Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

The Greatest Commandment 

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, October 31, 2023

Developed Israelites of Jesus’ time were required to keep 613 commandments found in the Bible’s first five books. As a result, it was a common practice among the rabbis to inquire from one another what is the greatest commandment, what is the central commandment and the organizing principle of the law. Sometimes to ensure clarity and succinctness, a rabbi was compelled to offer this summary while standing on one foot. In accord with this custom, one of the Pharisees, a scholar of the law approaches Jesus and asks, “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” (Matthew 22:36). Although his question was meant to entrap Jesus and use whatever he says against him, Jesus, nevertheless,  gives an honest, clear and extremely illuminating answer: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If you are still wondering what Christianity is about, this is it! Mind you, this is not one more philosopher among the many speaking. This is Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God speaking and telling us what the heart of the law is. So, it is incumbent on us and actually obligatory that we listen and obey. More to it, Jesus’ illuminating answer should set the tone for your entire life. I don’t mean your life for today or tomorrow, but your entire life.

But why are the two commandments so tightly linked in Christianity? By the way, it is not controversial to say that the heart of religion is the command to direct one’s energy and life towards God, the Highest Good. It is self-evident that loving God totally, and following his will completely is at the heart of religion. But as dysfunctional people, this is not always obvious. We have to be told again and again. This is one of the reasons why going to church is important. We have to be reminded over and over again to direct the whole of our life and every energy in us following God’s will. Not wealth, not pleasure, not power, not honor, not knowledge, not country, not political party, not family etc. Mind you, all these are good in themselves but God must be the center of our life. Apart from God, nothing else is the highest good. If God is central in your life, if you make Jesus the absolute center of your life, all the things we mentioned and many others will find their rightful place in your life.

As I said earlier, it is not controversial to insist that loving God completely and unreservedly is at the heart of religion. But why does Jesus immediately add the second commandment? Don’t forget that the Pharisee, the scholar of the law, only asked for one commandment: “Teacher, what commandment (not commandments) in the law is the greatest?” He asked for just one, but Jesus added a second one. Why? Because God loves everything and everyone that he has made. Everything visible and invisible would not have existed unless God loves them into being. Therefore, if you love God with all your soul, heart and mind, you will unquestionably and certainly love what God loves. This is precisely why the two commandments are interlaced. As I was growing up in my family, I got to know that there were certain things my mother loved not so much because they were her thing; she loved them because my father, whom she loved, loved those things. As we can see, the requirement of love is far more than simple affection or warm sentiment. Our love for our neighbor must express itself in concrete terms. So, who in your life, right now is in most need of love? Who is the poorest right now in your life? Think of someone that is irritating to you. Think of someone that is distasteful to you. Think of someone that you don’t really like. Think of someone you make an effort to avoid. Think of someone you may not automatically seek out. You may have plenty of reasons why you don’t like them. But remember this: that person has been loved into existence by God. What matters is not the person’s worth to you, but that person’s worth to God. You might consider the person ‘worthless,” “useless” and “not needed.” But the stubborn fact here is that that person has value and worth to God. So, love that person because God loves them and we love God.

You love the Lord with all your mind, heart and soul. Right? If you really do, you won’t forget the poor, the marginalized, the needy and the forgotten. You won’t forget those on the margins of the society mentioned in our first reading (Exodus 22:20-26) for today: “You shall not molest or oppress an alien, for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt. You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If you lend money to one of your poor neighbors among my people, you shall not act like an extortioner toward him by demanding interest from him.” God loves all things and all people. They won’t come into existence unless he loved them into being. But littered in so many pages of the Bible is God’s focused attention on the “poorest of the poor.” God loves  with a special love, those who are most in need of love. And so should we if we love God with everything we have got. For the past 55 years, the Catholic Church speaks about the preferential option for the poor. Now, don’t get it twisted. The Church loves everybody because God loves everybody and the Church loves what God loves. However, the Church loves with a special love, those who are poor in every sense of that term. The command now is to love them specially.

Veni Sancte Spiritus!  

Homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

The Puzzle Of Caesar And The Coin

Rev. Marcel Emeka Divine Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, October 22, 2023

We are not looking at a parable of Jesus, rather a riddle of Jesus. Our Gospel narrative today can rightly be called the riddle of Caesar and the coin. After the Parable of the Wedding Feast, which we read last weekend, Matthew says that the Pharisees secretly met, and the result of their meeting is to send their disciples to Jesus, along with the Herodians. What for? To entrap Jesus in speech. To set him up with a question that has serious political and theological consequences. At the time, Israel was under Roman rule; and the Herodians were totally loyal to Rome. The Pharisees, on the other hand, held that God alone was their King and Lord and viewed the payment of taxes to Rome as acts of surrender to the despised Roman emperor, Tiberius Caesar, a foreigner and a pagan at that. This hot issue was worsened by the fact that Rome’s tax burden on the Jewish people was extremely heavy. So, the Herodians’ loyalty to Rome and the Pharisees’ hatred for Rome and its emperor, Tiberius Caesar, made the Pharisees and the Herodians mortal enemies. But on this occasion, we see two groups of bitter rivals coming together. They set aside their hostilities in order to confront their common interest— which is, setting Jesus up and in the process getting rid of him. They tried to get Jesus to give a yes or a no answer to the question of whether it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not. If for instance, Jesus says, yes, it is lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he will anger the Jewish crowds. He will be accused of being a Roman sympathizer. In the first century AD, there were Jews famously called the zealots who vehemently opposed the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and to the land of Israel. They saw the Romans as pagan overlords who had no right to be in their land and they also saw Jewish tax collectors as the equivalent of Gentile sinners in part because they were colluding with the occupying forces of the Roman Empire. On the other hand, if Jesus says no, it is unlawful to pay taxes to Caesar, he will anger Rome and will be accused of sedition or of rebellion against the Roman government.

But as is always the case in the Gospels, you can’t just trap Jesus. You are always going to end up being trapped yourself. Responding to the Pharisees Jesus says, “Show me the coin that pays the census tax.” He is referring to a particular kind of coin called the Denarius, stamped with the face of the Emperor and with an inscription that says, “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, Son of the divine Augustus.” Some of these coins produced by the Emperor, Caesar Tiberius, from the time of Jesus’ life, that is around AD 14 to AD 37 are still available today. People still sell them for big bucks online. Think about this again. When Jesus was handed the coin, it not only had the graven image of the Roman Emperor Tiberius Caesar, it also had the inscription that called the emperor “the son of God.” His father, Augustus was deified and regarded as divine by the Romans. In the 1st century AD, the two previous emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar were both divinized. They were both elevated to the status of gods by the Roman Empire. If you read the book titled “Lives of the Caesars” by Suetonius you will find this. By the way, there were 12 Caesars. When the author, Suetonius got to Julius Caesar and to Augustus, he called them the life of the deified Julius and the deified Augustus. In essence, the coin that they handed to Jesus had on it the image of Caesar who was claiming to be the son of God. What Jesus does now is really ingenious. He takes the coin with all that is written on it and then asks, “Whose image is this and whose inscription?” As they answered “Caesar’s,” Jesus drops what has become one of his famous one-liners, “Then give to Caesars what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” In a very shrewd way, Jesus escapes from the trap and endorses payment of tax to Caesar. The money can go to Caesar, it can be paid lawfully to Caesar. Up and down the centuries, this passage has been used to enjoin and teach Christians to be dutiful to the state, to be responsible citizens, and to give to the state what is due to the state, which includes paying taxes and being contributing members of the society. That is the part of what Jesus is saying but not the heart of what he is getting at. Yes, he is telling the Pharisees to give their money to Caesar but then to give their life, their very self to God. Upon hearing the Lord, what was their reaction? The final verse of this Gospel passage, which the Lectionary leaves out but which is very important says, “When they heard this they were amazed, and leaving him they went away” (Matthew 22:22). In other words, they marveled at the truth of what Jesus said and the fact that they couldn’t catch him in their trap. His answer was simply too brilliant to refute. 

Now, what belongs to Caesar? The taxes he claims by law. The laws that he enacts. The demands of the state as long as they don’t require us to transgress God’s command to love. What belongs to God? Everything! Your life! Your political life! Your social life! Your religious life! Your professional life! Your business life! Your family life! Your entertainment life! Your civic life! Your love life! Your married life! Your academic life! Everything! All of it! We should not read Jesus’ one-liner as a demarcation of political life and religious life. We should not interpret it as though some aspects of our life belong to us or to Caesar or to friends or to family and not to God. Sometimes I hear some Christians utter heretical comments like, “Please, please, don’t bring God into this matter,” “Please, keep your religion to yourself, I don’t want to hear it,” “Uka di n’obi” that is, “religion or spirituality is a personal thing.” Now, when someone, a Christian echoes any of these expressions, what’s usually the goal? To keep God at bay. To dethrone the way of God, which is love and to allow division, tyranny, unforgiveness, and darkness to reign. Whenever an attempt is being made to clearly demarcate ordinary life and religious life, it is always to enthrone the devil’s way of divide, divide and divide and to spread darkness everywhere. Giving God what belongs to God means giving God everything about you. It is everything you do here in the church, at home, at work place, in secret and public. The greatest gift of offering you can give to God is not money, but your life, your whole being and everything associated with you.

Veni Sancte Spiritus! 

Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

God Invites And Invites And Invites 

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, October 15, 2023

What can we compare the kingdom of heaven like? Jesus says it is like a king who gave a wedding feast for his son. On the actual day of the feast, the king sent his servants to summon the invited guests. Unfortunately, they refused to honor the invitation. But rather than give up, the king sent other servants with more enticing news to the guests: “Behold, I have prepared my banquet, my calves and fattened cattle are killed, and everything is ready; come to the feast.” But despite the king’s best effort, some ignored his invitation and went away to their different enterprises. Others manhandled his servants and had them killed. Upon hearing what had happened, the king responded with extraordinary anger. He killed them and burned down their city. Thereafter, the king instructed his servants to go to the streets and invite whomever they found to the feast. The banquet hall is now filled up. As the king was making his way into the banquet hall, he noticed a man who was not properly dressed in a wedding garment and ordered that he be thrown out of the hall. 

What’s the point of this parable called the parable of the wedding feast? In this story, Jesus is using a very exaggerated narrative, exaggerated descriptions, exaggerated fictional characters and emotions to wake us up to some indispensable spiritual truth. So, the way the king in this story behaved is not the way God behaves. If that’s how God behaves, then new atheists are right to say that the biblical God is a psychotic tyrant. But we know that our God is patient, kind and merciful. Like other parables, that is, fictional and invented stories, this one is also meant to teach us a deep spiritual truth. What spiritual truth? Jesus the Mashiach, the very incarnation of the Yahweh, wants to marry the human race. He wants to unite the human race to God. And God, the Lord of host, is organizing a great banquet, a wedding banquet for his Son. The food offered in this wedding feast is the best breakfast, the best lunch, and the best dinner. God invites his special people through the prophets and teachers in Israel. Sadly, they were ignored, resisted, opposed and killed. Think of the many prophets and emissaries of God who have been murdered. This is why the king’s reaction is excessive. What we are supposed to see in this story is our consistent refusal to honor God’s invitation and not the king’s extreme response. It is utterly strange to refuse the invitation of our Creator. This story is meant to grab us by the shoulders and shake us up to the reality of the kind of invitation we have been given and from whom it is coming from. The invitation from God is the best possible invitation and it makes absolutely no sense to refuse it. 

As the human race consistently refuses God’s invitation, how does God respond? How do we read God’s anger in the Bible? The Bible, especially the Old Testament is filled with lots of examples of God raging in anger. Yet again do not read it in a strict and actual sense. God does not have emotions the way we do. God does not fall in and out of an emotional state. God is not erratic and unstable. God is love! The eternal God is unchangeable. So, do not say, “God is now in a good mood” or “Now he is in a bad mood.” Sometimes I hear people say, “God is angry with me because of…” If you believe that, it means you have power over God. It means  you can control God. But God does not fall in and out of state. How do we now read his anger? Read his anger as expressed throughout the Bible including this parable as a metaphor for God’s desire to set things right. The destruction of the city as we see in this parable indicates the spiritual destruction that follows from refusing the divine invitation. I tell you, there is no greater misfortune in life quite like refusing to listen to God’s invitation. If people are asked the simple question, “What is the greatest calamity in life?” The majority including some of you listening to me now might say things like abject poverty, homelessness, substance abuse, injustice, genocide, etc. And don’t get me wrong, all those are bad. But from a biblical standpoint, the greatest misfortune is saying no to God. It is rejecting God’s invitation. This invitation from the King to the wedding feast of his Son is being sent out through the Church, through the Sacraments, through the preaching, through the witnessing of holy people, through our religious icons etc. But how many people are receiving it? How many people are willing to attend it? 

Everyone is welcome to the feast. God is lavishing his grace upon the whole human race. God is relentless. Do we refuse? Sometimes! But when we refuse, God does not tire or give up, he invites more and more and more. As the party commences, the king comes to join the party. Then he finds a man without a proper wedding dress. He confronts him and eventually throws him out of the banquet. What’s going on here? Is the King suddenly in a bad mood? Has his dysfunctional side reasserted itself? From our human justice, this is unfair. How do we read this? Our invitation and admission into God’s household is grace. God invites and we comply. God gives grace and we cooperate. But then we must live according to the rules of God’s house. We must dress appropriately so as to live and act in divine house. What does the wedding garment stand for? What does the man lack in the wedding feast? In Isaiah 61:10, the prophet speaks about being clothed “with the garment of salvation” and being covered “with the robe righteousness.” If you take this image of Isaiah and move it to the New Testament, the man without the wedding garment seems to be lacking the righteousness that fits the Kingdom of God. He does not have a developed moral and spiritual life. And without it, we are not better than those who refused the invitation from the very beginning. In this parable, Jesus wants to wake us up from any spiritual slumber. 

Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

Diligent Builder And His Unproductive Vineyard

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

St. Alphonsus Catholic Church, Brooklyn Center, MN

Sunday, October 8, 2023

Today’s first reading taken from prophet Isaiah (5:1-7) begins in an unusual way. Instead of “Thus says the Lord,” Isaiah begins with “Let me now sing of my friend.” Isaiah does not shout or scream or scold. He does not mumble or meander. Isaiah sings. He tells the story of his friend. His friend has planted a vineyard on a rich and productive hillside. After that, he tills the land thoroughly. He clears the land of stones. If you have done this kind of work of clearing the land of stones, you know how difficult and back-breaking and time consuming it can be. After that, Isaiah’s friend plants “the choicest vines,” that is, the very best vines he can find. After that, he built a watchtower and hewed out a wine press. What’s the watchtower for? It is used to guard this precious vineyard against vicious invaders. As for the wine press, it is built in anticipation of a great harvest of grapes. Finally we are told that he built a wall around the vineyard to further protect it from marauders and animals etc. 

Who is Isaiah’s friend? Who is the owner of the vineyard? The Lord God of Israel! Who is the vineyard? The people of Israel! What’s the point of the love song? Prophet Isaiah is showing us the extent the God of Israel has gone to build his people. The cultivation of the land, the clearing of the land, the removal of stones, the building of a watchtower and a protective wall etc speak about a thousand different ways that the God of Israel has cultivated and formed his people. It is about all the ways the Lord has shared his heart with Israel. Think about the great act of liberation by which God brought out Israel from the slavery land in Egypt. This is all the ways that God has prepared this beautiful vineyard. But despite all the great effort made, God is disappointed and frustrated. Why? At harvest time, when he comes looking for crop of grapes, what he found “was wild grapes. Despite all his efforts, what he found at harvest time was stinking grapes. Up and down the prophetic literature, we hear that God gave his whole heart to his people, but his people has not responded in kind. They know the law, they received the covenant, they have the temple, they have the prophets, they have the benefit of escaping from the slavery land, Egypt, yet, they have not responded to God’s overtures. 

Now, don’t think that this story, Isaiah’s love song, is only about ancient Israel. It is also about us. St. Paul refers to the Church as the new Israel. We are the new Israel. We are now the chosen race. From the lips of John we hear, “He came to his own people, but his own people did not accept him. But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God…” (John 1:11-12). In Catholic terms, everything is grace. God lavishes his grace and love upon us, and we are meant to cooperate with that grace. God’s grace does not guarantee that the harvest will be great and fruitful unless we cooperate, unless we respond to it. Look at our own lives. Hasn’t God lavished his grace upon us? Of course he has. Like ancient Israel, God has also done for us a great act of liberation from the slavery land. God gives us his Son, Jesus Christ. His victory on the cross is our victory too. He wins for us. He liberates us from the shackle of the Devil. He even says, “Whoever has been set free by the Son of Man is free indeed” (John 8:36). Add to it, he gives us the sacraments, the Church, the Bible, the communion of the saints etc. We also have the angels, our Guardian Angels who are protecting and guiding us to the kingdom of God. These are the different ways that God is cultivating us, his children. Think of the sacraments again, especially the Mass, the Eucharist. How many of our brothers and sisters in faith are staying away from it today? A lot! The attitude today is, “I don’t need to go to church to pray to God.” Think about the sacrament of confession. How many churchgoing Catholics are staying away from it? A lot! The attitude today is, “I can confess my sins in my house and that’s enough.” Think about many Catholics who are cohabiting and having children without the sacrament of marriage. But they will bring their children to church for baptism. Why? Because they believe that the sacrament of baptism is good for their kids. Strangely, such couples dither when you encourage them to sacramentalize their marriage. They just don’t get it that in spiritual life, what is good for the goose is also good for the gander. 

Truth be told! God has cultivated his vineyard and will continue to cultivate it till the end of the world. And he is cultivating it through various means and ways. But will the people of the world respond? Will the attitude of “I am okay, and you are okay” allow us to yield to God’s grace? Will the secular philosophy of  self-affirmation “I am beautiful in every single way” allow us to cooperate with God’s grace? When God returns at harvest time, will he find good and sweet grapes or wild and stinking grapes? The stubborn refusal to surrender to grace, the prideful attitude of ignoring the sacraments, the delusional mindset of believing, relying and depending on oneself is the reason why Jesus, in our Gospel for today (Matthew 21:33-43) says to the chief priests and the elders of the people, “I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.” I tell you, the first most important fruit is humility. Humility is from the Latin “humus,” (soil)“humilitas,” that is, close to the ground, the earth. A humble person is so close to the ground, close to reality. In the spiritual order, reality is finally knowing the stubborn fact— that no one can pay his or her own ransom. That we all need God, we need the Church, we need the sacraments and all the various ways and means that God is sharing his heart with us. No matter how great, how wealthy, how talented, smart, beautiful, wonderful and amazing we may be, we ultimately need God to be saved. 

God bless you!