23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time 2024 - Gospel of Mark, Healing of Deaf Man, Year of Mission

 Last Sunday, we resumed the continuous Sunday Gospel readings from Gospel of Mark from which we’ll be reading until November. Especially if you’ve never done so, I’d recommend sometime in the next week or two reading through the entire Gospel of Mark. With only about 11,000 words and the average adult reading speed being between 175 and 230 words a minute, it would take about an hour. An hour: to read one of the most important texts not only of our faith, but to civilization.

By reading it in one sitting, you will get a more cohesive understanding of Our Lord and Savior’s  ministry and salvific mission. Mark's Gospel is structured in a way that builds momentum. So, reading it straight through will help you appreciate the urgency of Jesus’ message. And yet, Mark does not shy away from the fact that following Jesus, becoming his disciple, has a cost. And so you will also gain a deeper appreciation of how the disciples struggled and learned to follow Christ. 

Mark highlights both the human emotions and the divine authority of Jesus, and so an uninterrupted reading will give greater insight into the mystery of the Incarnation—how Jesus is fully human and fully divine.

Coming to Sunday Mass every week, without missing, you will still only get a portion of Mark’s Gospel. So, if you’ve never read the Gospel straight through, there are lessons from Our Lord that you may never have heard before.

So, give yourself the gift of an hour reading through the Gospel of Mark in the upcoming week or so, you won’t regret it—it will deepen your faith, your hope, and your love.

The healing of the deaf-mute man in this Sunday’s Gospel is a great story in itself, and also within the broader themes of Mark’s Gospel. It highlights key aspects of Jesus' mission and His identity. 

Throughout Mark's Gospel, Jesus is portrayed as the Messiah who brings about the Kingdom of God through his words and deeds. He is a man-of-action who backs up his teachings with miraculous works illustrating how Jesus has come to open us to the life of the kingdom of God. The healing of the deaf-mute man demonstrates how Jesus opens us—he opens our ears, he opens our mouths, he opens our hearts to the life of God—he has come to save us from those maladies which keep our minds, bodies, and spirits from the life God wants for us.

In the First Reading, we heard a prophecy of Isaiah, which foretold how the Messiah would open the eyes of the blind and clear the ears of the deaf.  And St. Mark’s Gospel narrates so many healing miracles to prove that point—that Jesus Christ is the long awaited Messiah. 

And yet notice where this miracle took place. The location of Jesus’ miracles is always significant. In today’s passage, he has left his headquarters in Capernaum, and even the surrounding villages of Judea. He has crossed the sea of Galilee with his disciples and has crossed to the eastern side of the sea of Galilee. This is significant i because it shows Jesus extending His ministry beyond the Jewish people to the Gentiles. Jesus is the Messiah not just for the Jews. Jesus fulfills God’s promise to bring salvation, not just to Israel, but to all people, of all places, of all times.

As the deaf man’s ears are opened, so too are the spiritual ears of all who follow Jesus. For Jesus helps us to hear God—to know that we are God’s beloved children, and that we have a God-given mission.

I’d like to consider how this Gospel has particular significance in this particular moment in Church history—during this final year of the Eucharistic revival, this Year of Mission

The deaf mute’s healing in this passage begins with Jesus' direct and intimate physical touch, as He places His fingers in the man’s ears and touches his tongue. This physical encounter mirrors how Jesus comes into real intimate contact with us, through the Eucharist. At Mass, we hear his words, we gaze upon his body and blood, and we physically receive Him. 

And just as Jesus opened the ears of the deaf man, the Eucharistic encounter opens the hearts and souls of Catholics to our vocation to holiness and our vocation for heaven. Additionally, the Eucharist brings us healing. St. Ignatius of Antioch, our patron, called the Eucharist, the medicine of immortality. The Eucharist is medicine, it brings healing that nothing else in the world can bring, because the Eucharist is Jesus the healer, the bestower of the salve of salvation. 

The healed man’s transformation—going from being deaf and mute to hearing and speaking—foreshadows the transformation that we undergo when we allow ourselves to be healed by Christ in the Eucharist. 

In the Gospel story, Jesus addresses both the man’s physical need (his inability to hear and speak) and his deeper need for restoration. In the Eucharist, Jesus fully gives Himself to us, fulfilling the deepest hunger of the human heart—the hunger for God—to know God, to know that we are loved by God. That’s probably something that many of us take for granted, yet it’s something that much of the world is starving for.

And that leads us to Mission. The encounter with Jesus, the healing he works in us, the deepening of our union with him, the transformation he brings about in us, isn’t just so that we can stand around being holy, but the Eucharist propels us into the world to invite others to that fount of healing, transformation, and communion. The Eucharist renews us, but then sends us forth to be Christ’s hands, feet, and voice in a world that is spiritually deaf and in need of hearing the Good News. 

So again, I invite you to read through the Gospel of Mark, in the upcoming days. It is a wonderful Gospel for this Year of Mission. It will deepen your faith, helping you to understand and experience more deeply the One who gathers us week after week around his table—to heal us, form us, and send us out for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time 2024 - Eucharistic Missionaries

 Back in 2022, the Church in the United States began a multi-year initiative of Eucharistic Revival. In the first phase of the Revival, each diocese had gatherings of the faithful. So back in June of 2022, members of the faithful, clergy and religious from the various parishes and institutions gathered with the bishop for a eucharistic procession and mass at the cathedral. We had four members from our parish attend that event launching the Eucharistic Revival.

I’ve continued to meet with those parishioners regularly. Our Light for Love program, in which we opened up the church for the evening, and invited passersby into church to pray with us in front of the blessed Sacrament was just one event that was born out of that diocesan eucharistic synod.

Following the launch of the Revival, each diocese around the country then began to prepare to send representatives to the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, which was held last month. It was the first National Congress in 80 years! 

And what a week it was! There were about four to five hundred Catholics just from our diocese, including 8 from our parish, who joined the 50 to 55 thousand Catholics from around the country for the Congress. It was truly incredible to join so many of the faithful for prayer and worship and faith formation. And even though some of the music was…not quite my style…to join so many souls in prayer for an outpouring of grace—for the Holy Spirit to deepen our love and appreciation for the Eucharist—was truly a awe-inspiring. God is at work to invigorate Catholics in our nation that we may be a light shining in the darkness.  I do hope that our Eucharistic Missionaries will be able to share with you their experience in the coming months.

The Eucharistic Congress began the final phase of the Eucharistic Revival—what the Bishops are calling the Year of Mission which will last until July of 2025. The Year of Mission. Mission, of course, comes from the latin word – missa, which means to be sent. And it is the Bishops’ desire that for the next year we seek to deepen our sense of mission—that especially through the Eucharist God missions us, he sends us into the world. God strengthens us through the eucharist for a purpose, for a reason.

We gather for Mass every week, not simply out of obligation, but because through the Mass God does something—in us, with us, through us. At Mass, we encounter Jesus Christ—we receive him— as food for the journey, the journey out of the doors of the church, into the world, in order to witness, to draw souls to Christ.

The very word Mass, comes from the same latin word, missa, mission. Jesus gathers us in order to sent us out.

In the first reading, the prophet Elijah is being sent by God on a very long mission—a forty day journey to the mountain of God, Mt Horeb—and what does God say to Elijah--"Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!" 

Similarly, in our journey to the mountain of God, heaven, Jesus gives us his flesh to be our food for the journey—because our human strength is insufficient. The Eucharist is the strength we need—it is the spiritual food for the spiritual journey—the journey of being a disciple of Jesus Christ every day—carrying our cross, forgiving our enemies, bearing wrongs patiently, and being attentive to the needs of others, sharing the truth.

The Eucharist strengthens us for the journey, but there are also a lot of things that weaken us on our missionary journey—which can even cause us to fail to finish the race. St. Paul lists some of them in our second reading: “All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice.” Why MUST they be removed? Because they weaken us, they cause us to stumble in the journey. These attitudes, these choices, must be set aside, or else we will not progress in the spiritual life; they diminish the life of God in us.

The Church teaches that Mass is the most important thing we are to do every week. And likely, many of us are not getting as much out of Mass each week, because we are unwilling to let go of those habits and attitudes that the word of God urges us to let go of. 

One reason to make a good holy hour each week, or to make a regular confession, is to humble ourselves before the Lord in order to let go of things that you need to let go of. So often, we are confused about God’s plans for us, or we don’t see the improvement of our relationships with family and friends as we’d like, or we’re bored or unfulfilled. It’s because of those things we are unwilling to let go of. 

But when we trust the Lord to lead us out of those toxic, sinful habits and attitudes, we come to enjoy a freedom, a reconfiguration and realignment, and a discovery of the mission for which God made us—which is the source of joy that nothing in the world can provide.

Speaking of mission and missionaries, today we welcome a true missionary, a sister of the missionaries of the holy rosary, and we will have the opportunity to support the missionary religious orders like hers in our second collection. I now invite sister to the ambo.