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Year C
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What
follows is cast as a homily for the Fourth
Sunday of Easter, Year C,
May
2, 2004
. It suggests that on at least one Sunday
in the eight Sundays of the Easter season,
the homilist should invite a mystagogy of
the season itself. What is the meaning of
the Fifty Days? How do these days come to
life in our own lives as an assembly, as baptized
persons newly come from the font, as households —
all living in and being some sort of world?
If a homilist uses the quotes from
Hopkins
given here, much practice is needed for the
pace and the clarity that will bring the full
impact of the lines to the assembly.
Gabe
Huck
How shall we measure the spring? Is it a series
of days, some of them named by the culture,
some by the church, some by the state? The
state tells us that April 15 is Income Tax
Day and that the last day of May this year
is Memorial Day. The culture tells us that
when Memorial Day comes we can have a three-day
weekend, but the culture also has some other
names for spring days: April 22 is called
Earth Day, and yesterday was May Day and next
Sunday is Mother’s Day. The culture
also crowds the spring season with graduation
days and wedding days.
Amidst all this, we who are the church seem
to have yet another day-naming going. Most
of the ninety-plus days of spring are our
fifty days of Easter. The Fifty Days begin
on Easter Sunday once we have kept our Easter
Vigil itself, the culmination of our Triduum,
once we have approached the font for baptism
and proclaimed the good news: Dying you destroyed
our death, rising you restored our life! And
at the end of the Fifty Days is the Pentecost
proclamation: “[I]n one Spirit we were
all baptized into one body, whether Jews or
Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were
all given to drink of one Spirit” (1
Corinthians 12:13).
Behind this Christian calendar, as is often
the case, there is the Jewish calendar: the
fifty days that are counted one by one from
the festival of Passover to the festival of
Shavuot. Passover remembers the going out
from slavery to freedom, Shavuot remembers
the giving of the Law to Moses. These were
the days and the seasons that made the calendar
observed by Jesus and his family and his friends.
Behind that Jewish calendar for the spring
is yet another calendar, perhaps the most
vital of all: the harvest calendar of the
eastern Mediterranean lands where the winter
rains bring the spring crops, the barley first
and then the wheat. Such harvests have always
held the roots of human celebration, of festivals
and seasons, because they are the very promise
of life.
Sometimes these calendars get wonderfully
entangled. In some places the May weeks of
spring and of Easter season became days to
celebrate Mary, the mother of God. More than
a century ago the English Jesuit poet Gerard
Manley Hopkins asked why this should be so
when he began a poem this way: “May
is Mary’s month, and I / Muse at that
and wonder why.” The poet tells us how
to seek the answer to why May is Mary’s
month.
Hopkins
says: “Ask
of her, the mighty mother: / Her reply puts
this other / Question: What is Spring? — /
Growth in every thing — Flesh and fleece,
fur and feather, / Grass and greenworld all
together.” That’s the answer,
he says: May and all spring is just this:
growth — in everything.
Hopkins
looks at
spring and says: “All things rising,
/ All things sizing / Mary sees, sympathizing
/ With that world of good, / Nature’s
motherhood. / Their magnifying of each its
kind / With delight calls to mind / How she
did in her stored / Magnify the Lord.”
Well, there we have it. Life exploding out
of earth, “all things rising!” as
the poet says — even after we have done
earth so much damage — and this “all
things rising” is like Mary, this is
like Jesus. So the tangling of the calendars
of earth and church isn’t about some
sentimental far-off Mary, but it is about
the bold Mary whose motherhood she sang in
images of a mercy, God’s mercy, that
is out there raising up more than the daffodils
and tulips, a mercy that raises up the humble
and fills the starving and deposes not just
the cold and ice of winter but deposes the
tyrants and sends the powerful packing. Some
spring this!
Hopkins
saw it
in every weed breaking through the cracks
of a sidewalk. What else is it to see and
keep Easter?
Like the weeds, new life springs up all over
the church in the spring: we baptize with
flowing water and we confirm with chrism oil,
we bring children and adults to the table
to feast on Christ’s body and blood
for the first time, we anoint the sick and
visit the graves of the dead, we bring some
into marriage and some into various ministries
in this church.Allthings
rising! the poet says, and that’s who
we are and what we do — we who are a
community of Christians, a parish of baptized
people, an assembly of Catholics gathered
here today on one of the eight Sundays of
the Fifty Days of the Easter season. Of course
these days are no vacation from the woes of
our worlds. Sickness and death take no vacation,
AIDS kills its thousands every day in Africa,
third-world children and adults sit their
dozen hours a day for seven days a week making
the clothes we’re wearing this morning,
two million men and women — a vast city — in
this land of the free are wasting in prisons,
schools and health deteriorate as our wealth
is spent in spring as in every season on walls
and wars that intend to keep us isolated and
afraid. The Easter days are no different in
their sufferings throughout the world that
matters deeply to us, the world God so loved.
Except somehow they aredifferent
days. How is this so? Think what the stories
are. Think about what we’re hearing
from the book of Acts: Peter last week telling
the authorities that disciples obey God and
not human authority: we will obey the God
of our ancestors, the God who raised Jesus,
he says; we will not obey you. And this week
Paul arrives in
Antioch
, in
Syria
, and next
week we’ll hear about how they visit
all these cities and their little Christian
communities around the eastern Mediterranean
rim: Lystra, Iconium, Pamphylia, Perga, Attalia,
and
Antioch
again.
Controversies abound — that’s
why Paul keeps moving. But there’s so
much going on, so much that’s breaking
loose, “all things rising!”
And all these Sundays we open the book of
Revelation to hear wild visions and maybe
some of them give us a way to see ourselves,
our world: just last week John heard every
creature in heaven and on earth and under
the earth cry out (do we remember what they
cried out?). And this week John sees a great
multitude of every nation, race, people, and
language and they are coming to the Lamb for
shelter, coming because they are hungry and
thirsty and they are crying from their hard
days. Next week John will see a city coming
down from heaven so glorious as to be a bride,
and a Sunday later John tells us how that
city has no need of sun or moon for the glory
of God is its light.
Where’s the sense of all that? The sounds
of the Easter stories go out from here into
the stubborn spring arriving and they go out
into the great crimes of our common world
and the suffering that has no time for spring
or Easter. But of course the Easter deeds
of new birth from water, sweet anointing with
oil, Mary songs and disciples on the move:
these things have no sound at all except the
sounds we make, no strength at all except
the strength we lend, no sense to them except
the sense that our lives might make. Easter
days are the days when the little Christian
communities dare to live as if that bride-like
city were our city. In some places and some
times, the communities said: For these fifty
days no one can fast and no one can kneel
for we live as if the reign of God had come
in our midst. We Christians are rehearsing
what so many of the poor and hard pressed
have proclaimed these past years: “Another
world is possible!”
Another world is possible and it is possible
right here. Each Sunday together we tell ourselves
that what we do and what we say and what we
hear and what we sing is one or a dozen little
glimpses of what makes it truer than the morning
paper: Another world is possible. We have
glimpsed it here as we dare to let the meal
we make here, the meal where all share and
share alike, let that meal be what we strive
for in the big world day by day. We will dare
to champion the prisoner and the occupied,
the disappeared and the AIDS orphan, those
poisoned by industrial and military chemicals,
the whistle blower and the union organizer.
We will champion them not with our charity
alone but with our intelligence, our wisdom,
our wills, our prayers, our time, our votes,
and our loud demands. We who live astride
the world’s present colossus will take
hold of ourselves, get a grip for once, and
whatever may be the consequences, discover
who it is that mother Mary and risen Jesus
would have us stand with.
When we live as if, as if this were it, this
were the vision, this were the time of “all
things rising,”
then in whose company would we be found? With
whose troubles will we mingle our own troubles?
Who are those in that multitude John saw if
not those that the powers of earth had scorned?
Easter is nothing if it is not our frightful
and delightful effort to face the gospel truth
that our lot lies with the weak and poor of
this world.
And the interesting part is this: It won’t
end on Pentecost. The season passes, but the
different people we have become, that doesn’t
pass. The community that walked into Ash Wednesday
will, ninety days later, walk out from Pentecost,
but further along, my friends, further along.
The ashes and harshness of Lent, the death-defying
deeds of Triduum, Easter’s fifty days
of “all things rising,”all things — rising! — we’ll
come through to Pentecost, but we’ll
never be the same. And if that’s true,
nor will the world.
We are today with just twenty-one of the
fifty days behind us and twenty-nine of
them ahead of us. Enough, more than enough
as always with God, to rise up and see and
hear and smell and touch what God so loved
about this dear world and there take our
Easter selves.
Copyright © Gabe
Huck. Used by permission.
Originally written for
Celebration, the worship and preaching resource
of the National Catholic Reporter (visit
their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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We resume this series that last appeared
in the February 2003 issue of Celebration.The
intent of the series is to explore how
catechesis from and for the liturgy
may be done as a form of mystagogical
preaching.This is cast as a homily
for May 18, 2003, the Fifth Sunday of
Easter, Year B.For more on the mystagogy
of the wine, see Wine and Bread by
Photina Rech, published by LTP.This
homily takes up and builds, as preaching
should do, on the homily given in the
October 2002 issue of Celebration for
the Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary
Time, Year A.
Gabe
Huck
Four weeks and five Sundays into Easter
season it should be clear to all: Eastertime
isn’t prose, it’s poetry.
Eastertime isn’t a news report,
it’s a concert. Easter isn’t
a lesson in the catechism, it’s
a love song. By this fifth Sunday in
Easter we begin to see how the Sunday
readings are like a multi-layered sound
track. The first readings from Acts
tell the ways and words of the tiny
but exuberant Christian community. The
second readings chime in with the first
letter of John where, no matter what
the starting point, the end point is
love. Then the gospels, most of them
taken from John, draw us into a great
jumble of images, all ways to grasp
from one angle or another that Easter
is, like it or not, the death of all
the death we deal out to one another.
And that is good news, painful good
news. We heard it last week in the image
of a shepherd, the week before it was
a hungry, wounded Jesus eating a fish
in the presence of the disciples. On
Easter Sunday and the following Sunday
the images were those of faithful women
and an empty tomb, of blood and water.
What is more basic to human life — and
human life together —
than water and blood?
With all that in our hearts we take
up today’s gospel. “I am
a vine,” says Jesus, “I
am a vine and you are my branches.” Branches
are for bearing fruit. Branches are
where the blossoms appear, then the
tiny grapes begin to grow. We may not
live ourselves among vineyards, but
we know about great clusters of grapes
and we know about the winepress and
the juice that comes from the pressing
of grapes and the wine that this juice
will become if time and nature and human
labor take their course. We know from
old and new images how vines grow and
reach out and out and out.
Probably it happened this way. When
Jesus started talking about being a
vine, those who heard thought about
the vineyards they had known all their
lives. Maybe they then thought about
the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve.
Why? What’s the connection?
Genesis has God saying: “You shall
not eat of the fruit of the tree that
is in the middle of the garden,” and “So
when the woman saw that the tree was
good for food, and that it was a delight
to the eyes . . . she took of its fruit
and ate; and she also gave some to her
husband . . . and he ate.” What,
no apple? The apple was probably how
the European Christians later envisioned
the tree and so every image most of
us have ever seen is of is a tree with
shiny apples. But the people who heard
the Genesis story in the Middle East
would never think apple, they would
think vine. They would think grapes.
They would think vine as thick as any
fruit tree, grapes delicious and abundant
and so inviting. So in the early Christian
writers and artists, the forbidden tree
of Eden is a grape vine, and then — what
else? — the cross is also a grape
vine, the ancient tree of death now
become the tree of life.
These Christians knew a Bible full of
vines for the psalmists and prophets
used to speak of God as the farmer and
Israel as the vine God planted. Psalm
80 says: “You brought a vine out
of Egypt . . . / you cleared the ground;
/ it took root and filled the land.
/ The mountains were covered by its
shadow” (Psalm 80:9–11).
But always there comes a time when the
vine is torn down, neglected. Ezekiel
says, “The east wind dried her
up, / her fruit was torn off; / Then
her strong branch withered up, fire
devoured it. / Now she is planted in
the desert, / in a dry land and parched” (Ezekiel
19:12
–13).
With these images from Genesis and from
the prophets and psalms in his mind
and heart, is it any wonder that Jesus
says that he himself is the vine? And
is it so strange that he cannot speak
of the vine without speaking of branches
being broken off and burned, of branches
withering, of the painful pruning that
is the only way to bearing fruit? Any
wonder then that we could think of the
cross and of the one who hangs on the
cross as a great vine, pruned and fruitful?
But if Jesus is the vine, he is also
the fruit of the vine: “Take this,
all of you, and drink; this is the cup — of
my blood.” He said this, and he
handed them a cup of wine. When we bring
wine to the table here we speak of it
as “fruit of the vine and work
of human hands,” for this wine,
like bread, is not simply what nature
gives but what we have done with the
gift of nature, the fruit of the vine.
Through the centuries, our ancestors
have brought to this table not only
bread but also wine. One author writes:
Bread is an absolutely indispensable
part of life, while wine provides that
something “extra,” a certain
exuberance.
Bread is the strength of the earth,
and wine the fire of heaven.
Bread strengthens us for bearing the
burden of the earth; wine exhilarates
us and allows us to forget the grim
aspects of this earthly existence.
Wine raises our awareness of being alive
and rouses us to song, to poetic enthusiasm,
fearless courage, lofty thoughts. Wine
empowers us in word and work. (Rech,
page 29)
Perhaps then we begin to grasp the poetry
of the eucharist, that bread should
be body and wine blood. When those who
heard the wild speech of the disciples
on Pentecost said, “They have
had too much new wine!” they were
close to the truth. The church sings
of a certain “sober drunkenness.” In
John’s gospel Jesus’ first
wonder is that of water become wine
at a wedding, the best wine saved for
last. So then what wonder is it that
at table Jesus took wine and spoke of
his blood? And why is it that at table
the church has always taken wine, the
fruit of the vine and work of human
hands, and then has held up the cup
to all in the procession and said, “The
blood of Christ”? And why is it
that to that we each and all say firmly, “Amen”?
Why is it that we drink from a cup filled
with wine but the word on our lips is “blood”?
The image of the grape crushed that
its juice may become the festive drink
is joined by the church to the image
of the savior of the world crushed that
his blood flow in saving waves over
all the earth. “Take this, take
this all of you! Take this and drink.
This is the cup of my blood.” Ambrose
of Milan, sixteen centuries ago, preached
it this way. He called Christ “that
strange grape which, like the grape
from the vine, was hanging incarnate
from the wood of the cross. From this
grape is made the wine that delights
the heart of humanity, intoxicates sobriety,
emits the mist of faith and of true
piety” (Rech, page 59).
Many of us grew up Catholics at a time
when only the priest drank from the
cup; and a few generations before that
it was unusual for any except the priest
to take the bread in holy communion.
But Pius V a hundred years ago urged
frequent communion, and in six or seven
decades that became a reality. After
Vatican II, the cup also became part
of holy communion, offered to all. Yet
the habits of the past hold on. Trained
to think that receiving holy communion
was taking the bread only, so we continue.
The cup seems some sort of extra, okay
for some but not really that important.
Yet remember who we are, we Catholics!
We are the ones who have sought the
grace and love and healing of God in
such things as water and oil, in the
sound of words and the laying on of
hands. We cling to the holiness of creation
and of our own bodies and gestures.
We hunger and we come to eat the body
of Christ. We thirst also, and so we
come to the cup and say Amen to what
we are, the blood of Christ, and we
drink the fruit of the vine and the
work of human hands. And we do such
things not in some self-centered isolation
but in the ever-messy midst of a community,
most of whose members have failed as
often as we have to hold dear to the
gospel, yet all alike are joining this
grateful procession to eat the one loaf
broken for all, and to drink from the
fruit of the vine poured out for all.
Eat this, all of you! Jesus said. Drink
this cup, all of you! Jesus said.
Come, then, to the cup, whether to let
a drop of the sacred wine touch your
lips, or to take a full sip of the good
wine become for us the blood of Christ.
Come in joyful peace to hear the minister
say to you, “The blood of Christ.” Stand
before the cup and say Amen to what
you are. Then take that cup in your
hands and taste. Parents, help your
children to approach the cup with reverence,
to listen to the words of the minister
and to answer Amen, then to take the
cup firmly and drink a tiny sip. We
Catholics are the neediest of peoples.
We need the holiness of walking in procession,
of singing, of bread broken and wine
poured out. Despite all that the marketplace
would tell us, we want to know here
in this place, here in the midst of
this assembly, that for which we truly
hunger and thirst.
Our hunger and our thirst, though, are
not so much satisfied as intensified
at this table. For here as nowhere else
does it become clear that the one whose
body we eat and whose blood we drink
is the one who hungers and thirsts for
justice and that hunger and thirst become
our own, little by little, in this holy
communion.
Copyright © Gabe Huck. Used by
permission.
Originally written for Celebration,
the worship and preaching resource of
the National Catholic Reporter (visit
their Web site at www.celebrationpublications.org).
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These homilies
may be copied and adapted for your own use;
however, they may not be commercially published
without permission of the author.
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