Homily for 3d Sunday of Advent

Homily for the
3d Sunday of Advent
Dec. 12, 1999
Is 61: 1-2, 10-11
Guardian Angel, Allendale, N.J.

Last nite and this morning I preached at Iona College and St. Vincent's Hospital, respectively, without written text, basing myself on the gospel reading. To have something to post here, I've reached back 12 years.

“The spirit of the Lord God…has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor…, to proclaim liberty to the captives…, to announce a year of favor from the Lord” (Is 61: 1-2).

The prophet of the Lord announces glad tidings, good news, gospel. And what is that gospel? Healing and rescue and jubilee for the poor and downtrodden and beaten of the earth. According to St. Luke, when Jesus began his public ministry by preaching in his hometown synagog at Nazareth, it was this passage from Isaiah that he turned to (Lk 4:16-21). Our Blessed Lady, likewise, in our response to the Isaiah reading, proclaims the Lord’s greatness in what he does for the lowly and the hungry, for those who depend utterly upon him.

If Dec. 12 were not a Sunday this year, from one end of the Americas to another Catholics would be observing the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the Americas. On Dec. 12, 1531—less than a dozen years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico—the Virgin Mary appeared to a lowly Indian, Juan Diego, to assure him and his people of her special love and protection. If the Indians were outcasts and nobodies in the eyes of their new masters from Spain, they were nevertheless beloved in her eyes and in God’s.

OL of Guadalupe shrine, St. John Bosco Church, Chicago

If I were to have preached such a gospel in certain countries just a few years ago—and it probably is true still in some places—I would have been marked for elimination by a death squad. At their meeting in Washington last month, our bishops endorsed the beatification of Abp. Oscar Romero of San Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980 for championing the human rights of the poor—shot while saying Mass in a convent, no less. Romero and other martyrs in Latin America preached that the poor, too, are God’s children, that they have human dignity, that they have God-given rights—to education, basic health care, employment at a living wage, a roof, and so on. By your assistance to refugees and by food drives for the hungry, for instance, this parish is showing that you believe the Good News that Isaiah and Jesus announced.

When Isaiah and Jesus refer to “a year of favor from the Lord,” they allude to the OT prescription of the jubilee year. According to Lev 25, every 50th year is to be a year of jubilee, a year of grace. All the land in Israel is the Lord’s, and he has graciously bestowed it to the individual clans and families of Israel as his tenants. Any land that has been transferred in the course of 50 years must be restored to its original family, the tenants to whom the Lord gave it as a heritage. All Israelites are to forgive one another their debts, and all Israelite slaves are to be set free. For the Lord ransomed Israel and made a covenant with them forever, and so must they do for one another.

In 1751 the colonial assembly of Pennsylvania commissioned a new bell for their province house at Philadelphia to celebrate the 50th year of William Penn’s Charter of Privileges, by which the colony was ruled with a relatively democratic form of government and almost complete religious freedom. It was a jubilee year. The bell was inscribed with the words of Lev 25:10: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” A quarter century later that bell rang out to proclaim a new freedom on the occasion of our Declaration of Independence. And when you visit Philadelphia today, you can of course still see and touch the Liberty Bell, one of our country’s sacred icons, a tangible image of jubilee.

National Park Service photo

There is untold ballyhoo about the year 2000 inaugurating a new century and a new millennium. In fact, it will be the last year of the 20th century and of the 2d millennium. Continuing a tradition that goes back to Pope Boniface VIII in 1300, we Catholics are observing 2000 as a jubilee year. A Christian jubilee is a year in which we specially recall the Father’s great favor by which he sent us a Savior to redeem us from our slavery to Satan, to cancel the debt we contracted by our sins. It is a special year of grace.

Not that the Lord comes closer to us in one year than in another. But by recalling the incarnation and birth of the Son of God 2000 years ago, and all God’s love for us implied thereby, we become more open to God’s love and to all that God’s wants to do for us, as he did great things for his lowly servant Mary. The jubilee year doesn’t bring God closer to us, but us closer to God, when we remember what God has already done for the human race and for us individually, when we therefore repent of our sins, when we turn to God in prayer, when we resolve to walk more truly in the ways of Jesus Christ. The banners all over the archdiocese urging us to “open wide the doors to Christ” are not talking about church doors but about the doors to our hearts, the doors to our lives. In the book of Revelation Jesus says to Christians, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me” (3:20)—which is a promise of eternal life, of a place at the banquet of life.

The “year of favor from the Lord” is also a call for us to do as the Israelites were to do, to be agents of the Lord’s favor. We are called to forgive debts. Internationally, some Third World debt is being forgiven. Personally, we might become more conscious of what we pray each day: “Forgive us our trespasses (or debts) as we forgive those who trespass against us,” where we don’t mean property trespass or monetary debt but the forgiveness of sins and other offenses.

Proclaiming “liberty to captives” doesn’t mean that criminals should be released from prison. For Isaiah it referred to slaves and debtors—the jubilee concept. For us it might mean that we ought to re-examine our attitudes toward criminal offenders, especially in an election year next year. Is the increasing harshness of our penal codes society’s necessary self-defense, or is it an act of vengeance, of desperation, of frustration? Do our penal codes distinguish between hardened criminals and the mentally ill and those who, having made a serious mistake, still might be set straight with some guidance or some education?

What about those who are, metaphorically, captives of some of our other attitudes? How many people have we imprisoned by the categories we have boxed them into, by our prejudices or stereotypes: how many women? (Not that women would ever stereotype men!) How many foreigners, members of another race, young people, old people? How many physically or mentally handicapped, how many panhandlers, bag ladies, people sleeping in the subways? Just as much as the campesinos of El Salvador for whom Oscar Romero spoke have God-given human dignity, so do all these people in our lives.

Among all those who over the years have brought glad tidings to the poor—the Gospel of Jesus—and healed the brokenhearted (and the broken-bodied), we can single out the religious sisters and brothers who have taught in our Catholic schools, staffed our Catholic hospitals, gone off to foreign lands as missionaries. Many of us were educated by selfless nuns in grammar school, perhaps in what today we’d call the inner city, or by dedicated brothers or nuns in high school, and some of us by priests or brothers or sisters both learned and devout in college. One of them might be our favorite all-time teacher, one who taught us to read, or introduced us to the wonders of chemistry or the beauty of music, or straightened us out before our parents had to. We seldom realized the financial sacrifices those religious were making; how little they were given in salary or benefits; how little their orders and congregations were able to put aside for the future; how much they were utterly depending upon God to provide for them. In the ’40s and ’50s it wasn’t a problem, for there was a seemingly endless supply of new vocations, and the young religious far outnumbered, and therefore supported, the older members. In the ’90s it is a real problem; in many congregations the very few young members cannot nearly support all the elderly ones. So for several years now American Catholics have been asked annually to give back to our now aged and retired nuns and brothers, to try to repay an immeasurable spiritual debt, that they might have a respectable retirement and decent medical care. Today our 2d collection is for the retirement fund that our bishops have set up for religious sisters and brothers who have given their lives for the Church and the Gospel and have so little, materially speaking, on which to live. Please be as generous as you can, not only in the collection but also with your prayers.