Sharing God’s Life by Accepting His Word

“People who walked in darkness has seen a great light.  Upon those who dwell in the land of gloom, a light has shown.”  Secular society imagines a world in which God doesn’t exist, or if He does exist, He is so far away that we can’t know Him.  But scripture shows something very different.  Scripture shows a God, who is a Father, who wants to be close to His children, who wants to speak to His children.   And today we celebrate this special Sunday of the Word of God.  Because we’re surrounded by so much human words, with all the opinions, all the human opinions, and studies show and experts say, and all sorts of stuff, and a lot of the human ideas a lot of times behind them is the father of lies.   And so, you can’t really know the truth or who knows, or everybody has their own truth.  But that’s why this is so powerful, because we’re selling today the Word which is of God.  And it has a power that no other word has.  St. James says, “It is able to save your souls.”  There’s no human word that can save our soul, only the Word of God.  And so, James says, “So receive with humility, the word planted in you,” that is God gives his word, we don’t have to get it, He gives it.  But we have to do something, that is we have to freely receive it.  He says, “receive, with humility, receive with humility, the Word of God planted in you, it has the power to save your souls.”   So, what does scripture show?   Scripture shows from the first book of Genesis to the last book of Revelation, it’s all about God speaking.  And this book is not like any other book, it covers over 1000 years.  It’s actually made up of many different books of many different authors.  But throughout all of these different situations and different people, it’s the same God who’s speaking.   It’s not like the Qur’an, which is a book which presents God speaking to one person, Muhammad.   But in this, it’s God’s speaking to, over this whole long history, it’s a whole history of God’s speaking.  And so, let’s look a moment at that history.  It begins with a Father who wants to share His love, and so He creates Adam and Eve.  He creates all of this world, and He creates this world in which His children can live in intimacy with Him.  But then, because of the lies of Satan, that Adam and Eve accept and are contaminated with, that separates God from His children.  And that’s the painful result that we’re still living with.  But then God doesn’t give up, He begins choosing the people, forming the people to bring people back to Him, the people of Israel, and speaking to many of them and speaking through the prophets, all leading up to that crucial moment in which God will send His very Son, the very word of God.  The Eternal Word of God becomes flesh, and lives among us, Jesus Christ, and His life, but here on this earth is short.  As He goes back up to heaven, He announces that He will send the Holy Spirit and at Pentecost, we know that He sends the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, praying with Mary.  And so, what does St. Peter say on that day?  So, after they received the Holy Spirit, the apostles, St. Peter goes out to preach, because there’s 1000s of people who have gathered because they’ve heard this mysterious noise.  And the first thing St. Peter says is that “we’re not drunk.”  It’s only nine o’clock in the morning, we not drunk, it’s the Holy Spirit.  But then it goes on to quote, the priest says, “what is happening today is what was prophesied many centuries ago by the prophet Joelle.  And here’s what he says, here’s the prophecy, “And in the last days, it shall be God declares that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy.  And your young men shall see visions.  And your old men shall dream dreams.  Yes, on my men servants and my maid servants in those days, I will pour out my Spirit.”  And they shall, what, I will pour out my spirit?   “And they shall prophesy, prophecy.”   “Young men shall see visions your old man shall dream, dreams.”  That sounds kind of weird, doesn’t it?  But, interestingly enough, even right here in this chapel, for many years, we’ve already had many experiences like that.  Here at the Mission, many people, because what this is saying is that God didn’t stop speaking 2000 years ago, at Pentecost.   When He pours out His Holy Spirit, instead of just forming one people, now He wants to spread that spirit to the whole world.  To spread the spirit of prophecy of God speaking, the Holy Spirit’s speaking to His people.  So, is God speaking today? We know God speaks in many ways.  He speaks in Scripture.  Here it is scripture.  And, He speaks through nature.  He speaks through events, many different ways.  But does God still speak today like He spoke through the prophets?  That’s a key question, I didn’t think was a key question.  But God made it very clear to me that was a key question, very important for this Mission of Divine Mercy.  It’s like at the core of this Mission of Divine Mercy.  But I think it’s not just for the Mission of Divine Mercy, it’s for the whole world.  And so, I wanted to share an experience, just briefly, and some of you have heard me talk about this several times, but some of you not.  So about in the 90s, I was serving in Monterrey, Mexico, and one day, two women who had made an appointment, two women I didn’t know, made an appointment with me and they came to see me.  The women in their 50s, and they said “I’m so and so, and this is so and so, and we receive interior locutions.   And my jaw dropped and my eyes opened wide, interior locution means sensing that God is speaking clearly interiorly not through our ears, but interiorly.  That was very surprising to me, I didn’t have much experience with that.  And so, we began to talk, and they said that the Lord had asked them to come to me to be their spiritual director.  And they said they had a letter from Jesus for me.  I had never received a letter from Jesus.  So I was, I was surprised.  And so, what am I supposed to do with this?  If that’s from God, that’s, beyond fantastic.  But if they’re just nuts, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be supporting it, and also if this is from the devil, even worse.  So, you know, in my formation, I think that’s probably true of most priests, we didn’t get much formation about how to discern in these cases.  And so, I began trying to talk to some of my brother priests.  And I remember one, he said to me, a good priest, a friend of mine, he said, you know, we don’t need that, we have the Gospel. We don’t need these crazy ladies, who says God’s talking to them because we have the Gospel.  But the striking thing to me because I felt a responsibility now to try to understand this, so I began reading scripture more, more, more attentively, to try to understand this.  And one of the passages that struck me was this passage where Jesus is criticizing the scribes and the Pharisees, because He says, “You’re building the tombs, and the monuments of the prophets as if you’re honoring the prophets that your ancestors persecuted, but you’re hypocrites, because when God is speaking to you today, through Jesus Himself, they don’t accept them.”  So, they pretend to accept the prophets of old who are safely dead, but now when God is speaking today, to them, they’re not listening.  Here’s what He says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. For you build the tomb of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous saying, “If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in the shedding of the blood of the prophets thus you witness against yourselves that you are the sons of those who murdered the prophets.  Fill up then the measure of your father’s, you serpents, you brood of vipers.  How are you to escape being sentenced to hell.  Therefore, I send you prophets and wise men and scribes,” – that’s Jesus who’s saying that – “I send you prophets,” He’s not done sending prophets.  He says, “I send you prophets,” and what are they going to do?  He says, “some of whom you will kill and crucify and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town.”  So, He’s saying that you pretend to honor the word of God, the prophets of old but when God speaks today, you don’t listen.   And so, and I was noticing who are the heroes of scripture, who are the models that scripture gives?  They’re not the skeptics they’re not the sophisticated people, they’re the people who had simple faith like the example of Noah.   God didn’t ask Noah to do a feasibility study to see if it made sense to build an ark.   He just said do it.  Or when Abraham at 75 years old being told to take his family and leave his homeland.   Or Moses, also think about 75 years old when he’s told to go back into Egypt and bring the people of God out.   These were people who had to accept very big surprises and most of the time, God didn’t give them any proof, He just said do it.   And the prophets themselves, all that the series of the prophets, it was hard for them when God was calling him like Isaiah or Jeremiah, that they resist it, because like Jonah it’s a very difficult thing but they were faithful.  Or like St Joseph, humble St Joseph, he had dreams, like the dream and when an angel of the lord said one night, “take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt.”  What if Joseph had said, yeah that’s crazy and we’re just getting established here, we don’t know anything about Egypt, and it was just a dream.  What would have happened if Joseph had been skeptical?   Would Jesus have been slaughtered?  But Joseph had the simple faith in this great surprise to leave.  And a great example of course we have is our Blessed Mother, a young girl, about probably about 15 years old, when the greatest question ever was not directed to a bunch of experts, to a council of experts, it was to this young woman, who alone had the faith to say, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord be it done to me according to Your word,” surrendering herself, opening herself completely to the word of God, and the Word became flesh in her.  Scripture is full of these heroes.   I want to mention one more, because just yesterday we had the feast of the conversion of St. Paul.  So y’all know what happened.   Saul was persecuting the Christians, bringing them into prison, he was there when Steven was killed, and he was approving that.  And now he has permission to go to Antioch to bring the Christians there back to prison.  And so, on his way we know that the Lord appeared to him and knocked him to the ground and left him blind.  But there is a person I think who we don’t honor enough, and that’s one of the Christians in Antioch who had heard this now.  He knows that Saul is coming and probably pretty soon he’s going to be knocking on his door, and the other members of the community and dragging them out to prison, to death.   But then it says the Lord spoke to Ananias in a vision and He said, “Ananias, go lay your hands on Saul who’s in such and such a house and Ananias says, “Lord you know that guy you know who he is because he says you know why he came here.”   So apparently Ananias has not heard what has happened and the Lord doesn’t give Ananias any proof.  Think of what he’s asking Ananias to do and is through simply on the strength of this vision.  He is asking to go basically into the house of he who is in charge of imprisoning him and laying his hands on him.  And so, God does not give him any explanation, he does not give him any proof.  He just says, Go.  And Ananias did.  And he was healed.  So, we have so many examples in Scripture of people who receive surprising messages from the Lord, and believed and obeyed.  Those are the great heroes, heroes of Scripture.  So, are we supposed to learn from them, that God stopped talking 2000 years ago?  No, he continues, of course, there’s need for discernment and prudence because there’s false prophets. The measure is always Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ is the fullness of God, the only Son of God, the Eternal Word of God, as the Catechism says, “Christ, the Son of God made man is the Father’s one, perfect and unsurpassable word.  In Him, the father has said everything.  And there will be no other word that is better than Jesus, beyond Jesus, that is different from Jesus.”   And so, any word which is different from Jesus, we do not accept as the Word of God, like the Book of Mormon, and any book which brings new doctrine.  Or any book which like the Quran, which presents Jesus, as a prophet, not as the Son of God, but as a prophet leading up to the Great Prophet Mohammed.  And so, Christians cannot accept that, because it’s not presenting the full truth of Jesus as the eternal and only begotten Son of God.  And so, in the end, we have Sacred Scripture and sacred tradition, which keeps and keeps, preserves this truth and hands it on.  And then we have the magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church, whose role is to faithfully transmit this, as the Catechism says, “The magisterium is not superior to the Word of God, but it is its’ servant.”  It teaches only what has been handed on to it. Those who have teaching authority in the Church, their authority is to teach Jesus, preach faithfully, what has been handed on and not teach new doctrine, not change, what is from Jesus.  And so, then what is the role of these prophetic messages of what is often called private revelations.  So just take them, let’s just take a few examples.  It is to help us not change, not to give us new doctrine, but to understand more deeply what Jesus has revealed to us.  Like when St. Margaret Mary received the revelations from Jesus of the Sacred Heart.  It is not a new doctrine, but it’s helping us understand more in depth, what is already in Scripture, or to help remind us at certain key moments in history of the truth of Scripture.  Like to shed light, highlight, put a spotlight, like the great revelations that St. Faustina received on Divine Mercy.  It’s not something new, but it’s to make us more aware today, of Divine Mercy.  Also, to guide actions, these messages often guide actions.  Like at Fatima, where our Blessed Mother asked, through the children, to have the pope consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart.   It is giving a very specific action that should be done at this particular moment in history.  Or to encourage and console, like the great apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose maternal presence was such a consolation to the people.  And so, it’s not new doctrine, but it’s helping us understand more deeply, reminding us, guiding us, encouraging us in these prophetic messages.  We have great examples, even close to our time, of people who listened to the Word of God.   Like Mother Teresa, who was in a certain community, and then the Lord appeared to her and called her to leave that community and start a new community, The Sisters of Charity.  Or Mother Angelica, who was just a girl from a poor broken home without much education, and she went on to found the largest religious media network because she was listening to God.   Or the great shrine she’s built to our Lord, just because she heard, where at a certain point when she was visiting in Latin America, the child Jesus said for her to build for Him a temple.  So, these are just many examples of God, the Word of God, the many ways that God speaks in Scripture, and who continues to speak to His people.  And so, Pope Francis, for this day of the Word of God, he wrote a document on the Word of God, a very, very helpful document.  And it’s on the archdiocesan website and the Vatican website.  But at one point, it says, that he uses the example of when Jesus in the book of Revelation when Jesus says, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”  And He says, “if anyone should hear His voice and open for Him, He will come in and eat with them.”  He says, Christ, Jesus is knocking at our door, and the words of Sacred Scripture.  If we hear His voice, and open the doors of our minds and hearts, then He will enter our lives and remain with us forever.  And so, the Lord continues to speak to His Church and to each one of us.  But it is up to each one of us to open the door, and to receive, as James says, “receive with humility, the word planted in you,” it is able to save your souls to change our life.  It is not always easy.  It is a very challenging word to follow.  But it leads us on the path of eternity.  And so, if you’d like, you could close your eyes now and with our Blessed Mother, following her example, we also could say, each one of us in the intimacy of our heart, “behold, the servant of the Lord, be it done to me, according to your word.”