Jesus Emptied Himself to the Point of Death

Our Story
You have just heard the longest Mass reading of the year, the solemn reading of the Passion. It is the only Gospel read dramatically at Mass, in three parts—four parts really, since you take your part too as the congregation. I can’t remember much about the Masses I attended every Sunday as a boy, but I do remember Palm Sunday every year—how long it was, how we would kneel for some moments of silence after Jesus dies, and how strange it was to see the Gospel read dramatically, and even to have my own part to read in it. The Passion Story is the core of the New Testament. Biblical scholars tell us that it was the first part of the Gospels to be set in writing, and then eventually the rest of the details of Jesus’ life were filled in. It is the compact core of our Bibles, the essential summary of our faith; rightly do we read it with high solemnity every year.

Two Colors
Palm Sunday is also the only Mass with two Gospels. The Mass begins in green (with the reading of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem) but quickly turns to red (with the reading of his Passion in that same city). Jesus enters the holy city in triumph, but within days he is strung up on the blood-soaked cross by the furious crowds demanding his death. The crowds’ joyful acclaim quickly turns to violent hatred. How frail we are. 

Emptying and being Filled
And yet Jesus never loses sight of his essential mission and purpose. He has come to die for his people, whether they love him or hate him. His love does not fail. And what about us? Brothers, for example, can you love your wife at the very moment that she is screaming at you? That’s the proof of love, when it’s under fire, when you are pinned to the ground.

St. Paul says “Jesus emptied himself … he humbled himself, becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” And because of his obedience, God “greatly exalted him.” This is how you can love your wife, or your husband, or your child, or parent, or employer, at the very moment he or she is screaming at you: by self-emptying. You find love by giving love. You become full by emptying yourself; you become great by becoming little. Some call this God’s Law of the Gift, that life is essentially a gift to be given, and only in giving do we receive. Many people, especially in our secular culture, think this is nonsense. They reject God’s way of glory through sacrifice. And yet … we all know it is true. No pain no gain. No guts no glory. Our secular culture tries its best to live the illusion of “buying on credit,” of just borrowing (or printing up) more money. But it can’t last. There comes a time when we need to stop spending what we don’t have, to empty ourselves, to give rather than to take. This is essentially what Christ did on the Cross. He stopped borrowing and started paying. He paid the price. And now it’s our turn.

Beyond the Cross
Don’t be afraid of blood. It’s the color of this Mass, and the color of our faith. The red blood of His sacrifice, of our sacrifice, waters the green and leafy branches of new life. We will pass beyond our crosses to a life beyond our capacity to imagine, if we stay true to those crosses with Christ. This week is the week to do it. Let’s be constant and brave this Holy Week, staying close to Christ, as did his Holy Mother, at the foot of the Cross. Beyond Good Friday rises Easter Sunday, for those who remain steady to the last drop of His Sacred Passion.

Homily: Laetare   

Laetare: Rejoice to know that God is very much alive.
In 1991, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, wrote a little book entitled Turning Point for Europe. Europe was at the point of deciding whether to maintain its historically robust belief in God, or to cast off its Judeo-Christian heritage for a radical secularism. Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out a phenomenon unprecedented in human history—the problem: drugs—the pervasive and persistent use of drugs by major populations who find life unbearable without them (well over 50% of American high school students abuse drugs). Why do we in the modern world find life so unbearable? Why can’t we bear the inevitable pains and distresses of human life, as people in former times could? Cardinal Ratzinger suggested one difference in our time: a pervasive and persistent atheism. As the German philosopher Nietzsche said in 1882, “God is dead, and we have killed him.” It is true, that we killed God, on the Cross. But is God dead? He is certainly not dead. He is very much alive, a cause of great joy with anyone who has eyes to see it. Jesus is our Joy, and his Holy Mother is the Cause of our Joy.

Blindness and Sight
In the Gospel, Jesus heals a blind man. The Old Testament rabbis taught that blindness, like all sickness, resulted from personal sin. Jesus, the New Testament rabbi, teaches that blindness is not from sin, but sin is blindness. Sin does not cause physical blindness; it causes spiritual blindness; it blinds a man’s soul; it imprisons a man in a gloomy darkness. The only deadly blindness is of the heart, not of the eyes. (“Blessed are the pure of heart, for they will see God.”) One man can see perfectly well, but not believe, while another man can believe with unshakeable faith, even though he cannot see. Seeing is not believing, but believing is seeing. “Do you believe in the Son of man?” Jesus asked the blind man. “I do believe,” he replied. I do not need my eyes to see.

“Seeing,” in the most important sense, means recognizing our own sin—that we are all beggars at the throne of grace—and “seeing” means knowing that God loves us infinitely, that my sins are just a drop in the ocean of his mercy.

Why is the world so sad? So negative? If anything happens in the world, the news media will make the worst of it. If it rains, how terrible the weather. If the weather is bright and sunny, how terrible the drought. Why is the modern world so inclined to see the bad in everything? Why do so many of us need drugs to cope with what we think is an unbearable world? It is because so many are blind to God’s goodness, his beauty, his providence.

God Lives. Rejoice: This is the day the Lord has made.
We live in a world culture that has long since declared that God is dead, that He never did exist. It is called radical secularism, and it is becoming dangerously aggressive. If secularist aggression continues unopposed at the current rate, Christianity, and especially the Catholic Church, will be illegal in ten to twenty years. A long winter of sadness will grip us; your priests and bishops will be eliminated, and the sacraments will cease, except in underground groups at great peril and difficulty. It has happened to many societies over the last 2000 years. It will happen again soon enough in our time, if we do not resolve to oppose it.

God is not dead. He is very much alive. We killed him, true enough, but He has risen from the dead. He makes every morning a new day for us. He is ever ready to sink our sins, our petty, miserable mistakes, into the abyss of his love for us. We have only to come to him. Laetare Sunday is a little prominence in the long valley of Lent, from which we glimpse Easter Sunday. We are halfway there. So let’s keep moving—we will be at Easter soon enough.

Let us turn especially to our Blessed Mother, most needed in difficult times. When the apostles realized what they had allowed to happen, that they had not stood by Jesus when he was arrested and crucified, they clung to Mary, his Mother. And to the apostles, gathered around Mary, he appeared after his resurrection. To the apostles, gathered around Mary, he sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We too must gather around Our Lady, His Mother, in order to be faithful to Him. Immaculate Heart of Mary, cause of our joy, pray for us.

Listening is Love

Listening to each other

Today’s Scriptures point out the crucial virtue of obedience. Jesus was transfigured before them, and a voice from heaven said: “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.” God says, if you love me, you will listen to me. And if you listen to me with your heart, you will obey me.

How do you feel when you’re talking about something important with a friend and you realize … they have not been listening? You’re talking on the phone and your get the feeling that your friend on the other end has been checking his Facebook page while you’re talking. The other day my mother was talking to me on the phone and I wasn’t listening to her. At one point she asked me a question and … there was this pause. “What did you say, Mom?”

“Joe,” my mother said, “were you listening to me?”

Listening is love. We all know how it feels to be really listened to, and we all know how it feels to be ignored. And when the person we are listening to is an authority, listening means obedience. God is our ultimate authority—he is never wrong, and never asks of us anything that would harm us—so listening to God means obeying Him absolutely. “This is my beloved son—listen to him.” That means, obey Him with dedicated trust.

Abraham’s obedience
We have the fearful story of Abraham and Isaac in the first reading. God had promised Abraham a son, and Abraham waited twenty years to see that promise fulfilled. His wife Sarah finally bore Isaac and he became the beloved child of his parents’ old age. When Isaac is about 8 years old, God tests Abraham’s obedience by asking him to slaughter his own son. God seems cruel, even sadistic. If it were anyone else, we could not trust him. But we can trust God. We can obey him without fear. Abraham makes ready to kill his own son.

The Virtue of Obedience
Abraham listens to God. God asks us to listen and trust His Son, Jesus Christ, even when it seems impossible. But we find it hard. In Spanish, kids often say this in the confessional: “no escuche’ a mis padres.” I did not listen to my parents. They don’t just mean that they ignored their parents, but that they disobeyed them. The word “Obey” in Latin, “obedire,” simply means to “listen carefully.” This is my beloved son. Listen carefully to him. Obey him, even when he asks something extraordinary of you.

We are constantly told, in our culture, that “choice” is important. “Keep your options open.” “You have many choices.” You want to sell any product, call it a “choice” product. But once we know that something is God’s will, we have only one choice, not many choices. Our one choice is to obey his commandment, to follow him carefully. Love is listening; love is obedience. Jesus said, “if you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

Jesus speaks through his Church
Jesus Christ speaks through the Church he founded 2000 years ago. Are we Catholics listening to Him? We are, but we could all do better. It is not easy to listen attentively every day to his voice in the Church, especially when Satan throws ten thousand conflicting voices at us through every conceivable form of social media. For example, God commands us to keep holy the Sabbath—to attend Mass every Sunday. But how many of us do that? I wonder how many high profile Catholics, the “Catholic” politicians and media stars, who presume to speak for the Church, keep this basic commandment. God commands us to tithe, but how many of us make a serious attempt to do that? God commands us to be fruitful and multiply, to have children, and to plan our families naturally, without artificially sterilizing our marital relations. How many of us obey this clear and constant teaching of Jesus Christ? On this issue of artificial contraception, which is so much in the news these days, our disobedience on this one point has led to manifold social problems, from broken families and social disintegration to economic depression. Many Catholics laugh when I say contraception is the root of most of our social and even economic problems. But the fact is, we Catholics have disobeyed Christ on this issue for two generations, and we are seeing the prophecies of Pope Paul VI realized. For forty years we have shut our ears to the clear teaching of Christ through his Church.

The Mass
It is hard to listen to God, and to God’s servants, be they popes, priests, or simply our own parents. But it is harder, in the long run, not to listen. To listen well, we need to pray. So I beg you to obey God in the first and most fundamental of all his commandments: keep holy the Sabbath. Mass every Sunday. Consistent participation in the most perfect prayer, the Mass, will keep us from going completely off the rails. Let us pray to our Holy Mother, Blessed Mary, to keep us faithful to the Mass, and faithful to Christ her son.

"If you die with me, you will rise with me"
(This homily was given at St. Patrick's in Ripon)

Lent: dust to dust
How is your lent going? We are five days into this most holy season, a retreat time of purity, sacrifice, and joy. I am preaching all of Fr. Peter’s English Masses this weekend to introduce myself as your Lenten Mission director, and to encourage you to attend the mission, which will be at 7pm Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the coming week.

I hope many of you were able to kick off Lent with a good Ash Wednesday. At my parish of St. Joseph’s in Modesto, the crowds were immense. In my 12 years as pastor, I’ve never seen crowds that big or lines so long. Everyone was there: rich and poor, Mexicans and Anglos, teens and seniors, even democrats and republicans. It reminded me of Ash Wednesdays in New York City, where I attended seminary. We would spend all day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, giving out ashes. Everyone came for ashes: the cabbies and the power brokers, office gals in smart business suits wearing their running shoes for the trot over from Broadway, news anchors and opera stars from Times Square, street cleaners and Wall Street financiers, homeless folk and Park Avenue elite. All were shoulder to shoulder in line, patiently waiting to get a smudge of ashes under the great gothic arches of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. This is the day when princes and paupers alike confess the universal truth: I am not perfect, I will die someday, and I need God’s help.

It’s ironic, really. As religion is more than ever ridiculed, as God is increasingly mocked in public life—even as our government seeks to shut down religion in America, the crowds at Mass are bigger than ever. Why is this? Because we know that sin is killing us: our marriages, our families, our culture. Deep down we know this, and we seek refuge in the simple truth of Ash Wednesday: “If you die with me, you will rise with me.”

The Ark
In the first reading, a flood wipes out the whole mess. Only Noah and his family are saved from death in those raging waters. The Flood was not God’s punishment for sin, but the consequences of our sin. And yet, even so, God said never again. How would he save us from our own sin? By sending his own son, the Savior. And in today’s Gospel, this savior enters the wilderness of our sin and its consequences, a zone of death, to fight for us. It is a wilderness full of beasts and angels, the best and the worst of our human race. It is planet earth, laid waste by broken families, violent streets, blasphemous language, drugs and alcohol, infidelities and brutality of every sort, but also graced with the lives of saints like John Paul II and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Jesus goes into the desert to rescue the beasts and make them into angels.

Noah’s built an ark, under God’s direction: a mighty ship that would save his family from the dark waters. The ark is a life raft, prefiguring the Church herself. Anyone inside this Ark, the Church, is safe, but anyone outside will drown. Jesus is the captain of this Ark, and the Ark is Our Lady. She is the great Ark of the Covenant who bears Christ within her. She guides us to Christ, and He guides us to the Father.

Parish Mission
Our Parish Mission next week will focus on Our Lady, Ark of the Covenant, and Jesus, the divine presence in that Ark. He is always within her. The closer we draw to Mary, the closer we draw to Jesus inside of her. There is no authentic devotion or life in Christ that ignores or disowns his mother, Mary.

I have been giving retreats to Mother Teresa’s sisters around the world for most of my priesthood. My three talks will be from those I give to the sisters, adapted for the parish. The first will tells the story of Mother Teresa’s life and her significance in the 20th Century. We will discover her devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Holy Rosary. The second will be the first two mysteries of the rosary, the Annunciation and the Visitation. And the third talk will be on the Great Sign of Revelation 12: the Ark of the Covenant, which shows us the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. I will tell some stories from my work with her in 1997 and my friends’ experiences with her. We will show a little bit of her life on a video.

I hope you can come. It will be each evening at 7pm. I will preach in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and do benediction at the end. There is wonderful grace in simply coming to a mission, because it is God’s will that we do this during Lent. Confessions will follow each talk. Each evening is self-contained, so even if you can’t make all three, I encourage you to come to one or two. But for those who make all three, I will grant a plenary indulgence.

Let us pray to Our Lady now in the words of Mother Teresa:

       Mary, Mother of Jesus, give me your heart,
       so beautiful, so pure, so immaculate,
       so full of love and humility,
       that I may be able to receive Jesus in the Bread of Life,
       love Him as you loved Him,
       and serve Him in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor.
       Amen.

High Holy Days

With this Mass, the Church enters into her High Holy Days. No time throughout the year compares with Holy Week, also known as Passiontide, the eight days between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. Every hope and every dream rests upon the great events of this week:

• Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem today;
• His Last Supper with the Apostles on Thursday evening;
• The Lord’s Passion and Death on Friday afternoon;
• The Great Silence following the death of God on Saturday;
• His Glorious Resurrection in the wee hours of Sunday Morning.

These eight days have forever changed human history, and continue to change it every year. Across the globe, calendars are measured by Easter Sunday, the center of every year. His death and resurrection are the only hope for a world in despair.

We Lay Down our Cloaks

Jesus Christ enters the Holy City, and the people lay down their cloaks for his donkey to tread upon, along with palm and olive branches. He knew very well that he was entering Jerusalem to die. With what devotion, then, with what wholehearted surrender, do we lay down our cloaks before Him. He beckons us: “Come with me for the sacrifice.” What would we not lay down before Him, who lays down his life for us?

In this last week of Lent, put aside all earthly cares. Let us lay down our lives before Jesus, and go with him to the Last Supper, to Calvary, to the resurrection. The Holy Mass is all of these things: the final meal with his friends, the Sacrifice at Calvary, and his victory over death on Sunday morning. Let us lay down our work schedules, our sports, our TV shows—our appointments with the things of this world, and enter the City with Him. Holy Mother Church beckons us to Mass on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of this week. Let us accompany him, and his Holy Mother, to Calvary, and beyond the Cross to the garden of his Resurrection. Our Holy Week schedule is in the bulletin.
 

Jesus Wept...

The fifth Sunday of Lent gives us the liturgical year’s longest gospel short of the the Passion itself on Palm Sunday. It is the seventh and the last of the great “signs” in John’s Gospel, pointing us, propelling us, towards the Great Sign of the Cross itself: Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, into which we enter next Sunday.

In urban parishes, with crowded Masses every 90 minutes, the Lazarus Gospel calls for a short homily. But since most of you are accustomed to long lectures, we can permit ourselves a little more time on these remarkable readings. On the other hand, the Lazarus reading itself counsels brevity, as it contains the shortest verse in the entire Bible. All the Protestant kids in my high school knew this verse, famous in Bible quizzes—John 11:35, “Jesus wept.” Two words only, but two words that reveal much about the Incarnate God. Christ stood before his friend’s grave, even foreseeing the Resurrection, and he wept. God weeps for us when we die. St. Augustine writes in his commentary on St. John’s Gospel: “Christ wept. Let man also weep for himself. For why did Christ weep, but to teach man to weep?” It is meek and just to weep holy tears with Him over sin and the wages of sin, the death of the body.

Dry Bones

As we draw closer to Passiontide, though, the Scriptures raise the Christian’s hope to unmeasurable levels. In the Old Testament reading, Yahweh promises resurrection, referring to Ezekiel’s vision of a vast plain filled with human bones. In the verses just prior to our First Reading, Ezekiel relates how God “made me walk among [these bones] in every direction so that I saw how many they were on the surface of the plain. How dry they were!” In the end, each of us must lay our bones down in some charnel house, conceding death’s triumph over every living being. But five centuries before Lazarus, Ezekiel prophecies Resurrection. Yahweh commands him, “prophecy, Son of Man, over these bones.” The prophet obeys, heedless of the shame. What was dead regains its original purity and vibrancy.

Likewise, St. Paul urges Christians to have no fear of death. “If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also.” In other words, face your fear, but face it in Christ. Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in his Introduction to Christianity that every man dies alone. But when we reach the pit of death itself, we find someone has gone there ahead of us, for He too has died. Death is no longer empty. Christ is there, in death, waiting for us.

Lord, if you had been here….

He has died, and he has wept. He allows Martha and Mary to weep. His waiting two days before leaving Galilee seems inexplicable to his disciples. It seems inexplicable to us. Why does God let his friends die? The most common question any priest gets, especially from young people, is why God permits evil? Why does he look on, aloof, as good people suffer? Both Martha and Mary ask the same question when he finally does arrive, “four days late.” “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Where were you when I needed you? It’s the question Jesus himself does not ask his friends after they let him die alone on Friday, but it is the question we often ask of Him in our weakness.

Martha, however, goes on: “But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, He will give you.” This “even now” is why Martha is a saint. She does not stop believing in God, even when he is “too late.” They go to the grave, and Mary points out that, after four days, there will be a stench. It is as if she is pleading with Jesus not to resuscitate him. It would be horrible to somehow animate a rotting corpse. Jesus assures her, “Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?” He doesn’t say when or how she would see the glory of God. And we have no right to demand anything of Him. It is ours to wait, to hope, with patience and faith, the perfect will of God.

Confession

In the meantime, during our pilgrimage, we confess our faith in him day by day. In particular, especially during Lent, we confess our sins to Him through the priest, hoping that somehow God will reveal his glory through us. Saint Augustine writes that the raising of Lazarus points to the Sacrament of Penance. “When you confess, you come forth… [God] calls you with an urgent voice, by an extraordinary grace. And just as the dead man came out still bound, so you go to confession still guilty. In order that Lazarus’ sins be loosed, the Lord said this to his ministers: ‘unbind him and let him go. What you will loose on earth will be loosed also in heaven.’”

Unbind us

It is the job of the priests to unbind us. It is our job to believe in that unbinding, which must precede any final resurrection. It is for us to confess our faith in Jesus Christ, the Resurrection and the Life. It for us to confess our sins, so that all might see the glory of God. Let us pray for those whom Christ will unbind at the Easter Vigil, who will receive baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection. Let us pray also for those who are already baptized, that we make a good confession this Lent, a “second baptism,” and that we may make a Holy Communion at Easter.

It has been a beautiful Lent, and now Holy Week is just around the corner. Thanks be to God for a fruitful season of grace, and thanks be to all of you for your works of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving! This Wednesday we hold our annual Lenten Penance Service at 7pm in the church, with confessors from all parts of the planet (really!-priests from India, Mexico, Philippines, South America, Vietnam, and ... California). May God help us all to make a good confession before Easter. And then comes Holy Week, with the glorious Masses of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday. Please pray for the forty or so adults and 40 or so youth who will be brought into the Church this Easter. And finally, I invite you to join me in the Modesto's annual Walk for Life on Good Friday, beginning at 8am. You can check our website for details on all of these great events. May you all have a blessed Holy Week.

Sincerely,

Fr. Joseph Illo, Pastor 

The Lord tells us that “everyone who listens to His words and acts on them” is a wise man. His house will stand strong against even the worst storms.

The Largest Religious Denomination in America

Do you know the largest religious denomination in America? It is not Catholic, nor Baptist, nor Mormons. The largest religious denomination in America is non-practicing Catholic. There are 77 million Catholics in America, far outstripping the next largest denomination (Baptists at 48 million). But only 22% of these 77 million attend Mass regularly. That means 60 million are “non-practicing Catholics,” by far the largest religious group in America. They say they are Catholic but rarely go to Mass or observe Catholic practices. They don’t act on their faith; they don’t put their money where their mouth is.

There is a little non-practicing Catholic in all of us. We tend to play chicken with God, seeing how little we can get away with. As we begin Lent this coming week, let’s practice the joy of loving Jesus. Let’s put our money where our mouths are.

Stewardship Principle

First there is the “stewardship principle.” That is, everything we have is God’s. St. Paul writes in our second reading, Romans 3: “all have sinned and are deprived of God’s glory….all are justified freely by his grace.” Justification is a free gift of God. We do not earn it. And every thing we have comes through that initial justification. Our education, our families, our friends, our homes and vehicles and bank accounts, our very abilities and motivation: all comes freely from God. We are beggars at the throne of grace, but beggars much-beloved by our heavenly father.

Second is our response to the gift. Jesus assures us that “not everyone who says to me Lord Lord will enter my kingdom.” In other words, not everyone that says “I’m Catholic I’m Catholic” will receive His blessings. We have to act on it. We have to respond to his infinite gift with a little gift of our own.

Lent: prayer, fasting, almsgiving

Lent begins this Wednesday. Catholics do three things in Lent: Prayer, Fasting, and Almsgiving. All three work together. Prayer without almsgiving is just empty words, but almsgiving without prayer is just a tax write-off. Join me in beginning our Lenten almsgiving by making a gift to our Bishop for his work in our Diocese this year.

Giving financial support to those who need it is not an option for Catholics, just like meatless Fridays and Sunday Mass are not optional. Certainly many Catholics ignore these Church precepts, but they are binding nonetheless. They are binding because they are good for us.

Almsgiving is healthy, and so we give with a cheerful heart. This Sunday we give to the Bishop, so he can run the diocese. He’s got to pay seminarian tuition, Catholic school subsidies, start up costs for new parishes, staffing salaries for the tribunal and other chancery officials, etc. Catholics support their bishops, even if they don’t always agree with them. The Catholic Bishops oversee the largest healthcare network and the largest private school system in America, to take but two examples of how the Church benefits our nation. Of course this costs money, and we Catholics are proud to support this vital component of American society.

Thank you for your continued support of our parish and the 2011 Bishop’s Ministry Appeal.  May God Bless each of you!