"You are not in darkness" (1 Thes 5:4)

St. Joseph Church (Cottleville)

33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year A

November 15-16, 2008 - 5:00 p.m. & 7:00 a.m.

Prv 31:10-13, 19-20, 30-31

Ps 128

1 Thes 5:1-6

Mt 25:14-30

In a few moments, we will profess the Creed together, as we do each Sunday. In professing our faith about Jesus Christ, we will say these words: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.” Because we are in the final weeks of this liturgical year (Advent begins two weeks from today.), the Church is calling us to focus our attention on the last things, the end times. Our Lord came among us the first time in the Incarnation in a hidden way. Who would have known on that first Christmas night, except perhaps for His Mother, that Jesus was not merely human but also fully divine? How many could have watched Him die, rejected on the cross, and imagine that God Himself had been put on trial? But when Christ comes again, His return will not be in a hidden way. For 2000 years Christians have professed the belief that He will be recognized for who He really is – the Lord of all times and of all peoples. As the Creed says, “He will come again in glory.”

At His second coming, our Lord will establish His kingdom definitively, His kingdom for which each of us, if we are honest with ourselves, desperately longs. What will this kingdom look like? The book of Revelation presents a beautiful picture of it: “God’s dwelling [will be] with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them [as their God]. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain, [for] the old order has passed away” (Rev 21:3-4). All suffering, all sorrow, even death itself will be obliterated. In place of these, we will know perfect peace, enduring joy, the fulfillment of every desire.

How wonderful this is! But we cannot forget the next part of the Creed. “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” We don’t like to think about this part of our faith. It makes us uncomfortable. We prefer to think of our God as loving and merciful, not as a judge. The fact of the matter remains, however, that the judgment of Christ is actually one more manifestation of His love and mercy. How can this be? When God created each one of us, He gave us a wondrous gift. He gave us the gift of freedom, the ability to choose for ourselves whether we would love Him back. In other words, He left the choice up to us – whether we would look to Him for happiness, or whether we’d turn our gaze in another direction, to some created thing that we hope can make us happy. It’s up to you and it’s up to me to choose for ourselves. Christ’s coming as judge, then, isn’t a vengeful God coming to inflict punishment on His people who have sinned. God is not out to get us. He’s not some sort of divine accountant watching closely to add every little sin to His list. But He does respect our free choices. When He comes as judge, He will take those with Him who have chosen to love Him, to make every decision in their lives based on Him. And He will allow those who have chosen to look elsewhere for happiness to continue to be separated from Him for all eternity. God longs for us to be in communion with Him for all eternity. He wants only our salvation. It saddens Him to see us turn away from Him, because He knows that only He can fulfill our deepest desires. But more than this, so much does He love us, that He respects our decision to seek our own good, to try to make ourselves happy, without any aid from Him.

The Church turns our attention to these last things at this time of the year because we need to be reminded to ask ourselves a very basic question: How am I living my life? Does my life accord with what I profess each week here at Mass? Am I truly living with Jesus Christ at the center of my life, or have I placed something or someone else above Him on my list of priorities? The prospect of judgment should not be a cause of terror and fear in our lives, because we know the truth, what is expected of us. We have received the truth from Christ, and it has been passed down faithfully from generation to generation in the teaching of the Church. As St. Paul wrote to the Thessalonians: “You are not in darkness. . . . For all of you are children of light and children of the day.” So we are faced again with the question: How am I living my life? Does my life look like the Catholic Church says it should look? Have I opened myself to the light of the Lord’s teaching?

The Gospel today spoke of the talents God has given us. There are some talents that every one of us have received. One of these is the gift of our intellect, the ability to come to know the truth. As Catholics, we believe that the Church is something more than a man-made institution. We believe that it is a gift from Christ Himself, the instrument through which He continues to live among us. We call the Church the Bride of Christ. If He loves her so much as to take her as His spouse, then surely He wants us also to love her. So, if there are areas of darkness in our understanding of the truth, if there are things the Church proclaims to be good news but that seem only to be great burdens to us, we must use that talent, the gift of our intellect, to seek to understand more deeply what the Church is saying to us. We must ask the Lord Jesus to come into the darkness of our ignorance with the light of His truth. Maybe I don’t understand why the Church teaches what she does about contraception. Maybe it makes no sense to me that the Church will not ordain women or that she insists that I confess my sins to a priest. Whatever it is, we must ask the Christ Himself to help us: “Come, Lord Jesus, into my confusion!” Whatever it is that stands in the way of my being in full communion with Christ, with His Church, I must beg the Lord to remove that roadblock, to help me to turn every bit of my life over to Him. At the end of time, I don’t think the Lord will outright condemn those who don’t understand the Church’s teaching, but I do think He will ask us if we opened our hearts to the Church, if we made an effort, strove to understand her, were willing to change our lives to conform them to the standard held up by His Church.

The truth of Jesus Christ is infinite. Even the most faithful of Catholics, even the most brilliant theologians, are called deeper into the mystery of God’s love. The fact that God is a mystery means not that He is incomprehensible but that there are always greater depths into which we can plunge. None of us knows how many days we will have on earth. None of us knows when we will meet our merciful Judge. This should motivate us to strive every day to deepen our knowledge of Him, while we have the time. As our knowledge grows, so too will our love. Let us today, at this Mass beg Him for this grace. Let us ask Him to pour His light into our darkened minds, so that we will come to know Him and love Him more perfectly. Then, when the day comes for us to meet Him in glory, when He turns His face towards us in all of its radiant splendor, nothing will stop us from running courageously towards Him, into His waiting arms, to hear Him say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” and to spend eternity with Him in the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Temple of God

St. Joseph Church (Cottleville)
Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica
November 9, 2008 - 8:45 & 10:30 a.m.

Ez 47:1-2, 8-9, 12
Ps 46
1 Cor 3:9c-11, 16-17
Jn 2:13-22

Today seems like an odd feast to celebrate. We’re not marking a recalling in the life of our Lord of His Mother. We’re not commemorating a particular saint who has had an important part to play in the history of the Church. We are marking the anniversary of the dedication of a church in Rome. The Lateran Basilica was built by Constantine in Rome in the 4th century. You may recall that Constantine was the first Roman emperor to approve of Christianity. Before that, Christians were not allowed to practice their faith publicly, and, when they did, they were subjected to persecution and martyrdom. They would gather to celebrate Mass in secret in homes that had been set apart for the use of the community. After legalizing Christianity in the Roman Empire, Constantine had a great basilica built on the Lateran Hill in Rome. Although several disasters have led to various parts of the basilica being rebuilt and renovated, a church has stood on the site continuously for seventeen hundred years. The building of the Lateran Basilica was a sign to the world that God had come to dwell in the world in a radically new way, through His own Son who had assumed human flesh and died and rose to save us from our sin. No longer was the spread of this good news hindered by the Roman government. It became public for all to see. This is why the Church celebrates this day with such joy. This particular church building reminds us that Christ’s saving work continues in our world, that He continues to dwell among us and to lead us as one Body, His Body, into communion with His Father and the Holy Spirit.

Every church building reminds us of this same truth, that Christ continues to live and work among us. What is perhaps even more incredible is that every church building in our world is a reminder to us of what St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians nearly two thousand years ago: “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” These are indeed incredible words. For the Jews at the time of Paul, the Temple was the holiest place on the face of the earth. It was God’s dwelling with His people. For this reason, Jews would often make pilgrimages to the Temple to enter God’s dwelling place, to know the presence of their Creator. With the coming of Jesus Christ and the sending of the Holy Spirit, that all changed. God’s holy presence was no longer bound to a particular geographic location. He came to dwell not in a building of stone and mortar but in the hearts of His people. This is what St. Paul was getting at. He was reminding the early Christians of their great dignity, which comes from the fact that the Holy Spirit was dwelling within each one of them.

This mystery continues today. Each and every Christian has become God’s temple, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. But how does this happen? How does God come to dwell in our hearts? It happens through the sacraments, which were given to the Church by Christ Himself as the means by which the Holy Spirit would dwell in the hearts of the faithful. It all begins at that most sacred moment of Baptism. So often we see Baptism as simply a nice ritual marking the birth of a child, simply the beginning of the journey of faith. It is so much more than this! At that moment, God truly comes to dwell in the hearts of His sons and daughters! We are made into Temples of the living God.

Our Lord knew that this new life of grace received at Baptism would need to be sustained and nourished over time, and so He gave us the gift of another sacrament – the Holy Eucharist. When we receive Holy Communion, our Lord Jesus Christ comes into our hearts in a very real way to breathe into us anew the Gift of the Holy Spirit. The Church nourishes us weekly, even daily, with this sacrament so that God’s presence within us, His temples, will abide.

Like the Jewish Temple at the time of Christ, our Lord’s temples can at times become polluted and in need of purification. When we choose sin, we bring into our hearts, which are the temple of the Holy Spirit, things that are not holy, things that should not exist in the temple of God. Our Lord foresaw this and so He gave to the Church yet another sacrament that is so essential to our Christian life – the Sacrament of Penance. In this sacrament, our Lord enters His temple no longer with a whip but with His mercy to cleanse us, to make us once again worthy dwelling places for His Holy Spirit.

This is why it is so important for us to receive the sacraments often. Baptism, we know, we receive once. After that, the grace received in Baptism is nourished and renewed in us through the Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist. So today it would be good to ask ourselves a few questions. How long has it been since I’ve been to confession? If it has been a long time, what is keeping me from approaching to receive God’s mercy? What is holding me back from allowing Him to cleanse my heart from all that pollutes it? Do I have a hard time understanding why the Church asks me to confess my sins to a priest? Do I need to study and come to better understand this sacrament? What about the Holy Eucharist? Do I come forward to receive Holy Communion out of routine, not really thinking about what it is that is being given to me? Do I ever come to receive Holy Communion when I have committed serious sin and need to go to confession first? Am I fostering a love for the Holy Eucharist through prayer before the Blessed Sacrament outside of Mass? Perhaps today, during the rest of this Mass, we could reflect upon the great gift God has given us in these sacraments and renew our resolve to receive them often and worthily.

Continually welcoming God to dwell within our hearts as His temple is important for our own eternal salvation, but that’s not all. Our world is desperately in need of God’s presence. Many words have been spoken and written these past months about the great crisis in which we find ourselves today, about the millions of lives affected by the reality of abortion, euthanasia, and other elements of the culture of death. These aren’t things that should concern us only in the days leading up to an election. They are significant every day. Our culture will only be transformed into a civilization of love, a culture of life, when we allow ourselves to be pure dwelling places for the Holy Spirit. When we allow that to happen, we will become instruments through which life-giving water will flow throughout the world. The river of God’s love will flow through us to water and soften even the hardest of hearts. Then we will begin to see a radical transformation of our society. Then we will all repeat together the words of today’s responsorial psalm: “The Lord of hosts is with us; our stronghold is the God of Jacob. Come! Behold the deeds of the Lord, the astounding things he has wrought on the earth.”