Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:38-48

There is a story about Desmond Tutu, the Episcopal archbishop of South Africa, back during the days of apartheid. He was walking on a narrow sidewalk when a white man came walking toward him. The man told him to get out of the way, and Tutu stepped down into the street. As the man passed, he said, “I don't step aside for gorillas.” Tutu replied, “Well, I do.”. Now the only thing about this story that I don't know is how loud Tutu said this. Since he's still alive I suspect it was in a fairly quiet voice. Jesus gives us two more interpretations of the commandments that Jews followed. Now you may not recognize these commandments, because they aren't technically part of the ten commandments. However, remember that the Jews had six hundred thirteen commandments to follow. Each of these commandments had a lot of footnotes. So the commandment “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” was the foundation of a whole legal system. If someone deprived a person of something unjustly, the judges would try to find an equivalent that the offender had to repay. We see some of this elaborated in other parts of the Old Testament – if you killed a person's cow and didn't have one of your own, they would find something of equal value that you had to give that person. But Jesus gives us an entirely different twist on this commandment. If someone takes something from you, let them have it. If someone slaps you on the left cheek, turn and offer the right one as well. If you are forced to do something, do twice as much as you were supposed to do. Is this any way to run a justice system?

I look at this commandment as impossible for most of us to follow. But if we look more deeply, I think we can see the point Jesus is making. The logical extension of the law “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is violence. It is of course a good basis for living in a community, but if we take this law personally and use it as a way to behave in interpersonal relationships, we end up filled with anger, the desire for revenge, and wishing evil on other people. If someone takes our cloak, and we react by demanding that it be returned or doing violence to get it back, we give that cloak a lot more value than it has. And of course, to the extent that these emotions consume us, we lose our freedom, we invite those urges which lead us to sin. And of course the other person sees everything from his or her vantage point, and for him or her, you are the enemy; and the circle widens.

This desire for “getting even” is especially dangerous in marriages, because it makes adversaries of the two who have pledged to become one. And yet it seems to be a common topic of disagreement in a marriage – You did this so I am going to do that.

The other law Jesus refers to is “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” Again, the rabbis spent a lot of time discussing who was neighbor and who was enemy; and as a rule for a small nation surrounded by aggressive neighbors, it made a lot of sense for the citizens of that country to follow this rule. Trust your kinsman, be very suspicious of the foreigner. We see this sentiment being played out even today in our debate over immigration.

But again, Jesus is warning us that we shouldn't be applying this as a personal rule. He tells us to imitate our heavenly Father, who gives his gifts to the just and unjust alike. For Jesus, it is again an issue of our essential freedom; if we hate, we aren't free – it takes a lot of energy to carry a grudge around.

So these commandments of Jesus seem to be impossible at first glance. He seems to be telling us that we should be doormats and let people walk all over us. His teachings go against our natural human tendencies.

But maybe that's the point. Our natural human tendencies get us into trouble; they are rooted in original sin. In telling us to reject those natural tendencies, Jesus is actually pointing out the way to joy. A person is joyful if nothing can affect his interior peace; certainly if we are not disturbed by allowing our enemy to hurt us physically or take something from us – our labor, our clothing – we have achieved inner peace. Surely if there is no one left to hate, we have peace. And the more peaceful we are interiorly, the more freedom we have; and when we have peace and freedom, it is easier to form and strengthen our relationship with God. So we are not trying to become doormats; we are becoming free.

What should we do today? If you are like me, there are probably a few people you've met during your life that when you think about them, you react with a little internal anger, because the memory of that person is associated with a bad experience. Is there a way to look at the situation objectively and detach it from the emotions it brings up? Jesus thinks there is.

And equally, how far could someone push you before you would push back? Jesus is not asking us to forgo justice, but to live in a way that no one can disturb our interior peace. Saint John Bosco saw as his mission the care and education of street kids. In his instructions to the members of his order, he talked about the need for discipline, but he emphasized that all discipline needed to be done with love, because of you let yourself get emotionally upset, you were harming your spiritual life even though you might be helping the boy. To me that's kind of what Jesus is talking about.

So this gospel should make us review all those “triggers” that cause us to react without thinking – even internally. Because we can get rid of them and we should, if we want to be joyful, if we want to create a space for God in our hearts.

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:17-37

I don't really like this gospel. I was ok with the ten commandments. It isn't terribly hard to not steal, not covet, not murder, and I honor my parents, I guess. I don't take God's name in vain whatever that means. There are moments when unbecoming language may escape my lips, but I don't bring God into it. And if honoring the Sabbath means going to Church and trying to make the day a little different from the others, I usually do that. The ten commandments aren't that hard. But here Jesus is reinterpreting them. And not just that, he's telling us, it seems, that unless we embrace this much higher standard, we will not enter the kingdom of heaven' we will not be released until we have paid the last penny; our bodies might end up in Gahanna (which is Jesus' way of saying we'll be tossed onto the garbage heap outside the city – I don't think he was thinking of hell).

And by Jesus' standards, I have no hope. It seems that there are always smoldering resentments in my heart. I don't want them there, I try to suppress them when they pop up – but you can't live 74 years without having experienced a few people that you would rather not have ever met. I gather even monks and nuns have this problem. And adultery? It's hard to turn on the television or read the newspaper, or look at billboards, for that matter, without seeing something that exploits our sexuality. Does that qualify as looking at a woman with lust?

Is it possible to let my yes be yes and my no be no? Because I doubt a day goes by when I avoid saying something that's on the tip of my tongue, something that may in fact be very true or even helpful, but I'm afraid to say it. And Jesus continues to reinterpret the commandments, making the keeping of them very difficult if not impossible.

In a way, Jesus is doing what the Pharisees of his time were doing. They described it as “building a fence” around the commandments. It went like this. If the commandment said, “remember to keep holy the Lord's day”, one of the implications is that you couldn't work at your usual occupation. Why? Because labor, which was most of the time physical, took your mind off of God and the obligation to pray. But then, what does labor mean? Eventually, it meant you couldn't prepare a meal, you couldn't walk more than 100 paces from your home, you couldn't light a fire in your house. In other words, by complying with these seemingly trivial rules, you got as far away as you could from breaking the commandment. The Pharisees, the ancestors of modern Jewish rabbis, were making these rules to guarantee that they did not even come near breaking a commandment. But I think Jesus had something different in mind. Jesus is building fences around the commandments, but behind everything he is warning us of consequences – not entering the kingdom of heaven; not being released until we've paid the last penny; being thrown on the garbage heap which is Gehenna. He is basically describing a way to live, where we are always striving to be better. This striving for spiritual perfection, which is really a matter of cooperating with God's grace, with God's desire to transform each of us into sons and daughters who resemble Jesus, the First Born, is the mark of someone who is seeking the kingdom of heaven. To not do so is to be left behind, to have wasted one's opportunities.

Jesus is making the point that we have to look inward – do we harbor those attitudes and psychological dispositions that could lead us to breaking a commandment? Because if we do, we need to get rid of them. When we are chronically angry, yes, that could lead us to kill someone; but just being angry keeps us from being fully human. We are slaves to that passion. Likewise, if we allow ourselves to feel sexual attraction towards someone other than our spouse, it may seem harmless, but it isn't. It enslaves us. There are people addicted to pornography who started out by looking at other human beings with lust in their hearts. And Jesus tells us not to swear. We don't do this much anymore, but in his time, the act of swearing on something like the city you lived in or your mother's grave or some other valued thing was common, and was a way of emphasizing that you were speaking the truth. Jesus is saying, if you have to do that, that means that the rest of the time you can't be trusted to speak the truth. And if you do lie easily, sooner or later you will begin to lie just because you can; truth won't really matter and if that is the case, anything goes.

As is always the case, Jesus is giving us advice that has to do with our achieving happiness here and now. When we get rid of those things that bind us, those habits of the heart which put limits on us, then we are happy, and that is where the kingdom of heaven begins. When we hang onto those attitudes which hold us down, our possibilities are limited; we are less than fully human.

A Jewish friend was asked what would happen if he ate pork or used the wrong set of dishes for his supper or drove to the synagogue on Saturday rather than walked. His answer was, “Why would I do any of those things when God asked me not to?” I think that is a good attitude to have towards these commandments that Jesus interprets for us.

So today lets resolve to go into our own hearts and look for those attitudes which could lead us to breaking the commandments; and let us take Jesus' words seriously – even the little seeds of sin can hold us down – but with God's help and our own efforts we can uproot them and enter the kingdom of heaven.

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:13-16

High school was a mixed blessing for me. I wasn't Irish, I lived on the wrong side of town, and being an introvert, I had trouble making friends. In my graduating class there were about 45 kids. Most of these I had known since first grade. By the time high school rolled around, everybody had settled into their appropriate social sphere. There were the class leaders of course. And the jocks and cheerleaders. There were a few class clowns and a couple of loners. And there were me and my very few friends, who you would probably call Nerds today. We couldn't understand why everybody wasn't interested in comic books and learning to play chess. We couldn't see the point of school dances, and when we went, we would keep the walls from falling down. And we would feel a little envious when someone threw a birthday party and we didn't get invited. But that's life.

There was one guy in our class, though. He stood out because everyone liked him. He could sit at any table in the lunchroom and be welcomed – and he did. He was the guy who invited the awkward guy to join him and his friends at the table. He was the one who would dance with the girls who no one else would dance with. And he did not seem to belong to a clique, although he could have.

He was different. He was the salt of the earth.

Today Jesus tells us that we ARE the salt of the earth, we ARE the light of the world. Most of the time we think this means that we are supposed to give good example, we are supposed to live exemplary lives so that all those pagans out there will be shamed into converting. But I think Jesus is telling us more than this.

In Jesus' time, there were two sources of salt – you could evaporate sea water, and you would be left with a mixture of salt crystals and sand and whatever else had been around in the water. Nowdays such salt can be further refined, but not then. So you had a kind of brown flaky mixture that had odd flavors and wasn't of great quality and smelled like rotten fish. The other kind of salt came from mines. Here you could find pure salt crystals. Even today, there are botiques that sell different kinds of salt that come from different mines. We have a large package of pink salt I bought in a moment of weakness that came from tibet. This mined salt was salt of the earth. This was the pure stuff, the stuff they used to flavor food, to preserve meat, to use in medicines; this was the salt that was used as payment for roman soldiers. This was the salt that enhanced human life.

And I think Jesus is saying much the same thing about you and I being the light of the world. Light kept to itself doesn't do any good. Light on a lampstand is useful to everyone in the room, not just the one who owns the light. And it is when light is available that truth is revealed and lies shown for what they are.

What do salt and light have in common? In themselves, they don't amount to anything. No one goes out and orders salt for supper. No one who posesses a flashlight sits and stares at the light. Salt is what makes everything else taste a little better; it brings out flavor. And light brings clarity to our sense of sight. As I get older, I find I need more light to read.

And that's the situation with us Christians. We are people of the incarnation. We are the Body of Christ, not the soul of Christ. We are the ones for whom God made this beautiful world; we are the ones for whom God created relationships. God really loves everything he made. He called it good and very good.

One of the things we incarnational Christians are supposed to do, I think, is highlight the goodness in the world, the goodness in each other, and we don't do enough of that. We keep falling back into the idea that religion is about me and God, and

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 5:1-12

You've just heard the eight beatitudes – again. If you've never heard them before, you would have to be living under a rock. Even people who don't know them at least know that there are beatitudes. One question is how to read them. Some people say that Matthew took a few of Jesus' sayings and put them all in this gospel. Others say that Jesus actually preached a sermon starting out with these statements. The second big problem is that Jesus gave the beatitudes in Aramaic; Matthew's gospel is in Greek, and even when you try to translate Greek into English, you often don't quite hit the mark. If you go to different translations of the bible, you find different words. Sometimes the beatitudes begin with the word “Blessed” as you've just heard them. Other times the word is “Happy”. I've also heard the variation, “How blest are those...” with an exclamation mark. And translators can't make up their minds wether Jesus is saying “Blessed are they” or “Blessed are you”. And the third problem with the beatitudes – what do we do with them? Are they descriptions of how we should live? Are they commandments? Are they just comments Jesus is making? Martin Luther said that they are meant to show us that we can never meet the standards that they set, and so all we can do is throw ourselves on God's mercy.

If you remember how this gospel starts, even there we have a lack of clarity. Is he speaking to the crowd who follows him? Or did he leave the crowd and go up on the mountain with his disciples? Is this a message for everyone, or just the inner circle?

One author gives an interpretation I like. Imagine that Jesus is speaking to his disciples, and pointing at the crowd below. If you look at the first four beatitudes, they describe people who are suffering, who are at the margins. Being poor in spirit are those who for whatever reason have no joy; they are the worriers, the people who have no one in their lives. She is the woman who sees no hope, who thinks suicidal thoughts, who dreads waking up tomorrow. Being someone who mourns is confronting loss. He is the man who has been told that he has to carry around an oxygen tank the rest of his life; she is the one who has lost a child and the void is always there. And the meek – he is the doormat, the person everyone kind of ignores. She is the teenager who is always getting teased, who is the object of bullying. And the ones who hunger and thirst for righteousness – the man who can't get a decent job because English is his second language and he hasn't gotten it down too well. Or perhaps she is the one who has been cheated out of her livelihood by her children, and because they are her children she has chosen to suffer rather than seek justice.

The first four beatitudes promise that God will reverse these things, if not in this world, than the next.

And then we get to the second set. Here the beatitudes don't describe something that a person is caught up in; instead, they describe traits that can be acquired. You can be merciful; you can be clean of heart, you can be a peacemaker, you can go out and try to make things right. And Jesus is saying that if you do these things, you are God's way of addressing the issues present in the first four. IF you are merciful, you will be there dealing with the bully; if you are clean of heart, you will have made yourself sensitive to the presence of God in other people, and that in turn will show you what you can do. And if you are a peacemaker, you will be a bridge between enemies, you will be the one who heals divisions. And you will notice that hungering and thirsting for righteousness is not the same as being persecuted for the sake of righteousness. Jesus is saying that the person who seeks to make things right will inevitably draw fire – because someone has a vested interest in keeping the injustice going. But such a person will achieve his goal – seeing the kingdom of heaven come about.

So Jesus says, look around you – God loves all these people who carry such burdens and you should love them too, because God will see that things come out right in the end. And if you make yourself merciful, if you seek righteousness, if you beome clean of heart, if you make peace, you will be part of that reward, and you yourself will have what you are looking for.

And finally, Jesus changes the last “blessed”. He's been saying “Blessed are they” and now he says, “Blessed are you” – he's speaking to his disciples now, to you and I – when as a consequence of your efforts on my behalf, you suffer – because as the martyrs of the early years of Christianity knew so much better than we do – you will not go unrewarded. To bring about the kingdom, identify people described by the first four beatitudes, and teach people to develop the characteristics in the second four.

One other point. Matthew has Jesus go up a mountain to deliver the beatitudes, just like Moses went up a mountain to receive the ten commandments. The commandments were meant to be a floor. They mostly say “Thou shalt not”. In other words, if you want to live together in some sort of peace, here are the minimal requirements. Jesus, on the other hand, says, “Here are goals to shoot for: A follower of Jesus is never satisfied with the bare minimum. He or she is always striving to be better. Saint Alphonsus Ligouri, the founder of the Redemptorists and a doctor of the church, died at the age of 90. Even in the last few days of his life, he was still reaching for those goals, he was still trying to live the beatitudes.

And so should we. Because the message of Jesus is that what is wrong will be made right, sooner or later. But those of us who are members of Jesus' body have the opportunity right here and now to begin this process. And he holds out an awesome promise that should make us rejoice.

Do a beatitude today. Find someone who needs you and be merciful, clean of heart, seek righteousness, make peace, and begin to right the injustice of the world. And you will notice your heart rejoicing because you are doing what Jesus calls you to do.

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 4:12-23

About a year ago I was approached by a man who was a friend of one of the patients at the Jewish Geriatric Center. They were both members of the same church, and were casual friends. Because he had come into the nursing home to visit his friend, the reality of disability probably intruded on his day to day consciousness; I know in my own case, despite a lifetime of taking care of cancer patients, I had very little idea of what went on in a nursing home until I became active in that ministry.

In any event, the man was very enthused about music therapy, and referred me to a few web sites about this. It was another area I wasn't familiar with, but as I explored it, I could see why he was interested; to believe the studies that have been done, music therapy has a positive effect on alzheimer's disease, stroke, parkinsons disease – you name it and music probably helps in some way or another. It turns out there is a whole scientific discipline which studies the effects of music on the human brain.

This gentleman wanted to do something. He wanted to help the people in the nursing home with music. I spent some time with him working out a project that would demonstrate whether or not this would be a good thing to introduce. After all, the nursing facility has limited resources. And I told him that he would have to get the permission of the director, as well as appropriate consent, in order to do this project. I met with him once or twice more, and then he more or less disappeared from view.

We human beings are designed to look at a situation and come up with ways we could make it better. That's kind of what my friend did. That is the very bedrock of civilization; that's the reason we make progress not only in our material world, but even in things like politics and law and religion; we are constantly trying to tweak what is so it will be better.

The Kingdom of Heaven is God's way of harnessing that tendency in us. If we are trying to know God and love him; if we have an active prayer life; if we have a relationship with Jesus Christ, then we know what the kingdom of heaven is all about; there is no more poverty; there are no second class citizens; people don't let other people go hungry, or sleep under bridges, or be deprived of an education. When there is evil in the world, the kingdom of heaven is constantly calling us to do something about it. And of course, we can ignore it, we can fail to do what we are supposed to do, and maybe someday we reach the point where we settle down in our armchair and say, “it's none of my business” or “I can't fix the problem so why bother?” But if we are at all sensitive, if we have listened even a little to the message of Jesus, we should feel a little guilt, we should feel a little of that call that Jesus gave his apostles “Come after me”.

My friend heard a little of that call, and even set out to answer it – in a very narrow, specific way. Because any time we can make the lives of our fellow human beings more human, we are bringing about the kingdom of Heaven, or I should say, Jesus is bringing it about through us.

But he didn't follow through. Because the biggest barrier to bringing about the kingdom of heaven is not really that we don't stick to our resolutions, its that we don't put down something else so that we can devote ourselves to the kingdom. That's what Jesus teaches us in this gospel. He says in effect, I will make you fishers of men, but first you have to stop being fishers of fish. And for most of us who already lead busy lives, we take it as a personal failure if we give up something good in order to take on something else. We can obviously do this once or twice, but you can see that if we keep this up, we burn out, or alternatively, we don't accomplish what we set out to do. And both of these results lead away from the Kingdom.

Every Christian should be consciously working to bring about God's kingdom – which is pretty much the same thing as fishing for men. After all, the kingdom involves moving this person or that, this group or that, a little closer to Jesus Christ. But what prevents us, what discourages us, is that when we try, we forget to put down another burden. Most of us, I think, could put down a few burdens. There's television, the internet, maybe a hobby or sport that is consuming our time and energy. Or maybe what is holding us back is that we are already working for the kingdom but that work is not what we are meant to do. Mother Theresa realized that her vocation to be a nun was not getting her where God wanted her to be – and she was in her forties when this realization hit her. She had to lay down that vocation and take up another before God could use her for the great work she accomplished.

Peter and Andrew, and John and James, threw aside their nets “immediately” it says in the gospel. It was only then that they could follow Jesus and fulfill the glorious vocation to which they were called – to become fishers of men and heralds of the Kingdom of Heaven.

We are starting a new year. We are followers of Jesus. We can't go wrong trying to bring about His Kingdom. We know exactly what that kingdom should look like. We know what we can do to bring it about – even if it's only a little part of the whole. And maybe for this new year, instead of resolutions which add something to our already busy days, we should look at what we can subtract, what we can leave behind, so that we can devote time and energy to more effectively creating the Kingdom of Heaven in our own homes, workplaces, and church.

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

John 1:29-34

When I was growing up, a good friend of my father was a priest who taught at the local catholic college in Helena, Montana. Father Mackin was short and overweight and had a great sense of humor. In those days my parents would invite him over for supper now and then and I liked to listen to him talk; he seemed to know a lot. But to me he was just another priest and the faculty of Carroll College in Helena was made up of priests. In fact in those days when there seemed to be a surplus of priestly vocations, most of the faculty lived in a dormitory and in the basements there were about sixteen altars so that the priests could offer their masses every morning.

One day when I was a teenager Father Mackin asked my father to show a guest of his around Helena. I went along, and the guest turned out to be the secretary of commerce for Germany – he had come to this country on a fact-finding trip and made it a point to visit Father Mackin, who was a world-renowed expert in the economic effects of worker's unions on the financial health of countries. I learned later that the union movement was growing in Germany and the government was trying to figure out how to deal with this situation. Father Mackin was widely known in economic circles for his expertise, and in Germany unions are part of the management of large companies instead of being antagonistic. This is largely due to Father Mackin's advice and expertise.

The secretary of commerce from Germany opened my eyes to something about Father Mackin that I had not known. After that car ride, I saw him with new eyes.

Something like that is happening in the gospel today. Jesus, who has been a follower of John, who probably grew up with John, since they were cousins, had been seen by John as a pretty ordinary guy, a carpenter who looked after his widowed mother. John seems to have had no reason to regard Jesus otherwise. But today we hear John exclaiming that this is the lamb of God who will take away the sin of the world. John goes on to tell his followers that this is a revelation from God, and John now sees that his whole purpose has been to prepare the world for Jesus.

I think there are two things in John's proclamation – that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and that he takes away the sin of the world.

Perhaps we think about Jesus as a sacrifice – that's been the common understanding of this passage. But perhaps John and those who listened to him were thinking of something else. In the book of Exodus, the Jews were told to prepare a lamb for the Passover supper, and smear it's blood on the door frame. If they did this the angel of death who was sent to kill all the first born in each house would pass over the houses signed with the blood of the lamb.

The second point is that the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. Sin is singular, not plural. We could certainly talk about the sins of the world – God knows there are an infinite number of them. But John's revelation is that Jesus will take away the sin of the world. One of the things about being human is that we are quite aware of the sin of the world. I visited a 90 year old woman yesterday, and she reminisced about her life. She missed her husband, who had passed away suddenly about eight months ago; she missed her daughter, who had moved to Illinois with her husband. She had few contemporaries and lived alone. She was in the nursing home because she had developed severe heart failure and had been told she could not expect to get any better. Her life was drawing to a close; her body was rebelling, those she loved were not at her bedside – and she had lived an exemplary life, as far as I could tell – a regular church-goer, charitable in terms of money as well as good deeds – certainly someone who, unless there was some deep dark secret, should not be barred from heaven. But her life was dwindling away. And that's the sin of the world. We lose our friends, our loved ones, our strength, our memories, and ultimately we lose our lives. And we know that deep down it is not supposed to be this way; we know that deep down we are meant to live forever, we are meant to be loved and to love, we are meant to be complete. The difference between what should be and what is is the sin of the world. So Jesus doesn't just forgive your sins and mine, his life, death and resurrection set in motion the work of God to restore everything to Him. Because of Jesus, the world will be the way it should be. It is an incredible promise, but in the redeemed world, nothing will be lost, no dear ones will be separated, and we will never lose our bodies or our minds. The blood of the new Passover lamb will spare us from all those things which we take for granted – the sin of the world.

John's revelation shows Jesus to be someone who is not what everyone thought he was. And on the strength of that revelation, as we know, many people including some of John's own disciples, followed Jesus.

And maybe that's the whole message of today's gospel. The role of Jesus in God's plan for the world is central. You and I have been invited to participate in this plan – we are like the Israelites who were spared from death because of the blood of the lamb. But there are many people who haven't heard the invitation. And they haven't heard it because we haven't proclaimed it. We haven't said to them, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”.

What a wonderful thing it is to be taken up into this new world, this redeemed world, this world where sin and death have been conquered. And what a tragedy it will be for those who never learn about this.

So let us listen to this gospel and understand that we have been given the same revelation that God gave John, and that it is our task to proclaim what we know. Whom have we invited into the world where sin will be taken away, where the Lamb of God will make all things new?

Feast of the Epiphany, 2017

Matthew 2:1-12

I once visited a dying hospice patient. He belonged to no religion and never had. He was married to a Catholic lady and his children had all been raised in the Church. In the course of my getting to know him he revealed that in his younger days he had done a lot of things he wasn't proud of, and had hurt his wife and family over and over again by his actions. And although he had very little in the way of a spiritual life, he knew he was going to hell. And he meant it; he was extremely saddened by this.

In separate conversations with his wife and one of his daughters, it seemed as though allthough they corraborated his history of alcoholism, abuse and abandonment, over the past fifteen years he had been an exempliary father and husband. They couldn't figure out why he was so despondent, or why he believed he was going to hell. He soon passed away, still unconverted, still in despair.

Today we hear about two kinds of people. The Magi, of course. They are restless – they know something is missing – or they would never leave their homes and their place in society to travel to a little backwater capital of an insignificant people to seek out their king. They knew nothing of the Hebrew scriptures, but somehow their studies back in their pagan land led them to believe their restlessness would be relieved if they could come into the presence of the newborn King of the Jews. They traveled probably for at least a few weeks braving various dangers and discomforts. They followed a star, whatever that means, and whenever we see this re-enacted in movies, the star stops leading them when they hit Jerusalem. The GPS fails and they have to look at a map; they have to consult with the locals. And eventually they find what they are looking for, they do him homage, they give him gold because he is a king, incense because he is holy, and myrrh because he will have to suffer and die. And they are finally satisfied; they do not continue to search, they go home, having accomplished what they set out to do, having found a savior.

The other group of people include King Herod and his advisors. When asked, the advisors reply that the king will be born in Bethlehem, its right there in the prophecies. And in fact, if they were to spend a little more time with their scriptures, and who is to say they didn't, they could have told you that right now was about the right time for this to happen. And they go back to their scrolls and prayer books and continue to study how far you could walk on the Sabbath day and how you could tell whether an animal was unblemished enough to be used in a sacrifice. The momentous event was to take place 8 miles away, but for them it was too much trouble. And Herod's reaction is worse. He does not deny that the baby will be the King of the Jews; he does all in his power to make sure that it doesn't happen. And later he will murder all the boys under two years of age, as we know. Herod and his advisors all know something predicted by the prophets, something ordained by God himself, is happening – and they ignore it, or in Herod's case, actively oppose it.

I think we human beings can see ourselves in one of the two camps, sometimes even if we are members of a church, if we are religious. It's quite possible to be a pillar of the church and at the same time have no sense of restlessness, of incompleteness. And it's quite possible for people who aren't religious at all to feel that restlessness and incompleteness, and to look for ways to reduce those troubling feelings.

Some of us learn that we need a savior. Some of us never learn that. The man I told you about would probably have agreed that he needed a savior; or perhaps if told that a savior existed (and he was told that many times) he might have answered that he did not need a savior, he did not want one.

Christianity, of course, tells us that all human beings need a savior. All of us have a sense that we are not complete, that we are lacking something or someone to be complete. I think if we are honest we can say with the Apostle Paul, “but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from this body of death?” If we are honest we know that only through God's grace have we been spared what so many human beings suffer – hunger, oppression, discrimination, torture, poverty – and only through his grace are we spared from serious sin and its consequences. Deep inside, I know that I cannot make it on my own; and we learn as we get older that there are many things we wish we had done, had learned, had avoided; and now there is no hope of doing them. We need a savior, because it isn't just the fact that we are prone to sin, it is that we are made up of sin, because at the root, sin is incompleteness, it is missing the mark. The greatest saints, who sometimes seem almost morbid in their sense of their own sinfulness, were concerned not about great sins – murder, robbery, slander – but about things so small that most of us would consider them minor faults. They were concerned because they loved God so much that they wanted to be exactly what he wanted them to be, and they knew they were not, and could never be, by themselves. And so they learned that they needed a savior, someone who would make up for wherever they missed the mark. And when they realized that they had a savior, that did not stop them from struggling to become what they were meant to be, but they also became light-hearted, joyful – because they knew that with Jesus they would in the end be exactly what God had meant for them to be.

The man from hospice knew he needed a savior. He was looking back on his life and seeing the terrible things he'd done, and granted, he was probably clinically depressed. Saint Faustina said that even at the point of death God gives the soul a moment so that if the soul is willing, it may return to God. I hope and pray that he found his savior.