HOMILY WEEK 01 04 – Year I
Torah and Temple, or Partners of Christ:
Memorial of St. Marguerite Bourgeoys
(Heb 3:7-14; Ps 95; Mk 1:40-45)
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Have you ever felt guilty for not picking up a hitch-hiker? Or not reaching out to a person seemingly lost in a parking lot?
Today’s liturgy invites us to go far beyond the rubrics of the Torah and the rituals of the Temple to be compassionate partners of Christ.
The author of Hebrews, in the first reading, has the Holy Spirit speaking to us about the waywardness of our ancestors in the desert. They were chosen by God to be icons of God on earth. By their fidelity to the covenant relationship with God, and to the way of life God had given to them on Mt. Sinai, they were to draw all other nations back to God.
Salvation history tells us just the opposite occurred. Although given the Law (Torah), Land and Temple, they continually fell for the false gods of possessions, prestige and power. They had, as the author of Hebrews puts it, “unbelieving hearts that turned away from the living God.” For its part, Psalm 95 reminds us not to “harden our hearts as our ancestors did in the desert.”
The gospel of Mark shows us the opposite example. A man with leprosy, who is ritually unclean, comes to Jesus with deep faith in him and his power to heal, and makes his request kneeling before Jesus. The suffering man realizes who Jesus is: not one prophet among many, but the Incarnation of the God of Israel, the only one before whom worship is the appropriate attitude.
In our sickness, our weakness, our shame, our sin, our oddness—lots of us feel like this leper. We feel as though we’re just not worthy. But whatever trouble we are in, we have to come to Jesus in the attitude of worship. He is the Lord and we’re not. This is the key step in getting our lives in order: right praise.
Consider the leper’s beautiful plea, essential in any act of petitionary prayer: “If you wish, you can make me clean.” He is not demanding; he is acknowledging the lordship of Jesus, his sovereignty. “Thy will be done” is always the right attitude in any prayer.
What an example of humble faith! Jesus, moved with compassion, doesn’t just speak words of healing. He significantly stretches out his hand to touch the leper, deliberately breaking all the rules of ritual cleanliness. Immediately, we are told, the leprosy left him and he was made clean, with Jesus technically taking on his ritual impurity!
The Temple was the religious, cultural and even political heart of Judaism at the time of Jesus. Cleansing one’s self in the mitzvah or ritual bath was a prelude to temple worship. Jesus, the Messiah, Son of God and Lamb of God, was “cleansing” people, not in the temple, but outside the temple, where the lowly and often excluded ones were, such as the leper. That is why he would ask the leper who was healed to first go and show himself to the priests “as a testimony to them” before spreading the news of his healing. Jesus was hoping the temple priests would get the message he was truly the long-awaited Messiah, and come to him with believing hearts, unlike their ancestors. Now that invitation extends to us.
The author of Hebrews challenges us not only to understand this mystery of the crucified Messiah and Lamb of God, but to participate in it as partners of Christ, the new Temple and the one who is greater than the Torah, who calls us to live the new law of love and compassion, not ritual and rightness. Returning to the question about guilt that opened this homily, Jesus would have stopped to see if the man needed a ride, and would probably have gone over to the person in the parking lot to see if he needed anything.
Driving home one cold November night, I came across a man hitchhiking. Although hesitant, I stopped and offered him a ride. Our conversation quickly revealed that he had just picked up some heavy drugs in the city, and was on his way to East Hastings in Vancouver to end his life there. As he shared his hurt at the hands of the staff at an Indian Residential School, I softly suggested that he should speak to a priest. When he did not respond negatively to that comment, I revealed that I was a priest, and we settled in for a heart-to-heart conversation about that soul pain in his life.
As we were passing by his home community, I suggested I drive him home and there, we sat in the car for another hour of profound conversation during which I encouraged him to reach out for help, go for treatment, and gave him my card and contact information. A year later, at 11:30 pm when I was in bed, I received a phone call. It was that hitchhiker. After our conversation that night, he decided to go for treatment instead of Vancouver, had sobered up and was now an addictions counselor on his home community. That phone call moved me to the depths of my being, as I realized that I had indeed gone to the periphery, reached out to the marginalized, taken on the smell of the sheep, and had been a compassionate partner of Christ.
St. Marguerite Bourgeoys, whom we honor today, is a wonderful example for us. Born in France in 1620, she had a strong faith in Jesus and even as a young girl, demonstrated an aptitude for “governing”, for gathering together the girls of her age and for group life and organization. She wanted to try a new form of life to honour “the life in the world of the Holy Virgin”, in which “without a veil or a wimple, one would be a true religious.”
In 1653, she sailed to Canada at the invitation of the Governor of Ville-Marie (Montreal) to teach and nurse. In 1657, she organized the erection of a chapel that would serve as a place of pilgrimage in honour of Mary and house the miraculous statue of Notre-Dame du Bon-Secours (Our Lady of Good Help). She started a school for girls including some from the Iroquois First Nation and formed a religious community, including two Iroquois, that became the Congregation of Notre Dame. Marguerite and her companions taught catechism, the basics of literature, as well as virtue, etiquette, practical skills and the love of work. She began to send her companions in pairs to new parishes to start classes for the children of the settlers.
Marguerite Bourgeoys died January 12, 1700, and was acclaimed as the “Mother of the Colony”. She was canonized on October 31, 1982, by Saint John Paul II.
In the Eucharist, Jesus reaches out to us, speaking words of healing in the Liturgy of the Word, and sharing with us his very own body and blood in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. May our celebration deepen our faith in Jesus, like the leper, and empower us to reach out to others, beyond Torah and Temple, as compassionate partners of Christ.
