Louis Review:
SOMETHING BIG IS COMING
My four-year-old friend Doris,whocalls me “Grandpa Jay,” knows that something big is coming. She started singing “We wish you a merry Christmas” the second week in November. She was early – but right. Advent, a word which means “coming,” celebratesnot just one big coming, but three: the coming of Christ at Bethlehem; Christ’s final coming at the end of time; and between these two, his intermediate coming here and how.
None of these three is the result of anything we do. They are the result of what God does. At Bethlehem God intervened not only in history, but also in biology. His son Jesus came not by the God-given gift of procreation, from within humanity. He came from outside humanity. He took his human nature from his mother. But he had God for his Father.
Similarly, Christ’s final coming at the end of time will not come through human effort. It will be God’s final intervention from without, as surely as Christ’s birth at Bethlehem was God’s intervention from without.
Between these two comings of Christ, however, there is an intermediate coming, here and now. Christ’s first coming at Bethlehem was inconspicuous. The only people who showed up to celebrate were some shepherds and three crackpot astrologers from God knows where. His intermediate coming is similarly inconspicuous. Most of the time we cannot feel it. Yet like Christ’s final coming at the end of time it is a coming in power, for it is the presence within us of God’s Holy Spirit. Jesus spoke of this intermediate coming when he said: “Anyone who loves me will be true to my word, and my Father will love him; we will come to him and make our dwelling with him” (Jn 14:23).
Doris is too young to know it. But she has three reasons to be excited. In obscurity and weakness God came to us at Bethlehem; in power and great glory he will come at the end of time. Inconspicuously, quietly, but with great power he wants to come right now – to you!
Fr. John Jay Hughes is the author, most recently, of No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace (Tate Publishing). The son and grandson of Anglican priests, he was a priest in the Episcopal Church himself for six years. He describes his difficult journey to the Catholic Church, and writes with passion about his joy in priesthood, “all I ever wanted from age twelve.”
“Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down …”
Advent IB. Is. 63:16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7; 1 Cor. 1:3-9; Mk 13:33-37.
AIM: To proclaim the Advent message of hope in the midst of discouragement.
Thirty-nine years ago a 43-year-old priest and professor of Catholic theology in Germany named Joseph Ratzinger published a book called Faith and the Future. In it he wrote: “It seems certain to me that very hard times await the Church. Her own crisis has as yet hardly begun.” Today the author of those words is Pope Benedict XVI. What form the hard times he predicted back in 1970 would take, Joseph Ratzinger did not say. Today, however, we know. The crisis of priestly sexual misconduct with minors, which burst upon us in a firestorm with reports in the Boston Globe starting in January 2002, has been the gravest, and the most painful, that we American Catholics have ever experienced. Nor is the damage confined to the United States. Similar things have happened elsewhere. Who can say with confidence that the crisis is behind us?
The people whom Isaiah was addressing in our first reading were also experiencing a painful crisis. They had returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon with high hopes. Now, years later, their hopes remained unfulfilled. The Temple was still in ruins. Selfishness and corruption were rampant. Many felt that God had deserted them. The prophet’s words reflect their desolate state: “We are sinful … our guilt carries us away like the wind. There is none who calls upon your name … you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us up to our guilt.”
In the midst of this crisis, Isaiah prays for a dramatic intervention from on high which would prove that God had not deserted his people. “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.” Even as the prophet utters this prayer, however, he affirms his faith that God has not deserted his people: “Yet you, O Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you the potter: we are all the work of your hands.”
God does care, Isaiah is telling his people. Through pain and discouragement God is shaping us according to his plan, as the potter shapes the lump of clay on his swiftly turning wheel: kneading it, coaxing it, forming it into something beautiful, and then fixing its perfect symmetry forever in the intense heat of his furnace. The things that pain us are signs not of God’s absence, but of his presence. He is not finished with us yet. He is still working on us.
The same Lord is still working on his Church today. The Second Vatican Council says: “The Church [is] at the same time holy and always in need of purification…” (LG 8). The disclosures about priestly misconduct which distress and anger us are part of this continual purification: painful, as all purification is painful. But also necessary. If we understand this purification aright, and cooperate with it, our present distress will bring forth a more dynamic Church, filled with greater missionary zeal.
Cooperation with the Lord’s purification of his Church means for all of us — bishops, priests, and all the baptized — deeper dedication to the service of the Lord who called us to be his own in baptism, setting his seal upon us for all eternity. “Be watchful!” Jesus tells us in our gospel reading. “Be alert!” Faithful, watchful waiting for the Lord is also the message of our first reading: “No ear has ever heard, no eye ever seen, any God but you doing such deeds for those who wait for him.”
The same Joseph Ratzinger who, thirty-nine years ago, predicted “hard times” for the Church went on to say: “but after the purification … a great strength will emanate from a spiritualized and simplified Church.” And fifteen years ago Cardinal Ratzinger, as he then was, told an interviewer: “I am still certain that the Lord prevails and that the Church survives, not only survives, but lives with strength through all these crises. I am in this sense optimistic, because I am one who has the hope of faith.” (Cited from Robert Moynihan, Let God’s Light Shine Forth: the Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, 30.)
Isaiah was filled with the hope of faith when he uttered the prayer we heard in our first reading: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down.” Mark’s gospel says that at Jesus’ baptism Isaiah’s prayer was fulfilled: “Immediately on coming up out of the water Jesus saw the sky rent in two and the Spirit descending on him like a dove” (Mk 1:10). Every Mass is a “rending of the heavens.” In the Eucharist Jesus comes to be with us, to give us medicine for the wounds we receive in the battle of life; food to strengthen us for the journey still ahead. What prayer could be more fitting on this Advent Sunday than Isaiah’s words from our first reading? “Would that you might meet us doing right, that we were mindful of you in our ways!”
“Doing right” is crucial — far more important than simply “avoiding evil.” If we are trying to be “mindful of the Lord in all our ways,” we shall be ready whenever the Lord comes. Then we shall know that Paul’s beautiful words from our second reading are true:
“He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Fr. John Jay Hughes is the author, most recently, of No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace (Tate Publishing). The son and grandson of Anglican priests, he was a priest in the Episcopal Church himself for six years. He describes his difficult journey to the Catholic Church, and writes with passion about his joy in priesthood, “all I ever wanted from age twelve.”
JUDGMENT
Christ the King, Year A. Ezekiel 34:11-12, 15-17; Matthew 25:31-46.
AIM: To present Jesus’ parable of judgment as both a warning and encouragement.
“Thus says the Lord God: I myself will look after and tend my sheep, as a shepherd tends his flock …” Ezekiel’s words from our first reading give us the theme for this final Sunday in the Church’s year. We find it continued in the responsorial psalm, with its familiar opening words, “The Lord is my shepherd.” We hear it again in the gospel from Jesus himself, telling us that on judgment day we shall find him sitting, as a king, “upon his glorious throne, and all the nations will be assembled before him.” He will act like a shepherd, separating the sheep from the goats in his flock.
But what does this image of a shepherd have to do, you may be wondering, with today’s feast of Christ the King? It tells us what kind of king Jesus is. He is no conventional ruler, a person of might, power, and glory who lords it over people. Jesus is a king who serves those he rules. “He exercises his kingship,” the Catechism says, “by drawing all men to himself through his death and Resurrection.” (No. 786)
In baptism we receive a share in Christ’s kingship. The first Letter of Peter says that baptism makes us “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people he claims for his own …” (2:9). We exercise this royal priesthood when, like Jesus our king, we serve others; “particularly,” the Catechism says “the poor and the suffering, in whom the Church recognizes the image of her poor and suffering founder” (786, cited from Vat. II: LG 8).
The parable of the sheep and the goats which we heard in the gospel tells us that service of others will the standard by which, one day, we shall be judged. We won’t be asked how many prayers we have said, or how many Masses we have attended. We shall be asked one question only: How much have you done for others? have you done anything at all?
Can Jesus really be serious? What about our duty to God: Sunday Mass, prayer, obedience to the precepts of the Church? Are these things unimportant? Of course not. Duty to God is his first commandment, every bit as important as duty to our neighbor. In this parable, however, Jesus tells us that we fulfil our duty to God first of all by serving others. That is why St. Vincent de Paul could write: “God is not neglected if prayers are put aside … Therefore, when you leave prayer to help some poor man, remember this – that the work has been done for God.” (Letter 2546; Office of Readings, Sept. 27). Jesus says it even more directly: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of the least brothers of mine, you did for me.”
Common to both groups in this parable of the sheep and the goats is surprise at the verdict pronounced on them. Those who are condemned appeal to their good conduct record. They have not lied, murdered, stolen, or committed adultery. As far as they know, they have kept all the rules. And now they find themselves condemned not for anything they have done, but for things left undone. Surely, they think, there must be some mistake.
The just are no less astonished to hear themselves praised. They were never conscious of doing anything special. They had not looked for any reward; and they certainly had never even started to calculate how high the reward might be. And precisely for this reason they receive a reward – one far greater than any they had ever dreamed of.
What a lesson there is there for us Catholics. The parable is, first of all, a warning. It tells us that everything we do in life, as well as the things we leave undone, have eternal consequences. The choices we make each day and hour are determining, even now, our final destiny. Judgment is not a matter of adding up the pluses and minuses in some heavenly account book. Judgment is simply God’s confirmation of the choices, or judgment, we have already made by the way we chose to live our lives. That is the warning.
Jesus never issues a warning, however, without giving us with it reason for encouragement. This consists here in the assurance that we need not fear judgment if we are trying to help people in need whom we encounter along life’s way. It is not that our good deeds gain us a row of gold stars in some heavenly account book which help balance out the black marks. Jesus is saying something quite different. He is telling us that the person who is genuinely trying to serve others’ needs will not fail to attain moral goodness in other areas as well. And such failures as remain (and we all have them) will be forgiven by God.
So which is the story for you? A warning? Or an encouragement? That depends. When you come to Confession, do you find that you have little to confess? You haven’t missed Sunday Mass. You have avoided mortal sin. Oh, perhaps a few white lies now and then, some bad language, and a little impatience – “but nothing really serious, Father.” If that is your situation, the story is probably a warning for you. Then ask yourself: Do I ever fail to help, when help is possible? Am I offended by sermons or statements by Church leaders on topics like war, oppression of the poor, or racial justice? Do I complain that in Church we should hear only about spiritual things? If the answer to such questions is Yes, then the story is certainly a warning for you.
Perhaps, however, your situation is different. Do you come here discouraged because your life is a tangle of loose ends, failed resolutions, and broken promises? You pray poorly, you lose your temper, you’re impatient, you are unable to overcome some bad habit or, as they say, to “get it all together.” Take heart! If that, or any of that, is your story, then the parable of the sheep and the goats is Jesus’ encouragement for you. It is his way of telling you that your failures are not ultimately important, if you are looking for opportunities of helping others, and using those opportunities when you find them.
Anything good you try to do for others, no matter how insignificant, is of infinite worth. It is done for Jesus Christ. One day you will discover, to your astonishment, that you have been serving Him all along, without ever realizing it. You will hear the voice of your shepherd-king saying to you tenderly, and very personally: “Come, you who are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”
That, friends, is the gospel. That is the good news.
33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Matthew 25:14-30.
AIM: To help the hearers overcome fear, and develop and deepen trust.
It seems terribly unfair, doesn’t it? The first two servants are praised for taking chances. The third is condemned for being prudent. There were no safe deposit boxes in Jesus’ day. Burying treasure in the ground was the accepted form of safekeeping. Jesus’ original hearers would have been shocked to find someone who had done his duty being condemned. Let’s look at the story more closely.
The sums entrusted to each servant were huge. Our version speaks of “talents”: five, two, and one. Biblical commentators tell us that one talent was equivalent to the subsistence wage of an ordinary worker for fifteen years. The sums involved were clearly enormous. Jesus’ hearers recognized that at once, even if we do not.
This tells us something crucial about the story’s central character: the man going on a journey. He is not a bean counter. Generous in extending his trust, he is no less generous in reward. On his return from a long absence, he praises the first two servants for doubling the sums entrusted to them. The words he speaks twice over, “You were faithful in small matters,” are ironic: the sums entrusted to each, and now doubled, were not small. They were huge. The master backs up his praise of the first two servants by inviting each to “share your master’s joy,” words which clearly imply a handsome financial reward.
The people hearing the story now expect that the third servant will also receive generous treatment. By returning to his master the smaller but still enormous sum entrusted to him he has faithfully discharged his responsibility as custodian. True, he has not increased the sum entrusted to him, like the first two servants. But he has also avoided the risk of loss which they incurred by what today would rank as speculation.
How shocking, therefore, for Jesus’ hearers to find this third servant not praised but rebuked as a “wicked, lazy servant.” In place of the reward which the first two servants received, this man, who has acted prudently according to the standards of the day, goes away empty-handed, banished into “outer darkness” to “wail and grind his teeth” in disappointed rage at his unjust treatment. The master, who up to this point in the story has seemed so generous, turns out to be no better than the greedy absentee landlords Jesus’ hearers knew so well, squeezing the inhabitants of the land for every penny they could get out of them.
The third servant’s description of the master seems to be all too accurate: “I knew you were a demanding person, harvesting where you did not plant and gathering where you did not scatter.” With someone so grasping and unreasonable, prudence was the only safe policy. “Out of fear,” the third servant explains, “I went off and buried your talent in the ground. Here it is back.”
How can we make sense of the story? Is the central figure, the master, simply arbitrary: generous with the first two servants, cruel to the third? So it would seem. The master’s final action confirms this view. Taking the money which the third servant has faithfully preserved, he gives it to the first servant as an additional reward for the enormous risks he has taken in doubling the sum entrusted to him — an example of arbitrary injustice if there ever was one.
To make sense of the story we must ask about motives: not those of the master, but the motives of the three servants. The first two servants acted out of trust. A man who had entrusted them with so much, they reasoned, was clearly generous. He could be trusted. The third servant was motivated by fear. He says so himself: “Out of fear I went off and buried your talent in the ground.” It is this fear which the parable condemns.
How often Jesus tells his followers, “Do not be afraid.” The master in Jesus’ parable rewards the first two servants not for the money they gained, but for their trust. He rebukes and banishes the third servant for lack of trust. The third servant did nothing bad. As we have seen, he fulfilled his responsibility. Like those at the king’s left hand in the parable of the sheep and goats, which follows at once in Matthew’s gospel, the third servant is rejected not for anything he did, but for what he failed to do. Fear paralyzed him into inactivity.
The parable is about the one thing necessary: trust in the Lord who gives us his gifts not according to our deserving but according to his boundless generosity. Refusing to trust, the third servant concentrates on security above all, and loses all. Jesus is challenging us to be bold. For most of us that is difficult. Boldness is not our long suit. Like the third servant, we prefer to play it safe. The boldness of his two colleagues came not from themselves, but from their trust in the master’s generosity. Burying our gift to keep it safe is like opting for a low-risk spiritual life, avoiding sin as far as possible but not loving much because of the risk involved: the risk of not loving wisely, the risk of having love betrayed, or not returned, and so being hurt.
Do you want to be certain that your feelings will never be hurt, that your heart will never be wounded as you journey through life? Then be sure to guard your heart carefully. Never give it away, and certainly never wear your heart on your sleeve. If you do that, however, your heart will shrink. The capacity to love is not diminished through use. It grows. What mother ever ran out of love because she had too many children? From the beginning of time loving mothers have found that with the birth of each child their ability to love is increased.
“Out of fear … I buried your talent,” the third servant in the story tells his master. Jesus came to cast out fear.
“God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him avoids condemnation, but who whoever does not believe is already condemned for not believing in the name of God’s only Son.” (John 3:17f)
To escape condemnation we don’t need to establish a good conduct record in some heavenly golden book: a series of stars after our name representing our prayers, sacrifices, and good works. Thinking we must do that is “not believing in the name of God’s only Son.” His name is synonymous with mercy, generosity, and love. Escaping condemnation, being saved, means one thing only: trusting him. It is as simple as that. We don’t need to negotiate with God. We don’t need to con him into being lenient. We couldn’t do that even if we tried, for God is lenient already. He invites us to trust him. That is all.
Trusting him means risking all, our hearts first of all. It means loving: generously, recklessly, without limit and without conditions. Because that is the way God loves us. And doing that will mean suffering the wounds that love inevitably inflicts. Show me a person whose heart is battered and bruised, and I’ll show you someone who has loved: not always wisely, perhaps, but deeply, passionately, tenderly. I’ve suffered those hurts myself: many times over.
With this parable of the three servants entrusted with enormous gifts on behalf of an absent master Jesus is inviting us to imitate the first two servants: to recognize the generosity of the one who gives us our gifts; and to trust him as we use and share his gifts to us, confident that when the Master returns we shall hear his voice, speaking to us personally, and with great tenderness: “Well done, good and faithful servant. Come share your master’s joy!”
“YOU ARE THE TEMPLE OF GOD.” (Dedication of St. John Lateran)
Ezek. 47:1-2, 8-9, 12; 1 Cor. 9c-11,16-17; John 2:13-22.
AIM: To help the hearers understand our calling as God’s temples.
Is the Bible a Christian book? Just about any of us would answer this question in the affirmative. Of course it’s a Christian book, we would say. While that is not wrong, most of the Bible is not about Christians at all, but about Jews. Even the New Testament is almost entirely about Jews. Jesus was a Jew, like his mother Mary and St. Joseph. Jesus’ twelve apostles and almost all his first followers were also Jews.
The Jewish people possessed, in Bible times, a special place of worship: the Jerusalem temple. It was built by King Solomon, son of the great King David. The temple was the earthly dwelling place of the God who had chosen them from all the peoples on earth to be his own. As a mark of his special favor God had given them the Ten Commandments: not a fence to hem them in, but ten words of wisdom which, if followed, would lead to happiness and fulfilment for the people and each individual.
As a devout Jew, Jesus worshiped regularly in the Jerusalem temple. The building he knew was not the one built by Solomon, however. That had been destroyed several centuries earlier by enemies who conquered Jerusalem and carried its inhabitants off to exile in Babylon. After their return to Jerusalem the people built a new temple on the site of the old one.
It was this rebuilt, second temple, which Jesus knew. There he was brought as an infant to be dedicated to God. There, at age twelve, he was found by his anxious parents after a frantic three-day search. There, as we heard in the gospel reading, he overturned the tables of the money-changers, rebuking people for turning God’s house into a marketplace. That temple did not long survive Jesus. Not forty years after his death and resurrection Jerusalem was again plundered; this time by the Romans, who pulled down the temple that Jesus had known, and in which Peter and the other first Christians continued to worship even after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. Now, Paul writes in our second reading, we are God’s temple: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
Today Catholics all over the world celebrate the dedication of a Christian temple: the Church of St. John Lateran in Rome. Though less well known than St. Peter’s basilica, St. John Lateran is the Pope’s cathedral as Bishop of Rome. It is customary in every diocese or local Church throughout the world to celebrate the dedication of the Cathedral, the bishop’s church. We celebrate this feast in St. Louis on October twelfth. Because the Pope is the chief shepherd of the whole Church, we celebrate the dedication of his cathedral each year on the ninth of November. Only when that date falls on a Sunday, however, do most Catholics become aware of the observance.
The preface to the eucharistic prayer, which we shall hear in a few moments, helps us to appreciate the significance of today’s celebration: “You give us grace upon grace to build the temple of your Spirit, creating its beauty from the holiness of our lives.” Even as we celebrate the dedication of a building, therefore, the Church’s public prayer reminds us that the most important temple is the one built not of stones, but of people.
The parish which I formerly served as pastor used to attract many visitors. They would often remark: “Father, you have a beautiful church.” To which I always replied:
“Thank you. And we think the building is nice too.”
The Church is people before it is a building. “The temple of God, which you are,” Paul writes in our second reading, “is holy.” “Holy” means “set apart”, removed from ordinary use, set apart for God. It is in this sense that a chalice is holy. It is not an ordinary cup. It is used only for the Lord’s Precious Blood. This building in which we worship is holy: it is not a dance hall, an auditorium, or a theater. It is set apart for worship.
We too are people set apart. When did that happen, you ask? In baptism! The Catechism says: “Baptism not only purifies from all sins, but also makes the neophyte [the newly baptized person] ‘a new creature,’ an adopted son of God, who has become a ‘partaker of the divine nature,’ member of Christ and co-heir with him, and a temple of the Holy Spirit.” [No. 1265] The whole of the Christian life, therefore, is not a striving after high ideals which constantly elude us. It is living up to what, through baptism, we already are: temples, dwelling places of God’s Holy Spirit.
Today, therefore, we celebrate not merely the dedication of a building: the Pope’s Cathedral in Rome. We celebrate no less our own dedication as people set apart for God. What that means in daily life St. Paul tells us in stirring words in his letter to the Philippians: “Show yourselves guileless and above reproach, faultless children of God in a warped and crooked generation, in which you shine like stars in a dark world and proffer the world of life” (2:15).
Dear sisters and brothers in the Lord: there is no call higher than that, no life more worth living.
