Sunday Homily

Fr. Tom Lucas, S.J. 

September 14, 2025

One of the things they don’t tell you about when you take on pastoral ministry is how acquainted you become with death and dying. I now know funeral directors and hospice nurses by name and have memorized the prayers for the dying and the rite of anointing. I drive around with the oil of the sick in the glove box in my car. I know where all the hidden parking places are in the Kaiser hospital lot.

This past week I anointed four dying people, I buried a friend - a holy 89-year-old Sister of Mercy, I sat with the family of a dying 9 month old, and have tried to absorb the news of the suicide of an acquaintance I tried unsuccessfully to get help for several years ago. I have shaken my head in horror and disbelief at Charlie Kirk’s assassination, school shootings in Colorado, and residual feelings from the Annunciation Church tragedy in Minneapolis, not to mention the far away, yet very real, wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan. Some days hope seems far away.

Yet on Arden Way at Watt Avenue, on a soon-to-be-demolished curb in front of Taco Express, some brave soul got down on hands and knees and wrote simply “John 3:16” in chalk. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son…that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life.” That is as good a place as any to be reminded of the only hope of the world, and how much I need to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Jesus spoke those words to Nicodemus, a learned doctor of the law, who came to him by night to avoid being seen in the company of a dubious, maybe heretical, prophet from Nazareth. Nicodemus wanted to understand, he really wanted to understand, and Jesus offered him an ambiguous image: what was toxic was healed by looking at an image raised on high. Moses raised a bronze serpent on a pole, and the wounded people looked up. They looked up. And they found life again.

So, Jesus told Nicodemus, the Son of Man had to be lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.

Last Sunday we celebrated the ancient Feast of the Exaltation, the raising up of the Cross of Christ. We believe that the instrument of Jesus’ humiliation and torture became the source of life. Death’s sting remains, and violence remains and suffering remains, but their ultimate power is broken by the one lifted up, lifted up for love for us and for all our broken sisters and brothers.

The invitation, the challenge we share, is simply to look up to him hanging on the cross, bearing our griefs and carrying our sorrows. Son of God he was, he emptied himself out for us.

My faith tells me I cannot ever conquer suffering and death alone; I can only bear it, understand it; no, rather to stand under it, under the arm of the cross with Mary and John and Nicodemus. Nicodemus feared and doubted yet stood there with them, and tenderly lowered Jesus’s broken body and laid it in a borrowed grave. That grave was a temporary place of rest before God raised Jesus up to life again. We are promised - assured that the glory of the cross is the glorious generosity of Jesus. We have only to raise our eyes and hearts to him and follow his generous path to be saved.

And so today I ask for that curbside faith, that the good sister and the little baby and my old acquaintance, that Charlie Kirk and the children, and all who are plucked away by violence, and the victims of war and hatred might be saved through him and may not perish but live.

Let us lift up our eyes to gaze upon him, bruised and torn, obedient even unto death: for God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.