Living the Beatitudes Leads to Freedom (6.C)

 

This was my favorite Christmas present this year. I guess that's to be expected since I bought it myself!

It's the four Gospels, the first volume of the beautiful Bible being produced by Word on Fire, the ministry founded by Bishop Robert Barron.

The book features exquisite art, with essays about each illustration, introductions by fine Catholic authors and—no surprise—commentaries by Bishop Barron.

Bishop Barron has been called the Fulton Sheen of the 21^st century. For those too young to remember Bishop Sheen, he was a pioneer in using radio and television—the social media of his day—to share the Gospel message.

There’s something else both men had in common: although they were able to communicate with all kinds of people, Catholics and non-Catholics, young and old,  they didn’t dumb down the message. Both were serious scholars with doctorates from prestigious Catholic universities in Europe.

You might say they were popular, but not popularizers.

And when I started to read the Beatitudes in my Word on Fire Bible, I also got more than I expected. I found  Bishop Barron's comments striking and new.

He starts. however, with the obvious, pointing out how strange these sayings sound. They contradict our experience.

I’ve only felt poor twice in my life, and I distinctly recall that there was nothing blessed about it. And being hated and reviled is surely worse still.

Bishop Barron tells a personal story that sets the stage for his thoughts about the Beatitudes. One Sunday afternoon there was a knock on the rectory door, and he opened it to find a man dressed in an expensive suit, projecting prosperity and confidence.

When the man said “Father, I’ve realized all my dreams,” Bishop Barron responded, “That’s wonderful.”

But it wasn’t. The man said “There’s only one problem. I’m perfectly miserable.”

His insatiable desire for money was an addiction that had robbed his life of meaning and joy. The “blessings” of success were a curse.

This leads Bishop Barron to interpret the Beatitudes in a very fresh way. He translates the Greek word used in the Gospel as “lucky” instead of the familiar “blessed” or even happy. And then he proposes this reading of what Jesus said: “How lucky are you if you are not addicted to material things.”

He carries on in the same way when he looks at “Blessed are you who weep now.” This, he says, we can understand as “How lucky you are if you are not addicted to good feelings.”

I always understood this beatitude as meaning only that we were blessed to weep because God would dry our tears in heaven. That’s true enough, of course, but the bishop draws out another meaning: feeling happy can be as much a false God as wealth if we can’t live without happy feelings, and want more and more of them.

Finally, he gets to the toughest of all these teachings: “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you and defame you on account of the Son of Man.”

When I read that, I figured even Bishop Barron would have trouble finding any good luck in those situations.

But he didn’t. He translates the Lord’s words as “How lucky you are if you are not addicted to the approval of others.”

Bishop Barron says “Status, attention, and fame are among the most powerful… of the false gods who lure us.”  He backs it up with his own experience, describing how his need for approval—first from his father, then his teachers, then his professors—became an addictive pattern in his life.

Needing approval is a dangerous thing. It's certainly a bigger spiritual risk for me than wanting riches or good feelings. 

And being too concerned for the opinion of others is not only a risk for the spiritual life but for any life of integrity and courage. As Winston Churchill said, “Never trust a man who has no enemies.”

When Jesus says, “Woe to you when all speak well of you,” he is warning us that those who are spiritually free will inevitably find themselves in conflict with those who are still in chains.

Bishop Barron showed me a new way of looking at the Beatitudes, but his conclusion was very familiar. The blessing, the “good luck”, of being poor, sorrowful, or hated is the blessing of freedom, an inner freedom that nothing and no-one can take from us.

The path to such freedom is clear throughout the New Testament, where Jesus tells the rich young man to sell all he has and invites us all to pick up our cross and follow him. St. Paul tells us to take off our old self and leave it behind.

This path is the way of the saints. St. John of the Cross called it detachment, St. Teresa of Avila spoke of surrender, while St. Ignatius uses the term indifference. And the spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ has a chapter titled “How Surrender of Self Brings Freedom of Heart.”

And in our time, the Serenity Prayer used by 12-step groups calls it acceptance: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…” By not living at the mercy of people and circumstances and events we find the true interior freedom to which Jesus calls us in the powerful words of today’s Gospel.

How blessed—how lucky we are—if we trust that God is at work in everything that happens to us, both the things we welcome and those we don’t.

Sharing the Good News in Full Colour (5.C)

In my day there wasn’t a lot of training in preaching at the seminary. 

But we did get some, and I remember one lesson well. A visiting expert told us it was good to start a homily with something from the news.

It wouldn’t be hard to follow his advice today. This week saw the 70th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth on her throne and the Conservative leader Erin O'Toole toppled from his . The Olympics have begun, and the pandemic has, well, continued.

But I don't think we need current events to connect us with the scriptures we've heard this morning. They are timeless treasures of divine wisdom which should get our attention without a catchy introduction.

God’s word is inviting every person in church today, and everyone watching the livestream, to make a connection with our own lives. In other words, whether today’s homily succeeds depends on the hearers, not the preacher.

At first, we might not find it easy to make a personal connection—after all, the first reading is about a prophet who lived 2800 years ago, and the Gospel setting is a lake more than 10,000 kilometers from here.

But the fact is: Isaiah’s words are meant for our hearts, and the call of the apostles is a call for each of us.

It’s so easy to put the Bible in a box marked “ancient history,” when God wants us to place it front and centre of everyday life. Let’s look at how we can move the message of today’s first reading and Gospel from history to now, from ‘there’ to ‘here.’

We can start by stepping into Isaiah’s shoes. Forget about King Uzziah, whoever he was, and even about the six-winged seraphim. Look at what the prophet says: “Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.”

Shall we translate this? “Oh no! I am a sinner, like everyone else, yet I know who God is; I have seen his goodness and glory.”

That’s something any of us might say. We are sinners, ordinary sinners, so please don’t ask us to be prophets. If you want a parishioner to help with Bible studies, faith studies, prayer ministry or Alpha, I can give you some names. Just not mine!

But let’s keep reading. Isaiah’s fear and resistance melts away when the angel tells him his sin is forgiven. In an instant his lips are touched by divine fire and made ready for mission.

Here’s where stepping into Isaiah’s shoes becomes a challenge. We haven’t encountered an angel lately, so the prophet’s ‘yes’ to God seems impossible for us: “Here am I: send me!”

So, let’s leave Isaiah for a moment, and turn to the Gospel. Let’s stand beside Peter and the others washing their nets.

There’s no heavenly smoke and thunder there. Not even a single seraph. It’s just an ordinary workday for some fishermen, an unsuccessful one at that. But the same thing happens: God calls, and they answer.

Once again, the future disciple responds the way we might: “Keep your distance, Lord. I am not cut out for this.”

But God does the same thing for them he did for Isaiah: he takes away their fear. He gives them a mission that leaves no room for hesitation. Later, we see how Jesus equips those fishermen for great things.

There are so many problems in the Church today, so much sorrow for past sinfulness, so many who have turned away. And yet there’s one thing that lets me face those problems with hope and without discouragement: the rediscovery of the ordinary Catholic’s call to be a missionary.

My friend Father James Mallon lives in Halifax, a city that played a big role in the rescue of survivors from the sinking of the Titanic. In his book Divine Renovation, he recalls the well-known story of half-filled lifeboats, and of lifeboats that stayed at a distance while people drowned.

He's not just lamenting history: Father Mallon is warning us not to repeat it. We can’t be Christians who put our own safety—our own salvation—ahead of others’.

He reminds us that the Church exists for mission. “Like Jesus, we have been sent to ‘seek and save’ those who are perishing, and there are plenty of seats in the lifeboats.”

“Perhaps,” he writes, “if a few people swam over to us we would help them” but going to them “is totally outside our frame of reference.”

Slowly but surely, I see this changing in the Church, in our parish, in individual lives. We are moving from maintenance to mission; we are beginning to know that God didn’t call prophets and apostles only in the Bible; he calls them now.

And we—every one of us who has been baptized—are the ones he’s calling. We are the ones whose lips have been purified to preach. God wants to hear each of us say “Here I am—send me!”

As we restore parish life after the pandemic, forming joyful missionary disciples is job number one at Christ the Redeemer.

I haven’t mentioned today’s second reading yet, but it’s crucial. This passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is the rock on which everything else stands: the core message of salvation.

Do you remember what we said at Mass after the consecration before the Missal changed? “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” That’s today’s second reading in a nutshell.

But more important, it’s Christian faith in a nutshell! Greek even has a word for it: kerygma. Kerygma literally means “preaching,” as distinct from teaching. Paul speaks here of the message he proclaimed—the good news that is the foundation of everything else.

Everyone knows that St. Paul taught many things about how to live the Christian life, but he only proclaimed one central message: “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”

If we ‘get’ that, we get everything else.

And if we don’t want to share that, we don’t get it.

Father Mallon writes that many Catholics live in a black-and-white world without any conception of colour. I get that, because for years I watched only black-and-white TV, without feeling I was missing anything.

And of course, watching in black and white was fine—we still got the jokes in the comedies, and were scared by the dramas. But once you’ve watched in colour it’s hard to imagine anything else.

God invites us today, as individual Christians and as members of this parish, to experience the Good News of salvation in full colour.

When and if we do, it won’t be hard for us to answer, “Here am I—send me.”