topleft05.jpg (18208 bytes)HOMILY
Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
03 July 05


 

If I performed my calculations correctly, this weekend our nation celebrates its 229th birthday.  Most families will be celebrating the holiday with barbecues, picnics, and perhaps watching the local firework displays.  Other families will be celebrating at the shore.  They’ll be swimming, sunning to build up a tan, and perhaps eating cotton candy while taking a stroll on the Boardwalk.  Still some other families will have traveled to distant locales for family vacations.

It all sounds so very relaxing and peaceful, doesn’t it?  For me, the image conjures up a portrait reminiscent of a Norman Rockwell cover on the Saturday Evening Post.

Yet, in the midst of this celebrating, we dupe ourselves if we fail to remember the fact that our nation is at war.  Peace is currently a pipedream and a vague hope, not a reality.  Our men and women in uniform are engaged in a deadly battle against the insidious forces of worldwide terrorism that threaten not only the peace we oftentimes take for granted but also our freedoms—if not our lives—as we discovered on the tragic morning of 9/11.

It was the much the same when our nation was founded 229 year ago.  While Patrick Henry was saying “Give me liberty or death,” thousands of soldiers were giving their lives for the cause of liberty during the Revolutionary War.  Just a short distance from our church, many of our nation’s first soldiers starved and froze to death in Valley Forge.

It was no different during the Civil War, as the memorial at Gettysburg attests.  Nor did the first and second World Wars, the war in Viet Nam, and the subsequent conflicts in Korea, Kuwait, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq prove any different.

War requires generous citizens, women and men who are willing to sacrifice their lives by serving at the tip of the sword, to preserve the peace that their fellow citizens oftentimes take for granted.

As we pray for the end of the war against terrorism and the healthy and safe return home of our men and women serving in the Armed Forces, we need to recall that our faith instructs us that it is not through war and by conquering enemies that nations achieve peace.  A temporary cessation of hostilities might ensue after one nation conquers another; but, as history sadly proves instructive, war inevitably will break out again.  In contrast, faith teaches that our hearts are “programmed” or “hotwired” for peace.  Yet, this peace is not the peace we oftentimes define as “the absence of hostilities.”

The prophet Zechariah announced God’s word as the Jewish people living in Jerusalem at the turn of the 3rd century before Christ feared for their lives.  Alexander the Great and his army were mowing down enemies one by one and pressing, the Israelites feared, toward Jerusalem.  The Israelite army was no match for Alexander’s mercenaries.  “What’s going to happen to us?” Israelites were asking.

Twenty three centuries later, the same fear raged within the hearts of the citizenry of Paris, France.  On June 3, 1940, as Nazi air raids were bombing the French capital into submission, 2000 German tanks were moving with lightning speed toward Paris to take it over.  Eight days later, with the city standing in ruins, the French government fell.  “What’s going to happen to us?” Parisians asked one another.  Then, almost three weeks later—on June 22nd—the French signed an armistice with Germany in the same railway car Germany signed its humiliating armistice to end World War I.

In the face of threats like these, the prophet Zechariah told the Israelite people that fidelity to God is the only thing capable of bringing about the kind of peace for which their hearts yearned.  “Even if the enemy should be victorious,” Zechariah asked the Israelites, “what does it matter since allegiance to God brings the peace for which your hearts yearn?”

It would be as if Zechariah asked the Parisians in 1940, “So what if the Nazis conquer you?  What does it matter?  Even if you lose your liberty, fraternity, and equality, fidelity to God will bring you true peace.”  Or, a little closer to home, it would be as if Zechariah was challenging us, “So what if the Islamofacists win?  What does it matter?  Even if you lose your freedom and liberty, if you are faithful to God, you will have true peace.”

The kind of peace defined as “the absence of war” obviously is not the kind of peace about which Zechariah was teaching.  Speaking on God’s behalf, the prophet was teaching the Israelites—and all generations of humankind as well—about the kind of peace the heart yearns for when, for example, spouses are estranged, family gatherings are filled with tension because relationships with the in-laws at the breaking point, or parents are at wits’ end because a child has been defiant.  All of these evils—and each truly is an evil—turn families and homes into war zones.  It would seem easier, wouldn’t it, to live in slavery to an evil regime than to live with a broken heart that yearns for peace with one’s spouse, in-laws, and children?

That is the idea the prophet Zechariah wanted the Israelites—and wants us also—to ponder.

We can narrowly define peace as “the absence of war” or “the cessation of hostilities,” but we dupe ourselves if we believe that is the peace for which our hearts yearn.  Our hearts yearn to “rest in peace” with God and neighbor, in relationships where there is no enmity, shame, embarrassment, or hurt.  Our hearts yearn to “rest in peace” where we feel secure and are able to enjoy the most important in things life.  Our hearts yearn to “rest in peace” where we don’t fret, worry, or become anxious about what tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year may bring.

As strange as it may sound, this peace is what Viktor Frankl reported in his book, Mans Search for Meaning.  As Jewish women, men, and children faced extermination in the death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau, Frankl discovered that human beings have a will to meaning that, if frustrated, leads to spiritual sickness.  Frankl wrote:

This was the lesson I had to learn in three years spent in Auschwitz and Dachau: other things being equal, those apt to survive the camps were those oriented toward the future—toward a task, or a person waiting for them in the future, toward a meaning to be fulfilled by them in the future.
 

Even in the most dire of circumstances, human beings can discover meaning in the moment which offers “a sequence of unrepeatable situations each of which offers a specific meaning to be recognized and fulfilled.”  Meaning—experienced in peace of heart even in the most difficult and trying of circumstances—is not invented but discovered. 

Jesus’ teaching about how to bring about this kind of peace is very different from how human beings seek to achieve peace.  Throughout the generations, political leaders have concluded that there is no other way to achieve peace other than by the force of armed conflict that brings an enemy to his knees or obliterates him from the face of the earth.  But, translating what the prophet Zechariah taught the Israelites as they pondered the desire for peace in their day as Alexander the Great and his troops advanced toward Jerusalem, Jesus’ life and death stands in stark contradiction to what political leaders throughout history have believed will bring and sustain the peace.

Don’t get me wrong.  It is not that going to war is always wrong.  As St. Augustine taught in the fourth century, there is such a thing as a “just war.”  What Jesus’ teaching warns his disciples about is that they will not discover the kind of peace for which their hearts yearn simply by declaring and winning wars.  Jesus wants his disciples to contemplate his life and to make it their yoke, the pattern by which they live their lives, so that they will rest in the peace for which their hearts yearn.  This is what “the wise and the learned” have failed to understand throughout the centuries but the “little ones” have always understood.  Yes, strength and power do win wars, but they do not bring the abiding peace for which human hearts yearn.  Jesus tells his disciple that simplicity, humility, and meekness bring that kind of peace.

If we really want to rest in the peace of heart that so many soldiers throughout the ages have given their lives for, Jesus teaches his disciples to recognize that the pathway of love and forgiveness—not the pathway of power and domination—is what brings abiding peace of heart even in the most difficult and trying of times and circumstances, like a crucifixion or an extermination camp.

Yes, sometimes it is absolutely necessary for nations to declare war and to engage in it as a necessary evil.  But, as Jesus disciples, we must remember that throughout history war has proven only to bring about a temporary cessation of hostilities.  War is not the pathway to rest in the peace for which our hearts yearn.

“Even if the enemy should be victorious,” Zechariah asked, “what does it matter since allegiance to God brings the peace for which your hearts yearn?”  “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,” Jesus said to his , “for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.

 

 

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