Homily
[Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8; Psalm 138; 1Corinthians 15: 1-11; Luke 5:1-11]
I am very pleased to have the opportunity, this weekend, to visit the parish of Corpus Christi. This gives me the occasion to visit the schools associated with the parish, and to meet with representatives of the many people who give of themselves generously to this community of faith. So, before all else, I want to express my heartfelt thanks to each and every one of you for your service to the parish. I am told that there are more than 500 volunteers serving here. That is a sign of great vitality and strong devotion. Thank you!
Friday was given over to the visitation of three of the schools associated with this parish. I was very pleased to see how the school division is seeking to integrate into their thematic activities the Jubilee Year in which we find ourselves, the Jubilee of Hope proclaimed by Pope Francis. This gave me the chance to speak to the students about the reason we are a people of hope. That is a timely and urgent question, because our world today is in search of a reason for hope and is unable to find it.
The reason for real and sure hope is, of course, Jesus Christ. This becomes clear when we ponder the encounter between Jesus and Peter in the Gospel text for this mass.
Let’s pay attention, first, to the futility and frustration Peter is experiencing: “We have worked all night long and have caught nothing.” Right away we have a connection between what Peter is going through and the lives of so many of us today: the experience of futility, of inability or incapacity. This is giving rise to widespread anxiety, the opposite of hope.
We all deal with worrisome situations in our lives about which we can do little or nothing. There are many things we encounter in the course of living we are simply powerless to do anything about. That is compounded currently by our real incapacity to address the very worrying global situation. Geopolitical insecurity and collapse are expanding, and that is deepening the angst gripping our hearts, especially because we know we can do little to change it, and we do not see world leaders making a positive difference to any meaningful degree. Anxiety is gripping us because of futility in both our personal and global contexts.
Now, let us return to Peter. His anxiety vanished when he obeyed the command of Jesus, who told him where to put down the nets. With the miraculous catch, Peter realized that, in this man Jesus, he was encountering a power he could never have imagined. The immediate lesson for us is this: when we give to Jesus our experience of limit and inability, he will fill us with a capacity far beyond what we could ever accomplish unaided. Trying to handle on our own what is beyond our ability fills us with anxiety, sometimes even dread. Giving it over to the Lord will dissipate that fear and fill us instead with real hope. Jesus Christ is the one and only reason for true and lasting hope.
How do we do this? In what way can we give to the Lord our weakness, our limits, and our inabilities so as to be filled with his power? Well, here I invite us to reflect together on the name of this parish: Corpus Christi. It points us to the mystery of the Eucharist. It is precisely here, in the mass, that Jesus invites us to give over the entirety of our lives to him so that we can receive from him all that we need for whatever difficulties and challenges confront us. The grace given in Holy Communion is that of Jesus’s very own life. He enables us to live from him, for whom nothing is impossible.
Your parish name also highlights the missionary dimension of every Christian life. By directing us to the mystery of the Eucharist, the name reminds us of the command we receive at the end of the mass: Go! Filled with the divine power that transforms anxiety to hope, we are sent to be agents in our world of the real hope that only faith in Jesus Christ can give. The prophet Isaiah heard the Lord sending him out to be amidst the people with the message of God’s promise of salvation. We also hear the Lord, now speaking to us through his Church, sending us out into a world marked by despair to be witnesses to the liberating truth that it does not need to be this way, that there is reason for hope, that the reason is Jesus, and that he is to be encountered in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist.
Corpus Christi: the very name points us to the reason for hope and reminds us of our missionary task. By the grace of this most holy sacrament, may we all be renewed in the hope that Jesus alone gives, and strengthened in our resolve to make him known.
✠ Most Reverend Richard W. Smith
Corpus Christi Parish
February 9th, 2025