Fr. Thom's Homilies

          “I am the vine, you are the branches.”   If we are careful students at all of our Lord, we know that He often uses these kind of earthy, agrarian images to get His point across – whether He’s talking about sheep and shepherds (as we heard last week), sowers and seeds, vineyards, fig trees, mustard seeds, harvesting wheat, or about a vine and branches.   Sadly, these are images that might not “translate” quite as well to us as they did to Jesus’ original audience, many of whom would have understood these images readily from their daily lives.   I have managed to keep a few plants alive at my house and in my office, and the past couple of summers have had a small garden, but that’s about the extent of my agricultural “know how.”   Unless perhaps you grew up on a farm, we have lost something of our access to these images in our modern, very technology-driven world.         ...

           “A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.  A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own…leaves the sheep and runs away…This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.”           There is a saying, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”   And I think there is a lot of truth to this statement.   We are all looking for that thing that gives ultimate meaning and purpose to our lives; that thing we feel we can’t not do because it’s just so in our bones; that thing that we love so much that even to toil at it feels more like a blessing than a burden.   You students, especially, are here at St. Ambrose hopefully not just to get an education so that you can get a good paying job, but to discover that thing about which you are so passionate that you would devote your whole self, your whole life to it...

On this third Sunday of Easter, we hear yet another account of our Lord’s appearance to His unbelieving disciples.   Last week we heard John’s account, with the episode with Thomas.   The account we hear today comes from Luke’s Gospel, and it follows right on the heels of the story of our Lord’s appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and in the breaking of the bread.   Something that we see both in John’s account of Jesus’ appearance (from last week’s gospel) and Luke’s account (this week) is that Jesus shows His disciples the wounds in His hands and His feet as proof that it is He; that He has truly risen from the dead. If you have not done so before, reflect for a moment on the fact that our Lord’s resurrected body still bore the wounds of the crucifixion.   We might expect that in this glorified body any trace of His sorrowful passion would be removed, that we might have a more “sanitized” or perfected version of the Lord, but this is not the ca...

          One would think that with all of this material it would be easy to preach.   But my experience in almost fourteen years of priesthood is that nothing could be further from the truth.   I have always found it more difficult to come up with a homily on these great holy days of our tradition.   Maybe it’s the pressure of having a typically larger, more intently focused congregation on these high holy days, but I think it is mostly because the events we commemorate in these days speak so well for themselves.   What more can I say?   How can I add in any meaningful way to what we have just heard?   Why talk about these things when, in a sense, we are living them this week?   Thankfully, the Church in her wisdom also recognizes this.   And so, the instructions for Mass today state that after the reading of the Passion “a brief homily should take place, if appropriate .   A period of silen...

           “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Twice in the gospel we hear this, once on the lips of Martha and once from her sister, Mary.  “Lord, if you had [only] been here!”  This is a very relatable statement, I think.  We can look back at the various challenges, difficulties or tragedies in our lives and ask, “Where were you, Jesus?  If you only you had been there, then this [whatever that is] would not have happened.”  We could look at the car accident this past Friday that left four of our students returning from spring break injured, one of them critically, and say, “Where was God when they needed him?”  We could look at the tragic deaths of two of our students last semester, Ethan Flaherty and Kayla Decker, and ask, “Why, God?  Why weren’t you there to prevent this?”  Or we could ask, “Where was God on February 14 th when at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,...

           Now two and a half weeks into our Lent, two and a half weeks into our “desert journey” with Jesus, it is only natural that we should begin to get a little thirsty .  And really all of the readings for this Third Sunday of Lent speak of thirst : the people of Israel thirsted in the desert, in their exodus from Egypt to the promised land; Our Lord Himself thirsted as he came to sit by the well; the woman he encountered there thirsted as she came to draw water in the heat of the day.  And in all of these cases their thirst was satisfied, albeit in some surprising ways.           First there is the thirst of the Israelites in the desert—this is thirst plain and simple.   They have been wandering in the desert, led by Moses, and leaving Egypt is starting to appear to them to be a bad idea.   They prize their material comfort more than their own freedom, and would rather return to ...

On this Second Sunday of Lent, we are presented with some very powerful and thought provoking readings.   I would like to look especially at that first reading from Genesis because I think it is so perplexing. Abraham is asked by God to take his own beloved son up the mountain to offer him in sacrifice.   Backing up a little, we need to remember that this son, Isaac, is the son that God promised to Abraham .   This is the son, through whom God promised to make of Abraham “a great nation.”   This is the son that Abraham thought he could never have because Sarah was barren for so long and was now too old to have a child.   So, how could God now ask Abraham to offer this son of his in sacrifice ?   I think it is good for us to think of this story from Genesis not as a story about a capricious God who one day lets a barren woman conceive a son, and the next day decides to take his life—but as a story of unshakeable faith .   God is looking for f...