CONCEIVED OF HOLY SPIRIT VIRGIN MARY MADE MAN

Conceived by the Power of the Holy Spirit in the Womb of the Virgin Mary and was made Man...

What an honour and privilege! I am so grateful to you for calling me to preach Jesus Christ. Could there ever be a great subject for discourse than Jesus Christ? He is more than a subject. He is Person, the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, whom I have known and loved all my life. He will not leave me and, and I will not let him go – so fast and furious is our embrace.

Yesterday you considered God the Creator, also known as the Father. From all eternity God knows himself and that self-knowledge is so perfect that it generates the Son: God expressing himself totally in the Son. The Son is God-as-he-knows-himself.

Now, can you imagine? God is going to extend himself personally in his creation. So he had prepared a mother for his Son in the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary from the first moment of her existence – the Immaculate Conception, a sinless woman. We believe that God was communicating with Mary from as early as she could think, and she was always assenting to the divine inspirations.  “Let what you will be done to me.” Thirty-three years on her son Jesus would say exactly the same in Gethsemane. Like Mother, like Son!

A brief note on the virginity of Mary. Virginity was not merely the abstention from sexual relations, but something biblical and theological. Biblical: Israel had lost all its battles and was on her knees, now under Roman rule. The house of David was in shambles. No help could be expected from other nations. Israel’s only hope was divine intervention, i.e. God’s help. Mary’s virginity was all this. Symbol of the uselessness of human help, her virginity stood for the absence of human sustenance. Virginity meant the hunger for God’s direct intervention and rescue. God did, indeed, intervene. Her virginity would bear fruit. “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus”, who would restore the kingdom of Israel  that would liberate the whole world. The Church is the new Israel.

The young maiden conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the personalised venue of the love between Father and Son. So the action of the Holy Spirit was an act of love. There was no human male intervention for the conception of Jesus. That was done by the Holy Spirit.

A few words about Mary’s pregnancy.

Jesus the Eternal Word took flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the power of the Holy Spirit, after she consented to God’s plan announced by the Archangel Gabriel. Reflecting on Mary’s pregnancy can teach us patience and the attitude of joyful expectation. This attitude of joyful expectation should accompany the pregnancy of every woman as we await the birth of her pre-born child. Each child is made in the image and likeness of God no matter what their handicaps or circumstances of conception. Every child deserves a chance to be born and to continue to grow and develop outside the womb. Jesus identifies with the pre-born since he himself was a pre-born child. Jesus went through all the stages of development that we went through. He was a tiny zygote, an embryo, fetus, infant, child, adolescent and an adult. At no time did he become more human. He simply went through different stages of human development as we all did. When Jesus was developing in the womb he was not a potential person but a real person. Mary also can identify with every pregnant mother in a difficult pregnancy. She did not fully understand God’s plan, yet she trusted. True devotion to Mary means imitating her virtues – her faith, her trust and her willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of her son and others as she stayed with Elizabeth for three months to help Elizabeth deliver John.  When Mary visited Elizabeth John leapt for joy within Elizabeth’s womb as he recognized Christ’s presence in Mary. Thus we see John who was a fetus recognizing Christ who was a tiny embryo. This should lead us to an even greater respect for the lives of pre-born children and inspire us to work for their protection. Jesus says "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters that you do to me" (Mt. 25, 40). St. Joseph cared for Mary during her pregnancy. He is an example for all men of the stewardship they are called to exercise. Men are called to respect the wonder of procreation and to care for pregnant women emotionally, materially and spiritually. During their pregnancies women become vulnerable and should be able to rely on the support of their husbands and other men in their life who should respect and assist women as the mystery of life unfolds within them.  Mary appeared as a pregnant woman to Blessed Juan Diego in Mexico in 1531. She identified herself to be "the perpetual and perfect Virgin Mary, holy mother of the true God through whom everything lives, the Creator and Master of heaven and earth”. Mary showed love to a people who had just escaped from the diabolical Aztec empire in which human sacrifices were offered to false gods. Pope John Paul II proclaimed Our Lady of Guadalupe to be the Patroness of the Americas. She is also recognized as the Patroness of the Unborn.             “For when peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half-spent, your all powerful Word bounded from heaven’s royal throne, a fierce warrior into the doomed land” (Book of Wisdom 18, 14-15).             The greatest things are accomplished in silence.  It is in silence that the heart is quickened by love, and the free will stirs to action. The silent forces are the strong forces.  And the greatest event of all was the descent of the Son of God from his throne on to this earth. It was the most silent event because it came from the infinite remoteness beyond the noise of any possible intrusion.             The Son of God became man, - “the Word was made flesh” (Jn. 1) in the womb of an unknown virgin. No one but the young virgin knew that Divinity had set up its tent among men.             In this Child, God, having spoken at sundry times through the prophets, chose to reveal to man the mysteries hidden from all eternity.  In this Child the infinite made an advance into the finite, a personal intervention, a divine transfusion by which we are transformed, elevated, redeemed; for whereas we were blind, now we see. In this Child, God and man have a purchase on each other. He breathed our air, felt our pain, hungered, thirsted, laboured and loved, and by doing so gave our life meaning.             The Incarnation was a descent into the temporal, into the material, into this world of births and generations, into this world of buying and selling, this world of housing and education, to this world of leisure and hard work, this world of unemployment and taxes. The Lord Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God, took upon himself all this in order to elevate and transfigure.  Therefore, our salvation does not consist in a flight or retreat from this world; not a flight of the alone to the Alone; not an escape from our fellowmen and our day to day burdens. It is an injustice to the Incarnation to confine its effectiveness merely to internal graces. In every line of progress, spiritual, intellectual and material, the Incarnation must be the enabling leaven. And if that is so, it should be the rule and not the exception to have saintly workers and peasants, saintly statesmen and judges, merchants and soldier. All stages of life are graced, from childhood to adolescence, from marriage to retirement, up to the last day of our life. “All flesh shall see the salvation of our God” (Luke 6).             Wherever the Christ Child is adored there is at least some sense of mystery. Ignore that birth, and the road to power runs straight as a ruler to the death camps. Focus on that birth, and the road to a healthy humanity cannot be missed. This Infant touched off a revolution, a quiet prolonged thunder, from the recesses of the cave of his birth, founding a kingdom that is known by unconditional love and undiscriminating service. The centre of this dynamic process is the human heart; and the source - the Son of God, born in the heart of every man and woman.              He is not an ideal or abstraction, a gaunt empty figure beyond description; but a person in whom is the fullness of the Godhead, the most beautiful among men, victor over death and hell. Nothing great he puts before us to achieve except to love him, to be faithful to him and to give faithful testimony to him when the time comes. His desire is that we love him, that we love one another for him and that we believe in his love for us. Jesus dying lives, and living he dies daily like the grain of wheat or else he takes no root in our hearts. He comes into this world, dispossessed infinity, naked and cold, that each one of us may give him something: the universe for his stable, for his manger our hearts, and their warmth. And as for the rest, we have no right to expect a status higher than that of the carpenter’s son.

ELEVENTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "C"

Sunday 11^th. Year “C”

The Sinful Woman

  We see from the Gospel the type of fellowship that Jesus was seeking. He knew who were those who needed him: tax collectors and sinners. They belonged to a world apart, a condemned world. And they took it as accepted fact that they were sinners.  So it was quite a shock to the official Jewish religion to see Jesus in the midst of sinners, sharing their meals and conversation. His choice was clear: he preferred to belong to the rejected class.  It landed him into trouble. His own generation had to choose what to do with him, since he threatened their traditional religion. He threatened their holy place (Jerusalem and the temple), the holy time (Passover and the Sabbath); h e threatened their holy men (scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees). So they promptly got rid of him and they thought they were doing an act of religion. As he was considered unholy, he was taken outside the city and given an unholy place to die in (Golgotha), hung between unholy men (thieves) and left to his grisly end. It was religious man’s rejected of Christ as the truth about God and man.

From what we know about him, Jesus liked sinners, he liked to eat with them and converse with them. During meals, he certainly was talking with them, exchanging pleasantries, making comments on the happenings of daily life, accidents and encounters. Jesus did not need to sound warnings and threats during meals. Nobody does that, unless he is very pessimistic, which Jesus wasn’t. He saw something good in everybody. No human being is totally and absolutely evil. “Nazareth? What good can come out of Nazareth?” said a prospective disciple. We answer: from Nazareth there came the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Jesus of Nazareth himself. What some people thought unholy God would make holy. It was the unholy place, known as Golgotha, that God claimed for his own. A new idea of holiness was born. We don’t count holy what God seems to; we don’t see the way that God sees. We say, let the world come to us. God replies, go into the world and meet the real Man.

My dear friends, during meals and conversations, don’t hesitate to correct your relatives and friends when you notice they are condemning people as just no good, with nothing good to be expected of them. You should react to such destructive remarks by saying, “You’re being pessimistic. You must have hopes for everybody; hopes for the future, including yours.”

Let us focus again on Jesus. Jesus came across as an understanding and affable friend. You could always feel comfortable in his presence. Today’s beautiful line is from the lips of Jesus. Pointing to the woman anointing and kissing his feet, he declares publicly: “She loves much because she has been forgiven much.” Try to imagine the scene. Jesus is seated at table with Simon, the tax collector, and his guests. They face the open entrance of the house so that they could see all that is going on in the compound outside. And then the woman crosses the entrance knowing that Jesus is seated inside. She looks for him from outside and he looks at her from where he is seated. Their eyes meet. She sees mercy and forgiveness. She then knows she is forgiven, and this fills her with love. “She loves much loves for she is forgiven much.” That is the gist of today’s gospel’s passage.

 To understand today’s gospel, we must discern behind it the very person of the man-God, ideal of encounter between God and man. In Jesus God and man meet. Christ has made a success of this encounter. Hence he can take the most desperate human situation and make wrongdoers aware of what they are expected to do. They must open to God’s gift (or his pardon) and respond with a loving “yes” to his initiative. The power of evil is still so strong in today’s world that we cannot be certain of man’s future. But what we are certain of is that Jesus Christ is always present and calling us to greater perfection, to become more human and considerate towards one another.

Let me end with a beautiful Prayer of Padraig Pearse:

I have made my heart clean tonight

As a woman might clean her house                                                  

‘Ere her lover come to visit her                                                              

O Lover, pass not by.

I have opened the door of my heart                                                

Like a man what would make a feast                                                    

For his son’s coming home from afar.

Beautiful, thy coming, O Son.

Amen

St. Thomas’ Church

Kolkata

Sunday, 16 June 2013

WIDOW OF NAIN Sunday 10th. Year "C"

Sunday 10^th. – Year “C”: THE WIDOW OF NAIN

The Homily: Jesus’ sympathetic heart went out to widows. In today’s Gospel he works a miracle to help a distraught widow. He once publicly commended a widow for putting a few coppers into the Temple collection box. One of his parables was about a widow insisting with a magistrate to redress some grievance. It seems certain that when Jesus was well into his ministry his mother Mary was then a widow. Widows were representatives of helplessness in a society that refused them any personality and protection. A woman had no personality apart from her husband; and when he died she had no status. Two things at least are clear from the reading of the Gospels. 1. Jesus was on the side of the widows. The way he spoke about them and treated them gave them status and self-respect. 2. To prove that it was not just a matter of words, Jesus himself entered into the hapless condition of those who had no security. From the moment he expelled the business men from the Temple he knew he’d have to go it entirely alone. His friends would abandon him and the Temple police would run him to earth and beat him up.

There is a Greek word in today’s Gospel that is rendered too casually by the English phrase: “he felt sorry.” The Greek word signifies more than that. The word is “splanknenzein”. Let me explain. You see on TV policemen and soldiers beating up demonstrators. The bloodied corpses of innocent women and children brutally massacred by terrorists; or you actually see on the streets of Calcutta a child being smashed by a speeding truck. Your stomach turns, your blood curdles. You feel a deep reverberating revulsion and anger, despair, a sense of the uselessness and frustration of it all, a sort of hatred for those old politicians who hold on to power at the expence of young lives. We felt like saying things like, “These things shouldn’t happen, I won’t allow it, I won’t stand for it.” That is how Jesus felt as he stopped the funeral procession of the widow’s son. Jesus is God and Creator, and here was a fine young specimen of his creation cut off in his prime. So, as the Greek verb tells us, he groaned deeply, which must have meant something like this in so many words: “Whereas I am preaching that I have come that they may have life and have it to the full, here is a dead boy seemingly challenging my manifesto, calling me a liar, as it were. So I’ll show them what I intend for my creation.” “Young man, rise.”

Every miracle of Jesus was an anticipation of his own Resurrection. Every miracle was life-giving: feeding, healing and raising to life. And, please note, those miracles were not thrown at people from the mountain top: Mt. Olympus of the Greeks or Mt. Kailash of the Hindus. Jesus Christ, Son of God, acted from within his people. He would know hunger and thirst and feed the hungry. He’d know physical hurts and wounds, and heal sickness. St. Paul says that he who was sinless was made into sin for us. No religious leader knew sinners as intimately as Jesus; and finally he died to lead us into eternal life. Jesus was a man who tested life and was in turn tested by it; and he discovered that life was not a bad joke. The more deeply we are involved in life the more deeply we can redeem it - from within.

When the war has been won and he boys come marching home, we don’t clap for those who sat in front of computers pressing buttons to launch missiles from a distance at targets 2,000 miles away. No, we cheer and clap for those who were in the mud, who went over the top with bullets falling every inch of the way.

That’s Jesus. He didn’t see a funeral procession from a distance; he came upon it, went right up and put his hand on the cot bearing the deceased. I pray that he lay his hand on each one of us and take away the death-dealing poisons like self-hatred, anger, low self-esteem; and far from that temptation to rip life away, make us givers of life and saviours of the helpless.

(The Catholic Church is a widow in regard to many of her priests. They are dead: morally and spiritually dead. Causes of death: cynicism, hatred, anger, and self-indulgence. And most of these are causes of moral suicide).

 Prayer:

Dearest Lord Jesus, Son of the living God, through your death and Resurrection you have achieved eternal life for your followers. Lord of life and victor over death, we beg you to point our bodies in the direction of your Resurrection which death will open for each one of us, sweetly and swiftly. And may you come soon, as you have promised, to convey us to your eternal dwellings. We ask this in the power of your name. Amen.

“Swing low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home.

Swing low, sweet chariot

Coming for to carry me home”

EUCHARIST AND MATERIAL FOOD

EUCHARIST AND MATERIAL FOOD

Introduction: “Eucharist” itself means Thanksgiving. There couldn’t be a better way of thanking God than by celebrating the Eucharist. Every Mass is a thanksgiving Mass. No sacrament contributes more to our salvation than this, for it purges away our sins, increases our virtues, and is the pledge of eternal life. The Most Holy Eucharist is the real, substantial and personal presence of Jesus Christ under the symbol of food and as Head of the community.

Let us begin the Eucharistic Lord’s celebration with profound sorrow for our sins and failures.

The Homily: Material food also has a spiritual dimension. Offering each other food is an important gesture of hospitality. It recognizes that feeding people is more than satisfying their physical need. Food becomes a symbol for welcome, generosity, protection, kindness, equality and sharing. And a special emphasis on showing hospitality to strangers makes it clear that food and hospitality must be offered without discrimination. Food does not merely hold a calorific value but also has a moral weight, an ethical energy.

Listen to the experience of a relief worker for Kurdish refugees along the Turkish border. “Hundreds of thousands of people had fled their homes in Northern Iraq and were now living in terrible conditions in cold mountain camps. Everyday people were dying because there was not enough food. On my first visit to a camp, one old man greeted me and invited me into his small shelter, a sheet of plastic stretched between the branches of a tree. Inside were huddled his three wives and his eleven children. It was very cold and some of the children were ill. We sat down and he offered me a cup of tea. These people had nothing except this tea, and their only water source was the snow, one hour’s walk away. But still they offered it to me, insisting that I share a cup with them. In this terrible refugee camp where food should have been values more than ever for its nutritional content alone, people still used it to embody other moral values. Here it was the values of equality and dignity. This man who now had nothing, wanted to show me that, despite his suffering, he was still human, still a moral being. He was still that. The message in that cup of tea came through loud and clear. It helped see him as a person, to recognize him and not pass him over as yet another refugee statistic. Drinking our tea we sat together. He talked about the crisis and I listened.”  

Who is your neighbour? Is it anybody in need? Is it someone you find on your path of life? Or is it someone on whose path you find yourself and discover who you are? The New Testament is full of stories about food. Jesus uses food as a metaphor for many of his sayings. He often is found eating with people who offer him hospitality. And finally when his inhospitable enemies are baying for his blood, Jesus proves to be the most hospitable host by giving himself to his friends in the Eucharist. In the bread and wine of the Eucharist the friends of Jesus hope to get a glimpse of a new life, a risen life. We take part in a mystery we cannot understand fully, but which can at least be tasted. The Eucharist is a small sample of the heavenly feast we look forward to. A crumb falling from the table of God. We eat the bread when it becomes for us a mysterious spiritual food which holds great meaning and embodies the strange story of our faith.

The story of the man in the prison cell breaking bread and giving it to his wife and children saying, “Take and eat, this is the Body of God.” I believe that when said that the stale bread turned warm, fresh and fragrant with the presence of Jesus, and his wife and children parted from him with strength for the future.

Prayer:  (Kate Mcllhagga):   As wine is poured for the world, may we see the world’s pain. As we share the cup of suffering with our neighbor, may we also share our experience. Make us good stewards of opportunity to listen, to comfort, to work for healing, peace, and community. In our common life may we remember the God of redemption, the saving, salving, suffering God, the God who never forgets us. Thanks be to God, whose broken hands are inscribed with our names and whose Spirit calls us to account.