Homilies

I think we’ve all met people whom you can never please. No matter what you do, it’s never the right thing. They always have another complaint. But that is not what this Gospel is about, although there are similarities. Jesus is describing people who want their own decisions affirmed.

They play the flute, and you should dance. They sing a dirge, and you should weep. That is how the Pharisees and the Sadducees are behaving. It’s not that they can’t be pleased. It’s that the only way to please them is to do exactly what they want. They want control, and Jesus and John the Baptist are not giving them that control.

This scene in the Gospel has been depicted in art many times. For many people, especially mothers, it is a deeply emotional scene. But it also shows us something important about our faith.

One of the great challenges in the early Church was getting people to accept that God truly became man. There were people who did not want to believe that Jesus was truly human. They wanted to believe that it was somehow an appearance, that it had been faked. They were scandalized by the Crucifixion. God dying on a cross—that is difficult to accept.

We are astoundingly capable of being self-centered. We can put ourselves—our desires, our wants, our will—above everything and everyone. We can make ourselves the center of the universe and measure everything by what it means for us. And I think that is at the heart of this parable.

We hear today’s Gospel as a lesson about forgiveness: we must forgive if we are to be forgiven. And certainly that is its message. But Jesus also shows us what can keep that lesson from ever reaching the heart. He shows us someone who receives an extraordinary gift and goes on living as though nothing has changed.

“But when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.”

I often hear people use this verse to justify studying the faith. And I think that is reasonable. We need knowledge of the faith in order to live it out. Knowledge of God is valuable to us. But knowledge comes in two broad varieties, and sometimes we give priority to the wrong one.

The first is the kind of knowledge we associate with school. We go into a classroom, sit down, and listen to a lecture. Or we read a book and think about a subject. That knowledge gives us frameworks for understanding the world and the situations we face.

We commonly hear someone speaking about another person say, “He’s a good man.” Rarely does the sentence stop there, though. It’s usually, “He’s a good man, but he’s kind of cheap.” Or, “He’s a good man, but he has a bit of a temper.” It’s always, “He’s a good man, but” something.

And that makes sense. We are all sinners. But I think it’s that “but” that Christ is talking about here in the Gospel.

Although these are the ordinary readings of the day, not readings proper to this saint, they fit remarkably well with the life of Saint Peter Claver, whom we celebrate today. He spent his life ministering to slaves. In fact, he called himself “the slave of slaves forever.” That was how he wanted to be known.

Peter Claver, who was canonized by Pope Leo XIII, used every resource available to him in that service. He had been born into a better life, but he laid those advantages aside and devoted himself to serving slaves. He was there on the shores as the boats arrived in the New World, ministering to them, tending their wounds, and offering them baptism. It is estimated that he may have baptized up to three hundred thousand people. He poured out his life offering them the Gospel. Cf. Society of Jesus, “In September, let us pray to St Peter Claver”; Leo XIII, In plurimis, §20 and n. 27.

Joseph is a righteous man, and that is why he was unwilling to expose Mary to shame.

To understand that, we have to look back to the book of Deuteronomy, where we get the law of Moses for the people living in the land of Israel. It addresses what happens when a man marries a woman who claims to be a virgin and then discovers that she is not. There is a process to follow, but it amounts to this: he takes her to the city gate, shames her before the elders, and then she is taken to the entrance of her father’s house and stoned to death for having lied to him. Cf. Deut 22:13–21.

I am not sure that Jesus would recognize us anymore. I am not sure that he would recognize us as the community that he founded.

To be clear, I am not saying that he would fail to recognize the Church. He would recognize her worship, her structure, and her teaching. These are gifts he entrusted to her, and she has preserved them through the millennia. But would he recognize the way we live together as members of that Church?

The disciples walk through a field, pick some food, and begin to eat. The Pharisees ask them, “Why are you doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?” Luke 6:2. But notice the question no one seems to ask: “Whose field is this?”

That tells us something about how different their priorities were from ours. Imagine the same situation today. A group of what are effectively vagrants are wandering through a field—our field. We probably aren’t going to approach them with a religious question: “Why are you working on a Sunday?” We are more likely to begin debating within ourselves, “Am I allowed to shoot them under stand-your-ground laws?”

I think we often hear this parable as nothing more than a kind of unbridled enthusiasm for change and newness. Sometimes it is even preached that way: you introduce some change and then pull out this passage to justify it. But I don’t think that is the image.

It is not a justification for change for the sake of change. In fact, if you listen closely, the image is more about destruction. Jesus warns that you do not cut up a new cloak to sew a patch onto an old one, because in doing so you destroy the new cloak and make the old one worse. In the same way, you do not pour new wine into old wineskins, because you will destroy the wineskin.

I’m sure we all know that feeling of simply being tired at the end of the day. But I think tiredness comes in two different varieties, and it matters which one we are experiencing.

There is the tiredness that comes from a successful day. The things I was trying to accomplish were accomplished—or at least I made progress—and now I’m tired. My body is simply tired from doing it all.

Looking at this scene, someone today might conclude that Jesus was a bad Christian. He is going around healing all these people, and then he stops in order to go and preach.

If somebody did that today, everyone around him would say, “You just don’t have compassion on us. You’re not willing to meet our needs, even though you have the power to do it. Instead, you’re going off to do your own thing.”