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Bishop's Homily for the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary

June 8, 2024

[Co-Cathedral of St. Theresa, Honolulu (Oahu Eucharistic Congress Mass)]

How easy it is to leave Jesus behind!

I am sure Mary and Joseph placed great trust in their twelve-year-old son.  This was not their first journey to the holy city of Jerusalem from their home in Nazareth, since it was their custom to go there at the Passover.  There must have been a happy caravan of friends and relatives journeying together to deepen their faith and to become more immersed in their calling as God’s chosen people.  Jesus must have been quite the gregarious young man, feeling at home in many of the households that made up the caravan, enjoying the company of his old friends, and perhaps meeting some new friends along the way.  That must have been so routine that Mary and Joseph took a whole day to notice that he was not with them.  This Immaculate Heart of Mary we celebrate today was suddenly filled with worry and anxiety, perhaps thinking the worst, and simply not knowing where their beloved son had gone.  So they went back immediately to look for him, though it took two more days to find him.

We might wonder how such loving parents could possibly leave their son behind in such a large city, teeming with people at the festival time.  But let us be honest, that we, too, often leave Jesus behind.  Yes, we love him.  Yes, we desire to be close to him always.  Yet we still become so distracted with our own anxieties and pleasures – even our noble dedication -- that we leave Jesus behind more often than we may think.

Jesus calls us into unity not only with the wonderful friends who are such a blessing to us, but with the stranger, the one who looks or speaks differently, and even (unbelievably!) with our enemies.  When we only journey with those with whom we are comfortable, with those who look and think the same way we do, do we not leave behind the One who is the very source of our unity?  We may be having the best of time, chatting with our friends, but at some point our hearts may be touched to realize in sorrow that when we leave others out of our lives, we also leave Jesus behind.

Jesus calls us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the sick and imprisoned.  We know they are all around us, crying out for our love.  Some are war-weary Ukrainians who continue to live in terror in their own homes, while others have fled and are refugees in foreign lands – and many, right here in Honolulu!  Some are the homeless who live in tents and under freeway overpasses in the many cities around our country.  Some are ignored as if they were simply blobs of tissue rather than precious babies who depend so much on their mothers and others for life.  Some are imprisoned in cell blocks, but others are imprisoned in ideologies and addictions that make them as enslaved as anyone locked up in a prison.  We, of course, have the resources not only of our money, but of our education, our faith, and the compassion that has been placed into our hearts.  But when we walk by the least of our brothers and sisters, do we not leave Jesus behind to fend for himself?

Amazingly, we can even leave Jesus behind when we come to this great banquet of his love.  We can be so caught up in the quality of music or preaching, the kinds of people in the congregation, the form the liturgy takes, or our own personal preferences, that we forget that the real reason we gather and that the Church has gathered every day for two millennia is to encounter a living person, the crucified and risen Jesus Christ.  He makes himself physically present to us in the Body of the Baptized he calls his own Body; in the proclamation of the Word, who is God-with-us; and most of all in the bread and wine the Holy Spirit changes substantially into the very Body and Blood of Christ.  We may even be so caught up in externals that they eventually bore us, and we drift away farther and farther from the Bread of Life, leaving him behind as we go our merry way, engaged in all the other pastimes we enjoy.  We may speak of wanting to evangelize, to bring others to the faith, but we tell them about the wonderful people we encounter in our church groups, about the awesome music we hear at some parishes, about the many social service and educational programs that are the hallmark of our Catholic faith; yet we may not even mention that all this has only one purpose:  to give witness to Jesus!  Thus we leave Jesus behind more often than we may imagine.

But just as the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the heart of Joseph, her beloved spouse, were broken when they realized they had left Jesus behind, so the Lord from time to time may plunge a sword into our hearts, so that we will yearn to journey wherever we must to find Jesus when we have left him behind.  And when all our searching is done, when our journeying together is complete, we will simply find him here in the Temple of the Lord, opening the Scriptures for us and breaking the bread.  Then we can return home in peace, to our own Nazareths, becoming obedient to Jesus and keeping in our hearts the many wonders and mysteries of his love.