Homilies

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.”

“Get behind me, Satan!” This is not the first time we hear these words in Matthew’s Gospel. During Jesus’ forty days of fasting in the wilderness, Satan puts him through three temptations. In one of them, Satan shows him all the kingdoms of the world. He offers Jesus kingship without suffering, without the cross: all he has to do is bow down and worship. Jesus answers, “Get away, Satan!“ Matt 4:1–11, esp. vv. 8–10.

The Lord here is speaking principally about the Second Coming, when he returns in glory and brings history to an end. But each of us experiences that reality personally. We may or may not live until that time, but each one of us will encounter him when our earthly life comes to its end.

In that sense, the parable still speaks to our day-to-day lives. We often say in the Church that it is never too late to convert. No matter how you have lived or what you have done wrong, you always have the opportunity to make the right choice, to be converted, and to receive God’s mercy. Yet Christ warns us that there is a bit of an asterisk beside that statement. No, it is never too late—until you meet him. It is never too late during your life, but your life does, in fact, come to an end. And then it is too late.

I think the question for us is: what is drunkenness in this scene? What does it mean to eat and drink with drunkards? This servant was placed in charge of the household, responsible for caring for everyone within it. The Gospel specifically mentions his distributing food at the proper time. Although the master is away, he still cares for his people, and he entrusts someone to make sure they receive everything they need.

This is one of the Lord’s many condemnations of hypocrisy. Here, I think, he condemns perhaps its most insidious form: the kind of hypocrisy that looks good.

Broadly speaking, in the time of Jesus, the Jews were divided into two large groups, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees would have been the principal party among the priests and religious leaders at the time. They were not well liked. They were regarded as corrupt, and they taught things that the people did not like. The community at the Dead Sea—the community that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls—left us a great deal of material expressing its hatred of the Sadducees. So the Sadducees were not liked by the average person. Many scholars understand the “Wicked Priest” of 1QpHab as the reigning Jerusalem high priest—Jonathan is the most common single identification—and the scrolls’ wider polemic as extending to the other Jerusalem priests who followed him. On that reading, the target is the high-priestly establishment associated with the Sadducean party. The precise identity of the Wicked Priest remains disputed. See 1QpHab VIII–XII; Timothy H. Lim, “Wicked Priest,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 973–76; Alex P. Jassen, “Persecution, Victimhood, and Storytelling in Sectarian Portraits of Present-Time Violence,” in Violence, Power, and Society in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 132–63; cf. Josephus, Ant. 13.288–98.

“Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah.” In these three answers, we hear both the hopes and the fears of the Jewish people.

Elijah was the great prophet taken up into heaven, and many traditions arose about his return one day to prepare the way for the Messiah. To identify Jesus with Elijah, then, was an expression of hope. People could see in Jesus the dawn of the Messianic Age—though perhaps not yet its full realization.