Nothing More Beautiful – Come and See (October 18, 2009)
October 27, 2009
A couple of weeks ago, Father Paul mentioned that he and I would be talking to you about Archbishop Smith’s first address in the “Nothing More Beautiful” series. Two weeks ago, Fr. Paul used the readings on marriage to talk about Archbishop Smith’s discussion of the image and likeness of God. Today, I will speak about the first part of Archbishop Smith’s talk, so it’s a bit backward.
The first words Archbishop Smith used to introduce the entire “Nothing More Beautiful” series were taken from Pope John Paul II. They were a bit confusing for me the first few times I read them, so I’ll say them twice: “Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.” “Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.” You know, it’s one of those statements that sounds like it must be true, but it’s hard to figure out just what it means. The Archbishop must have understood that, because he continued by reading a story from John’s Gospel (John 1:35-42): “The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah.’ Then he brought Simon to Jesus.”
It’s kind of a funny exchange between Jesus and these two disciples of John the Baptist. They didn’t know Jesus, but they just started following him. And when Jesus turned around, he didn’t say: “Hey, why are you guys following me?” He said: “What are you looking for?” Now, I think they must have been confused by the question, because they didn’t really answer it. All they said was: “Where are you staying?” And when Jesus said: “Come and see,” he was saying that he would answer their question about where he was staying, but he would also answer his own question about what they were looking for. During the time he spent with them (the reading says “they remained with him that day”), he showed them what they were looking for – the deepest desire of their hearts – they were looking for Jesus. And they were so convinced that Jesus was the answer to their question that one of them – Andrew – rushed to tell his brother Simon Peter that they had found the Messiah. And we know that they dropped what they were doing and followed Jesus – not just for an afternoon, but forever. That must have been an amazing visit.
What are you looking for? What is the deepest desire of your heart? When I ask you that question here, the answer is pretty obvious. We see our Saviour hanging on the cross. We see the altar where he will become present in the bread and wine. But I think the question is still worth asking: what are you looking for? Why are you here? Are you here because you have to be – because it’s one of the commandments? Are you here because it’s important to give your children or grandchildren a good example, or because your parents or grandparents made you come? Are you here because your friends are here, and it feels good being with your friends? All of these are good reasons.
Or are you here because the deepest desire of your heart is to have a profound and life-changing encounter with Jesus Christ? The sort of encounter that Andrew and the other disciple had in the reading from John’s Gospel – the sort of encounter that will affect us in all parts of our lives.
Well let’s think about that. Let me change the question a little bit. Most of us are only here in church for an hour or so each week. You spend a lot of time at home, at school, at work. What are you looking for there? What are the deepest desires of your heart at home, at school, at work? When we’re at work, we have to think about sales, service, productivity, profit, growth – and that’s good and important – but is that all? When we’re at school we have to think about assignments, tests, friends, popularity, fashion – but is that all?
Can you imagine getting ready for work in the morning and saying: “Today at work, I want to have a profound encounter with Jesus Christ?” Can you imagine getting ready for school and saying: “Today at school, I want to have a profound encounter with Jesus Christ?” You know that we can see Jesus in our co-workers, in our clients and customers, in our fellow students, in our teachers. But we can also be Jesus to all of those people. We can be that life-changing answer to the questions in the hearts of everyone we meet.
This is the ultimate goal of the Archbishop’s plan – that we will bring the beauty of Jesus to everyone we meet. But in his wisdom, he understands that we must first re-acquaint ourselves with Jesus. We have to open ourselves to a fresh, new encounter that will make us change – will make us different.
Well, how do we do that? That’s always the hard part. I put a couple of questions in the Bulletin related to this issue and asked you to consider them. I asked you to think about the main goals in your life, and asked if you have a goal that relates to your relationship with God. I asked you to think about a life where you’ve accomplished all or most of your material goals and whether that would be satisfying if you didn’t have a strong relationship with God – or would you be left saying: “Is that all there is?” Miguel will be leading a discussion Monday/ tomorrow night at 7:00 to talk about those questions and others that you may have. I encourage you to be there.
Pope Benedict said: “There is nothing more beautiful than knowing Jesus Christ and telling others of our friendship with him.” Archbishop Smith is urging us to have a new encounter with Jesus – to ask ourselves what it is we’re looking for – to accept the invitation of Jesus to “come and see.” And he does this knowing that through this encounter we will find that Jesus is, indeed, the answer to the question that is every human life.
Archbishop Smith’s Homily at Scripturefest 2009
October 7, 2009
This Scripturefest gathering occurs at a time when we are intensifying our preparations for the second year of our Nothing More Beautiful initiative. Let us recall the purpose of NMB – evangelization. Evangelization has as its goal conversion – first conversion for those who have not yet heard the Gospel, and ongoing conversion for those who have long heard it and sought to live in accordance with it. Conversion is lifelong, and as we rediscover again the beauty of the Gospel we can expect to be confronted by its truth and its consequent challenge to all that is false or complacent in our lives. When we read and hear the Word, its ability to get to the truth of things, to penetrate our hearts and call us deeper becomes quickly clear. This is what is happening in the Scripture readings for this Mass. The readings and the liturgical
feast in which they are proclaimed cut to the heart of our lives of discipleship with a rather riveting question: are you ready to die
for the Gospel?
Are you ready to die for the Gospel? Nothing is more important to us than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Nothing is more beautiful. Therefore we desire with all of our hearts to make known to the world Him whom the prophets had long foretold would save the world, Him who has fulfilled that prophecy by his dying and rising and his abiding presence in the Church and world through His Holy Spirit. Making Christ known is our mission and the very reason for our existence. But making him known involves death. Are you ready to die for the Gospel?
We honour today the Canadian martyrs, by whose death the Gospel first began to take root and spread here in North America. They are among the countless hosts of martyrs described in the reading from Revelation, the martyrs who gave their life that Christ might be known, and who now live in the presence of the Lamb of God, whose death on earth for the life of the world was the foundation and pattern of their own. They accepted, first, the possibility, then the reality of death, because they lived from that teaching of Jesus in today’s Gospel that
discipleship means taking up the cross in imitation of their Lord, and that it is only by losing life for his sake that we will actually find life.
These words of Jesus and the example of those who met death by making him known lead inescapably to the question that each of us must answer: are you ready to die for the Gospel? When the cross was planted on Canadian soil by Sts. Jean de Brebeuf, Isaac Jogues and their companions, it cost them their lives. Today there needs to be a new implantation of the Cross of Christ in our country, which in so many ways has grown allergic to the Gospel. For us, too, it will cost us our lives, not likely in the same way as being put to death, but the cost will nonetheless be real. Where we need to plant the cross is very deep in the soil of our hearts. This means learning to view all of our reality through the prism of the Cross; it means making all of life’s decisions in the light of the Cross. This leads to death; a death to self. Embracing the Cross, or better, allowing it to embrace us, means dying to all that is of self and not of God, to all that is selfish and self-absorbed so as to be alive for God and others. Our country is witnessing the opposite of this way of life. What is becoming more and more prevalent is the sacrifice of the common good for the sake of individual wants and desires. This is the case with abortion, some would want it to be so regarding euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, it happened with the redefinition of marriage and it occurs whenever people are so caught up in their own materialist and consumerist pursuits that they are not aware of the needs of the poor, here and elsewhere, and hence neglect to make the sacrifices that can restore the balance and improve the lives of their brothers and sisters.
Are you ready to die for the Gospel? St. Paul in the second reading reminds us of a wondrous truth: through our death, Jesus becomes visible. We want him to be visible, seen; we want him to be known, we want him to be loved, and we want him to be followed so that the world might
know the life and joy he intends for every person. Our desire springs from the treasure within us. That treasure is the gift of faith; the gift of an unshakeable conviction, rooted in our personal encounter with Christ, of the love and mercy of God. We want that conviction to be known and shared by others, and so we embrace death, a death to self, as did the martyrs we honour today, for the sake of our Lord and his Gospel. Weak clay vessels that we are, we cannot do so without the help of God. Let us pray, then, that our celebration of the Eucharist will
renew and deepen our encounter with Christ, implant more deeply the Cross and its beauty within our hearts, and enable us to say “yes” to the question we cannot avoid: are you ready to die for the Gospel?
Richard W. Smith
Archbishop of Edmonton
September 26th, 2009
Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Envy
October 2, 2009
As part of my other job this week, I was reading about a woman who had recently been widowed. She was in her mid-50s. Her husband had been a very successful lawyer, at least if you measure success in terms of money and toys. They had several very large houses, a condo on Park Avenue in New York City, two jets, a yacht and a sizable art collection. They employed a large staff of people to cook, clean, look after the gardens and the pools, fly airplanes, and so on. She had her hair done three times a week, a manicure a pedicure and a facial once a week. Aside from visiting their various houses, they vacationed in exotic places and attended many local social functions. She spent about $75,000 a month on her credit card. Apparently, she liked shoes. She typically spent $600 on a pair of shoes, but she didn’t think she had as many as 100 pairs.
How many of you are saying: “I want that kind of life!”? Certainly, there are parts of this lifestyle that would sound really good to a young mother up to her elbows in dirty diapers – a family struggling to make mortgage payments – a business person eking out a small profit each month. I must admit, I got excited about the airplanes. But I wondered, as I read her story, how this woman could have had time to do anything but spend money. I would think that it would take a lot of time to spend $75,000 every month.
Each of the readings today talks about our reactions to what other people have. In the reading from the Book of Wisdom we hear some people who are called “godless people.” Just before the part we heard today, these godless people were talking about the fact that they were going to die. They believed that death was the end of everything. No one would remember them after they were gone – there was no afterlife. So they said: “Come, therefore, let us enjoy the good things that exist, and make use of the creation to the full as in youth. Let us take our fill of costly wine and perfumes, and let no flower of spring pass us by.” So basically, they were saying: “Let’s live it up.” Now these were Jewish people, and they knew the law – and they knew that the kind of life they were thinking about was contrary to the law. They knew a righteous man – a person who kept the law and who believed that God would protect him. He made the godless people very uncomfortable. The godless people would test the righteous man, even to the point of killing him, to see if God would protect him. They wanted their carefree, self-indulgent life, but they were also envious of the righteous man. The verses just after the ones we heard today say: “Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray, for their wickedness blinded them, and they did not know the secret purposes of God…through the devil’s envy, death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.” Their envy of the righteous man brought them only death.
In the second reading, St. James also spoke about envy and said that, where there is envy, there will be “disorder and wickedness of every kind.” He talked about conflicts within the community of Christians and asked where these conflicts came from. He said: “Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you?” Remember how the godless men had internal struggles: “I want to live a carefree and selfish life, but I envy this man who lives by the law.” Well, these early Christians also had the same internal struggles.
St. James used the word “covet.” The definitions of “jealousy,” “envy,” and “covetousness” are related, especially envy and covetousness. We “covet” when we want something that another person has. This goes beyond simply admiring someone else’s possessions or thinking “I’d like to have one of those.” It reflects a sinful attitude toward material things. When we covet a thing, we often envy the person who has what we don’t have. We resent them and even wish them harm. For example, the student who can’t afford fancy clothes might covet the designer jeans that a classmate is wearing. They might envy their classmate and then say nasty things behind their back.
What we see in the first two readings is that covetousness and envy come from a conflict within ourselves: we want what we have but we also want what someone else has and we resent them because they have it and we don’t.
In the Gospel, we see jealousy even among Jesus’ closest followers. You know, I’ve read this part of Mark’s Gospel a number of times, and I always get upset about the disciples arguing with one another about who was the greatest. But I never connected that discussion with the fact that Jesus was telling them in this part of the Gospel that he was going to be killed. Were the disciples just arguing about who was the holiest person (kind of a spiritual contest), or were they saying: “Hey, Jesus told us he’s going to die, who’s going to be next in charge?” If I were Jesus, I would have been hurt and angry. Jesus used it as an opportunity to teach. He said that their leader would not be the one who was the greatest in terms that we usually use to measure greatness – things like wealth, power, and prestige – or even holiness, but rather, it would be the one who served – the one who put himself last – the one welcomed even the least powerful in the community – the children.
The readings today tell us that jealousy, envy, and covetousness have a long history. Mark’s Gospel and the Letter of St. James were written in the first century and the Book of Wisdom even earlier. We saw in all of these instances that the people who had these feelings were not happy. These feelings brought arguments and conflicts. The people wanted something that they didn’t have – something material, or even something spiritual. St. James said: “You do not have because you do not ask.” If we don’t have something that we desire, is it the fault of someone else who has what we want, or have we not asked – have we not done what is necessary to have the material goods, the position or prestige, or the spiritual gifts that others have? Or, as St. James suggests, do we ask for the wrong things
I haven’t spoken today about our desire and tendency to accumulate things. That’s for another day. Actually, we pray about that each time we say the Stewardship Prayer, when we ask God that we will “possess sensibly.” But there will always be people who are wealthier, more successful, or holier than we are. Indeed, even the couple that I spoke about earlier had friends who had more money than they did.
We spoke today about how we react to what other people have. We can rejoice in the good fortune of others, we can even admire their possessions – their successes of every kind – material and spiritual, or we can bog ourselves down with jealousy, envy, and covetousness. The readings today tell us clearly that when we turn to these negative thoughts, we compromise our
own happiness, our relationships with other people, and most importantly, our relationship with God.