Home > 25th Anniversary Homily
Rev. William M. Lies, C.S.C. Notre Dame, Indiana
Basilica of the Sacred Heart
April 19, 2008 10:00 am Video of the Anniversary Mass.
A couple of years ago
I was part of a faculty seminar
on Catholic Social Teaching.
It was organized by Arts and Letters,
and there were fifteen of us;
we read a lot, and we met a couple hours every month
with a different speaker…
an impressive group from Notre Dame
and around the Country.
Among them were Scott Appleby
and George Weigel and Gustavo Gutierrez.
When we met with Gustavo,
the father of liberation theology, who teaches here now,
he gave an amazing reprise of the theology of liberation
and then his perspective on the response of the Church
and the signs of the times.
It was a gentle, inspiring talk.
When he finished,
one of our colleagues was anxious to tell him a story…
she seemed almost desperate.
She said that recently her class had been discussing poverty
and our social responsibility in the face of it,
when one of her students spoke up and said,
“You know, this is all well and good,
but you know what? I just don’t really care.”
Well, she was bummed out telling the story…
and we were bummed out to hear it.
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Now, I know what you’re thinking…
“Great… here’s Bill Lies at the 25th Anniversary Mass
for the Center for Social Concerns,
and he’s talking about how our students don’t care about the poor
and how we’re all bummed out about it… oh brother!”
But wait… it’s not all I have to say…
and I don’t pretend that this is the attitude of all of our students—
indeed, we all know it’s not… not even close—
and I’ll tell you about Gustavo’s response in a second.
But it does prompt me to ask an important question.
What happened?
Friends, what happened to the hope of today’s Gospel story?
What became of those words of Jesus,
the words that—as he said to the people in the synagogue that day—
“are fulfilled in your hearing?”
We know the words:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
And we know how Jesus rolls up the scroll,
and hands it back to the one he took it from and sits down,
and how the eyes of all in the synagogue
stare at him, and he says:
“Today, this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
What happened?
What became of those words of Jesus?
Maybe the words were lost right away?
The people in the synagogue on that Sabbath
were probably like most of us now,
sometimes only half here, half present to the present,
half hearing the nice message.
The people probably found it comforting
to hear this Jesus, one of their number,
read that a Savior, a Messiah,
would come to bring good news to the poor…
and proclaim liberty to captives…
and give sight to the blind
and let the oppressed go free… some day.
A lovely thought.
Something to look forward to… no demands for now.
They were probably pretty shaken up
when Jesus put down the book and said,
"Today, these words are fulfilled in your hearing."
In fact, we know they were a little more than shaken up…
it made them really mad.
They’d become so accustomed to waiting
that they weren’t willing to do anything else.
They couldn’t even begin to be present,
present to the very moment they’d been waiting for.
Here it was, right here, right now… and they missed it…
they missed what Martin Luther King described as
“the fierce urgency of the now.”
They just couldn’t see it…
couldn’t begin to believe that
this one, here, now, could be the Messiah.
In fact, Jesus got them so riled up
that just a bit later in the passage
they try to throw him off a cliff.
What happened?
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I wonder if we aren’t sometimes like them,
the people in that synagogue that day?
Have we grown so accustomed to waiting
for Christ to come again
that we can hardly believe
that the Messiah is among us… here… now?
You know, the Spirit of the Lord
that Jesus talks about in the Gospel today,
the one that anointed him…
well, that same Spirit has anointed us…
anointed us for the same mission.
And the social teaching of the Church
is at the core of that mission.
It is rooted in the Hebrew prophets
who announced God's special love for the poor
and called God's people to a covenant of love and justice.
It is a teaching founded on the life and words of Jesus Christ,
and it is founded on these words in the Gospel today,
because Jesus really did come "to bring glad tidings…
and liberty… and sight… and freedom… and life,”
and Jesus really did identify himself with "the least among us,"
the hungry, and the homeless, and the stranger,
and the ones on the margins of his day.
And that’s why, as the bishops put it,
“Catholic social teaching is based on and inseparable from
our understanding of human life and human dignity.
Every human being is created
in the image of God and redeemed by Jesus Christ,
and therefore is invaluable and worthy of respect
as a member of the human family.”
(Sharing Catholic Social Teaching, NCCB).
But sadly, we barely know our rich social heritage.
We barely share it or teach it in any consistent way in our schools,
our seminaries, our religious ed programs,
or, I daresay, even our colleges and universities.
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And this brings me back…
to my really compelling story about our faculty seminar
on Catholic Social Teaching and Gustavo’s response.
So, there we were, from all sorts of disciplines,
wondering “What happened?,”
wondering how good a job we were doing,
and still a little mortified as we thought about
our colleague’s desperate question: “What do I do?”
Well, Gustavo spoke up that day,
“Listen,” he said, “we can tell our students
what we want them to hear,
we can give them what we want them to read,
we can even try to tell them what we want them to think,
but until they walk in the shoes of the poor,
until they spend time in their homes or on their streets,
until they know them… befriend them,
nothing much will happen, they will not understand.”
_____________________
Friends, as we celebrate
the Center for Social Concerns this weekend,
we celebrate Notre Dame’s effort…
and so many people’s passion and contribution…
to the grounding of Catholic social tradition in faith
through coursework, service and action at this special place.
And we celebrate all who have been touched and transformed
by these efforts.
We celebrate the living witnesses.
And we come here today,
as much as for any other reason
because we know of our need to walk in the footsteps
of those on the margins.
We know we have to hear anew these Gospel words,
the words Jesus proclaims.
And instead of waiting some more with impatience,
like the people of the synagogue that day,
we realize that we are the people that we have been waiting for.
_____________________
If as the bishops have said,
“the sharing of our social tradition
is a defining measure of our education and formation,”
then living it ought to be a defining measure of our lives.
In love and mercy, Jesus reached out to all in need.
Like the master, so the followers.
We who bear the name of Christ, as Christians,
must take on Christ's mission.
It is our mission—as individuals and as a community—
to bring Good News to the poor in our society…
to defend the defenseless,
and to make sure that those
who are not heard in this global, noisy world
are heard.
Today, we are challenged
to stretch out our hands in practical solidarity
with those all around us.
As Christians we should not only
be concerned with saving people's souls,
we should be concerned with saving their bodies, too…
their health, their housing and their jobs.
The Good News is for every person
and for the whole person, body and soul.
Friends, these are complicated days.
It’s time for some good news… it’s time for jubilee.
It’s time for us to be that good news.
It’s time for us to make that happen.
So, bring glad tidings to the poor… and liberty to the captive… and sight to the blind… and freedom to the oppressed.
Today, my friends, let these words… let this Gospel…
be fulfilled in your hearing.
Let it be fulfilled with your life!
