Homily for 8th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
8th Sunday of Ordinary Time

March 22, 2025
Luke 6: 39-45
Sir 27: 4-7
The Fountains, Tuckahoe, N.Y.
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“From the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks’” (Luke 6: 45).

One of the many sayings attributed to Abraham Lincoln is, “It’s better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”  Our words tell a lot about us.  The wise author of the Book of Sirach says, “One’s speech discloses the bent of his mind” (27:6).  We reveal what we’re thinking—or at least that’s what speech is meant to do; it’s not meant for lying and deception.

Our words may benefit others.  We can share learning, wisdom, and encouragement.  We can voice compassion and concern.  “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good” (Luke 6:45).  That’s one reason why God gives us the power of speech.

Another reason is praise.  The psalmist sings, “It’s good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praise to your name, Most High, to proclaim your kindness at dawn and your faithfulness thruout the nite” (92:2-3).  God has given us life, health, freedom, forgiveness of our sins, the friendship of his Son Jesus, the protection and help of Jesus’ mother and the saints.  With our voices, then, as well as our actions, we thank him for his goodness, we praise him, and we ask him to continue his blessings.

We use our voices also to praise, thank, and commend others.  With our words we express friendship and love for family and others, such as neighbors, co-workers, and students.  God gives us tongues to help us do good.

It’s awful, then, that we also use our tongues for evil.  Sirach says today that “one’s faults appear when one speaks” (27:4).  We criticize, blame, find fault, and abuse people.  We lie.  We gossip—Pope Francis has spoken many times about the harm that gossip does to people’s reputations and to relationships within families and acquaintances.

Perhaps the strongest words in the Bible on this topic come from St. James in ch. 3 of his letter:  “If anyone doesn’t fall short in speech, he’s perfect, able to bridle his whole body also.  The tongue is a small member [of the body] yet has great pretensions.  It exists among our members as a world of malice, defiling the whole body and setting the entire course of our lives on fire.  It’s a restless evil, full of deadly poison.  With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings who are made in the likeness of God” (3:2,5,6,8-9).

Wow!  Sirach’s wisdom is tame in contrast to that.  So is Jesus when he states that one’s mouth reveals “the fullness of the heart.”

There may be no fault, no sin, we’re more likely to fall into—even leap into—than the sins we commit in our speech.  In that context, I’m a little amazed that some people think their hands are unworthy vessels for receiving the Holy Eucharist and insist on receiving our Lord on their tongues.  Are our tongues really worthier than our hands?  For most people, I think not.  (It is true that there are sins that we can commit with our hands, which I won’t enumerate.  But in general, which part of us is more inclined toward sin?)

On Wednesday, we’ll begin Lent, the season of repentance and reform of our spiritual lives, the renewal or renovation of our relationships with God and with the children of God.  It might be a good practice for us to consider how we use the power of speech, to review what our “speech discloses about the bent of our minds” and the content of our hearts.  It would be a real penance to work, with God’s help, to tame our tongues, to use them for good and not for evil.

THE MESSAGE OF THE VICAR

Fr. Stefano Martoglio, SDB

WE ARE DON BOSCO TODAY

“You’ll finish the work I’m beginning; I’m making the sketch, you’ll add the colors.” (Don Bosco)

Dear friends and readers, members of the Salesian Family, for this month’s greeting in Salesian media, I’ll focus on a very important event that the Salesian Congregation is holding presently: the 29th General Chapter. This assembly, the most important one that the Salesian Congregation can experience, occurs every 6 years along the Congregation’s journey.

Our lives are filled with many things, and this Jubilee Year proposes to us many important events; but I want to focus on a different, particular one because, even if it would seem outside one’s realm, it still concerns all of us.

Don Bosco, our Founder, was aware that things wouldn’t end with him but that his life was only the beginning of a long journey to be traveled. One day in 1875, when he was 60 years old, Don Bosco said to Fr. Julius Barberis, one of his closest collaborators: “You’ll finish the work I’m beginning; I’m making the sketch, you’ll add the colors.... I’ll make a rough copy of the Congregation, and I’ll leave to those who come after me the task of making it beautiful.”

With this happy and prophetic expression, Don Bosco outlined the path that we’re all called to take. Its highest form is what we are carrying out at this time in Valdocco: the general chapter of the Salesians of Don Bosco.

The prophecy of the caramels

Today’s world isn’t like Don Bosco’s, but there is a common characteristic: it’s a time of profound change. Total, balanced, and responsible humanization of his boys in both their material and spiritual components was Don Bosco’s true goal. He was concerned with filling the “inner space” of the boys, making “well-formed minds,” “virtuous citizens.” In today’s world, this is more relevant than ever. Our world needs Don Bosco today.

Before all else, everyone must pose to himself/herself one simple question: “Do I want an ordinary life, or do I want to change the world?” Can we still speak of goals and ideals today? Whenever a river stops flowing, it turns into a swamp – even so with people.

Don Bosco never stopped moving forward. Today he does so with our feet.

His conviction about young people was this: “This most precious segment of human society, upon whom all hopes of a ... happy future are founded, isn’t itself of a bad disposition…. If at times these youngsters are already infected with evil, it’s more often through thoughtlessness than through deliberate malice. These youngsters truly need a helping hand to take care of them and to lead them away from evil to the practice of virtue....”[1]

In 1882, in a conference to the Salesian Cooperators in Genoa: “Removing, instructing, and educating young people in danger is good for the whole of civil society. If young people are well educated, we will have a better generation over time.” It’s as if to say: only education can change the world.

Don Bosco had an almost frightening capacity for vision. He never says “until now” but always “from now on.”

Guy Avanzini, an eminent university professor, always repeated: “The pedagogy of the 21st century will be Salesian, or it will not be.”

One evening in 1851, Don Bosco flung a handful of caramels from a window on the second floor. Naturally, this resulted in great joy. One of the boys seeing him there, smiling at the window, yelled up to him: “Don Bosco, how wonderful it would be if you could see the whole world studded with oratories!” Don Bosco fixed his serene gaze toward the horizon and responded, “Who knows, the day may come when the sons of the oratory are truly scattered throughout the world.”

Looking Far Beyond

But what is a general chapter? Why fill these pages with a theme that is specific to the Salesian Congregation?

The Constitutions of the Salesians of Don Bosco, which orders their way of life, in article 146, define a general chapter as “the principal sign of the Congregation’s unity in diversity. It is the fraternal meeting in which Salesians carry out a communal reflection to keep themselves faithful to the Gospel and to their Founder’s charism, and sensitive to the needs of time and place.

“Through the general chapter the entire So­ciety, opening itself to the guidance of the Spirit of the Lord, seeks to discern God’s will at a specific moment in history for the pur­pose of rendering the Church better service.”

The general chapter is, therefore, not a private matter of consecrated Salesians, but a very important assembly that concerns us all, touching the whole Salesian Family and those who have Don Bosco within them, because the people, the mission, the charism of Don Bosco, the Church, and each one of us, of you, are at the center.

Fidelity to God and to Don Bosco along with the ability to see the signs of the times and of different places are also at the center. This fidelity is a continuous movement, renewal, and the ability to look far ahead while keeping one’s feet firmly planted on the ground.

For this reason, about 250 Salesian confreres from all over the world have gathered to pray, think, dialog with each other, and look far beyond – in fidelity to Don Bosco.

Then, after having constructed their vision, they’ll elect the new Rector Major, the successor of Don Bosco, and his general council.

This chapter isn’t something extraneous to your life, dear friend reading this, but is part of your life and your “affection” for Don Bosco. Why tell you this? So that you’ll accompany it with your prayer – prayer to the Holy Spirit that he may help all the capitulars know what is God’s Will so that we may give better service to the Church.

I think that GC29 – no, I’m sure – will be all this: an experience of God that will help us “clean up” some parts of the sketch that Don Bosco left us, as all the general chapters in the history of the Congregation have done before, always in fidelity to his plan.

I’m certain that even today we can continue to be enlightened so as to be faithful to the Lord Jesus and our original charism with the faces, music, and colors of today.

We’re not alone in this mission; we know and feel that Mary, our Mother and Help of Christians, the Help of the Church and model of fidelity, will sustain all our steps.

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[1] Giovanni Battista Lemoyne, The Biographical Memoirs of St. John Bosco, vol. II (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Salesiana, 1966), 35-36.