https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/catholicpreaching\/10.26.25_Homily_1.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n <\/p>\n
The following text guided the homily:\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n- In the next few weeks, I\u2019ll have a chance to help lead three different retreats, one for deacons, another for priests and the third for diocesan directors of the Pontifical Mission Societies. One of the classic practices when one goes on a retreat is to meditate about one\u2019s death. Since we never know the day or the hour when Christ will come for us, pondering the end of our life helps us better to learn how to live, to focus on what really matters in life, to prioritize what\u2019s truly important, and to order our choices wisely. It\u2019s a practice that the Church encourages all the faithful every November \u2014 which begins Saturday \u2014 when we ponder the four last things of death, judgment, heaven and hell. As helpful as meditating upon our death is, there\u2019s an even more useful practice: entering into the holy thoughts and prudent preparations of the saints as they prepare for death. Today, in the second reading, we are given the privilege to read what is essentially St. Paul\u2019s last will and testament. He was in a Roman prison, preparing for execution and writing what he thought might be his final words to his spiritual son St. Timothy. He said he was already being poured out as a sacred sacrificial offering to God \u2014 like the Romans used to finish their sacrifices by pouring wine on the ground to the pagan gods \u2014\u00a0and that the time of his departure from this life was near. In one phrase, one of the most powerful and memorable lines in Sacred Scripture and human history, he summarized all he had sought to do in his life since his conversion outside the gates of Damascus. He wrote. \u201cI have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.\u201d As we think of our life and the time of our eventual departure from it, St. Paul would be urging us, like he urged the young St. Timothy, to make these three things our priorities, so that we might echo them throughout our life and at the hour of our death.<\/li>\n
- The first thing he writes is, \u201cI have fought the good fight.\u201d He points to the truth that the Christian life isn\u2019t easy. It isn\u2019t supposed to be. It\u2019s a battle. The word he uses for fight is the Greek word for agony. He says he\u2019s agonized through the \u201cgood and beautiful agony.\u201d St. Paul heroically and agonizingly battled through multiple imprisonments, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, labors, sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, anxiety for the Churches, betrayals, abandonments and more (2 Cor 11:23-28). But he never gave up the fight. He competed like a champion. And he wanted to help strengthen St. Timothy. He was indicating that in the Christian life, we must struggle against our weaknesses and failings, we need to war against the devil, principalities and powers and unending infernal attempts to turn us from God, we must contend against the temptations, obstacles and difficulties others and human life in general can place in our way to make it harder to live and share our faith. Despite all the blows that he took in life, St. Paul told St. Timothy in today\u2019s passage, \u201cThe Lord stood by me and gave me strength.\u201d The same Lord will stand by us. That\u2019s why St. Paul could write to St. Timothy at the end of his first letter, \u201cFight the good fight of faith\u201d (1 Tim 6:12). The Christian life is meant to train us to be fighters, to be strong and resilient, to be heroic like Jesus, like Paul, like the martyrs young and old throughout the centuries, because we recognize that God is standing by us to give us strength and that we can do all things in him who strengthens us (Phil 4:13). St. Paul wants St. Timothy and each of us to be as stout in the spiritual life as championship boxers are in the ring. And we\u2019re living at a time in which that strength is ever needed.<\/li>\n
- The second thing St. Paul declares is, \u201cI have finished the race.\u201d One of the reasons why St. Paul was able to do so much for the Lord was because he always had a sense of urgency. He recognized that the Christian life is not one where we sleep until noon, spend the day leisurely, and take as many naps as we wish. The Christian life isn\u2019t a lazy saunter following in Jesus\u2019 footsteps with plenty of time for diversions and no urgency to prioritize the things of God. Rather, the Christian life is a race! It\u2019s a life-long marathon. St. Paul sped all over the ancient world, throughout the Middle East, Asia and parts of southern Europe. While most of us are not called to anywhere near the same total on the pedometer as he amassed, we are called to live our faith with similar tenacity, priority and promptness. We\u2019re called to hasten to God, to hasten to serve others, to hasten to grow in and share our faith. Just as St. Paul said and showed caritas Christi urget nos <\/em>(2 Cor 5:14), the love of Christ and of others is meant to motivate us to persevere in the marathon of Christian life, up hills and down into valleys. The same Lord who gave St. Paul spiritual stamina will sustain us, because he\u2019s running the race right alongside of us to the heavenly Jerusalem.<\/li>\n
- The third thing St. Paul states is the most important: \u201cI have kept the faith.\u201d This expression means far more than that the apostle was rejoicing that he hadn\u2019t in the end become a heretic or an atheist. Rather, he looked upon his greatest triumph as keeping the faith that he regarded as the greatest gift of his life. He had remained faithful. He had stayed true to the Lord. St. Paul preserved the faith by sharing it. He wrote to the Corinthians, \u201cFor I handed on to you as of first importance what I myself received\u201d (1 Cor 15:3). In today\u2019s passage, he told St. Timothy that his goal was that through him \u201cthe proclamation might be completed and all the Gentiles might hear it.\u201d Pope Francis commented a few years ago on this connection between keeping the faith and sharing it with others. He asked, \u201cHow did St. Paul preserve the faith?\u201d and replied, \u201cNot in a safe! He didn\u2019t hide it underground, like the lazy servant who buried the talent. \u2026 He kept the faith because he didn\u2019t limit himself to defending it, but proclaimed it, spread it, brought it to the farthest reaches of the world. \u2026 He preserved the faith because, just as he received it, he passed it on.\u201d Pope Francis urged us likewise not to try to keep our faith like a private possession, but to share it with words and witness. This will happen, he said, if we recognize how great a treasure the faith and seek to share that treasure with those we know and love, indeed with everyone we meet. To keep the faith through having given his life to spread it was St. Paul\u2019s greatest boast. He wants it to be ours, so that at the end of our life, we can look back with similar joy.<\/li>\n
- To fight the good fight, to finish the race and to keep the faith are three lenses with which we could look at all aspects of our Christian life. In today\u2019s Gospel, however, Jesus speaks to us about prayer, and so it\u2019s important for us to re-read the Gospel in the light of St. Paul\u2019s words and re-read St. Paul\u2019s last will and testament in light of Jesus\u2019 instructions on prayer. We know that prayer is a battle. The Catechism tells us that sometimes prayer is like Jacob\u2019s struggle all night against the angel of God (see Gen 32:25-32). We\u2019re called to fight the good fight of prayer, to run to God in prayer and persevere in that marathon of a praying always without growing weary, as Jesus taught us all last Sunday in the Parable of the Persistent Widow. And if we\u2019re going to keep the faith, we need to preserve a life of intense prayer, since, as Pope Benedict never ceased to say, prayer is faith-in-action. So today let\u2019s pay particular attention to what the Lord teaches us in the Gospel about how to pray well so that we may be strengthened by him who stands with us to fight, to run, and to stay faithful.<\/li>\n
- In preparation for Jesus\u2019 teaching in the Gospel, the Church gives us the first reading and the Psalm. Sirach reminds us that God doesn\u2019t play favorites. He\u2019s not \u201cunduly partial to the weak\u201d or the strong, \u201cyet he hears the cry of the oppressed, \u2026 the orphan, \u2026the widow, \u2026 the lowly, \u2026\u00a0the one who serves God willingly.\u201d The Psalm reminds us, \u201cWhen the just cry out, the Lord hears them,\u201d for he is \u201cclose to the brokenhearted,\u201d those \u201ccrushed in spirit,\u201d those who \u201ctake refuge in him\u201d and the \u201cpoor.\u201d Yet while God hears the prayers of everyone and seeks to respond, in order to receive his gifts, each of us needs to know that we need those gifts and be open to them. Our prayer, in other words, must be humble, since pride can and will close us off to what God seeks to give. The surest way to lose the good fight, to quit the race and squander the faith is through pride. We see that in the parable Jesus gives us about the two men who went up to the temple to pray.<\/li>\n
- The first man was a Pharisee. He prayed, \u201cThank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity \u2014 greedy, dishonest, adulterous \u2014 or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.\u201d The man was what most people would deem a highly religious man. He was going up to Jerusalem to the temple to pray, rather than just praying wherever he found convenient. He, like his fellow Pharisees, never sought to do the minimum in the practice of the faith but as much as they could. Whereas Jews were required to fast only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week, every Monday and Thursday. Whereas Jews needed to tithe only certain items, Pharisees tithed their whole income. While outwardly the Pharisee praying in the Temple was probably a role model, there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, of faith, and of others. The first clue is that Jesus said about him, \u201cHe spoke this prayer to\u00a0himself<\/em>.\u201d This doesn\u2019t mean that he simply said his prayers quietly so that no one else could hear, but, in a sense, he was directing the prayer not to God to himself, as if he were God. He was basically informing God of his goodness rather than turning to God with praise, thanks, contrition, intercession and petition. He rejoiced that he was not like so many others, whom he deemed sinners and losers, exulting in what he saw was his virtue, while failing to recognize that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He didn\u2019t ask God for mercy because he didn\u2019t think he needed it. In fact, he didn\u2019t ask God for anything, because he didn\u2019t think he needed anything \u2014\u00a0or even God. Compared to so many around him, and to the other person he saw praying at that time in the temple, he considered himself a saint among sinners. He had come to the temple not to worship or beseech God, but essentially to give God a chance to pat him on the back and applaud him.<\/li>\n
- Jesus contrasts the Pharisee\u2019s prayer with that of a tax collector. Tax collectors or publicans were hated by their fellow Jews not just because they were collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in carrying out their duty, they, out of greed, would routinely rip off their people. Tax collectors were assessed a certain amount that needed to be collected in a particular area; whatever they could get beyond that was theirs to keep \u2014 and many of the tax collectors were swindling the poor precisely in order to support a lavish lifestyle. They were corrupt, similar to an ancient mafia class that the authorities with whom they were conspiring would do nothing to stop. One would think that someone who had given his life over to this type of betrayal of his nation and his people wouldn\u2019t pray at all. For him to pray, some might have argued, was hypocritical. But he realized that even if others would never forgive him, God might, and he knew he needed God\u2019s forgiveness. With great humility, he stayed in the back of the temple, beat his breast and cried, \u201cO God, be merciful to me a sinner.\u201d In fact, the Greek St. Luke uses is even clearer. He prayed, \u201cO God, be merciful to me the<\/em>\u201d He considered himself the worst and only sinner around. He didn\u2019t try to exalt himself against anyone but to think of all people he was most desperate for God\u2019s mercy. He was conscious that he didn\u2019t deserve it, but since he knew that the Lord was kind and merciful, and that the Lord\u2019s mercy endures forever, with great repentance he prayed for that gift.<\/li>\n
- Jesus gave a startling conclusion to the parable. He told his listeners that of the two, the good man who fasted, tithed and lived outwardly by the mosaic law, and the despicable one who conspired with pagan authorities and shook down his own fellow Jews, only one of them had their prayer heard and left the temple in a right relationship with God \u2014 and it was the publican! We\u2019ve heard the parable so many times that we can miss the absolute shock that Jesus\u2019 first listeners would have had in response to it. To understand their surprise, it would as if Jesus substituted a pope for the Pharisee and a drug lord for the tax collector and said that when the two left St. Peter\u2019s Basilica only the drug lord was justified, on good terms with God. Such a comment was obviously not about the type of life the Pharisee and publican were leading until then, but about the type of prayer they made. The take-away is that no matter what type of life we have been leading until now, we are called to pray well, which means to pray humbly with a deep recognition of our need for God and for his mercy. This parable points to what Jesus taught elsewhere, \u201cI have come not to call the self-righteous, but sinners!\u201d We have come here on this Lord\u2019s Day to pray. If we wish to leave on good terms with the Lord, we must humbly recognize how much we need Him, how we\u2019re sinners in need of his mercy and seek to live by it. Only those who pray for mercy, who open themselves to it, will be able to receive it. Only the truly humble will be exalted because they\u2019re the only one who will allow the Lord to lift them up.<\/li>\n
- Jesus proclaimed this parable, St. Luke tells us, to \u201cthose who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.\u201d Pride not only separates us from God and his assistance, but also from our neighbors. We begin to look down on others, including, for the Pharisee, not just on tax collectors but even on other Pharisees and, as we see throughout the Gospel, on Jesus himself. Such self-righteousness remains a great problem today. There are some in the Church who, when they look at themselves in the mirror, deem that, even though they may have their weaknesses and problems, at least they\u2019re not like those who have \u201creally sinned.\u201d They might admit that, sure, like \u201ceveryone,\u201d they, too, have some little \u201cpeccadilloes,\u201d they need perhaps a pinch of God\u2019s mercy, but nothing near what others need. They don\u2019t think, as we pray at the beginning of every Mass, that they have \u201cgreatly sinned\u201d by their own \u201cmost grievous fault.\u201d Jesus gives this parable as a wake-up call, because such an attitude can incapacitate not only our prayer but our perseverance in the life of faith.<\/li>\n
- Such self-righteousness, however, isn\u2019t just a problem for those who, like the Pharisees, actually try to live religiously. It can also afflict those who live like the publican, something that\u2019s popular today in our culture and even in some places in the Church. Those who are clearly violating the Lord\u2019s commandments left and right \u2014 by engaging in lifestyles totally incompatible with the Gospel, never coming to the temple to worship God, never praying at all, and advocating things diametrically opposed to what God has revealed \u2014 rather than repenting and coming to ask for God\u2019s forgiveness, sometimes can glory in the shame of their sins and attack the Church or anyone seeking to help them to convert. They can pray like this, \u201cI thank you, Lord, because I am not one of those hypocritical and judgmental modern Pharisees, haters who worry about fasting, who are obsessed about coming to Church and praying, who are guilt-tripped into tithing, who are neurotic about sin and think that everyone needs confession, but who in real life are much worse than I am!\u201d Jesus is proclaiming today\u2019s Parable to everyone<\/em>who is convinced of his or her own righteousness, whether the person has been religiously observant up until now or not. He is teaching us all about the importance of humility before him, in prayer and in life.<\/li>\n
- Paul\u2019s used to kill Christians for a living, but he converted. Even after he became a great apostle, he always openly confessed that he was worst and least of all, because he had persecuted God\u2019s Church (1 Cor 15:9). He discovered, however, that God was rich in mercy, so rich in fact that he called Paul himself to be an ambassador of that mercy, to help people throughout the known world to be reconciled to God. At the end of his life, St. Paul was able to pray with humble gratitude to God that, because of divine mercy, he had fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith.<\/li>\n
- As we enter through the Mass into Jesus\u2019 last will and testament, as he is poured out like a libation for the forgiveness of our sins, as we participate in his beautiful good agony and the race he hastened to fulfill at the end of the Via Crucis, we ask for the grace to imitate Jesus and St. Paul in humbly fighting the good combat of the faith until the end, completing the course, treasuring, keeping and spreading the faith, and persevering in prayer to the One who stands by us still, on the inside, to strengthen us. That is the way by which, like St. Paul, at the end of our life, we will be able to look back with humble gratitude, joy, fulfillment and peace. This is the path by which we will receive the crown of righteousness that awaits us as we long for Christ\u2019s appearance not just at the finish line of life in the heavenly Jerusalem but and even now here on the altar.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/p>\n
The readings for\u00a0today\u2019s Mass were:\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n