Homilies & Thoughts

“Without cost you have received.” The words of the Lord seem so clear. The Gospel is free. Salvation is free. Yet we have slowly allowed ourselves to believe something else. The world and its ideas have taken root in many hearts. Many people have come to think that we somehow purchase the faith.

I saw this in a parish not long ago. It was not our parish. Difficult but important changes were introduced, and some people were unhappy. Tensions rose enough that the diocese had to send in others to listen and help bring healing. In the aftermath of those meetings, I saw some of the feedback on social media. One comment struck me: “Why don’t we let the market decide? Each parish can do what it wants, and the money will pick the winner.”

A grain of wheat looks almost weightless in the hand. It is small enough to be overlooked and dismissed. Yet inside that small thing, God has hidden a path from from human hunger to eternal life.

One of the great tragedies of modern life is that we have learned to see creation as flat. A tree is wood and leaves. Water is a chemical substance. Useful things, perhaps beautiful things, but sealed off from any deeper purpose or meaning. The world becomes a collection of facts, and we become people who know how to use things without knowing how to see them truly and experience them.

N.B. I will not ordinarilly post my letters to the parish I serve because they are focused on local matters. However, I think this letter addresses an issue of broader importance.

This week our parish was shaken. ICE came into our community and people were taken away. Fear was left behind. Many of our parishioners are now afraid to go to work, to go to the store, and even to come to mass. Attendance at mass in Spanish dropped. Our trained liturgical ministers were absent. When civil enforcement creates fear that keeps the faithful from the Eucharist and prevents ministers from serving at the altar, it injures the worship owed to God. We must face this as Christians before anything else.

To forget a face is to lose more than a memory. The face mediates relationship. It puts flesh on the spirit. To forget a face is to lose a relationship. It is to lose love.

When sin entered the human story, the face of God grew dim in us. We had been made in his image, made to reflect the living communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The image remained, because God does not abandon his own work, but the likeness became blurred. Choosing our own will over the will of God, we lost sight of the One we were made to resemble. Once God’s face became harder to see, humanity itself became harder to understand.

A locked door seems like wisdom when fear has taken hold. The disciples know danger. The crucifixion is still fresh in their minds. Every noise outside could mean discovery. So they stay behind the door, and for a little while the room feels safe. But the longer they remain there, the more that safety will consume and claim them.

Then the risen Christ appears. He stands in the middle of the room, among men who know they are weak. They had scattered when courage was needed. Out of anxiety that it would come for them, they could not watch while evil did its work. Now the Lord stands before them, with the marks of the cross still on his body. He does not speak to their fear.

“Manifesting” has become one of the favored words of our age, wrapped in glossy promises of a better life. The idea is simple enough: concentrate desire until the universe somehow bends toward it. It treats longing almost like a tool. Aim it hard enough, and it may deliver what the heart has chosen.

At Pentecost, the Church places before us a different kind of longing. Jesus stands at the height of the feast and cries out, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.” He begins with the kind of need everyone understands. Thirst is desire at its strongest. When a person is truly thirsty, the whole body is focused on a simple fact: without water, life vanishes.

St. Matthew lets the number stand in the open. The disciples climb the mountain in Galilee, and there are only eleven of them. Eleven. A wounded number.

For most of the Gospel, Jesus has walked with the twelve. They were the visible sign of a new Israel, the first stones of a renewed people, the beginning of a Church meant to gather the whole human family into the love of God. Now one place is empty. Judas is gone, and Matthew does not hide that absence. Before the risen Lord sends the Church to the nations, the Church stands before him incomplete.

Absence can reveal the truth. While someone stands near us, the meaning of that life often remains scattered through ordinary days. We remember a gesture without grasping the love behind it. We hear a sentence and only later feel its full weight. After departure, the pieces begin to gather. Death, and even the approach of death, can become a revealing light.

In the quiet of the upper room, Jesus begins to shine that light. The meal is over. The feet of the disciples are still clean from his hands. Judas has slipped into the dark. Jesus remains with his friends, and the hour closing around him will soon make sense of everything he has said and done.

The upper room has the stillness that comes before grief. Jesus has spoken of departure, and the disciples feel the ground shift beneath them. Their daily life has taken shape around his presence. Now the one whose nearness has steadied them speaks as though he will soon be hidden from sight.

That apparent hiddenness is where this Gospel touches us most today. The disciples could look upon the face of Jesus. They could hear his voice without the veil of memory and meet the gaze of the Son who reveals the Father. Their confusion was real, but their privilege seems undeniable. They could see God in the flesh.

I think we all recognize that the incarnation—God becoming man—is God’s free choice. He decides to do that. Nothing compelled him or coerced him. But I do not think we always appreciate some of the consequences of that choice. Not only does he freely choose to become man; he also chooses of whom he becomes man.

He chooses the Blessed Virgin Mary. He did not have to. And in choosing her, he chooses the situation in which she lives. God could have chosen to be born among the royalty of the world. He could have been born the son of a king and lived that life. He could have been born into the leisure classes, among those who do not have to work.

There is a kind of noise that does not merely fill a room. It takes possession of it. Leave a television running long enough, keep the phone close enough, let the commentary pour in day after day, and the soul begins to change. The noise takes root. What was once a stranger begins to sound familiar, it begins to sound like the truth.

That is the danger Jesus calls out on this Good Shepherd Sunday. The stranger does not always sound strange at first. He may sound like courage itself. But his voice carries a hidden deception. It pulls the sheep away from the gate and into places where the heart grows suspicious and hardens.

Several years ago, when I bought a car, I did everything carefully. I researched the options, compared features, went on test drives, talked to other owners, and slowly narrowed it down until I found exactly what I wanted. Then I bought it, drove it home, and before long I had the same thought everyone eventually has: it was good, but something was missing. There was some feature I wished it had, some improvement I could already imagine.