Peace be with you.
Friends, all during this year,
we’re reading from the Gospel of Mark.
And Mark is such a fascinating literary work.
You know, on the one hand, it can seem
rather primitive.
The Greek is not sophisticated,
and Mark seems to write in this kind of
breathless, staccato manner.
But I always find the more you look at St.Mark,
the deeper you look, the more it appears iconic.
He’s presenting scene after scene in a very concentrated way,
telling us some rather deep truth about the faith.
Well, our Gospel for today
—we’re still in chapter 1, by the way, of Mark—
is a good example of this.
Let me put this in your minds first.
Pope Benedict, and I’ve often shared this with you,
Pope Benedict said the Church does three essential things:
it worships God, it serves the poor,
and it evangelizes.
Those are the three basic things,
and everything else in the life of the Church
isunder one of those headings.
I remember Cardinal George,
who was a great mentor to me,
and he was a great devotee of Pope Benedict.
He said, think about the institutional commitments of the Church.
When the Church wants to build something or really
invest money in something, what do they do?
Well, in churches,
in hospitals, and schools.
Well, there it is:
to worship God, the churches;
hospitals, that’s serving the poor,
to heal those who are sick;
and schools, places where we evangelize.
Well, go right back now to chapter 1 of Mark,
and I think you see these three moves on clear display.
“Rising very early before dawn,
he” —Jesus—
“left and went off to a deserted place,
where he prayed.”
The first basic thing the Church does is it prays.
Why?
Because Jesus prayed.
The Church is the Mystical Body of Jesus,
the extension of Christ’s energy and personality
throughout the centuries.
Jesus prayed, so the Church prays.
I remember, this is many years ago when
I was still a bishop out in California
and we had our ad limina visit with Pope Francis,
and it’s all the bishops in California,
there were like forty of us
in this big room with the pope.
And he spoke to us for three hours.
I remember he was talking about, at one point,
the basic relationships
a bishop has to have.
And he said,
your relation with your brother bishops,
your relation to your priests,
your relation to your people.
But then he said, it’s really vivid in my mind.
He pointed upward
—he was speaking Italian—
he said, but first it’s the relation
“con il Signore”, con il Signore,
with the Lord. With the Lord.
And he kept his finger pointing up in the air
as if to say the other relationships
aren’t going to amount to anything
unless they’re grounded in
a relationship to the Lord.
Still true everybody.
Unless, like Jesus, we go off
at least symbolically speaking
to a deserted place to pray,
everything else in our Christian life is going to fall apart
or devolve into something it shouldn’t be.
Now, what does the desert place look like?
It might be a Holy Hour.
That’s what I try to do every single morning.
I’m a morning person, so I get up early
and the first hour of the day I spend in the chapel,
in this deserted place where I’m not in touch with anybody else.
I’m not doing anything in particular.
I’m trying to maintain that relationship con il Signore.
Maybe for you, it’s the car
—a car can be a good place to pray.
When we’re kind of isolated from the distractions of the world,
and we kind of move into a more meditative frame of mind.
Maybe it’s time you spend it at Mass.
Maybe it’s a morning prayer, you can find
some special time.
I don’t care what it is, but unless we pray,
we are not going to be successful
in the spiritual order, period.
Now that I’m a bishop of a diocese and we do a lot of,
we meet to talk about all sorts of things,
all the different activities of the diocese
and a lot of pragmatic, practical,
financial decisions have to be made.
But I try to remind everybody around me and myself,
con il Signore.
Unless we’re rooted in prayer,
all our practical activities
are going to amount to nothing.
Or as I say, they’ll devolve
into something they oughtn’t to be.
So the Church prays, that comes first.
But now listen:
“On leaving the synagogue Jesus entered the house of Simon.
Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever.
He approached her, grasped her hand,
and helped her up.
Then the fever left her.”
“When it was evening, after sunset,
they brought to him all who were ill
or possessed by demons.
The whole town was gathered at the door.
He cured many . . .
he drove out many demons.”
Here’s the second great task of the Church.
The Church prays.
Secondly, the Church serves the poor.
Now the poor in every expression of poverty:
yes, it means the economically poor,
but it means the emotionally poor,
it means the spiritually poor,
it means the intellectually poor,
it means those who are poor because they haven’t heard the word of God.
The second basic task of the Church,
listen now, born of prayer,
is service.
Now why? Why?
It’s very simple.
When you’re con il Signore, you’re with the Lord,
who is the Lord?
Well, God is love we’re told, in the First Letter of John.
Therefore, the more you are in touch with God,
the more devoted to love you will be
—or better, the more that divine love
will start flowing through you into the world.
Gosh, who’s the best example of this is Mother Teresa of Kolkata,
who spent hours of her day con il Signore,
in prayer, in very focused, concentrated prayer.
But then how marvelously that grace of God
surged through her into the world.
We serve the poor.
Think now, we’re not Mother Teresa,
okay.
Maybe you’re not a professional religious person,
okay.
But everyone who prays and feels this divine love
coming through him or her
should now look at the world around and say:
Where are people suffering here?
Where are people who are in pain?
Who’s sick here, who needs to be healed?
Now, they all came rushing to Jesus,
but we who are members of his Mystical Body,
we’re supposed to be other Christs.
Through our love and our service,
we reach out to a hurting world.
Good, good,
that’s the second great task of the Church.
Okay.
And what’s the third?
The Church prays, the Church serves the poor,
and finally the Church evangelizes.
Listen now, I’m still in this passage for today:
“Simon and those who were with him pursued him,
and on finding him said, ‘Everyone’s looking for you.’
He told them, ‘Let us go to the nearby villages
that I may preach there also.
For this purpose have I come.’”
Jesus prays, yep.
Jesus serves and heals, yep.
And he’s come primarily to preach,
to proclaim the word of God, to evangelize.
Repent, the Kingdom of God is at hand;
believe the good news.
That’s the message that he preached all over Galilee.
The Church
—the Mystical Body of Jesus,
carrying on his task across centuries—
therefore, evangelizes,
proclaims, preaches, teaches.
Now, beautifully, the Church gives us
as a second reading today,
from Paul in his First Corinthians.
And it’s Paul reflecting on his evangelizing work
—Paul, look, he’s the evangelist
par excellence in the whole tradition.
Listen now to Paul speaking to the church in Corinth.
“If I preach the gospel,
there’s no reason for me to boast,
for an obligation has been imposed on me,
and woe to me if I do not preach it.”
Now, that’s the language of a real Christian, everybody.
What’s evangelization?
Oh, I guess if you get around to it or
that’s for other people to do or
if it’s really the right circumstance
I guess I’ll evangelize or
maybe if I’m not too embarrassed.
No, no, no, none of that.
“An obligation has been imposed on me,
and woe to me if I do not preach it.”
That’s the voice of the Church up and down the ages.
We pray, yep.
We serve the poor, yep.
And we evangelize.
We speak the word.
We bring people to Christ.
Now, listen, as Paul specifies
his method, listen to him:
“I’ve made myself a slave to all
so as to win over as many as possible.”
Think about that, its someone speaking
in a culture that knew about slavery, right?
It was not an abstraction for him.
“I become a slave to all.”
In other words, he’s so possessed
by this obligation to evangelize
that he’s not that concerned about his ego
and about his career and about advancing himself.
No, no, I’ll become a slave to anybody
if that serves to bring them to Christ,
to win over as many as possible.
See, that’s his priority, is winning souls for Christ.
Listen, now, as he goes on, beautifully:
“To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak.
I have become all things to all,
to save at least some.”
Okay, if being weak
makes me effective with people who are weak,
I’ll do it.
If being strong with those who are strong works,
fine, I’ll do that too.
I don’t care, whatever works.
Because I’m on fire with a desire to evangelize.
You might think of here, everybody,
one of the greatest evangelists in our tradition,
St.Francis Xavier, when he goes over to India.
Well, in India, holy people lived in great austerity
and basically naked
and covering their hair in dust and so on and so forth.
So Francis Xavier said, okay, if I’m going
to reach these people, I’ll have to live that way.
But then go to one of his successors,
Matteo Ricci, when he’s going into China,
and in China, holy people were at the royal court
and wore elegant clothes.
Okay, that’s what I’ll do.
I’ll become weak with the weak,
I’ll become strong with the strong,
I’ll become poor with the poor,
rich with the elegant.
I don’t care because what I want to do
is evangelize.
Woe to me if I do not evangelize.
Look, everybody,
woe to the Church if it doesn’t pray.
Then our evangelization becomes rationalistic,
our service becomes social work.
Woe to the Church if it does not serve.
If it doesn’t serve the poor,
then our worship of God becomes an abstraction.
Then evangelization is just a show.
And woe to the Church if it does not evangelize.
If we think that somehow being of service to the poor,
that’s enough
—no, no, no.
It’s indispensable, but it’s not enough.
It’s all three of these:
the Church prays,
the Church serves the poor,
the Church evangelizes.
From Mark chapter 1 all the way up to the present day.
And God bless you.