Sunday Homily

First Reading: Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Gospel: Mark 1:14-20

Homily:
“The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent, and believe in the gospel.”

The kingdom of God.  Quite often when we think of kingdom, we think of a geographical area or a principality, but that’s not what Jesus is talking about here.  The word for kingdom in the original Greek is “basileia”.  Basileia actually means royalty, or having a royal nature.

Then we have that word, Repent.  Now for many, repent means we have to stop doing what we like and start doing what we don’t like.  Again, in the original Greek, the word is metanoia which means to think differently, to have a new understanding.  Think of repent as allowing the Holy Spirit to change the way we understand things, to be our guide.

So, when I read these two sentences, this is what I hear:  God’s royal nature is present, here and now, in the person of Jesus Christ. Change, allow the Good News of Jesus to reside in our hearts and give us the mindset of Christ.

And in one of the great mysteries of our faith; God’s royal nature, Jesus, did not enter the world as a might warrior or great king. 

Carried in the womb of our Blessed Mother, He was born in a barn, worked most of His life as a day laborer and itinerant preacher.  He was put to death for treason, executed as a common criminal while soldiers gambled for the few earthy possessions He had.  Not what one would expect from the son of an almighty God, but you see, God cherishes the small, He values the unimportant and the marginalized, He treasures the innocent. 

This past Friday, January 22^nd, marked a sad anniversary, the 48^th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade that legalized abortion in all fifty states.  The National Right to Life organization estimates that over sixty-two and a half million lives have ended through legal abortion in those 48 years.  Over sixty-two and a half million people, each unique and unrepeatable, loved immeasurably by their Creator; these lives were snuffed out through the violence of abortion.  To help put this loss in perspective, imagine losing the entire population of California and Florida and you’re still a million short of what has been lost.  Yet, numbers alone cannot measure the loss and there are no words that can truly describe the horror of it all. 

The numbers too, don’t tell of the ripple effect of abortion.  The father who will never hold his child, the pain and regret a woman may carry with her for the rest of her life.  The pain and loss a sibling or grandparent must feel.  Another thing the numbers don’t show; abortion is a direct attack on the family structure.  The family is the most sacred and important institution of our culture and our church.  For it is the domestic church that is essential for the survival of the church proper.  Honestly, without the pillar of support the domestic church provides, I fear the Catholic Church cannot and will not survive. For it is these individual families coming together as brothers and sisters of Christ that make us all connected as one great family, one church, all children of God.  Not to mention what it says about the morality of our society, what does it say about us as a nation, that we would allow such an atrocity?  Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote: “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.  Every Sunday, at the beginning of Mass, we pray for God’s mercy and forgiveness “in what we have done and what we have failed to do.”  In other words, we pray, as Dr. King puts it, for God’s mercy to be what we ought to be, true disciples of Jesus Christ.  And it is this same church founded by Jesus Christ that proclaims in no uncertain terms of the sanctity of life from conception to natural death.  God cherishes the small, He treasures the innocent.    Every child conceived is a gift, a unique creation from He who is the Creator.  Every child conceived deserves to be what it ought to be.  In his encyclical, The Gospel of Life, Saint John Paul the Great began with these words, "The Gospel of life is at the heart of Jesus’ message…to be preached with dauntless fidelity to the people of every age and culture".  And this is what we ought to be, this is what we as Catholic Christians, are called to be, people who cherish all life, protect all life and proclaim the Gospel message of life to the world. 

This my friends, is not a part of our faith that we get to pick and choose, it is not subject to debate; this is non-negotiable!  As Catholics, we must continue to speak up for those who have no voice, to assist those in need who chose life for their child and to comfort and support those suffering the effects and the wounds of post abortion trauma.  We will not be silenced and we will not rest until it is over.  Years ago, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote, "It is characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unaware of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives.  Men do not want to believe that their own times are wicked, partly because they have no standard outside of themselves by which to measure their times. If there is no fixed concept of justice, how shall men know it is violated?   Only those who live by faith really know what is happening in the world; the great masses without faith are unconscious of the destructive processes going on, because they have lost the vision of the heights from which they have fallen."

He wrote this in 1948, over seventy years ago, yet the words still ring true today, now more than ever. 

Every year, a few days after Christmas, we commemorate the massacre of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem ordered by Herod.  And rightly so, history has judged king Herold harshly.  After World War Two, when details of the Holocaust emerged, the world was in shock of what had happened in Germany during the war.  And history too, has judged them harshly. 

One of the saddest photographs I have ever seen, was of a young man holding a sign at one of the pro-life marches in San Francisco a few years ago.  The words written on that sign still make my heart ache.  It simply said, one third of my generation has been killed. 
One third of my generation has been killed.  Let that sink in. 

So, I have to ask this morning, in 50, 100, 500 years from now; how will history judge us?  But, more importantly, how will God judge us?  God cherishes the small, He treasures the innocent.