It’s not Catholic custom to give a title
to a homily and post it on a reader board, but if it were, I would
probably call this one, “DO THE GOSPELS MAKE SENSE?” And my answer
to that question would be, ‘maybe not so much!
And if that sounds a bit irreverent, let me remind you,
for starters, of the Christmas story – from the Annunciation to the
birth in Bethlehem. How much sense does it make? Or how about the
Beatitudes (“Blessed are the poor, blessed are those who mourn, blessed
are those who suffer persecution”). Do the Beatitudes really make sense?
Or how about the twelve apostles – unlettered and unimpressive as they
were: how much sense do they make? And then there are some of the
parables of Jesus – the Prodigal Son, the eleventh-hour vineyard workers
– do they make sense? Or how about the crucifixion? St. Paul dared to
speak of “The folly of the cross.” You get my point.
There is something about the Christian gospel that
defies the rules of logic and runs counter to all accepted human wisdom.
Today’s gospel is a good case in point. It contains this wonderfully
spontaneous prayer that gives us a window onto how Jesus prayed, how he
talked to his Father. We hear him praising God for hiding the great
mysteries from the very ones who ought to be able to understand them the
best – the learned and the clever – and of revealing them instead to
mere children. Does that make much sense? Only if you abandon the normal
rules of human logic and buy into what I like to call “gospel logic.”
In gospel logic God does strange things: God uses the
little ones of this world to confound the great, the weak to put down
the strong, the foolish to put to shame the wise. Only in that context
can we ever hope to make sense of things like God becoming human and
being born in poverty, or of the dead and defeated Jesus rising from the
dead, or all the things that happened in-between.
All this comes home to me in a striking and very
personal way whenever I celebrate Mass with the L’Arche community over
on Capitol Hill. Many of you know about L’Arche. It’s today’s gospel in
flesh and blood: “Father, Lord of heaven and earth, to you I offer
praise; for what you have hidden from the learned and the clever you
have revealed to the merest children.” L’Arche – French for ark - is a
wonderful movement that welcomes the “merest children” of this world –
most of them with developmental disabilities - into loving, familial
communities. L’Arche believes that each of these ‘little ones’ is sent
by God to teach and heal, comfort and challenge the rest of us.
Celebrating Mass with the L’Arche Community is, shall
we say, in marked contrast to celebrating Mass in the Cathedral! That’s
an understatement. It is, shall we say, a tad less formal and solemn
than a cathedral Mass! My ‘concelebrants’ are likely to have Down
Syndrome or to be severely deaf, or to be living with other
disabilities. Often, they sit next to me on the couch and always they
pray with a joy and an intensity that can take my breath away. And I
venture to say that they understand things about God and God’s love and
God’s mercy that I will never understand. And not only do they
understand, they teach! They teach me – they teach everyone present -
how to sing and laugh, how to celebrate and how to bask in God’s love.
No theological treatise I’ve ever pondered, no tome I’ve ever read or
studied has taught me the deep things of God I learn just from being
with, and praying with, the L’Arche community.
I began by speaking of gospel logic. It’s a logic that
Jesus espoused and preached and lived, but its roots are in the Jewish
scriptures, as is evident from today’s Old Testament reading from the
Prophet Zechariah. The reading paints a strangely incongruous scene: a
victorious king who is not a warrior but a messenger of peace. He is a
humble figure with none of the trappings of royalty. He comes among his
people not in the usual manner – sitting astride a charger surrounded by
troops and weapons of war; no, he comes in utter meekness, riding on the
back of a lowly beast of burden.
The Church has always read that passage from Zechariah
in light of Jesus’ triumphant Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem, and
rightly so. But the story doesn’t end there. That’s only the beginning.
The story runs down through the ages whenever God raises up a gentle
apostle of non-violence, a prophet of peace, to challenge the world’s
powerful and call us back to gospel logic. I think of saints like Martin
of Tours, who when he became a Christian could no longer in conscience
serve in the military; or of countercultural saints like St. Francis of
Assisi who I think has become far too domesticated. Everything about St.
Francis was radical. And that’s true, too of people like Dr. Martin
Luther King, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, and, of course, of our own
Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen.
When you put people like these – and my friends over at
L’Arche - up against the great powers and the great power brokers of the
world, you come up with a strange picture indeed, but no stranger than
the helpless child of the Bethlehem manger, or that vulnerable figure,
arms outstretched, on Calvary’s cross. All are part of the upside-down
logic of this faith of ours, the mysterious wisdom which God withholds
from the learned and the clever and reveals to mere children.
We go now to the table of the Eucharist, the table to
which Jesus bids us come. And we will find nourishment here, abundant
nourishment, but only if we abandon our pretenses, drop our facades, and
approach the table as children.
Father Michael G. Ryan
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