Monday, October 14, 2013

Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

(Romans 1:1-7; Luke 11:29-32)

There is an account of an African slave who served a Catholic household in antebellum Georgia.  The woman was so dedicated to the family that she did not leave it after emancipation.  The people considered her a family member and buried her in the family gravesite.  We will note a similar evolution in Paul's salutation to the Romans which comprises the first reading today.

Paul introduces himself as a "slave of Christ Jesus."  He does what the Lord commands.  But this term by no means exhausts Paul's identity.  Paul also recognizes himself as Christ's apostle and  will surely include himself among those whom he later describes as having been made children of God by adoption.  This means that he carries out Christ’s commands not really out of submission but out of freedom.  He need not  see God as a prisoner views the warden watching his every move.  Rather God has become more like a mother observing her baby begin to walk and ready to assist the baby with each step.

We, of course, have been equally adopted into God's family.  We rejoice under His care and give thanks for the fine people now given to us as sisters and brothers.  We also perform our family services -- helping one another and calling others to join our household.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Monday of Holy Week

(Isaiah 42:1-7; John 12:1-11)

In one of last week’s gospel passages, the Jews become indignant to think of themselves as slaves of anyone. Their rejection of the term is ironic mostly because the Jews indeed lived as a subjugated people for swaths of history but also because they have seen themselves as the corporate Servant of the Lord as pictured by Isaiah in the first reading. Christians have not been reluctant to see Jesus and themselves as slaves in a metaphorical sense, at least.

In our minds we may distinguish servant from slave but in Hebrew the same word serves for both. A servant in ancient society was not a free person who hires him or herself out for domestic work but a person owned by a household. It was a degrading position as countless witnesses of American slavery attest. Yet Jesus put himself in the position in as much as he did the dirty work for the salvation of the world. In the gospel Jesus does not flinch from being anointed with costly oil because he knows that he is about to suffer in a worse way than the most abused slave and also because he is aware of the good intentions of the person who anoints him.

As much as Jews since the Holocaust see themselves as God’s corporate Servant of the Lord, the Church identifies with Jesus, whose life and death clearly reflect the description in Isaiah. We serve the world by deeds of justice and charity. When we support a poor child in Honduras or campaign for worker rights in Mexican maquiladoras, we add further testimony that Jesus brings justice to the nations.

Homilette for Friday, May 11, 2007

Friday, May 11, 2007

(John 15)

We can note a certain tension in the New Testament that the gospel today suggests. In different places Paul calls Christians “slaves of Christ” (I Cor 7: 22 et al.) while John quotes Jesus today as saying that he does not consider his disciples slaves but friends. How should we accommodate this difference of perspective?

There is no inherent contradiction in being Christ’s slaves and his friends. A slave can win the confidence of his or her master to be treated as a friend or even as a relative. I once read the story of a slave in a Georgian Catholic family who so loved her masters that she stayed with them after Emancipation and eventually was buried in the family plot.

In calling Christians “slaves of Christ” Paul means to emphasize that we follow Jesus unreservedly. If he tells us – as he does – that it is a sin to divorce one person to marry another, we do not divorce, at least in the sense that the word is interpreted by the Church. In calling his disciples “friends” the Jesus whom we meet in the Gospel According to John means to underscore his confidence in us. He trusts us implicitly to understand his words and to carry out his will.

The two terms – slaves and friends – should be seen as complimenting one another. At times we may have difficulty comprehending what Jesus means. It is hard, for example, for the family of a murder victim to pray for the perpetrator of the crime. Yet they do so out of faithfulness to their master. Most of the time, however, we can reflect on and appreciate the wisdom of Jesus, our friend, when he shares with us, for example, how we eat his body to have eternal life.