Dear Msgr Smith and Fr. Giovanni, and dear parishioners of
Christ the Redeemer,
It is a joy for me to celebrate with you your parish feast day! It’s
a wonderful occasion on which to remember all the good work this parish has
done over the past year and all your generosity to the poor.
And as you come to the end of the liturgical year it is also a
good opportunity to remember and give thanks to God for all the good work you
were able to do for the poor as a parish community. I am a living testament
that when I was a seminarian here, this community did indeed feed the hungry!
Myself! Except for the time Msgr. pretty much banned me from his fridge because
I ate something I wasn’t supposed to… Fr. Giovanni, if this ever happens
to you, remind our dear Msgr. of today’s Gospel… “I was hungry and you gave me
food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink…”
Today we mark the last Sunday of the liturgical year by
celebrating Jesus Christ as universal King. As you can remember all the gospels
as of late have been parables about the end of times, how we need to be ready
with our oil, how we need to invest our talents for when he comes, and today we
hear Jesus’ last discourse in his public ministry, “the final judgment”, where
he will sit and separate the sheep from the goats, those who have followed him
and those who have stubbornly rejected his call to love.
Many people no longer believe in hell… and what is more
distressing, many no longer believe in heaven. But Jesus Christ has made it
very clear to us, especially these last few Sundays, that heaven and hell are
true realities and that we are currently picking a side by the way we live out
our life. In the last three Gospels, it hasn’t been murder, or stealing or some
outrageous crime that has stopped people from entering the kingdom… it has been
sins of omission, a lack of preparation and a failing to live out the
Christian calling. In today’s Gospel, Jesus makes our love for the poor a
condition for entering the kingdom of heaven.
The second Vatican council says that all of us here have the
same two calls, the universal call to holiness, and the universal call to
evangelization. In other words, we all have the calling to (1) reach heaven and
(2) to lead others into heaven. It is not an option, it’s a commanding call.
These two calls originate from our two greatest commandments, to love God, to
live holy lives, and to love neighbour, to bring them the message of good
news. Jesus really does make 'love of neighbour' a necessary component for
love of God. God commands us to live lives of fraternal love now so that we may
be able to lead lives of divine love for all eternity.
Mother Theresa of Calcutta based her ministry on this Gospel.
She called it the five-finger gospel… You. Did. It. To. Me.
The other day at the cathedral a drunk man had pretty much
stripped himself of his clothes because they were all wet and he was trying to
dry them on the radiators… I got a call that there was this man stripping in
the church so I ran over and immediately lost my patience with him… I told
him... this is a church! Have you no shame? and I hurried him to the back
rather brusquely and told him to leave…
Well, that evening was the first time I did Lectio Divina for
this Sunday’s Gospel and it got me thinking… Jesus equates the love we show to
the least of our brethren to the love we show him. When I say mass, I am most
attentive that not even one particle falls to the ground. I protect the host so
that nothing happens, so that I can give God, present in the sacred
species, the utmost reverence I can give. When I prepare the chalice I do
likewise and cover it, and dress it and make it beautiful, to give him glory…
And it dawned on me, Jesus wants me to treat the poor at the
cathedral like the sacred vessels of the altar, they are people who hold in
themselves (just like the chalice and the paten) the very person of Jesus
Christ.
We have an invitation from Jesus who is the universal king to
rediscover his presence in the darkest corners of our humanity. In fact, he
tells us that there is where he will
be and that we will be judged by how much love we show him in these poor and
broken vessels of his, which he calls “the least of mine”. It's not only the
homeless and the penniless that Jesus is speaking about… Mother Teresa put it
very well… she said, “being unwanted, unloved, uncared for, forgotten by
everybody... I think that is a much greater hunger, a much greater poverty than
the person who has nothing to eat”. And in another place, she says, “Never
worry about numbers, help one person at a time and start with the person
nearest you”.
Whom has Jesus placed in our lives now? Whom has he bonded us to
in love? Through whom does Jesus demand love in our lives?
As we approach this Eucharist, as we see the chalice and the
paten, let us ask our Lord to give us the patience and the ability to see all
of our brothers and sisters as holy, as worthy of our love and devotion,
vessels of God’s love poured out for us, to treat them with reverence and
respect, knowing that Jesus Christ is present within them, waiting to be loved,
waiting to catch our gaze.
Just as faith is the only thing that allows us to see that the
bread becomes the body of Jesus and that the wine becomes his blood, so let us
now ask, as we prepare these gifts, for the faith to see the divine and
universal king, living and abiding in the broken hearts of the people God has
placed in our lives, so that we may lead them closer to heaven by the concrete
love which we show them.
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