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The inner word

02 Sep 2012 - Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

In the gospel Jesus found himself in the kind of conflict that would eventually accelerate into his Passion: Going against the deeply held beliefs of influential people. He and his disciples not only violated the traditional religious practices regarding eating and other matters of purity, but Jesus turned the whole episode into a stinging rebuke of the hypocrisy of his critics. No matter how hard you tried, he said, following the rules did not make you pure and righteous if your heart were otherwise. The practices of religion are not unimportant, but have you ever let observing them substitute for true faith? Do your outer actions reflect what’s really going on inside?

Rules practices actions

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Homily themes

02 Sep 2012 - Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B

Be doers of the word and not hearers only. On the Sundays of Ordinary Time this month the church reads from the Letter of James. The message is pretty consistent: hearing God’s word leads to living justly and generously. Those who only listen politely to scripture and homilies and recite creeds and prayers perfectly but do not take those words to heart and live them are “deluding” themselves. Of course redemption starts with words—they have the power “to save your souls”—but if they skip lightly across the surface of people’s faith without sinking in and making some waves, they are squandered. External words or actions cannot by themselves save. What’s most important is what happens inside and how that shapes what happens outside.

Authors Joel Schorn

letter of james actions

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Homily Stories

06 Feb 2011 - Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A

Beware of anybody who starts a sentence with "I am a Christian, but . . ." That "but" will usually lead to trouble. The neighbor who is angry because the church is feeding the homeless, bringing undesirables to the area; the gentleman in the three-piece suit screaming that transitional housing in an unused convent would bring drug addicts to the block; the parents who want no children in the school with a different color of skin than theirs--they all start their excuses with that "but." We proclaim our faith by our actions. Isaiah the prophet makes it very clear what we are called to do. And then Paul tells us it is not easy. Usually confident Paul writes about being afraid and trembling. Isaiah says our faith-driven actions will heal us. I wonder what healing that neighbor who is so angry with the homeless people needs? Why does that well-dressed man so violently oppose the shelter in his neighborhood? Do those parents really believe that children with different skin color will somehow lower the quality of learning in the school? What are they really afraid of? We cannot be salt and light if we don't know what is causing us to respond as we do. Our human wisdom is flawed, limited, and corrupted. The power of God, on the other hand, remains true and focused and gives us the light to know what we need to do, what to change, and to find the courage to do either or both when necessary, no "buts" about it.

Authors Father Dominic Grassi

salt of the earth Faith actions

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Who's listening?

15 Mar 2009 - Third Sunday of Lent, Cycle B

People in the community will have varying reactions to the Ten Commandments. Some may feel that copies of these words of God that came to us through Moses should be posted in every courtroom and schoolroom in the country. Others may wonder why religion has to be so full of the “thou shalt nots.” The readings take us through the delivery of the Commandments through Paul’s identification with Christ Crucified, to Jesus’ anger at the venality of the moneychangers in the temple. The point of all these stories is that our actions have consequences and reflect the quality of our relationship with God.

Commandments relationship with God actions consequences

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Homily stories

02 May 2021 - Fifth Sunday of Easter, Cycle B

I have the knack of selecting the wrong line at the grocery store. Once, I was next in line, with four people behind me, when the cashier announced that her register had closed, which meant (of course) that everyone behind me turned and scooted with their shopping carts to a newly opened register, leaving me at the end of the new line. I complained that they should have a better system, then left the store without buying anything, hurting only myself. Recently I was in line with my groceries at a different store. Ahead of me a customer was giving the cashier a hard time and taking a long time doing so. The woman behind me had one item. I invited her to go ahead of me. Turns out, she wanted cash from her debit card. That took a long while as well! I was proud of staying patient and not saying anything untoward to anyone. When my turn finally came, the cashier apologized even though she had done nothing wrong at all. I noticed her COVID mask had WWJD printed on it. Often it’s what we do that matters, not what we say or don’t say. I called the manager over and complimented the cashier’s gentleness and professionalism. Then I opened the bag of delicious Sumo apples (try them) I had purchased and gave one to each of them. The cashier started to cry. The harried manager smiled. Actions can speak louder than words. I didn’t have to be knocked off a horse this time to get it.

Authors Father Dominic Grassi

kindness actions speak louder than words

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Exploring the word

06 Mar 2022 - First Sunday of Lent, Cycle C

“There’s saying and there’s doing,” as Mom used to say. A world of discrepancy often lies between the two. It is easy for us to say, for example: “I’ll clean up my room later,” or “I’ll take the car into the shop tomorrow.” But the follow-through is where we usually get stuck in the trap our words have made. The chasm between words and actions is rendered in Pauline terms as a lack of harmony between our lips and our hearts. We have to declare a truce between lips and heart, so that our actions may keep integrity with both. The alternative to this integrity, of course, is to bear false witness, which is one of the 10 grave matters between God and us. We may bear false witness in the obvious ways: by lying about others or by breaking our public vows. But it’s also false to profess the Creed in the assembly on Sunday, and to live against Christian values the other six days of the week. All of us, from the pastor of the parish to the woman in the last pew, have problems with the integrity thing. We want our words and our lives to match up, but often they just don’t. Make it personal Moses was a great religious leader because he understood the human heart very well. Basically he knew himself, and that self-knowledge wasn’t always flattering. He knew himself to be capable of murder under the right circumstances, not to mention cowardice, self-righteousness, impatience, and sheer mortal weakness. Moses didn’t always choose the good, so he presumed the nation that followed him was tempted in the same way. So he urged future generations to keep the story of their salvation in holy memory—but also to keep it close. The recitation of the history should remain personal: It was our father Jacob who went down into Egypt, not merely some ancient ancestor. And we were the ones who were maltreated and oppressed, and we cried to the Lord in our distress. And God heard our cry, not some ghostly, primordial scream captured by Edvard Munch on canvas. Just as we personally knew the affliction, so, too, the saving power of God was for us. If in this way Israel kept the covenant intimately near, the people would always remember that salvation was a personal matter, and the God of their ancestors was their God, too. The devil gets personal with Jesus We begin our Lenten journey, as Jesus began his mission on Earth, in the desert. We try to copy the tools of the trade as the Master demonstrates them: follow the Spirit, fast, pray, and expect temptation. When the devil arrives on cue, Jesus is prepared for him. But it is not personal sufficiency that makes Jesus ready; in fact, his personal resources are depleted by fasting, and Luke says plainly he is hungry and therefore humanly vulnerable. What makes Jesus ready for the devil is God’s sufficiency, not his own. And it is on these terms that he battles the temptations laid before him. Luke plays a bit of a shell game with the temptation scene, reversing the order of the final two challenges from that which Matthew establishes. Of course, because Mark does not supply any information about the conversation Jesus has with the devil, we can’t know for sure whether it was Matthew or Luke who tinkered with the traditional order, but the church fathers always deferred to Matthew in matters historical. What we do know is that it served Matthew’s ends to finish the temptation cycle with the egregious bid to denounce God and worship Satan in exchange for worldly power. And it obviously served Luke’s aims to conclude with Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem. Luke’s whole gospel is pointed in that direction like a rocket, and this scene provides us with the same level of foreshadowing of the mission that Matthew gives us in his Magi story, in which the Jewish leaders don’t recognize Jesus but foreigners readily do. One other contrast is notable: Matthew’s gospel tends to be oriented toward Israel’s past in a cycle of promise and fulfillment, or type and archetype. His temptation story is set up to be a reenactment of the Exodus story with its perfection found in Jesus resisting the temptations that Israel indulged. But Luke is not interested in looking backward: His gospel points forward to the story of the church that will comprise his second book. So Luke’s temptation story presages the crucifixion to come, when the devil will return and Jesus will be tempted three more times. Bread, glory, authority Liturgical time, as we might occasionally remind ourselves and those we serve, is not playacting our way through “first-century Bibleland,” as a professor of mine used to say. We can’t therefore ignore that we live in the era of the resurrection even as we liturgically travel from the Lenten desert to Holy Week in Jerusalem each year. We don’t have to “pretend” that the crucifixion hasn’t happened yet, and we shouldn’t read these earlier stories as daily news reports written oblivious of what comes next. Luke knew what happens next, and he wrote as if he did. The three temptations of bread, glory, and authority as God’s Son that the devil presents are deliberate parallels to the three times Jesus will be challenged to save himself from the peril of the cross. He is taunted as king, offered wine, and jeered at as God’s Messiah in an eerie echo of that earlier hour in the desert. As was warned at the close of the final desert temptation, the devil would retire from the scene, but only for a time. Applying the word Words and deeds together Jesus, like the devil in the temptation story, quotes good scripture. But in the case of Jesus, the words and the life are perfectly in synch. What comes from his lips is also in his heart, and that integrity bore him from the desert to the cross without contradiction or exception. Because we see that even the devil can come up with the right pious words on schedule, we can’t trust that our mouthing catechism answers will save us. As Jesus demonstrates, our own resources are not what we rely on. God alone is sufficient. Related scripture links Matthew’s temptation story: Matt. 4:1-11 Comparison with cross: Luke 23:34-39 Darkness trails Jesus: Luke 4:41; 8:29 Jesus quotes Moses: Deut. 8:3; 6:13; 6:16 Devil replies: Ps. 91 Catechism links Temptation: CCC 333; 394; 538; 2083; 2096; 2119; 2835; 2855; 2849

Authors Alice Camille

words versus actions false witness integrity temptation in the desert temptation story

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