Luke’s gospel for the Feast of Christ the King presents Jesus, not in a royal palace, but on a dark desolate hill. He’s not surrounded by cheering crowds, but by people cursing his name. He has no crown of gold, but a crown of thorns. His robe lies torn from him, heaped on the ground soaked in his blood. His throne is a cross, and over the cross is the inscription: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.
The temptation is to see this scene as a failure. But listen to the gospel. One of the criminals calls out to the wretched figure hanging next to him: “Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom.” And power goes out from him. “This day you will be with me in paradise.
The thief is an interesting figure in the gospel. He has no name, nothing is known of his life or his crime. There he is, desperate, thinking all is gone. Powerless, no one would take a chance on him. Who would bother with him or think him worthwhile? Who would come close to him? Only a God who in the person of Jesus Christ would come so low as to share a cross with him.
The thief has no name, but we believer that he bears everyone’s name. In the thief we see ourselves, our desperate, poor, powerless selves. Yes, that is how much Christ loves us. He is close to the sinners of this world, to us..
Let me begin with my apologies. Forgive me for coming to you yet again with nothing. I’m sorry. Look at me, I’ve just begun and here I go again, saying things that are just not true. Of course I do not come “with nothing.” No, I come with nothing of value. Yes, that’s better. Yes, I come with nothing of value. For as You well know, Lord, I do come with plenty of things that simply get in the way of me doing my job, the job You Yourself assigned me, the job for which You Yourself designed me perfectly.
God, You are so patient.
Truly.
Yes, Sir.
Sorry, forgive me. Yes, I will stop talking. Of course I’ll listen to You. I’m all ears. Please, my Lord, go ahead, if you please, when You’re ready…
“My son, it is good to see you. I am always pleased to see you. You really have grown. Do you know what I hear when you speak to me? I hear hope. Yes, hope has a sound. No, it’s not like the sounds that you hear in the world. In heaven everything is Love. And the sound of hope is the sound of one of my children falling into love. I never grow tired of you, or any of your brothers or sisters, speaking to me. Think about it. You know this yourself, the most painful thing for parents is one of their children turning away from them, ceasing to talk, cutting off all communication, denying their very existence. Oh, how that hurts. Don’t you see then how Jesus taught you all that you need to know? He taught you all that you will ever need to know while He hung upon the cross. He taught you to never turn away from me. To speak to me. To direct your heart and your mouth and your will toward me. He taught you to keep your eyes on Me. The world only sees terrible pain and suffering upon the cross, I see you being set free. I see you this very morning coming to your Father and speaking openly. I see hope and I hear the sound of my dear child falling into Love.”
Whenever I can, I invite visitors to our monastery in Jamaica, Long Island, to take the subway to downtown Manhattan for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry and then visit Battery Park, the Museum of the American Indian, and some of the old churches and shrines among the city’s famous skyline. I try to tell the story of our country and the Catholic church in America by walking through those places. It’s a good opportunity to talk about the care we need to give creation as we look at the waters of the harbor, the question of immigration as we visit Castle Clinton in the Battery, and the church as we visit the area’s churches. Looking at the past helps you to understand the present.
Our walk usually ends at St. Peter’s church, the oldest Catholic church in New York City, on the corner of Church and Barclay Streets, a block away from the World Trade Center. The church was dedicated November 4, 1786, three years after British troops evacuated the city at the end of the Revolutionary War and it’s been there as an active parish every since.
Previously, New York City was under Dutch and British rule for almost 150 years. During that time the city was strongly anti-Catholic, with laws calling for any Catholic priest who came there to be jailed. Catholic worship was forbidden; there were no Catholic churches.
Even after the Revolutionary War, despite their support for the American cause, Catholics were looked down upon in New York City. There were only a few hundred in a population of almost 20,000. Being a Catholic didn’t get you far in New York in those days.
So how did that church get built? Well, there were some foreign diplomats from France and Spain and Portugal in the city then. New York was the nation’s capital at that time. (1785-1790)
There were a couple of well-to-do Catholic businessmen, but most of the Catholics that formed St. Peter’s were poor Irish and German immigrants and French refugees and slaves from the recent revolution in Haiti.
Not a good mix of people to form a parish, you might think. This new congregation, besides facing the anti-Catholic attitude of New Yorkers, was poor and getting poorer as new Catholic immigrants poured into New York from Europe. Its priests weren’t the best either. They seemed to be always squabbling among themselves. There were some scandals among them. The laypeople were also divided among themselves. There were factions that wanted to run the parish their way or no way. There wasn’t a bishop in the country at the time to straighten things out.
So what kept it going? The other day we celebrated the Feast for the Dedication of the Church of St. John Lateran in Rome. The liturgy for that feast offers some wonderful insights into what a church and a parish should be. “My house is a house of prayer,” Jesus says. This church is not a social hall; it’s a place where we meet God and God meets us. It’s a place where we are welcomed on our way through life by a living water that restores us and helps us grow. ( Ezekiel 47.1-12) It’s is a place where we remember our mission in this world: we’re builders of the City of God, living stones that together form the temple of God. ( 1 Corinthians 3, 9-17) It’s is a place of communion, where we commune with God and God with us.
The readings for the feast say a church is a place of welcome. It’s where the lost sheep find their way home. It’s where people like Zacchaeus, the tax collector mentioned in St. Luke’s gospel, find new hope for their lives. It’s is a place of sacraments, where infants are blessed, where marriages begin, where we put our dead in the hands of God who promises eternal life.
What keeps a church and a parish going is its spiritual life, its life of prayer, its life of ministry.
Whenever I go to St. Peter’s Church on Barley Street I point out two markers at its entrance. One says that St. Elizabeth Seton, the first native born American saint, was received into the Catholic Church here in 1806. She had been a member of a prominent Anglican church just down the street, Trinity Church, but came to St. Peter’s drawn by her faith in the Mass and the Blessed Sacrament. Socially, it was step down for her. Spiritually, she found a home here in this struggling, messy parish of poor immigrants.
The other marker recalls Pierre Toussaint, a Haitian slave who was also a member of this church in colonial times. He became a famous New York hair-dresser and was welcomed into the homes of elite members of New York society for over 50 years. For 50 years he came to Mass every morning at St. Peter’s. He’s buried in the crypt at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and in being proposed for canonization today.
The church is not a place of brick and stone. It’s a place for people, holy people, to meet God and one another. They make the church.
Pope Leo had to step in when Attila and his army were threatening to destroy Rome. The elite of Roman society had fled the city, the government was gone, the rest were busy securing their own homes in the city. I don’t think Leo, a churchman who was by nature a thinker deeply engaged in the study of spiritual things wanted to meet the dangerous invaders at the city gates, but he did. He rose to accept the responsibility.
When society is in danger because it refuses to face the issues that endanger it, the church can’t flee or look to its own security. It has to step in. That means not only church leaders but every believer has to meet the challenges at our gates today which government and society won’t acknowledge– Climate change and care for the earth, immigration and care of refugees, nuclear disarmament, universal healthcare, global peacekeeping, respect for the family and human rights.
“Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God for you. Consider how their lives ended and imitate their faith. “ (Hebrews 13, 7) (Common of Pastors} Remember Leo.
Tomorrow we have another leader, who fought for the poor when most were concerned for the rich: Martin of Tours. Remember Martin of Tours.
How do we want to die? I think we’ll be hearing that question more frequently after our current elections are over. “End of life” decisions are going to be part of the political agenda in the future. In our society we’ll be facing a range of questions about death and dying..
Let’s think about the term “end of life” first. If we listen to our first reading from the Book of Maccabees, the seven brothers who are put to death for defying their Greek conquerors and keeping their Jewish faith don’t see death as an end of life. “You are depriving us of this present life,” one of the brothers says, “but the King of the world will raise us up to live again forever.”
The seven brothers see this life as given to them by God, who is master of life and death. Life doesn’t end. We are in God’s hands from the beginning. It’s for God to decide when we die, but God promises life beyond death. It’s for us to remain faithful as long as we live.
We hear in today’s gospel people denying that there’s life after death and trying to bait Jesus with what they think are absurd circumstances. Jesus tells the Sadduceesthat life beyond this life is not the same as here on earth. A heavenly life is beyond what we can imagine.
So denying life beyond death isn’t new. Today we can hear the same denial of eternal life, the life that Jesus promises and shows us in his resurrection. One of the signs of that denial may be, I think, the increasing number of suicides, even among young people. We can see this life as our only life, and when circumstances become seemingly intolerable and seemingly hopeless, some unfortunately end their earthly lives. But we leave them to God’s mercy.
Today death often goes unmentioned. We don’t want to talk about it. We just want to think about life. But death is an important part of life.
There was a passage in a popular book some years ago by Carlos Castenada about an old Indian, Don Juan, and a young sophisticated scientist from the northeast, walking together in the desert in the southwest. The two are world’s apart in the way they think.
As I recall it, the old Indian says to the young man, “Did you see the White Eagle circling over your shoulder?”
“ Yes, I see it,” the young man replies.
“That’s your death, keep an eye on it.”
“That’s a morbid thought,” the young man says, “We don’t think about that any more.”
“You should,” Don Juan says, “Keep an eye on your death. It will keep you from being small-minded.”
The young man’s describing the way a lot of people look at life today. We don’t want to think about death. We’re thinking more about extending life here on earth, through better diet, better heath care, better exercise;we don’t like to think of a life ending in death.
But we should keep death in mind. Death is the door to another life. By ignoring it we can limit ourselves to a life too small, too self-centered, too brief. We need to see life as God sees it. Life is not ended in death, it’s changed.
So deathis not something to be ignored; it is one of the two most important moments in life. That’s why we say in the Hail Mary. “Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
What if you were the only one that the child could be handed to?
Only you.
No one else around to help.
Would you receive that child into your arms?
There’s no sterilized room, no sanitary precautions, no sink, not even a bar of soap—just plain old you, a bunch of imperfect circumstances, and a poor tiny child that needs to be embraced.
You know what you would do.
Even if your hands were filthy, completely covered in soot and mud, you know what you would do.
You’d quickly rub your hands against your pants or shirt and wipe away the obvious dirt.
Then you’d hold out your hands.
Wouldn’t you?
Yes. You would.
We all would.
That’s what makes us human.
That’s what makes us children of God.
We’d do what we could with what we have to help an innocent child.
We know that “cleanliness” in such cases really doesn’t matter. For even if the circumstances were “perfect” we’d still have that uneasy feeling. That feeling that we’re not worthy to hold such innocence, to be entrusted with such treasure.
It’s a holy hesitancy that only true humility can bear.
Yet, it’s the necessity to help, the clear need for our assistance—the abundantly clear reality that we’re the only “hands” on deck—that drives us to overcome such holy and righteous fear—a fear that reveals just how poor we really are, much poorer in fact than even the helpless child we are about to embrace.
It is preciously this beautiful fear of God that propels us to love boldly—to boldly reach out beyond ourselves, to boldly become part of God’s mystical body, to become His very arms and hands—to embody Divine Love Itself—that perfect love of the eternal Father for each and every child ever created.
For it is the Father’s love that creates us, and sustains us, and longs to flow through us.
We just sometimes need extreme circumstances—ridiculously obvious situations—in order to tap the needed courage to let it to flow beyond our own borders and into those around us.
You are in such a situation. Right now.
We all are.
This very moment.
No matter where you are or what you’re doing.
Such a situation is at hand.
A child, a new born—cold, hungry, and without a home—desperately needs to be held.
Quick then, wipe your dirty hands, make due with what you’ve got—believe the Word of God, it’s good enough—now hold out your hands.
During the summer of 2016, I had the opportunity to travel to Krakow, Poland, to attend World Youth Day. I began my journey with five other people from my parish, Holy Family Church in Fresh Meadows. along with the 500 people from the Diocese of Brooklyn. I had no expectations for what was to come my way.
I had so many incredible experiences when I realized that there were approximately 3 million Catholics who came from across the world to be united in Poland because of their love and passion for Jesus. There were an overwhelming amount of opportunities to experience the year of mercy throughout the different activities in Poland. I attended the catechesis sessions in Krakow, walked through the concentration camp in Auschwitz, visited the chapel in the shrine of the Black Madonna in Czestochowa, and attended the festival in Blonia Park where Pope Francis visited the anxiously awaiting pilgrims.
The incredible overnight experience in Krakow was so joyful as I walked along a five mile route with the rest of the young people from Brooklyn and Queens. We camped out in an open field and joined millions of youth in a peaceful environment. The year’s World Youth Day was focused upon the lives of Saint Pope John Paul II, Saint Faustina and Saint Maximilian Kolbe, especially during the catechesis sessions.
World Youth Day in Krakow changed my view of Catholicism because I was used to attending church on Sundays and occasionally a meeting with my youth group. I never would believe that there were so many young Catholics that are truly seeking Jesus and eager to spread his mission. I truly believe that my Catholic faith has been transformed spiritually and I am very grateful for that experience.
I hope to attend World Youth Day in Panama in 2019!
The Victor's Place 