Four minute homilies

Joseph Pich

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Christianity
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Short Sunday homilies. Read by Peter James-Smith

1d ago

25 Sunday A Labourers in the Vineyard

Labourers in the vineyard We can relate to this parable in South Africa. So many people looking for work. Often you see them at roundabouts, with a sign announcing their skills: electrician, plumber, carpenter, painter. All waiting for somebody to hire them for the day. We can pray for these people that they find work to feed their families. And pray for the corruption to go away, greedy people who only look after themselves. We all feel uneasy with this parable, sympathising with the workers that worked for the whole day and got the same wages as the ones who worked only for an hour. It is not fair. Children use this expression when they see something that lacks equality. But parents treat different children differently. The same with God. We are all the same in God’s eyes, with the same dignity, but God gives different graces to all of us. Why? Because we are all unique, and we all show different perfections and qualities of God. Variety brings forth many more gifts. Imagine if all of us were the same; life would be boring, all cracking the same jokes, inventing the same stories, composing the same music. Opposites attract each other, different skills balance societies, the more choices the more richness. At the end God gives the same reward to everyone: heaven. In paradise everybody will be filled with gifts, as much as they can hold. But if you compare them, some will contain more than others; the containers all have different capacities. What is going to happen with people becoming Christians at the end of their lives, Catholics going to confession after many years just before they died, babies dying just born, fetuses being aborted in their mother’s womb? We all agree that they should go to heaven, in spite of their brief or non existent Christian lives. What about the good thief who stole heaven at the last moment? Jesus promised him: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” We cannot limit God’s mercy, goodness and generosity. Precisely as Jesus asks us in the parable: “Are you envious because I am generous?” In the first reading from the book of Isaiah the Lord says: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” How can we dare to pass judgment on the Lord? How can we try to fit God in our mind, to measure him with our imperfect and limited human standards? We cannot cage him in our small world. It is like trying to fit all the data of the servers in the cloud on a single floppy disk. The Lord continues: “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” We are a bit like babies trying to read the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas. We human beings see things with our eyes directed towards earth, only seeing the flat surface of the ground with no spatial perspective. Jesus finishes his parable saying: “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” In heaven our society will be up side down: the poor will at the top and the multimillionaires will be the rubbish collectors, the famous and influencers will be forgotten and the real good deeds will come to the light. Imagine a race where this saying is fulfilled: everybody would run backwards. This is what we need to do: instead of running towards our own ego, we need to run towards God. We should be first in our love of God and last in our pride. josephpich@gmail.com
5d ago

Our Lady of Sorrows

Our Lady of Sorrows Standing at the foot of the Cross is our mother. She is standing, not crying or fainting; she is there supporting her son with her presence. Silent tears run down her cheeks. And Saint John is also there, the celibate apostle, the one Jesus loved. Other women are there too. Women are stronger than men. Many artists tried to capture this moment but with different results. It is almost impossible to represent in a painting what happened at Calvary. Where are the other apostles? Where are the big guys? They said they were going to die for him. They ran away from the cross. We too are still running away from the cross. When are we going to stop running away? Today is a good day. We can ask Saint John to help us to be at the foot of the cross, not to be afraid of the cross. We ask him to grasp our hand tightly and help us to remain there at this critical moment in human history. We are between him and Mary, hiding our face in our mother’s robes. We don’t want to see what’s happening. We can only hear. The passion of Jesus is the passion of Mary. It is impossible to know what is happening through Mary’s heart. We can only imagine. Spiritual sufferings are more acute than physical ones. Why do we bring to our consideration something that happened 20 centuries ago? Because it is still affecting us. In eternity everything is present. We are the cause of their suffering, mother and son, united in their sorrow. The more we look at what happened at Calvary, the more we will try to avoid our sins. The more we love Jesus and Mary, the more we will avoid what is offending them. Our sins affect the people we love, the same way our love for them empowers them. Jesus says: “Woman, behold your son.” It is not a detached expression calling his mother “woman”. He is reminding us that when Adam saw Eve for the first time, he called her “woman”, bones of my bones. Eve was the first woman. Mary is the second woman. The first one let us down because of sin. The second one was the cause of our redemption, of our healing. The Fathers of the Church loved this parallelism between Eve and Mary. Jesus called first his mother “woman” at Cana; at the beginning. Now it is the end. Then he changed water into wine; now the wine is becoming blood, Eucharistic wine. She still remembers that moment. For Jesus has to die for us; for her, to become our mother. She gave birth to him at Bethlehem without pain; now we are born at Calvary in a bloody and painful manner. We have caused her so much blood, so much suffering. This is what we are considering today, Mater Dolorosa, Sorrowful Mother, to foster our love for her: how much pain we have delivered to her, for her to deliver us. The more we suffer, the more we love. We contemplate her sorrows for us to react, to change our lives, to have a deep conversion. We cannot remain indifferent in front of her sufferings, specially knowing that she is there because she wants to be there, the fruit of her love for her son and for us. “Behold your mother.” Now Jesus talks to us. First he asks his mother to look after us. Some people say that he wasn’t planning to give us his mother, but when he saw from the cross our feebleness, he decided to give her to us. Now he asks us to look after her. He gave us his treasure, his masterpiece. We are represented by Saint John. Nothing is left for him but the wood of the cross. josephpich@gmail.com
Sep 9

24 Sunday A Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

Parable of the unforgiving servant The parable of the unforgiving servant is at the heart of the Gospel. It is an example for us to learn how to forgive and forget. We know by experience that it is not easy. Until we forgive the other person from the heart, we won’t be able to forget. If the grudge keeps coming back to our mind, it is a sign that we haven’t managed to forgive. It is only a desire, an intention, something we would like to do, but we don’t have the heart to do it. Jesus gave us this parable to learn how to find true forgiveness. This parable puts things into perspective in a very graphic way. The difference between what the servant has been forgiven and what he should forgive to his friend is colossal; it must have blown the minds of the listeners. For us it is difficult to grasp the ammount of money, because the Gospel uses the local currency of the time and we are not familiar with it. It is the difference between millions of dollars and few hundred dollars. It doesn’t make sense that the servant didn’t forgive the debt of his friend, specially just after a big debt was canceled. It is so ridiculous that it highlights the selfish attitude of the unforgiving servant, and at the same time our own pettiness. This parable helps us to understand a bit better the difference that exist between us and God. God forgives us everything, but we keep track of little petty things. When we go to God with our complaints, pointing out the offences we have suffered from our brothers and sisters, the first thing he asks is: “Do you want me to show my list? Do you really want to see it? It is so long that it is rolled up as a toilet paper. And I have a whole warehouse full of them.” Once we see how ridiculous our small list of grievances is, compared with the infinite list of our offences to God, we can forget about our little grudges and learn how to forgive. Once I saw a cartoon where God was displayed as an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud, looking a bit sleepy. There was a small angel flying around asking God: “What do you do all the time? Aren’t you bored?” And God responded: “What do I do? I forgive.” This is what God does with us all the time. We are little children, being naughty, trying to push the boundaries, trying to get away with things. And God, who is a good loving Father, is always ready to forgive and forget. He says that once he forgives, he buries our sins in the deepest black hole in the universe, and they disappear from his eyes, sucked in by the dark matter. God’s delete button is for ever; you cannot retrieve the files from his hard disk. God doesn’t keep grudges and he doesn’t remember once he has forgiven us. He has a very short term memory. We need to learn from him if we are to be good sons and daughters of his. He loves when we make up with his children. If the unforgiving servant had forgiven the little debt of his friend, he would had become the forgiving servant, even though the parable would had disappeared. But It would had started a chain of forgiveness that would have reached down to our own time. We can start this chain ourselves, beginning to pray about the grudges we keep in our hearts and trying to heal them, comparing them with all the offences we have caused to our Father God, and learning from Him how to delete them from our minds. josephpich@gmail.com
Sep 1

23 Sunday A Fraternal Correction

Fraternal correction Today Jesus talks to us in the Gospel about fraternal correction. We are all brothers and sisters in the faith and we need to help each other. Last week we saw Jesus correcting Peter. You could say that during his life with us he actually spent three years correcting his apostles, forming them, passing the Gospel on to them, preparing them for their mission. From a human perspective he didn’t do a good job: at the end only one followed him to the cross. One betrayed him, another denied him and the others ran away. The early Christians practiced fraternal correction; they corrected each other, they said things to each other face to face. They didn’t talk about others behind their backs. Others said of them: “See how they love one another.” People wanted to become Christians when they experienced their Christian charity. It is the best example we can give of our faith. We should love everybody, but specially our brothers and sisters in the faith. We want them to be better, to become closer to God. Both to correct and to be corrected is hard. Our pride gets in the way. It is important not to correct when we are upset or frustrated. It is going to lose its effect. We should correct when we are serene, out of love, thinking beforehand what we are going to say and how we are going to express ourselves. We should only do it when we are close to the person we want to help. It is a good remedy against gossiping or back biting. It is very rewarding to know that the people that love us are not going to stab us in the back. We can be very honest with them. We should be also open to correction ourselves. It is something you see in the Saints; they are very grateful when they are helped. It is not easy to be told about the mistakes we have made, but it is good for us, specially when it comes from people we know who love us. We should be grateful when our spouse, our parents, brothers and sisters, our friends, tells us things openly, face to face. I remember talking to the Managing Director of a company who was complaining: “Nobody corrects me, they are all afraid of me; they want to please me.” It happens to parish priests too. We all need to be told how can we change or improve. If nobody tells us how is it possible? Nobody is perfect. Some couples they have a moment every week when they can tell each other one thing they don’t like about the other spouse. This is what it means to be vulnerable. It is very difficult to get to know ourselves. It is one of the most difficult things, because we are always on the inside looking out. We cannot see ourselves from outside, only through a photo or a video. The first time you record your voice it sounds strange. We all want to take a selfie to see us through the eyes of others. Look at the Holy King David. God had to send Nathan the prophet to tell him of his sin: he took somebody else’s wife and put him in a position where he was certain to be killed in battle; he didn’t realize what he had done until Nathan told him. We normally place our imperfections behind us so as not to see them. We don’t like to be aware of them or to be reminded of them. We always put our good deeds in front of us. We always think that we are better than we are. They say it is a good business that buys people by their real price and sells them at the value they think they have. We all like putting people down to place ourselves above them. Fraternal correction helps us to correct these bad tendencies. josephpich@gmail.com
Aug 26

22 Sunday A Take up His Cross

Take up his Cross Last week Jesus told Peter that he was the rock on which he was going to build his Church. Today he calls him Satan. What happened? Last week Peter called Jesus the Christ, the anointed one; today he tries to discourage him from suffering and dying on the cross. Last week he was inspired by God; today he looks at things as we humans normally do. Jesus took advantage of this moment to talk about one of the most difficult paradoxes of our faith: to be happy we need to carry our cross. Nobody wants to hear about the cross, but Jesus is on the cross, and the cross is the symbol of our Christian life. How can we explain this? That the cross is a blessing. This idea goes against the basic core of our present society: that is, seek pleasure at any cost. People kill themselves with drugs or alcohol; they destroy their families committing adultery; they gamble their wealth away; they compromise their body, eating too much or consuming food not good for them; they risk their lives driving too fast; they harm their health working too hard and later on they spend their money trying to fix it. And all of this for the sake of pleasure. We all want to be happy, but many times we look for happiness in the wrong places. Saint John of the Cross once told his brother Francis a secret: “I will tell you something that happened to me with our Lord. We had a crucifix in the monastery, and one day, when I was standing before it, it seemed to me that it would be better placed in the church. I wanted it to be venerated not only by the friars but also by those outside. And I carried out this intention. When I had placed it in the church, I stood before it in prayer. Then Jesus said to me: ‘Brother John, ask me what you would like me to give to you for the service you have done to me.’ Then I said to him: Lord, I want from you sufferings which I might bear for you, and that I should be despised and accounted for nothing.” Not long afterwards he was taken prisoner against his will and locked in a small cell for nine months, with almost no food. From there we have the Saint we know. While we look for pleasurable things, saints look for the cross. Why? Because they know that God is trying to bless them with the cross. Saints want at any cost to do what God wants them to do. And sometimes the will of God is hard for us. Why? Because He wants us to grow, to mature, to conform ourselves to the image of Christ. Parents know that for their kids to become better, many times they have to suffer. Suffering goes with human life; it is part of human existence. Pain is the other side of the coin of love. Who loves you makes you suffer. It comes from original sin. We either accept it and love it, or we rebel and become bitter. Michael Angelo used to look at a block of marble and say: ‘I can see the statue inside; I am going to free it.’ Then he began to hit it with a hammer and a chisel. We are the same. The image of Christ is hidden in our nature. God can see it and He is trying to bring it out. But the process is painful. God has to chisel away many pieces that are not Jesus in our lives. Then he has to polish us and he normally uses people around us for his purposes. As long as we love the will of God, we let him do his work of sanctification. josephpich@gmail.com
Aug 18

21 Sunday A Upon this Rock

Upon this rock Jesus today in the Gospel is asking questions to his apostles: What do people say about me? There was a lot of gossip about who Jesus was. The apostles were keen to tell him all the conspiracy theories going around. Then Jesus confronted them asking a direct question: Who am I for you? They were all silent. It is a good question for all of us. Who is Jesus for me? What is the place of Jesus in my life? It is a question every human being should ask him or herself. The answer is important. It determines how we live our lives and eventually our future eternity. While the apostles ponder the question Peter answers: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The Holy Spirit answered the question through Peter for all of us: Jesus should be our priority, the centre of our lives, the apple of our eye. As Pope Benedict XVI used to say, Christianity is a not just a set of rules, but a relationship with a person who changes our lives. Answering the question, Peter shows his primacy and Jesus confirms it: you are the rock where I am going to build my Church. Jesus took advantage of this important question to establish his Church on solid foundations, on the rock of Peter. Without the Church, we cannot place Jesus at the centre of our lives. It is not possible to love Jesus and not to love the Church, because Jesus is her spouse. He left us his Church for us to have a beacon to follow, for us to have a straight path to heaven, a sure way not to go astray. We need to base our lives on Jesus, and he is seated on the cathedra of Saint Peter. Jesus changed Peter’s name from Simon to Cephas; it means stone in Aramaic. Peter comes from Petros in Greek and Petra in Latin, which means the same. The changing of the name was very important in the Old Testament: it was a way to determine the mission and role of a person. Jesus meant renaming Peter, to found his Church on solid ground: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the underworld will not prevail against it.” These words are written on a mosaic inside Saint Peter’s basilica, around the cupola, in big letters, three meters tall, for people to read them from the ground. And they have been fulfilled. After twenty centuries the Church is still alive and kicking. We constantly hear that the Church is finished, and we see how the boat of Saint Peter keeps weathering storms, while the enemies of the Church disappear. We call the Church One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Saint Pius X used to add another note: Persecuted. We complain when Christians suffer persecution and we should defend them against discrimination. But it is a good sign when the media criticise us: we are on the right path. Jesus warned us that, like him, we were going to suffer trials and tribulations. But we shouldn’t worry too much about it; the Church is build on solid ground. Jesus is watching us through the office of the Pope who is the Vicar of Christ, the visible Christ on earth, or like Saint Catherine of Siena used to say, the sweet Christ on earth. There is an old proverb in Latin that says: Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia, ibi Deus. Where there is Peter, there is the Church, there is God. We want to be with Peter, because with him is the Church, with him is God; and without him, God is not there. We can be very good, but if we separate ourselves from Peter, from the Church, we will wither away. We have the experience of history. Today we can pray for the Pope, to lead us through these unprecedented times, and to feel on our shoulders a bit the weight of Church. josephpich@gmail.com
Aug 16

20 Sunday A The Canaanite woman

Canaanite woman Today we see in the Gospel a pagan woman getting from Jesus what she wanted. Even though she wasn’t a Jew, she managed a miracle from the Lord. She teaches us how to pray, how to ask and how to get what we need. This simple woman shows us how to approach Jesus. She gives us an example of prayer and what should be the main characteristics of our petition: faith, humility and perseverance. We should learn from her when we find ourselves in her shoes. Jesus had gone to that region of Tyre and Sidon, close to the coast, to get away from Herod and the Jews, who were looking for him, to spend time with his apostles without distractions. It was a region of gentiles, colonies of Phoenicians and Greeks, people with no faith in the God of Israel. But she sensed who Jesus was. She didn’t have anybody to go to and she knew that Jesus would be her last chance. She was determined to get from Jesus what she needed, and she didn’t stop until she achieved her end. She had such a great trust in Our Lord that he praised her faith: “O woman, great is your faith!” Jesus doesn’t normally praise people. The second quality of her petition is humility. She kneels in front of Jesus, cries out so much that the apostles have to ask Jesus to send her away, and she is not discouraged when Jesus puts her down. She knows who Jesus is and she knows that her daughter is possessed by a demon. She is in a position of necessity, lacking what she needs and knowing that the Master can do what she is asking for. She knows too that she doesn’t have anything to give to him in return, and in this regard she is powerless, without any card left to play. Her condition is of total poverty, in front of a powerful prophet, who can heal her daughter out of compassion. But the best example this woman gives us is her perseverance. She goes all the way in her request and she is not going to stop until she gets what she wants. Jesus tests her faith. It is what our prayer should be. We must keep asking what we need, even though it looks as if Jesus is not listening to us and he is not giving us what we are asking. If we keep praying it means that Jesus is listening to us, otherwise we will stop praying. He is making sure that we really want what we are asking for and his delay improves our desires. Constancy is a great quality of a good prayer. Another lesson this scene teaches us, is how powerful mothers are in front of Jesus, when they pray for the spiritual revival of their sons. It reminds us of the pleas of Saint Monica, when she begged a holy bishop for her son Augustine. He answered her: “It is impossible that the son of these tears should perish.” History proved him right. Jesus’ heart is specially touched by them. We can see it today in the gospel, and in other instances, as with the widow of Nain, or the mother of John and James. God listens in a special way to the prayer of those who know how to love. josephpich@gmail.com
Aug 11

The Assumption

The Assumption Today we celebrate the feast day of the Assumption of our Mother to heaven. What can we say about what happened on that day? We haven’t got much information. Saint John witnessed it and didn’t tell us anything. John, you told us all about the life of Jesus, with plenty of details, but you didn’t want to tell us about our Lady leaving earth. She is our Mother too, and we would have liked to know more about her. But you preferred to be silent. We needed to know about how Jesus gave his life for us, but we didn’t need to know how our Mother flew up to heaven. It is better for our imagination; we can let it free. It took the Church a long time to declare the dogma, in 1950. Now we can let our imagination fly and accompany her up to heaven. The apocryphal gospels, those books written by the early Christians to try to fill the gaps, say that the apostles came back to say good bye to our Mother. They say that they came back each in his own cloud, first Saint Peter and then Saint Paul. Maybe John didn’t tell us this because nobody would have believed him. Saint James was already dead and Saint Thomas, as always, arrived late, because he came back all the way from India. We understand why they wanted to be back. We too want to be there to say good bye to our mother. There is a debate about what happened, if our Lady died or not, before she went up to heaven. She would have liked to follow her Son, and die with him on the cross. But Jesus didn’t want her to endure his horrible death. No son wants his mother to suffer. I don’t think Jesus wanted his mother to die either. God wanted her, body and soul in heaven, without her beautiful body experiencing corruption. That’s why she fell asleep. You could call it a sweet death. That’s how saints normally pass away, falling asleep, in a simple and beautiful manner. You die in the way you live. There is a feast in the East called the Dormition of our Lady, dating from the sixth century. According to tradition she fell asleep and they placed her in a tomb. When Saint Thomas arrived, he wanted to see her, and they found out that the tomb was empty. That is why we don’t have any relics from her body. How did she fly to heaven? God has his ways of moving people. Most likely it was a transport of love. When love is very intense, it can do things that reason cannot understand. Love is crazy, endures all things, achieves all things. Love can travel through space and time. There is no better means of transport than going through the people we love. Love fired the engines of her soul and lifted her up all the way to heaven. Tradition says that our Lady’s beauty, which was veiled here on earth so as not to blind human beings, not to drive them crazy, was revealed on her way to heaven, showing her in all her splendour, dazzling angels and saints in all its wonder. They never have seen anybody like that, not even in paradise. The book of Revelation tries to describe her, precisely with the words of Saint John: “A great sign appeared in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her head.” I don’t think it is possible to find a better description of our Mother’s countenance. At last Saint John opened his soul and told us a bit about her Assumption. josephpich@gmail.com

Short Sunday homilies. Read by Peter James-Smith

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Joseph Pich
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2022 - 2026
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