Homilies

There is something almost painful in this scene. Jesus is told that his friend is gravely ill. He loves this family. He has power to heal. And still he waits. To Martha and Mary, that delay must have felt like silence. To anyone watching from the outside, it can even look heartless. But the delay belongs to the love.

Had the Lord gone at once, Lazarus would have been healed. Bethany would have rejoiced. Tears would have dried. But Lazarus would not have become what he now becomes: a witness. He would have remained a man restored to health. Instead, he becomes a man carried through death and brought back by the voice of God. He enters the place where every family must one day surrender someone they love, and from there he returns. In Lazarus, the Lord gives more than relief. He gives a sign that death itself has met its Master.

A difficult thing happens, and the human heart begins its familiar work. It starts searching for a cause, a guilty party. Someone must have done something. Someone must deserve this. That instinct appears almost immediately in the Gospel. The disciples see a man blind from birth, and before they see a neighbor, they see a problem to be explained. Before they see suffering, they begin assigning fault.

Jesus refuses that path. He says, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.” With that sentence, he turns the whole scene. He pulls his disciples away from blame and toward mercy. He teaches them, and he teaches us, that suffering is not an invitation to sit in judgment. It is an invitation to let God act.

Noon is a harsh hour. The sun is straight overhead. Shadows shrink. Nothing is softened. At Jacob’s well, a woman comes carrying her water jar and, without knowing it, carrying something heavier: a life she has learned to explain and excuse. Her history is no secret in that town. And Jesus’ knowledge of her is not a surprise. What surprises is the change in her: in the presence of Jesus, she begins to see herself clearly.

Despite biblical precedent, a mountain is an odd place for a revelation. The air is thin, the ground uneven, and the climb tiring. Jesus chooses height and solitude, as if he wants his friends to feel, in their bodies, how much they rely on him. Then the veil lifts. The apostles glimpse a beauty too intense for ordinary eyes, the kind that makes knees buckle and words fail.

And beside him stand Moses and Elijah. They are often described as the law and the prophets, a way of saying that Israel’s whole story points toward Christ. Which is true. Yet the scene also speaks to the human heart. Moses and Elijah look like us.

Anyone who has tried to choose a restaurant with friends knows the tension it can create. Options multiply, nobody wants to impose, and minutes vanish. So much energy for a decision forgotten before the bill is paid.

Meanwhile, the choices that shape a life can receive only hurried attention. A decision to forgive or to stay bitter. To speak honestly or to hide. Around those moments, voices multiply. Advice comes from friends, family, headlines, and the constant hum of opinion. Even the good voices carry some fog, because sin has dimmed God’s light in the world and made our own beauty harder to recognize.

Today is about remembering death. We should not mince words. That is what it is about. We rub ashes on our heads and hear, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It is inescapable. We will die. Technology will not save us. Science will never stop it. We will die. And when we die, we will be judged. We will stand before an infinite, perfect being and he will weigh our life against his—against his life as revealed in his Son. There will be no excuses. There will be no grey areas. There will be no secrets. He knows the inmost depths of our minds and hearts. There will simply be the sum total of our choices. What will he say to us? “Well done, my good and faithful servant.” Or will he say, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire?” What he says in that moment is all that matters. It is all that matters. Live accordingly.

Most evenings are not dramatic. They are ordinary: the same rooms, the same chores, the same tiredness, and the small frictions that appear when two lives share one home. Many of the Lord’s hard teachings can be attempted at a distance—one generous act, one patient response, and then we slip away to quieter company. Marriage is different. It places love in the same room, day after day, and trains the heart in the quiet courage of staying.

N.B. This weekend was the annual Bishop’s Appeal.

Picture a small clay lamp on a rough table in a Galilean home. It is not a sealed lantern with glass and metal. It is an open flame, steady and exposed, giving light as long as it is fed. Jesus says, “Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket,” and the image lands with force in a world where fire is never merely decorative. A basket over a flame does not simply hide the glow. It catches fire, it smolders, it collapses into ash.

Most of us learned the faith with a checklist in hand. Do not lie. Do not steal. Do not harm. Those commandments matter. They guard human dignity and teach what love refuses to do.

But a Christian cannot live only by asking where the line is. When the heart is trained to look for the minimum, it begins to treat God like a strict referee, watching for a foot out of bounds. That mindset shrinks the spiritual life into anxiety, as if holiness were mainly the art of avoiding mistakes.

News travels fast when a prophet is taken away. John had been preaching in the rough country across the Jordan, telling the truth plainly to the man who held power. Herod Antipas tried to solve a moral problem by putting the messenger in chains. The arrest was meant to end the noise; instead it became the spark that set everything in motion.

The moment Jesus hears of John’s imprisonment, he does something that looks, at first glance, like retreat. He leaves the wilderness and heads to Galilee. Yet Galilee is not a safe hiding place. It is Herod’s territory. Jesus steps straight into the same domain that just proved it is willing to silence God’s word.

At the request of the bishop, I want to share with you the story of how the Lord led me to this altar—not because my story is the pattern for everyone, but because it is one example of how patiently God can pursue a heart.

I was not born Catholic. In my earliest years, my family raised me in the Episcopal Church, and that is where I was baptized. Later, as the Episcopal Church continued along its present trajectory, we left. We went to a Southern Baptist church, and I spent more years as a Baptist than anything else.

At the edge of the Jordan, there is a line of ordinary people stepping down into the water—tired, hopeful, carrying secrets, searching for a new beginning. John stands there, calling hearts to turn back to God. Then Jesus arrives. Not as a spectator. Not as a judge. He walks into the same river, into the same current, into the same place where sinners are admitting they need mercy.

John recoils, because he recognizes the truth: Jesus has no sin to wash away. He has no stain that needs cleansing. Yet Jesus does not keep himself at a safe distance from the human condition. He chooses nearness. He chooses solidarity. He chooses to take on the weight of humanity—not because he is forced, but because love is never afraid to step into another person’s burden.