Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be with you this morning here at St. Joseph’s. When our Holy Father, Pope Francis, declared this year a special year in devotion in honor of St. Joseph, I made a promise to myself that in all of the parishes that are under his patronage in my area of responsibility, I would try very hard to get to them and offer Mass in each and every one of the St. Joseph churches. So, I am so very grateful to your pastor, Father Madori, for allowing me to be with you today to fulfill my promise to St. Joseph, who is very dear to my heart and in my prayer life, and I try to model myself after his faithfulness each and every day.
But today is also, declared by our Holy Father, the World Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving for Grandparents. Isn’t that wonderful? It sure is. You deserve every day in honor of grandparents. But today, especially, the church throughout the world honors those very special people. And we’ll conclude our Prayer of the Faithful this morning with a prayer that was composed for this day. A special prayer in thanksgiving. A special prayer asking God’s blessings upon those who continue to form our lives, whether in person, or in the great treasure of our memory.
For those of you who were not here when Mass began, I asked the congregation to look around the church and see what things were different. Because every now and then you get one of those puzzles where the same picture is printed twice, side by side, and there are changes in the second picture, and you have to figure out what they are. Usually there are about twenty of them, and I always get about three. So here’s the changes I made in the church. I moved the credence stand off the platform to the floor. By the way, credence stand is the English for credenza. And many of you still have a credenza in your dining room set. I separated the two candle stands, which were together. And I moved the kneeler from here to here. Did anybody get that, or any part of it? I didn’t think so. The reason why I did that is because of today’s gospel.
Before I discuss today’s gospel you have to understand something about ancient writing. We have so much print in our society. When we finish with the daily paper, if we still get one, we put it out with the garbage. We have magazines, all sorts of things. We’re inundated with print media. Writing was extremely rare in the ancient world. Few people could read. And even fewer could write. That seems odd to us. How could you be able to read and not write? But they weren’t taught to write, only to read what they had to read to get by. Not only that but there weren’t many words. If you took all the words that existed in Ancient Greek and put them in a dictionary it would take up only about a quarter of any standard American dictionary in size. That’s how small the language was.
I’m sure you figured out what’s the most famous opening and closing of a story in history, and that is “Once upon a time” and “They lived happily ever after.” When I was studying Greek in high school we read the famous epic, The Odyssey. And every now and then you’d come across this line, “And then the early born rosy fingered dawn appeared.” And we liked when that showed up, because we wouldn’t have to translate that line after the very first time; it was a giveaway. But the author used it (this mysterious unknown author) every time a new episode in the story was about to begin. So it was a standard opening to an episode.
That’s what we have in today’s gospel. We have a standard opening that the gospel writers inherited in the tradition before the written gospels. And the standard opening was this: “He was moved with pity for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd and so He ____.” That’s where it ends. Fill in the blank.
“You like me. You really, really like me.” Those words have been attributed to Sally Field as her Oscar acceptance speech for the movie Places In The Heart. She didn’t really say that. And that was her second Oscar win after winning for Norma Rae. But legend has it that that’s what she said. We’re going to use that as the lens through which to understand today’s gospel.
I came across something on the internet the other day. A group of people reminiscing about Jesus rock. Those of you who were teenagers in the 1970s will remember Jesus rock. The rest of you, let me clue you in. In the late 1960s, up until around 1972, the airwaves in popular music were flooded with songs about religion and about morality. And many of them specifically referenced items of the Christian faith, especially centering on Jesus. Here’s just a small sampling:
It’s been a long time since July 4th fell on a Sunday. It’s almost ten years. And that’s important for us to know because, ordinarily when we celebrate the Fourth of July, it’s on a weekday, and we have a special Mass just for that day. When the fathers of the Second Vatican Council were preparing the changes in the liturgy, they decided that every nationality be able to have some Masses exclusive to its own culture and its own nation. And so, the American bishops were invited to write special prayers, a special Mass for July 4th. Ordinarily we celebrate that Mass and we invite people to come. Part of that Mass is always a large selection of readings from which to choose. And so, naturally, you look for those readings that have a sort of uplift to them because, after all, it’s our national holiday, we want to be happy. And yet, here we are, on July 4th, stuck with the readings for the Sunday because, in our liturgical forms, Sunday, the Lord’s Day, always takes precedence over all except the most important feast days. This August we’ll have the feast of the Assumption of Mary, which will take the place of Sunday, but that’s very, very rare.
And so we wind up this Sunday with three readings that don’t fit our mood. I asked you to listen, and see what you could figure out was the common thread going through all the readings. That is, what we would call in the 1960s, a downer. They’re very depressing. We’re going to look at each one of them and see what it’s all about.