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24TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME 2024 Homily by James DiLuzio CSP

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Readings may be found at https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/091524.cfm:

Who are the people who “light up our life?”  They are the people we are always happy to see – no matter the occasion, no matter what state they find us in -happy, sad, distracted, whatever. They are the people who bring us comfort, joy, hope, and those whom we readily, freely affirm, and who, in turn, affirm us. These are the people who engage us in LIFE – its joys and sorrows, goals and dreams and disappointments. These are the people who are REAL. 

In his book ON THE THRESHOLD OF HOPE, Pope Saint John Paul II wrote that “the search for God and the search for ‘self’ is one and the same search.”  So, to answer the question who Jesus is, we do well to begin with ourselves. 

Who first introduced us to “the Light?”  Who brought us to life? Might as well start with our parents – everyone has them, even if they were not the ones to nurture us after birth.  But today I am thinking of a most nurturing mother and father, or any caretaker caressing an infant, engaging in a baby’s smiles, the coos.  There is not just joy here, but anxieties, too, but not without hope that all will be well, and that this new life will prosper. In all of this, faith offers comfort in this wonderful quote from the prophet Jeremiah 29:11 on behalf of God: “For I know well the plans I have in mind for you—oracle of the Lord—plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.” 

Keep that quote in mind as we follow our parents or guardians sending us off to school for the first time—feelings of excitement, yes, but also fear, and sadness mixed with longing, acknowledging the passage of time, the deep realities of change. That’s what they felt, and likely, that’s what we felt, too. 

Life engages us time and time again and again in all the human realties of thought, and feeling.  Our first days of school (thinking of the highs and lows starting Kindergarten!) and later, when we were off to junior high, high school, college. Did he get any easier? One experience building upon another- sometimes “yes,” sometimes “no.”  And then, for all the love we may have experienced from those who Light Up Our Life, still, the securities and the insecurities we encounter completing job applications, dating, announcing our engagements or entrance into the priesthood. Love we experience from others could have, can still, if we let us,  root us in a deep acceptance of life’s realities, of who we are, who we are not, of successes and failures along the way, of, yes, in religious language, the realities of sin and grace. Faith addresses these realities by acknowledging the Crosses we bear, while knowing that all things will pass. Sorrows can and will be turned to—well, if not always JOY, at least to WISDOM, to greater faith, hope, and, above all, love. 

In the powerful Genesis story Adam proclaims one of the great comforts in the Creation, speaking of  Eve “This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; This one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of man this one has been taken.” This is part of our comfort and hope. Essentially, we are never alone. We are destined for relationship with God and others.  Our Trinitarian Faith affirms God is the essence of Being, i.e., God is Relationship itself, and relationship is the Life God calls us to embrace.  This is very important in our response to who Jesus is. 

The Church reminds us continually that Jesus is bone of our bones, flesh or our flesh, making Him the light of our lives, indeed, the light of the world.  He engaged in the joys of life and its pain, enduring the Passion, the Cross. The Resurrected Jesus refers to himself in a similar way when He says  to the disciples: “Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I Myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see, I have.”  Thus, we must examen our relationship with HIM and others because we are extensions of Jesus’ very flesh and bones. 

THE CREED SAYS: “and (He)  became man.”  All was created WITH HIM, THROUGH HIM, AND IN HIM to culminate in His person, in a particular historical, biblical time and place. Jesus comprises all aspects of creation -material, emotional, spiritual, and more because of God’s intentionality, that all came before Him and is retained by Him for Him to be part of this world. However, Jesus’ life on earth was not an end in and of itself,  but life with a purpose, to engage in the pattern of dying and rising to inaugurate a transition to something yet to be fulfilled, as the Bible says, into “a new heaven, a new earth,” including a newly defined, ever-perfecting humanity for all. For the Creed states “He rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”: 

Here we have the vision on our horizon. In these lines we find both a literal and spiritual acceptance of the value of LIFE, physical, human life, in both joys and sorrows, engaging in the thoughts and feelings of parents, single people, babies, children, adolescents, young adults, mature individuals in every stage reminding us to accept the pattern of Jesus which is the pattern of Creation and everything – life, death, rising, renewal, change, dying and rising.  This is LIFE in its fullness, LIGHT for our lives, and the depth meaning of love because, as we acclaim in the Creed: and his kingdom will have no end.                    

JESUS is the Godman, who is NOT JUST AN IDEA, CONCEPT, A TEACHING, BUT INCARNATE FLESH, transformed yet all too REAL. This is  why the church insists on perpetuating eucharist.  This is why we come to the table and worship and be thankful, unafraid of the fullness of life, joys, sorrows, all of it.     Again, I repeat that thought I began with from Pope Saint John Paul II wrote “the search for God and the search for ‘self’ is one and the same search.”  So here is our answer to Jesus: 

Who do we say Jesus is today?  “Jesus, you are who we are:  We are You, and You are Us. We are bone of your bones, flesh of your flesh, ready to die and rise, picking up our crosses not in despair but in hope and perseverance because that is what LIFE is, both LIGHT and Darkness. For where there is Great LIGHT, there is also Shadow, yet all of it, yes all of it is sustained by LOVE.  And that is LIFE in its fullness. So, what can we say to Jesus when he asks, “Who do you say that I am?”  Jesus, this is our answer, our answer is this: JESUS you are bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh.  Jesus, you are LOVE. 

LIVING IN THE ETERNAL NOW

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GOSPEL OF JOHN 3: “everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

From anxiety to eternity, fear to freedom

At waking, before the demands of the day enter our consciousness, we know who we are and who we are before God. Our being is one with Being, with God, I AM. This is a window into eternity; this is heaven come down to earth. This is eternal life’s prelude. The journey of Faith from Lent to Easter insists we keep cultivating this heavenly reality every day, every week, every month – beyond any liturgical season, every year of our lives.  How can this be done? Not by our own merits, but our openness to grace, to allow ourselves to be caught up in the eternal verities. 

The Scriptures tell us Abraham surrendered in just that way, in the passage about the STARS in THE SKY. Recall:  

GENESIS 15: GOD’S PROMISE TO ABRAHAM

  • But Abram said, “Lord God, what can you give me, if I die childless and have only a servant of my household, Eliezer of Damascus?” 3 Abram continued, “Look, you have given me no offspring, so a servant of my household will be my heir.” 4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: No, that one will not be your heir; your own offspring will be your heir.  5 He took him outside and said: Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so, he added, will your descendants be. 6 Abram put his faith in the Lord, who attributed it to him as an act of righteousness.[b]

At first, Abram’s encounter with God was all about Abram – Abram’s concerns, what Abram needed, what Abram was lacking. But then he silenced his own voice and listened to God. The vision of the Stars of heaven helped faith take hold.  Hope became a reality to be lived, savored, and returned to time and time again.

In our first reading we heard the misery of the people exiled, strangers in strange lands. Yet they did not become so caught up in their misery not to recognize the voice of God in a new empire arising: Cyrus, the Persian, inviting people to return to their own lands and worship their own God. Some will choose to stay in their misery, some will return and find new life. 

Analogous events are presented to us every day. Not to get so caught up in our woes and misfortunes that we miss the call to choose hope and PEACE in the moment –a vision of eternity accessible in the here and now. Yes, God’s realm, “the kingdom” requires our attention, and eternity will tend to us if we get out of our own way. The Sacraments are our opportunities to experience heaven here and now, and our touchstones to feel heaven’s presence again, later today, tomorrow, and the next day. One hour of peace a week is not enough for anyone! We must surrender to Christ’s peace continually. This is what Saint Paul meant when he wrote “you will be saved by faith.”

This is what the Church means when she says the Sacraments engage us in eternal verities.  Of course, it is not a matter of our concentration alone. No, it is  – far more a surrender to the Christ who knows our humanity better than we do. The best we can do is admit our distractions, worries, fears at Mass, and merge them into our prayer, consciously asking  Jesus for His help in making us present to deeper realities—seeing our needs in a bigger context.  

A PARENT with an infant: first objective may be to get the child to sleep so mom or dad could get back to  paying bills, or cleaning up dinner, or making phone calls. But when the child smiles and stares into their eyes, they have an opportunity for something greater. There’s eternity in the child’s smile, his or her sparkling eyes. All the work to be done can vanishes from their minds if they let it. If they do – and it is always a choice – they will find themselves in the perfect present – that’s eternity’s realm. If they are smart, they will savor it. They will hear Jesus say, “have faith in God, and faith in me, we are engaging you in eternity.” 

And should the child cry uncontrollably, while they are trying everything possible to soothe and comfort, they might do well to think beyond that moment and recognize in one infants’ pain or fear, the pain, and fears of the universe — the cries of victims of war, of hostage, of insult and degradation. 

Perhaps, with this larger image in mind, think and feel beyond their own frustration, their own fears. Then, they may experience both irony and mystery as the parents find themselves crying along with their infant. And with that vulnerability, of feeling out-of-control, they just might allow the voice of Jesus to say again and again: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” That is when the best decisions can be made = be it for a crying child, for the parent, for anybody in distress. 

We must bring the words of Jesus to heart time and time again. Life comprises far more than just our personal thinking and doing. There is Jesus’s words and ways of thinking that insist eternity is waiting for us in the here and now. The Kingdom of God is at hand. 

Remember the words of the biblical Job, who, in the midst of his suffering cries out: “I will see God:27 I will see for myself, my own eyes, not another’s, will behold him: my inmost being is consumed with longing.”   Eternity beckons even in the most difficult of situations. 

Jesus’ words to Nicodemus are for us, too. But we must believe them, internalize them, appeal to them, surrender to them: “so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” Lord, we believe! And help our unbelief!