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Hearts of Prayer: Sacred Liturgy - Homilies |
THE Humble Light Shines in the
Darkness
Homily for Sunday, September 2, 2007- 22nd Sunday in
Ordinary Time, Yr C
Fr. Joseph Rogers
Read other homilies by Fr. Rogers>>>
Sir 3:17-18, 20, 28-29; Ps 68; Heb 12:18-19, 22-24a; Lk 14:1, 7-14
Today, my sisters and brothers, we can start with the punch line
from Luke’s Gospel: “blessed indeed will you be because of their
inability to repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection
of the righteous.” The purpose of the Christian life, of every life,
is happiness. In Scripture the word often translated as “happy” is
makaros – blessed. The blessed person is the happy person.
Blessedness is seeing God face to face because only God can fulfill
us, make us happy. The way to happiness is the way of Jesus Christ.
Following Jesus means being righteous. In the Old Testament
righteousness is not about following a lot of rules and precepts,
codes and provisions – although they can be important – or being
better than someone else; righteousness means the total response of
a person to God: body and soul, mind and strength, heart and will.
To be righteous means to have totally handed our lives into the care
of God. In the New Testament that means faith, total adhesion to
God, total trust. Faith is the way to happiness.
In the parable of the banquet Jesus hints at the Book of Proverbs,
chapter 25, verses 6 and 7. Proverbs states: “Claim no honor in the
king’s presence, nor occupy the place of great men; for it is better
that you be told, ‘Come up closer!’ than that you be humbled before
the prince.” Israel was distinct from all the nations, having no
earthly ruler, for God was King. (Eventually the people would cry
out for an earthly ruler, but the kings of Israel and Judah never
supplant the authority of God.) In Israel God is sovereign. The land
was his royal court. To inhabit the Holy Land was to stand in the
court of the King. The Temple was the sacred house where the poor
and the lame came to worship the one, true God. No one could claim
this honor for himself, herself. It was a gift. It could only be
received. Ben Sirach understood this. He writes in the early 2nd
century BC at a time when Israel is without a sovereign of her own,
where the secularism of Greek culture seems to rule the day, but
Israel is not abandoned. Her way is clear, he reminds us: “Humble
yourself . . . and you will find grace with God.”
In the Gospel of Luke the language of humiliation and exaltation is
the language of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus. In the
parable today the Lord reminds us that we are to sit at the lowly
places and to allow the host to exalt us. This is the way of
Christian conversion. We must walk the road of humiliation, my
sisters and brothers, that the Lord may exalt us. We must enter our
personal darkness that the light of God’s love may triumph. The
place where we most concretely encounter the power and love and
light of God who enters into our humiliation and lifts us up is the
Sacrament of Reconciliation. In confession we encounter Christ in
the person of the priest. Christ descends into our hearts as we
confess our sins, and we rise with him through the absolution of the
priest. “I absolve you from your sins . . .” These words in their
sacramental power communicate the Resurrection to us, our exaltation
in Christ. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not
overcome it. We come to confession to be freed of our idols, our
self-worship, the empty idols of money, power, and we may be
humiliated as we face our sins. But this humiliation, this coming
face to face with our sins as we are face to face with
God-who-is-Love is the road to the “city of the Living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem . . . of the assembly of the firstborn enrolled
in heaven.” It is the way out of the lowly place of death and sin to
a seat at the table of the Eucharistic King himself, where he gives
us his body and blood.
When I was in sales a few years ago in Atlanta I remember throwing a
banquet for my biggest customers. They were flown in. I promised
them a great dinner after some meetings, but they weren’t
interested. We were all good friends, and the guys decided that
instead of a nice dinner on the town they’d just like to share the
time together and have a few drinks with chips and salsa. My expense
budge took a deep breath all of a sudden. I went to the grocery
store near by to get chips and salsa. As I was there a gentleman
came up to me: “Young man, what’re you lookin’ for?” “Chips and
salsa,” I told him. “No,” he told me, “I mean what’re you really
lookin’ for?” “I must tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m really
looking for chips and salsa.” “No, young man, the Lord has sent me
to tell you . . . I’ve got a word for you: some people think they
got to get ready to go to God, but the truth is you got to go to God
to get ready.” Wow – Reginald did have a word for me. Some people
think you have to get ready to go to God, but the truth is we have
to go to God to get ready. We go to confession. We enter the
darkness. We let his light shine. We go to God to get ready.
Many of us this week have heard or read the story of Mother Teresa’s
spiritual struggles, the darkness she carried for most of her
earthly life. My sisters and brothers, this is an opportunity for us
to go to the source, to understand our faith and share our faith
with others. Let’s not be satisfied with what we hear in sound bites
and pod-casts. Let’s discover the saint ourselves.
Mother Teresa is a foundress. She received a charism, a spiritual
gift from the Lord that is meant to build up the whole Church. The
charism was communicated to her in an allocution from the Lord. He
spoke to her from the Cross: “I thirst.” Teresa understood that
Jesus was thirsting for souls, the souls of the poorest of the poor.
The poorest of the poor are those who are alienated from God. As she
founded the Missionaries of Charity, she received a grace to
experience Christ’s loneliness and abandonment on the Cross and the
dryness of his thirst, so that she could experience the abandonment
of the poorest of the poor, those outcast from society – materially,
spiritually – who are left on the streets, who experience the total
abandonment of their neighbor and who ultimately feel totally
abandoned by God. Teresa wasn’t a closet atheist stuck in the faith
of her childhood; she wasn’t suffering from a series of
psychological pathologies. Teresa was sharing in the Passion of
Jesus Christ. She was sent to the poorest of the poor, not as one
exalted but as one humiliated, as Christ on the Cross. She was
incarnating in her very person, in every dimension of her being, the
charism the Lord had entrusted to her: the charism of Jesus’
desperate thirst from the darkness of the Cross for the poorest of
the poor. By entering into the darkness of Christ she could enter
the darkness of the hearts she served. She came as one abandoned to
the abandoned – sent by Christ who was abandoned by us on the Cross.
In time the darkness and dryness of Teresa’s interior life would
become the single greatest confirmation that she had authentically
received and was in fact communicating the charism entrusted to her.
This she explains in a letter to her spiritual director:
I can’t express in words – the gratitude I owe you for your kindness
to me – for the first time in . . . years – I have come to love the
darkness – for I believe now that it is part of a very, very small
part of Jesus’ darkness and pain on earth. You have taught me to
accept it [as] a ‘spiritual side of your work’ as you wrote – Today
really I felt a deep joy – that Jesus can’t go anymore through the
agony – but that He wants to go through it in me.
Mother Teresa discovered in her darkness the key to happiness: Jesus
Christ. Her humiliation has become her exaltation: “blessed indeed
are you because of their inability to repay you . . . for you will
be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” Amen.
+++
[Words spoken after communion:]
My sisters and brothers, today is the last time this summer I am
scheduled to celebrate the 11:30 AM Mass with you. Soon I will
return to school, and so will many of you. You are in my prayers.
Please keep me in yours. Before I leave I’d like to ask for your
forgiveness. As a new priest I know I’ve ruffled some feathers,
perhaps hurt some of you by what I said or didn’t say, did or didn’t
do. We priests are weak men. I am. Please forgive me. I want you to
know that I have been blessed to be with you. Most of all may we
praise God whose mercy is all-powerful – who heals and binds our
wounds.
Praised be Jesus Christ!
Fr. Joseph Everett
Rogers resides at the Pontifical North American College
in Rome studying for the
Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. He is a Graduate of Notre Dame
University, with an MA from the John Paul Institute for Marriage and
Family. He was ordained a Priest on May 26, 2007.
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