Ordinary Time 29 - Christian Friendship

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 29

October 19, 2025

Christian Friendship

 

            A young college student named Francis ended up being assigned an interesting roommate: an older man, an ex-soldier, named Ignatius, who had just gone through a major conversion to Christ. Francis was a party animal who wanted nothing of Ignatius’ religiosity, but despite their differences, the two became close friends and ended up rooming together for three years. They got along well except for one annoying habit: every single day, Ignatius would say to his friend, “Francis, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?”

            Day after day, Ignatius would say this, and Francis grew rather annoyed. He told him to mind his own business, that he wasn’t all that religious and that this question was really bothersome: “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” But Ignatius never stopped – year after year.

            It began to wear down his younger friend. Finally, in the third year of college, Francis broke down and realized that Ignatius was right – it was meaningless to pursue all the parties, the girls, the success without even a thought to his own soul. He finally said, “Ignatius, you’re right. I’ve been wasting my life without Christ. What must I do?” Ignatius told him about a new group he was founding, called the Company of Jesus, and Francis agreed to join. We now know them as St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, two of the first six Jesuits. It was friendship that led Francis to become a saint!

            All of us need friends – and our readings are all about that. In the first reading, Moses is given a task by God to help Israel win the battle, by raising his hands aloft. But he couldn’t do that without Aaron and Hur to help him when he grew tired. In the second reading, Paul is writing to his friend and protégé Timothy, who is a close collaborator in Paul’s work. Neither Paul nor Moses were a “lone ranger” – they knew that they needed others to accomplish God’s tasks.

            We too need Christian friends, but we are sometimes afraid to admit it. A 2020 study found that 28% of young men say they have zero close friends. So many are turning to technology – a Pew Research Study from 2024 revealed that 67% of young adults have interacted with an AI “companion” (a website where you can have a “conversation” with a computer that responds like a real person) and 23% prefer digital relationships to human relationships. But our hearts yearn for real, authentic, healthy friendships – all of us!

            But what makes a Christian friendship unique? Aristotle identifies three levels of friendship. First is friendship of utility – I’m friends with this person because they can do something for me. Maybe they can help my career, or they’re one of the “cool kids,” or they just take away my loneliness. But fundamentally this is based on using another person, not love. A second type of friendship is friendship of pleasure – I’m friends with this person because we like to do fun stuff together. This would be our fishing buddies, sports teammates, coworkers with whom we like to share a drink. Nothing wrong with these friendships, but they’re pretty shallow and they don’t require a whole lot of commitment. But Aristotle mentions a third, deeper kind of friendship – what he calls friendship of virtue, where we have a common goal of becoming a virtuous, holy person and pursuing Christ together. This is a deep, lasting friendship based on the only enduring bond: the love of Jesus Christ.

            So how do we find those kinds of friendships? A wise priest once gave some profound dating advice that we can apply to friendships: “Start running after Jesus, and once you’ve been running after Him for a while, look around and see who’s running with you. That’s who you should date.” That’s also who you should become friends with – people who are pursuing Christ, who make you a better person. One day I opened a Dove chocolate to find the inside message to be quite profound: “Your vibe attracts your tribe.” If you pursue Christ, you will find Christ-centered friendships.

            But then, of course, we have to actually go out and seek friendships, instead of waiting for them to come to us. My mom had a great saying: “The phone works both ways” – in other words, instead of waiting for someone else to take the initiative in a friendship, maybe I need to go out and get to know fellow Christians – through Walking With Purpose, our men’s groups, Youth Encounters, etc. I know everyone thinks they’re an introvert, but really we’re just all stuck in our middle-school mindset where we’re afraid of rejection. And that’s where Christ can help us – if we realize that we are profoundly, passionately loved by Him, then we can take risks in relationships because we are grounded in our identity in Christ. No matter whether I fit into this group or develop this friendship, my deeper friendship with Christ is unshakeable.

            But there’s the key – our deepest friendship must be with Christ. But let me ask – do you have only a friendship of utility with Him? I often bring food to Cardinal Kung because you win the hearts of teenagers through their stomachs. So I had a plate of cookies one day and this sixth-grader named Kenny asked if he could have one. I gave him one and he replied, “Gee, Fr. Joseph, you’re very easy to manipulate!” Kids say the darndest things…but don’t we often treat God like that, just a Divine Vending Machine? “What do I want today – healing, a job, help on a test…” and we put in our three Hail Mary’s and think that we will get what we want. But apart from asking God from stuff, we don’t ever spend time with Him.

            This is a friendship of utility, and it is not the point of the Gospel! Jesus talks about how God wants to give us good things if we persevere in prayer, but then He says these words which have always haunted me: “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?” In other words, are we merely using God to get what we want, or will we have a living faith that seeks Him for His sake, loves Him, and trusts that He gives us what we truly need?

            We develop that kind of friendship with Christ in a similar manner as our other friends. We spend time with Him – prayer, the Sacraments. We listen to Him – He speaks through His Word in the Bible. We begin to adopt His values. We try to please Him in our thoughts, words, and deeds.

            So, pursue Christian friendships – we deeply desire them, and they will make us happier and holier. And most fundamentally, pursue a friendship with Christ. Then our faith becomes less about a set of doctrines and rules, and more about a love affair with a God Who calls us “friends”.

Ordinary Time 28 - The Cure Of A Soul

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 28

October 12, 2025

The Cure of the Soul

 

            One of the great conversion stories in Christianity is the conversion of St. Francis of Assisi. He started out his life as a playboy, a party animal, and one who wanted fame and fortune as a knight. But his knightly career came to a halt when he was captured in battle and imprisoned for a year. This got him thinking – what is the purpose of my life? Am I truly happy pursuing the things of this world? What if, instead, I lived for God?

            When he was finally released, he began to pray, make sacrifices, and live in poverty so as to depend on God alone. But there was still one thing he hadn’t given to God – he was repulsed and disgusted at the sight of leprosy, which is a disfiguring disease of the skin where the sufferer begins to look so completely deformed that they look monstrous. Francis would be literally nauseated if he had to pass by one of those poor sufferers – but he knew that these poor souls were Jesus in disguise – and he would not be able to be a saint unless he was able to love Jesus in the distressing disguise of the poor.

            So one day on his journeys, Francis came across a beggar who was particularly hideously disfigured from this disease. He knew it was now-or-never – he had to be “all-in” for Christ. So he dismounted his horse, came up to the man who was begging, and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Instantly, the man was cured of his disease – but more importantly, St. Francis was cured of his repulsion to the sick. Francis’ first biographer, St. Bonaventure (who knew the saint personally), later wrote of this incident: “I don’t know what I should admire: such a cure, or such a kiss.” A man cured of leprosy, and a saint cured of selfishness – both acts of God!

            Naaman experienced both in the first reading. Naaman was a military general from Syria, which meant he was a pagan – he worshipped the Syrian gods. He had come to the Jewish prophet Elisha because he had heard rumors of his miracles – he came and was healed of his disease. But more importantly, he was healed of his idolatry. Greater than the physical miracle was the spiritual conversion, when he could declare, “Now I know there is no God except the God of Israel!”

            This same conversion happens to the Samaritan in the Gospel. Samaritans were dirty half-breeds, which is why the Jews hated them – they were half-Jewish, half-Babylonians, who didn’t worship God in the Temple in Jerusalem but instead worshipped God on a mountain called Mount Gerazim. They denied most of the Old Testament and only accepted the first five books, called the Torah. Basically, they had a corrupted relationship with God.

            So when the Samaritan receives his physical healing, he was also instantly converted to a right relationship with God when he comes back to worship Jesus Christ. Yes, he has gratitude, but more importantly, he has faith – and that is a more important miracle than a physical healing.

            Consider all the good things He has given us – He gave us life, family and friends, health, gifts and talents, this beautiful natural world. When we had turned our back on him through sin, He so desperately wanted to be with us that He took the punishment for all our sins and died in our stead. And now He passionately wants a personal relationship with us that lasts into eternity. How good is our God!

            And yet all these good things are meant for one thing only: for our holiness, that we may live in union with God. These blessings from God are not ends in themselves, but means to the end of loving God more perfectly. God desires primarily the spiritual health of the soul!

            This is important to remember when we are faced with suffering, too. Let’s be honest – how many of us turn to God more when we’re suffering than when we’re happy? And this is why God often does not answer our prayers for healing, or financial help, or fixing broken relationships – because perhaps those things we want would cause us to forget about God, or we wanted them just for our own ego or comfort. Consider – what would we do with that good health if God gave it to us? Would we use our strength to serve Him and do good to others, or do we want it just so we can be comfortable and resume our usual hobbies? What would we do with that financial success that we so desperately want – would we use it for generosity to others, or for self-indulgent purchases? Would our health or financial security make us think that we were in charge of our destiny, and we’d lose our desperate dependence upon God? God desires our souls to be cured of the disease of selfishness, sin, egoism, addictions…and suffering is often His bitter, but effective, medicine.

            But why? Because we live in a broken world – due to Original Sin, that brokenness that has been passed down from generation to generation. We intuit that there is something wrong with the universe and that we were made for more than this! But despite this mess, God is bringing something beautiful out of it: to make us like Christ. When we endure suffering with patience and joy, we are made more like Christ. When we feed the hungry and shelter the homeless, we are made more like Christ. When we struggle against our own sinful temptations, we are made more like Christ. When we trust God despite our struggles at work, we are made more like Christ. When we are lonely but use that as an opportunity to develop a friendship with God, we are made more like Christ. Every brokenness, illness, loneliness, fear, setback, disappointment, insult, or death can be an opportunity to become more like Christ – even if our problems don’t go away, our souls are made holy through grace.

            A perfect example of this is St. Dymphna, the patron saint of those with mental illness. Dymphna was the daughter of King Damon of Ireland in the 7^th Century. Damon was a loving Christian man, but when his wife died, he began to be so overwhelmed with grief that he started to lose his mind. In his insane grief, he decided to kill his daughter because she reminded him so much of his lost wife. Dymphna, hearing of this, decided to flee the country, so she sailed to Belgium where she settled in a small town called Geel (no relation to me!). Being a princess, she was fabulously wealthy, so once in her new country she founded the first-ever hospital for those with mental illness, in honor of her beloved father who struggled with it. So many people flocked to this hospital that even the townspeople had to welcome patients into their homes – which became a tradition even to this day! Even now, hundreds upon hundreds of people with severe mental illness live with families in the Belgian town of Geel, where they are treated with charity and respect as one of the family, and given the opportunity to live normal and healthy lives. From Dymphna’s mother’s tragic death and her father’s mental illness and her own exile to a new land, God has brought great good to the world…and made her a saint!

            Our readings today feature two great miracles – a physical healing, but more than that, the cure of a soul. When we experience the blessings of this world, they are meant to lead to our holiness as we experience the goodness of God and a foretaste of Heaven. But when we instead encounter suffering, this too is a blessing from God, for it helps us become like Christ and reminds us that we were made for a better world: Heaven!

Ordinary Time 27 - Increase Our Faith

 

Homily for Ordinary Time 27

October 5, 2025

Increase Our Faith

 

            People will say to me all the time, “I love my faith.” What do they mean by that? Do they mean that they love hearing “Ave Maria” at funerals and getting ashes on Ash Wednesday and lighting a candle at church? Signs and symbols, sentiment and rituals, are not the same as faith.

            Rather, according to the Catechism, there are three elements of faith. First, faith means believing that God exists. This is something that we take for granted, but how do we know? St. Thomas Aquinas gave us five proofs for God’s existence, but I’d like to share two of them with you.

            First, consider anything material that exists – this church building, your clothes, the donut you ate for breakfast. Everything was caused by something else – this roof came from trees, which came from seeds, which came from other trees, all the way back. Nothing material simply exists without being caused by something outside of itself. But the entire universe is a material thing – hence, it needs to have a cause outside of itself. We call God, then, the Uncaused Cause. But wait – who caused God to exist? The answer is that causality requires time – there was a time when this roof didn’t exist, and even when those timbers and logs didn’t exist, but they do exist now, and someday they may stop existing. But outside of time, there is no before or after, no beginning or end, so speaking about “causing” outside of time doesn’t make sense. God dwells in the eternal “now” – so there was not a time when He did not exist, because time itself does not exist in eternity. Thus, God is the Uncaused Cause.

            A second clear argument is very simple: anything that has a design needs a designer. If I see a painting, I can assume there is an artist, even if I don’t see the artist herself. The universe clearly has a very specific design – for example, our DNA acts as a computer code, containing upon the amino acids information that tells our cells what to do. But information that is intelligible (aka, able to be understood) requires an intelligence to both inscribe it there and for another intelligence to decode it. It is our human intelligences that decoded much of our DNA to understand the genetic code, which means that there must be an Intelligence at least as smart as ours to have written it there in the first place.

            A very brilliant man named Avery Dulles was converted through this argument. He was an atheist in law school in Harvard when one day he went for a walk along the Charles River, just as the trees were in their spring bloom. It struck him that all the trees knew when to bloom, and they did it in unison and at the same time every year. How would they know when to do it? It was as if some vast intelligence had programmed these insentient trees to have a genetic knowledge…who could this vast intelligence be except God? He began to believe, converted to Catholicism, and became a Jesuit priest and a Cardinal.

            The second element of faith, according to the Catechism, is that after we believe that God exists, we believe in His promises. Many people lose their Faith in God because they don’t understand what He promised…and what He didn’t. Did He promise that life would be easy? Did He promise that if we prayed, all our problems would go away? Nothing of the sort. However, He did promise that all things work for good for those who love Him. He promised that He would be with us always, until the end of the age. He promised that those who believe in Him will have eternal life.

            As Pastor Rick Warren likes to say, “God cares more about your character than your comfort.” He wants you to be holy and filled with Heavenly joys, not necessarily happy with earthly pleasures. Bl. Alexandra da Costa was a Portuguese young woman who tragically fell out of a second-story window and became paralyzed. She prayed and prayed that God would heal her, even promising that she would become a missionary if God would let her walk again. But to her prayers, God was seemingly silent. However, gradually, she began to realize that her mission was to offer her sufferings to God as a living sacrifice – and she began to find joy in the Cross. God began to grant her miracles – she consumed nothing but the Holy Eucharist for the final 13 years of her life, and God gave her the gift of healing others, even though she herself was never healed. But now she’s a saint in Heaven, where I am confident she can walk again! So God had a different plan for her life than she wanted, but He was faithful to what He promised – all things work for good! He would never abandon! Everlasting life comes to those with faith!

            Finally, the third aspect of faith is to believe everything that God has revealed. We can never be “Cafeteria Catholics” who pick-and-choose what to believe based upon our own preferences. Our Catholic Faith is much like Jenga – all of the parts fit together into a coherent whole, and removing one part would weaken the rest, and pretty soon the whole tower will fall down. Likewise, if a person disagrees with one part of our Catholic Faith, their entire faith is weakened, and it may soon crumble, because all pieces fit together into what theologians call the “economy of salvation” – the comprehensive plan of what God has revealed.

            For example, we believe that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of the Lord, given to us as spiritual food – which leads us into the belief in the soul – but what kind of soul do we have? One in the image and likeness of God – but what is God like? He is a Trinity, which is a life-giving community of love – and He created marriage and the family to be the perfect image of the Trinity – which is why the moral teachings of faithfulness to our spouse and openness to life are related to the Trinity – but the moral teachings of the Church are directed to our belief about everlasting life…and so forth. The “economy of salvation” is the giant web of our Catholic Faith and how all doctrines and teachings of God’s revelation are interconnected, and we can’t doubt one item without weakening or even destroying our faith as a whole.

            So, how do we increase our faith? Faith is a living thing, and like all living things, it needs to be fed. If it’s fed, it grows; if it withers, it dies. That’s why Jesus concludes with this parable about these servants who only do what’s required of them – when we just do what we have to do, the bare minimum obligation of going to Mass weekly and Confessing annually – if that’s it, then we are “unprofitable servants,” in Jesus’ terms. Our faith will never grow. It’s like if we only ate oatmeal at every meal – it might keep us alive but it wouldn’t lead to our flourishing. Yes, weekly Mass is the bare-minimum to keep your faith from dying, but if we desire, like the Apostles, “Lord, increase our faith!”, then we need to feed it more, and feed it a variety of spiritual food – daily reading the Bible, going on retreats, frequent Confession, spiritual reading, fellowship with other fervent Catholics. Do we really want our faith to be increased? If so, feed it!

            My friends, it is faith that saves us – the first person in Heaven, according to the Bible, was the good thief crucified with Christ, who had no good works but only a last-ditch Hail-Mary-pass act of faith – and it was enough to be promised paradise. As Pope Leo the Great said: “If we are steadfast in our faith in Christ and in our love for Him, we will win the victory He has won, and receive what He has promised.”