Homily
for October 29, 2006
Liturgical Year B - Cycle II
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Fr. Tom Margevicius Topic:
Universal Priesthood +
+ +
Gospel
Mk 10:46-52
As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd,
Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside
begging. On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out
and say “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me." And many rebuked him,
telling him to be silent. But he kept calling out all the more, “Son of
David, have pity on me." Jesus stopped and said, "Call him." So they
called the blind man, saying to him, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is
calling you.” He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.
Jesus said to him in reply, "What do you want me to do for you?” The
blind man replied to him, "Master, I want to see.” Jesus told him, "Go
your way; your faith has saved you.” Immediately he received his sight
and followed him on the way.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Last night, my nieces, Madeline and Catherine, and my nephew
George, were in the music group. I did the Mass at 6:00 p.m. last
evening and I guess someone wants to make sure I don’t make the same
mistakes this morning. After Mass, I was talking to my nieces and my
nephew. We were sitting around the dinner table. Terry and her husband
Steve came by. We were eating our filberts and peanuts and we were
nibbling away at finger foods, and I said to my nieces, “So, what
should I do better this time?” “Oh, Father Tom,” they call me Uncle
Tom, of course. “Uncle Tom, talk about what it is like in a seminary.
People want to hear that. They like stories about what’s on the other
side of those secret doors. Some people want to hear those stories.
Others…”
This morning, Deacon Ray said to me, “Father Tom, you teach
in the seminary.” “That’s right, Deacon.” “You didn’t tell me you teach
Liturgy. Now I’m all nervous. How am I going to do?” Liturgy is one of
those hot button issues nowadays. Are we doing it the right way? Are we
doing it the wrong way? Can we do it a better way? All sorts of things
like that. I was in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania last weekend, and after
Mass, the priest said to me, “So, you teach in the seminary.” I said,
“That’s right.” He said, “Well, good thing you don’t teach Liturgy
because if you were a liturgist, I’m sure you would have found out all
my mistakes.” I didn’t tell him.
Seminarians nowadays, have a great energy for ritual things
of the Mass. They like dressing-up. They like wearing the collar. There
is a pendulum swing from what it was twenty years ago. Nowadays, they
want to see lots of smells and bells. They even like to wear the
cassocks with all those black buttons all the way down. There is a
strong conservative movement out there. Liturgy is one of these grounds
where the conservatives and the liberals are butting heads on who’s got
it right. It is all about worship. No, it’s about following the
rubrics. Well, it’s about both. How do you kind of navigate both? Part
of my job, and I take it very seriously, is to not only teach these
seminarians what the text says and let’s pray the church’s liturgy but
can we do so in a way that is truly worship? There can be a tendency to
turn priesthood into some kind of otherworldly experience. In addition,
some of these young men that tend toward the conservative side, they
sort of adopt an affected demeanor in the pulpit. They get up and,
“Lord, be with you. And also with you.” You don’t talk that way in
life! You shouldn’t pray that way. I’ve heard readers do that. You read
very well, by the way. However, people sometimes put on an affected
tone when reading.
Liturgy should be natural human worship. It should not be
something that takes us out of the real world, but it should be the
real world brought here into worship. When priesthood is removed from
that, when priests sometimes want to take on a “holier than thou”
mentality, you run into all sorts of problems. I think we have all
weathered twelve years of the fallout of some of these priestly
problems. Men who have thought they were above the law and could do
whatever they felt like. Then it came back in a very nasty way to wound
us all deeply. I tell these young men in the seminary, “Yes, love the
priesthood. Love doing the rubrics correct. Follow the rules. But by
God, men, put your priorities in the right place. It’s first about
loving God and loving neighbor, before it’s about loving certain texts
and how you hold your hands.”
Priesthood has undergone some interesting changes over the
past several decades. At the time of Jesus, Jesus Christ Himself was
not a Jewish priest. There was a cultic priesthood in the Jewish faith,
where those who were the descendents of Aaron, as the Second Letter to
the Hebrews tells us, their job was to offer sacrifices in the temple.
They slaughtered the animals, they sprinkled the blood on the corners
of the altar, sprinkled the people. They made sacrifices, first for
their own sins, and then for the sins of the people. Now, Jesus was not
of that group. He was not a Jewish priest. As a matter of fact, some of
the Jewish priests of Jesus’ time, couldn’t figure Jesus out. Who is
this? Where does He get this? How does He go around, walking around
like He knows His way around the Holy things of God? He’s not one of
our clan. Then there’s this great jealousy that developed. It was
because of the jealousy, the Gospel of John tells us, that some of them
handed Jesus over to Pilot and the Romans killed Him.
Now, a short time after, within 40 years after Jesus walked
the earth, the temple itself was destroyed by the Romans. First, it was
certain subverts within the people, who colluded with the Romans to get
them to kill Jesus, and then a little bit later, those very Romans
destroyed the cult worship of the Jewish people. They destroyed the
temple. Jesus said, “A day will come when not one stone will be left
upon another.” But a fascinating thing happened in Jesus’ own ministry
when He’s talking about the Jewish priesthood. He, Himself would go to
the temple and worship. At the same time, He started to make a move, a
theological shift, to say, “If you destroy this temple, in three days,
I will rebuild it.” They of course thought, “Nonsense. You can’t lift a
brick that size by yourself.” The Gospel of John says that He was
talking about the temple of His body that after it died for three days,
He would rise from the dead. In another passage, He is talking to the
woman in Samaria, and she of course doesn’t like Jewish people. There’s
all sorts of racism back then, too. It is nothing new in any
generation. She says, “Oh, in Jerusalem, you Jewish people worship in
the temple. Here in Samaria, we’ve got our own hill to worship on.”
Jesus says, “Ah, woman. A day is coming when true worshippers will not
worship either only in Jerusalem or on a certain mountain, but true
worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” That even
within His life, Jesus knows that while there is temple worship, the
focus of worship will shift off of a cultic sacrifice in a certain
building and onto His person. He becomes the new temple worship, the
new high priest.
After the Romans destroy Jerusalem, the Letter to the Hebrews was
written. The Letter to the Hebrews calls Jesus the Great High Priest.
Jesus was not of this cultic group. He did not offer sacrifices,
slaughter the animals and all that. However, He has taken upon Himself
what they were doing for the placating of God and the forgiveness of
their own and the people’s sins. Now, Jesus takes upon Himself that in
my person, I offer the sacrifice to my Father for the forgiveness of
the sins of His people. That the shift of priesthood off of a certain
group and a certain type of worship, onto the person of Christ.
Now the fascinating thing is that at the same time the
Letter to the Hebrews was being written, another letter was being
written under the name of 1st Peter. Whether 1st Peter wrote it, or one
of his disciples later on did, 1st Peter says, “For we are a chosen
race, a holy people, a priesthood set apart.” What the letter of 1st
Peter says is now a priesthood which now has been shifted from a cultic
group, onto the person of Christ, is now dispensed through the person
of Christ into all who believe in Christ. It is a universal priesthood.
We all offer worship to the Father in Christ. When we are baptized into
Christ Jesus, we immerse ourselves in Him, so that now we unite our
worship with Him and make a full worship to the Father. We say it every
time we say Mass when we say, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all
creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which
earth has given and human hands have made.” We offer ourselves, our
work, our own effort is laid right there on the altar. It is not just
Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, but it is ours participating with it. We are
the bread and wine laid on the altar, that we all now are priests who
worship the father because we are immersed in Christ. The word Liturgy
is broken up into two parts. “Laity” is the first part and “ergon”,
meaning work. It is the work of the people that you and I, all of us,
have our part to play.
Now, within all of us, somebody has to lead all the
business. The church picks out certain men, ordains them to be the
leaders of the worship, and so then now, those who are priests have
been ordained by the church in order to serve the common priesthood of
the people. The documents of Vatican II are very clear about that.
Priesthood of ordination is at the service of priesthood of all the
believers. Jesus Christ gave the model for that Himself when He said,
“The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His
life as a ransom for many.” The church has said, “OK, let’s have
certain men picked out who can serve the needs of all, for the worship
of God, the Father in Christ.” Now, what happened over the course of
time, we know, that some of those who were picked apart took it upon
themselves as a badge of honor, thought we were holier than thou,
thought we could do whatever we want in the confines of our privacy,
and the church says, “That is a mistake.” We have all known that now.
We have fallout now. We have the priest shortage. We talk
about the priest shortage. What do we do about the priest shortage?
Well, on the one hand, you should know that there is a lot of hope.
There are many new young men coming into the seminary nowadays. Last
year, in our archdiocese, we ordained fifteen men. There is a lot of
hope. These young guys catch the vision. They are John Paul II
seminarians. That is all they’ve known. Now, Benedict, of course, they
love him too. They have hope, they have vision, and they have energy.
They want to give themselves to the service of the people of God.
How does their effort benefit the parish in Los Alamos? How
does the fact that there are some people who are catching the vision,
translate into here and now? Father John Carney said to me, “Father
Tom, you don’t know how happy I am that you are taking some of the
workload this weekend for me.” He misses Father Joshua, as you can
imagine. It is hard. Priests out there put in 70 and 80-hour weeks. It
is not an easy life. What makes it more difficult is the culture out
there doesn’t support it very well. They don’t listen to music where
the rappers are saying, “Maybe I should be a priest! Amen.” That is not
what the culture is thinking about at all.
I think there are two things that the parish here in Los
Alamos, and the parish in White Rock on the other side, can do to
benefit from this new springtime of priestly vocations. One is to
worship well yourselves. In my work as a seminary instructor, I say,
“What kind of parishes do the average seminarians come from nowadays?”
More and more, they are coming from those parishes that worship well,
where the common priesthood of all the people is taking. I am used to
it, and Deacon Ray is too that when we sit up front, we know that
everyone is staring at me. Now I’m on a tape recording too but what you
don’t know is that we stare back sometimes. Some people are just not
worshiping God in spirit and in truth. They just sit back and, “I’m not
going to sing, I’m not going to pray, I’m not going to get into it.” We
are all called to worship God the Father. Vatican II wanted full and
active participation of all the people of God. So, we kind of watch out
there. Who is singing the Psalm response? Thank you musicians for doing
a wonderful job. Mariana, you were singing, I noticed that. I was happy
to see that.
There is a bishop in the Midwest who has made this policy.
If a parish has not produced a vocation in the past 15 years, when its
present priest leaves, it won’t get a replacement. That brings it home,
doesn’t it? I don’t know how firm he is in trying to enforce that but
the idea is this. It’s us. It’s not some guy out there – isn’t it nice
that somewhere a priest…. No, it’s from our own. Where do priests come
from? Parishes. From happy families who know how to worship. The better
we do with it, the more likely that God will raise up within our midst
those whom he has called to serve in this capacity.
Then, the second thing. We need to do all that we can to put
out a good liturgy, to worship, to give ourselves to the life of the
parish financially, in volunteer efforts and what not. However, in the
end, it has to be God who does the work. Otherwise, priesthood is a
farce. It is just a human effort; it is not a participation in the
priesthood of Christ. It is prayer. It’s “Lord, send us.” “Lord raise
up from within us.” “Lord, help us.” It’s coming back and back. You
know the story of Bartemaus, here. He kept calling out to Jesus. He
kept calling out. There is a certain line of theology out there today
that says, “If you prayed for it once, then let it go. If you keep
having to pray that shows you’ve got weak faith, that you don’t trust
God.” Well, that is not what Jesus said. Jesus said, “Ask. Seek.
Knock.” Be like that persistent widow who won’t let the judge sleep
until she gets her ruling. In addition, Jesus, after telling that
parable, says, “Ah, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on
the earth?” Well, that means, are there people that are persistent in
prayer and keep coming back again and again and again? Moreover, I
think Eucharistic Adoration is a beautiful way to do that.
I know some bishops who swear by the fact that the more
parishes get into Eucharistic Adoration, and come before the
Eucharistic Lord in prayer, that the more vocations come out. They are
just convinced by it. It is a hard thing to do. To commit an hour of
your week to come, especially if it’s at odd times, in the middle of
the night or whatever. It takes a little bit of act of faith, but
that’s exactly what faith is. It just keeps coming back to the Lord and
saying, “Lord, you can do anything.” “What do you want me to do for
you?” “Lord, I want to see more priests. I want to see better worship.
I want to see holier families. I want people who know what the common
priesthood of worshipping the Father in spirit and truth is all about.”
I think if we did that then Eucharistic would be what it is supposed to
be. It will be nourishment for the life of the people of God.
That is my prayer for you. Continue to pray for us in the
seminary as well. Pray for the young men and those who are discerning
vocations. Pray that we would all know how to worship God in a fuller
way and that we would never cease praying to God with the earnestness
of faith.