Good Friday - 2024: Unite your sufferings with Jesus on the cross

The challenge of preaching on Good Friday is that the Passion contains too much content to do it adequately, let along completely. To employ a cliche, it’s like drinking from a firehose. Just to give one example, I could talk about how Jesus begins our salvation from sin in a garden. He enters a garden to undo the destruction wrought by Adam and Eve in the Garden. Jesus’ is, therefore, the new and more perfect Adam sent to reverse the punishment of death that was given to Adam and Eve through disobedience. That’s just one piece in a million pieces I could focus on.

Instead, I really felt God drawing me to the words of Fr. Etienne Huard, a monk of Conception Abbey in Missouri this morning. He wrote

“As we venerate the cross and meditate on Christ’s passion, let us also unite our own sufferings, struggles, and burdens with His. Just as Jesus embraced His cross with courage and love, may we learn to embrace our crosses with faith and trust in God’s providence.”

Some people criticize Christianity because they say it is an escape. They think we are praying to a higher power in the hopes that God will be nice to us and make our life easy. Indeed, that seems to be the message of some mega church pastors who believe in the so-called prosperity gospel.

Contrary to this message is the passion we read. Being a faithful follower of Jesus means accepting that there are sufferings and uniting them to His sufferings. It doesn’t mean we get to avoid them, as though he anesthetizes us from them. Or that he makes them enjoyable, as though we become masochists. Instead, we can find meaning in suffering. It unites us to him. Fear is from the evil one but suffering is different. We are tempted to react to suffering and sorrow with fear but that only makes us paralyzed. If we can unite our sufferings with Jesus on the cross and share them with him, we may find that he lightens the load because he always takes more than us. But, ultimately, we also get to see that there is a larger plan to this world and he trusts us and loves us so much that God even lets us share in it.

Holy Thursday 2024: Proclaim to remember

Friends

Peace be with you.

Have you ever been sitting with some friends and started telling stories about the past and had a flood of memories come to mind? I’m guessing we all have. Sometimes they’re positive and sometimes they’re negative. It tends to happen for me when I get together with college friends. We start to talk about a choir tour trip or a class we had together with a particularly enigmatic professor or a rooming situation and memories come flooding back.

I have a feeling, this is how the scriptures were written. With all due respect to the Chosen’s theory that St. Matthew and St. John were both writing down things as they happened in the field, the Gospels feel more to me like reflections on past events than they do a blow-by-blow description of an event as it is happening. Which is okay. In fact, contrary to our contemporary truth that the farther away you are from an event the less you remember details, I think that the disciples and we, their successors, needed some time to reflect on what just happened to understand it.

In the second reading, St. Paul twice quotes Jesus saying of the bread and wine that we are to “Do this in remembrance of me.” There have been entire books written about the word remembrance as it is used in these sentences. When we think of remembrance or remembering things, we tend to think of calling to mind a memory of something that happened in the past. The trouble with that understanding is that we have undoubtedly had an experience of remembering something completely different than someone else. This may in part have to do with the differences between a society that is bombarded with information from screens and a society that relied on telling stories for entertainment. It’s harder to remember details when we have a million of them being thrown at us all day long. However, another part is a difference in understanding what a memory is.

As I said before, we think of remembering as a calling to mind a memory that is restricted to our mind. However, for St. Paul and Jesus, a memory is a calling to the present of something that happened in the past. It’s closer to but not exactly like what I was talking about when I began my homily. Oftentimes, when I find myself talking to college friends about the past, it feels like I’m transported back to that time. I can remember the feelings I had at the time and even start to feel them. I cringe when I remember some dumb thing I said or did. I have to check myself if I am reminded of a time when I was arrogant or cocksure. I feel happy and ecstatic when I remember a really fun or exciting experience.

At the end of the Second Reading, St. Paul clarifies that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” It’s not that we are expected to proclaim the death of the Lord after you receive communion, though that is undoubtedly true too. It’s that, by eating and drinking the Body and Blood of the Lord, you are proclaiming his death until he comes. Jesus called it giving us an example in the Gospel, using it in reference to his act of humbly washing his disciples’ feet. It’s like we’re setting aside the mundane world in which we live and entering into the world of Jesus, entering into the very life of Jesus. It’s all a gift to us, not something we could ever earn or deserve. This is really his body, blood, soul, and divinity offered to us to bring to mind and enter into his life. It is the same body and blood that was shed for us on the cross fulfilling the Old Testament sacrifice of the Lamb. And, whenever we gather here, we proclaim to the world its importance.

That’s the reminder for tonight, the importance of gathering in service to our local community. We have been doing that on Fridays in a special way at our fish fries, in loving service to this community. We can do it when we serve at St. Vincent De Paul or Metro Catholic Outreach or other places. But we primarilly do it when we gather for Mass. Is Mass a place for you to serve the Lord by proclaiming his death or is it more of performance meant to serve your pleasure?

Palm Sunday - 2024: Jesus planned it all

Friends

Peace be with you.

Should we be having a fish fry on Good Friday? I get this question from people outside and inside the parish each year. Yes, we should and here’s why. First, I understand that it is one of two days, along with Ash Wednesday, of both abstaining from meat and fasting from food in general. But, fasting means we get to eat one regular-sized meal along with two smaller meals that don’t equal the large meal. The fish fry meal is our regular-sized reward after a full-day of smaller meals that don’t equal it. How could anything equal the best fish in town anyway, right?

A connecting aspect of both the Gospel we read at the beginning of Mass and the Passion that really struck me was that Jesus had made plans for both. He planned on where his disciples would get the donkey he would humbly ride into Jerusalem. Unlike an invading king on a mighty warhorse, Jesus would have looked rather pathetic riding in on a donkey. But that was part of the plan. He planned where he would inaugurate the Eucharist during the Last Supper. He arranged for his disciples to meet a man there with the code words beginning with “The teacher says…” He even warned the 12 apostles that they would abandon him, despite their protests. Amidst the chaos of his arrest, he indicates that it is a fulfillment of scripture.

This isn’t a scenario of a failed coup, a plan that started well that gets out of hand. He knew what he would say and not say all the way through. Jesus invited Pilate to faith when he asked him if he was the King of Jews. “You say so”, he says to this powerful individual. Please say it, please believe it, he seems to plead with him. His final words come from a Psalm that begins in utter frustration but ends with “And my soul shall live for him, my descendants serve him. They shall tell of the LORD to generations yet to come, declare his saving justice to peoples yet unborn: “These are the things the LORD has done.” We are some of those descendants. We need to be able to gather to serve the Lord and be part of the plan that Jesus has to bring about salvation, yes, even at a Good Friday fish fry…if we’re open to it.