The Irrepressible Jesus — Sixteenth Week of “Ordinary Time,” July 22 to 28, 2012

God is irrepressible. And the risen Jesus is popping up all over the place. Paul says that after the resurrection Jesus “appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive” (1Corinthians 15:6). Preaching a mission in North Carolina, I just saw him appear in more than five hundred members of the parish of St. William/Immaculate Heart, and all of them are still alive — or have come back to life because of the pastor and congregation that have ministered to them for the past sixteen years. They are the “sign of Jonah” — the life, the joy and the love of the risen Jesus is visible in them.





We read about multiple scandals in the Vatican. We see bishops and chancery officials standing trial for criminal failure to restrain child abusers. And some complain of “restorationist” priests trying to revive the “legalism, clericalism and triumphalism” rejected overwhelmingly by the bishops in the first session of Vatican II. But that is not where the Church is. Or what the Church is. I saw the Church in Murphy, North Carolina. The Church is the People of God. And Jesus lives in them.




The pastor introduced visitors at the beginning of Mass. I have seen this before, but when he did it I realized he was putting everyone’s focus on the congregation instead of on the priest and ministers in the sanctuary. He didn’t have to call for “full, active, conscious participation” in the Mass. He made everyone conscious that their activity was the Mass, and he was just presiding over it.




(I compared this to a recent book on the Mass, highly praised on the back cover by “big name” people, that had twenty-eight pictures. Twenty-four of them were of the author as celebrant. Not a single picture showed the congregation. The words reinforced the pictures).



The pastor did not recite the Eucharistic Prayer like someone reading words out of a book. Nor did he come across like Moses, going up the mountain alone to commune with God while the people watched in awe (Exodus 19:10 to 20:19). When he read the words, it was obvious that he was talking to God — and doing it with a keen sense of being in the midst of his people, saying the words with them, in union with them, as their spokesman. He was happy saying them. And so were the people.


At Communion time he smiled at each one. A parishioner told me, “That had never happened to me before. The first time I came to Mass here, I knew I was home.”


And I knew Jesus is alive and well in North Carolina — and in thousands of parishes all over the country, where on “ground level” Jesus is rising irrepressibly from the dead.


In most of the country, if you leave your back yard alone for awhile, it will be taken over by grass, weeds, bushes, and — if you leave it long enough — even trees. God is simply irrepressible, even in giving vegetative life. God is not afraid of life. Jesus told of a field where an enemy sowed weeds among the wheat. But the owner told his workers not to focus on weeding out what was bad: “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:24-30)

 Church ministry is not about attacking the sinners and excluding those not in “good standing.” It is about encouraging the life God is already giving to everyone who has been raised from the dead in Baptism (Ephesians 2:6; Colossians 2:12, 3:1). When we encounter one who, like Lazarus, has come out of the tomb still “bound hand and foot” with rules and regulations, Jesus says to us, “Unbind him, and let him go free” (John 11:44).


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