Fr. JC Maximilian

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asks this question of the blind man Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel, yet He asks the question of us as well. By looking closely at Jesus’ encounter with Bartimaeus we should learn how we should respond to Jesus when He asks us what do we want Him to do for us.

First we should note that this event in Jesus’ earthly ministry happens when He is on the road to Jerusalem. Jesus has already predicted His own death three times, and as we have been hearing in the Gospel readings for the past few weeks, Jesus has been instructing the apostles on what true discipleship entails. Jerusalem stands for more than just the capital of Israel or even its religious center. It is in Jerusalem where Jesus makes the eternal sacrifice that conquers sin and death. Jerusalem is a sign for paradise; where we will live in union with God forever. Jerusalem is the sign of true freedom.

In today’s first reading we hear from the Prophet Jeremiah. The Book of Jeremiah is not filled with much joy. Throughout most of it the Prophet warns the people to stop looking at themselves for their salvation, but to give themselves to God. Jeremiah sees the people reject God’s call, and in their blindness they are conquered and taken into exile. However, in the 31st chapter of Jeremiah the Prophet bursts into this oracle of joy, anticipating the time when God Himself will lead the people out of their exile back to their home in Jerusalem. Of course the real events that lead us to freedom and our eternal home is Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection.

And there, on the road to Jerusalem as Jesus is passing by is the blind man Bartimaeus. His name is rather interesting. In Hebrew “bar” means “son of”, while in Latin “timeo” means “fear.” In a certain sense Bartimaeus’ name means, “son of fear,” and isn’t it fear that keeps us from following the Lord’s call so often? When Bartimaeus hears that it is Jesus who is passing by, he casts off his fear, and responding to the moment of grace, Bartimaeus expresses his faith in Jesus by calling Him the Son of David, another title for the Messiah. Bartimaeus is open to God’s loving presence in his life. At first the people around him tell him to shut up and be quiet, but Bartimaeus perseveres against the many voices which try to silence him; the “son of fear” courageously persists in his openness to God, and Jesus calls him to Himself.

With joy Bartimaeus “sprang up, and came to Jesus.” Remember, Bartimaeus is blind. Blind people do not usually “spring up.” They have to be concerned about tripping, falling, and bumping into things. However, in his faith, Bartimaeus puts all his trust in Jesus, the Son of David; the Son of God.

“What do you want me to do for you?” “Master, I want to see.” “Go on your way, your faith has saved you.” Then Bartimaeus, after receiving his sight, follows Jesus on the way. We should note that Bartimaeus is the first person, besides the Apostles, who is described as following Jesus on the way. “The way” means more than just the physical road to Jerusalem. Rather “the way” is a whole new life leading to the eternal Jerusalem.

“What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus still asks us that question today. How many of us would be quick to give Jesus many answers to that question, “a new house,” “to win the lottery,” “to be cured of some illness,” etc. Jesus is serious when He asks us this question. We need to take the question seriously, and not superficially. We need to consider the question in all its transcendence and always from the perspective of eternity. St. Catherine of Siena once said, “There are more tears shed over answered prayers than over unanswered prayers.”

While Bartimaeus asked to see, his blindness must not be seen as just a physical blindness. Bartimaeus stands for all who are in spiritual blindness, and all of us suffer from some spiritual blindness. The response we give to Jesus when he asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” will define what we receive.

We are called to follow Christ along “the way,” as Bartimaeus did. Following God’s will always means getting up and moving on. It means leaving old ways and things behind. We must deny the so-called “logic” of the flesh and our materialistic society which puts all hope in human securities and achievements. We must put all our hope in God. We must abandon ourselves completely into God’s hands.

This is not easy. In the past Western society was largely defined and imbued with Christian faith and culture. The overall culture shared a worldview that was in harmony with the Gospel. That is no longer the case. We live in a prevailing culture of death. This does not just refer to our society’s acceptance of abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic stem cells. No, the culture of death refers to all the ways in which modern, secular culture tries to redefine what God has decreed. Just this week, here in our own State, we see how the culture of death is trying to redefine the nature of marriage and family. A former governor was quoted as saying he wants to have his homosexual relationship “blessed.” Only God can bless things, and He is very clear that marriage is between one man and one woman. The culture of death has brought about a rupture with the truth of Christ. Jesus said that He is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” so when we break with the truth of Christ we become blind, and worse yet, in that blindness is death.

What better time to be a disciple of Jesus! The world so desperately needs the Good News of Jesus Christ. When Jesus asks us, “What do you want me to do for you?” the best answer we can give is “You!” We need Jesus! We need to become New Men and Women in Christ. Then as His disciples we are entrusted with the question, and bring others to Jesus.

Yesterday I was driving past one of the local Baptist churches which always has a saying on their marquee sign in front. Their saying for this week caused me to laugh out loud. It says, “Stop, Drop and Roll will not work well in Hell.”

I am sure that some of the so-called “more enlightened,” will be shocked at the reference to Hell, but it needs to be talked about, yet in too many Catholic parishes there is a reluctance to talk about Hell, or even Judgment, because it might upset somebody.

Eschatology is the branch of theology that deals with the Four Last Things, namely, Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. It seems to me that no one has a problem talking about Heaven. For many people they talk about it as if it is that retirement home that they have already paid for. While I certainly hope that all souls go to Heaven, we need to guard against the sin of presumption. Christ has won the victory over sin and death which makes Heaven a possibility for us, but we still need to accept and cooperate with the grace of Salvation that He offers us. In a certain way, presumption is a sin against the Divine Gift of Free Will that God has given us. God has made us for Heaven, but He will not force it on us.

I knew a priest who thought he was being so terribly “traditional” because he reminded people that Purgatory was real possibility besides immediately going to Heaven after death. While this is a step in the right direction, the real alternative to Heaven is Hell, not Purgatory. Purgatory is not for eternity (despite the TERRIBLE “theology” in the movie Van Helsing in which a family was condemned to spend eternity in purgatory). For the souls in Purgatory, Hell is NOT a possibility — they have been judged worthy of Heaven; they just need to atone for the damage they committed to the Body of Christ. While God is Perfect Love, He is also Perfect Justice. In the end there are only two places in which we will end up — Heaven or Hell. And in case you have not heard this in a while, Hell is a very bad place to end up. We should fear going to Hell. While perfect contrition springs from filial fear of God (we are sorry for our sins because they offend God who is all good, and not just because of our fear of going to Hell), servial fear is not a bad starting place. This is one of the reasons I do not like how they have “renamed” the Gifts of the Holy Spirit in most Confirmation classes so that Fear of the Lord becomes “Awe and Wonder”.

One of the options that a priest has in vesting for a funeral Mass is to wear violet (the other two are white and black), and I usually wear violet. Some people have asked me why, especially since I do not “match” the pall covering the casket. First, the pall over the casket is white because it represents the baptismal garment. I wear violet to remind people of God’s Divine Judgment and the need for repentance.

Hell is a bad place to be. Try to avoid it. To quote St. John, “My children, love one another for love is of God.”

One of the tasks that I, and seemingly a lot of other priests, do not like to do is write the Prayers of the Faithful, also known as General Intercessions. There is a pattern that we are suppose to follow; after an invitation to prayer there should be an intercession for the Church (Pope, bishops, priests, etc.), then for civil leaders, special concerns (homelessness, natural disaster victims, etc.), local needs, then the sick and the dead, and ending with a prayer offering these intercessions to God. In the busyness of our lives we often look for good published books with General Intercessions which we can use or at least adapt.

I have been being mocked since this summer. When I was in St. Louis for my niece’s First Holy Communion, the parish there had a book of General Intercessions that I had not seen before. A very quick scan of it, lead me to think it might be useful (it has general intercessions for all the Sundays and Solemnities, for all three years of the Lectionary cycle), so we purchased a copy of it. It has proven to be shockenly bad. Here are the intercessions for the Assumption:

“For the beautiful, that they will grow more hansome with age, we pray to the Lord.”
“For the homely, that their hearts may be beautiful enough to show through, we pray to the Lord.”
“For the old, that we may love their mellowness and character, we pray to the Lord.”
“For the middle-aged, that we may admire their strength and support their weariness, we pray to the Lord.”
“For the young, that we may be tolerant of their youth, we pray to the Lord.”

Could you imagine what kind of response we would have gotten for praying for the homely? I guess the young have nothing to offer, we must simply tolerate them.

Or how about these for the Immaculate Conception:
“For those who haul garbage, clean our parks and streets, inhale dirt and fumes, that their work and lives will be blessed as they help us keep the world clean, ….”
“For employers whose primary interest is in effciency, self-confidence, and good appearance, that they will also hire the ugly, create a demand for the unwanted, and support those who are new on the job, ….”

I think the author has a hang up about their appearance. While some of the intercessions in the book are OK, I guess the search continues.

Today’s Gospel reading, about the Rich Young Man, has a special place in my heart. When I was in the seminary, taking my first homiletics practicum, this was the first Gospel I was assigned to preach on. As I have reflected on this passage I have always been struck by the richness of Christ’s teaching. In giving a homily to a group of seminarians I focused on Jesus’ courage to be disliked – He most likely knew that the rich young man would not like what He told him, but Jesus had the courage to say it anyway. Yet Scripture is so rich that as I sat to prepare this homily the Holy Spirit prompted me to talk about something else.

As I hope you were aware, our parish recently hosted a lecture series entitled, “From the Religious Sense to Christianity: The Basic Writings of Msgr. Luigi Giussani, the Founder of Communion and Liberation.” The works of Msgr. Giussani are quite profound, yet as I meditated on today’s Gospel I saw how the basic structure of Msgr. Guissani’s theological project is found within this Gospel passage.

First notice that the rich young man “ran” to Jesus. There was a deep excitement and eagerness to learn what he needed to do to inherit everlasting life. We all seek happiness, we all seek fulfillment, we all long for understanding. These deepest human desires are what Msgr. Giussani calls the “Religious Sense.” Some of our desires can be satisfied easily, on my own. If I am hungry I have a desire for food, but if I eat a sandwich that desire becomes satisfied and I no longer have it – at least not for a while. However, there are other desires of which we can never completely satisfy. Can we ever have enough “justice” or “truth” or “goodness” or “love”? No, when we experience these, we desire them all the more. We see this expressed beautifully in today’s first reading from the Book of Wisdom.

Notice also that the man called Jesus “good teacher.” Jesus, in saying to the man “why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone,” was not rejecting the praise the man was offering Him. Rather Jesus wanted to do two things. First He wanted to show the depth of meaning of the man’s words: Jesus is good not because He is a good man, but because He is God, who is goodness itself. In pointing this out, Jesus is showing us that these deepest longings of the human heart, which prompted the rich young man to run to Jesus, and what Msgr. Giussani calls the “Religious Sense,” can only be fulfilled by God who is infinite Love, infinite Good, infinite Truth, infinite Justice.

Secondly, Jesus wanted to caution the young man, and all of us. The Christian life is not something of mere, overflowing emotion. It cannot be a sentimental passion for just the human Jesus that attracts us to being a Christian, rather we must look at God – see the divinity in Jesus and not just His humanity. Jesus in effect told the man to “Stop and think!” The fullness of love is not mere emotion, but is also reason and an act of the will.

This is the second component of Msgr. Giussani’s theological project; he calls it the “Origin of the Christian Claim,” — simply that God, who is the fulfillment of our deepest desires, came into time and history, “the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us.” It is our faith in Jesus, the God-Man, that makes us Christians, and our encounter with Jesus is what truly makes us happy.

Our desire for Christ needs to be the first priority in our lives. Our relationship with Jesus must color everything that we do; all the decisions we make. We cannot allow anything to become more important than our love for God and our desire to do His will. Yet the road is often filled with many difficulties, and often we are tempted to give up and find happiness in counterfeits of God’s love and truth. These counterfeits are the idols which the Prophets warned the People of God against throughout the Old Testament, and which are too often still a stumbling block for us today. Jesus, looking at the man with the eyes of Divine Love, saw the idols of wealth and prestige in the man’s life and called him to turn away from his idols to follow Him – the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The rich young man walked away sad. Do we?

Msgr. Giussani tells a story in one of his books which is appropriate for today’s reading. Imagine that you are a prospector looking for gold; you spend years looking for it. Once day a person comes up to you and says, “I know where you can find a lot of gold. I have mined it for years and have become very rich. I know that there is still a lot of gold there, and I want to share my good fortune with you.” He then tells you to go to the river and go to a certain spot, where in the middle of the river, under a deep level of very black mud, you will find the gold. How many of us would say, “No, I don’t want to have to go into that cold water, fight against the current, and dig through all that filthy mud to get to the gold. If the gold was all nice and clean from mud, and sitting on the bank of the river, I would take it, but not when it is in the river covered by mud.”

Wouldn’t we be crazy to say something like that? Yet too often we do just that. NOTHING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD! God is our Gold! Yet how often do we make excuses for missing Mass because of work or sports or vacation or any number of other reasons? How often to we fail to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ by our lives because people might not like the witness we give? Or some people say that it does not matter what they do because “Jesus is my friend,” without recognizing that He is also our Lord and Savior, God-in-the-Flesh. Or they allow the hardships in this life, and even the scandals in the Church, to make them bitter, angry, or discouraged? When we do that we are choosing the mud over the gold. Choose Christ! Follow Jesus!

Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary. Often when priests preach about this memorial the focus is on the Rosary as a prayer, but not the history of why this memorial was created. Those that do might mention that it celebrates the naval victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, but do they explain what that battle was all about, who was fighting who?

The Battle of Lepanto was a battle between the Christian, European forces (yes, Virginia, there was a time when Europe was Christian) and Muslim forces. Muslims fighting Christians? Have you ever heard of that before?

Now, history is rarely simple. You really cannot say that one side of a conflict was all wrong and the other side was all good. It is a sad part of Christian history that we too have tried to spread the Gospel by the sword (not really what I think the God of Love would want). However, Muslims cannot say that they have not historically tried to spread their faith by the sword.

If you follow this link http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52338 you can read a nice little summary of events leading up to the Battle of Lepanto. Basically for the previous 1000 years the Muslim forces, mostly Turks, had been invading and conquering Christian lands. While the Christians had fought back, it was not very organized (a lot of “well that’s not my problem”). I am sure there were plenty of brutalities on all sides. We know that the one Muslim leader had a Christian leader skinned alive, and then enslaved 12,000 Christians as galley slaves in the war ships. The Holy League was formed because the European leaders finally realized that, to quote John Hancock of the US Revolution, “if we do not hang together, we will surely hang separately.” In the end, the smaller Christian allied navy destroyed the Muslim navy, and Don Juan freed the 12,000 enslaved Christians. It was the one of the largest naval battles in history, and the last one involved oared ships. However, it was a short lived victory, for the Muslims rebuilt their navy and went back to harassing the Christian trade routes.

My point here is not some type of triumphalism. It is to point out that there has been a long history of conflict between Christian civilization and Muslim civilization. We believe in a God who loves us so much that He sent His only Begotten Son into the world, to become a man like us in all things but sin, not to condemn the world but to save it. Jesus, the Son of God and Son of Mary, perfectly reveal God the Father (yes, I am dissenting from the Archbishop of Canterbury who recently issued a letter to the “clergy” of the Church of England that told them to stop referring God as Father and Lord because those terms may lead to domestic violence). Jesus also perfectly revealed Man (male and female) to himself, and his relationship with God. Jesus then sacrificed Himself to atone for our sins, but in rising from the dead He destroyed sin and death. Jesus then promised to remain with us for eternity. Christianity is a civilization of love and reason (again, sadly, too often we have not acted civilized). Islam considers it a sacrilege to think that God would enter into human history in such a personal way.

However, there is common ground. Archbishop Fulton Sheen, in his book The World’s First Love, noted that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the means for the conversion of Muslims. In Islam, Mary the mother of Jesus, is held in very high esteem. Infact she is given higher honor than even Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad. Isn’t it interesting that Our Lady appeared in a town named in honor of Muhammad’s daughter? Mary is the way. Hers is not a way of violence, but a way of prayer and peace; a way of ever drawing close to Jesus and seeking only to do the will of God. Let us, particularly today, pray for peace for all the world, especially between Christians and Muslims.

I guess for someone who just came home from vacation, I really should not be feeling like today’s reading from the Book of Job in which he laments the day he was born, but I really think that I am the Born-Loser.

I came back from my cruise to Alaska to be faced with a lot of issues concerning my Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob is my father’s older brother. While he is only 70, he has a lot of medical problems, and my parents really allowed him the illusion of independence the five years after my grandmother (with whom Uncle Bob lived) died. With my father’s illness last fall, and then his death, I promised my dad that I would look after Uncle Bob, and became his power-of-attorney. Uncle Bob agreed to move into assisted living, last February, so I thought that things would become much easier for Mom and I. How wrong I was. While I helped Mom as much as I could, Mom really was the one who cleaned out Uncle Bob’s house to get it ready to be sold. But we did sell it pretty quick, so we thought it would just be visiting Unlce Bob.

I did not realize that assisted living really means, “pay $111/day, but we don’t help him with really anything.” He seems to have constant doctor appointments, and we have to take him (mostly Mom). They call to complain regularly (Uncle Bob is hard of hearing, so they find his TV/radio too loud).

At the end of August Uncle Bob seemed to take a turn for the worse. He fell at 4 a.m., and needed 7 staples in the top of his head. A week later he fell again, this time breaking his ankle. He had surgery on Labor Day for that, and then got transferred to a rehab hospital attached to the assisted living and nursing home facility he is at. That first weekend I thought he was going to die. He was so out of it; I had to go up to feed him one night. Mom has been doing his laundry. It turned out he had pneumonia. He is better now, but he is not improving in rehab as much as he should. It seems as if he has no motivation.

They really cannot keep him in rehab much longer, and the assisted living place will not take him back because he needs too much help with everything (but we are still paying $111/day). I thought it would be an automatic “step up” to the nursing home, but they have no beds, and do not expect one for 2-3 months. So they want us to move him to another nursing home until he can get into the one there. I think if he is never going to get back to the level where he can function in assisted living, we should just find a permanent nursing home placement. They want me to fill out the paperwork ASAP, but they do not call back to tell me what they think his long term prognosis is.

Today I have been mostly doing Uncle Bob’s paperwork and banking (the real annoyance is that the application for the nursing home is the same, just check a different box, as the one that I completed to get him into assisted living, but they needed a new application anyway). Mom met him at the dentist; oh yeah, all of his upper teeth are falling out. Mom has been running all day for him too. This has not been a great way to come back from vacation.

I will try to find time to write about the cruise to Alaska; it was very beautiful. I was the chaplain onboard, which had some cool things too. I did read a fantastic book, With God In Russia, the story of Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. Read it if you have not yet.