Homilies

Twenty-eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time: October 12, 2025

I would like to begin this morning by quoting from Father Greg Boyle, Jesuit in Los Angeles who, for thirty years, has been working with members of gangs in the city. His homeboys and homegirls have saved lives of many young adults though he has had to bury a number of young people over these years as well.

Greg Boyle believes there are no evil people, but that there are many sick people. They need healing, not condemnation. Convincing people that they are sick, not bad, is a big step to healing. And his main focus is to help people to know they are cherished, his favorite word which he finds more appropriate than loving.

I believe this is what Jesus was doing. He was not a miracle worker but a healer. His big interest was to help people return to the community from which they had become isolated and be once again respectable members within it. We can see that in his healing of the lepers in today’s gospel.

Unfortunately, it is often the case that we do not recognize our own illness. It is common to project our unrecognized illnesses on other people. And this can be done not only as individuals but as a group as well, such as a nation, a church. There is societal sin as well as individual sin. It has been written that the present chaotic situation in the United States is the breaking through of the shadow suppressed in our tolerance of slavery, of genocide of indigenous people, of anti-Semitism, of suppression of women, of the attitudes of exceptionalism and white supremacy that have gone along with the generosity and openness and goodness of America.

So the first step in healing is to recognize the illness. Naaman, the Syrian, recognized his illness and was humble enough to seek out an Israelite prophet to find healing. The ten lepers who approached Jesus recognized their illness. What of those who cannot see their own sickness, who accept the abnormal as normal?  What if that is really true of us?

How can we heal without seeing the sickness? Isolation and individualism, for instance, are forms of social leprosy. We fear others as infectious and then isolate ourselves. If we continue to reject the immigrant, the outcast and the stranger, will we ever find ourselves and be whole?

Isolationism is now a mark of our society. The pandemic tended to set us aside from each other and was particularly lethal for young people. The scars are very evident in people today.  Equally toxic has been the extravagant usage of social media and modern technology. People go around with their faces in their i-phones instead of with each other. The virtual streaming of social and religious events is a blessing for some people but an excuse to avoid live participation for others. The internet helps us but also isolates us. Passive presence as couch potatoes for hours at a television also dulls our minds and voices.

Created in the image of a Triune, relational, loving God, we cannot know ourselves nor can we be healed of our illnesses without other people helping us. Community, as well as good friendship and socializing, are part of the human story.

I realize I am preaching to the choir. You are here joining the community in common worship and dialogue. We worry about our isolated young people and hope they find such help?

I find I need stimulation from others. I need dialogue and conversation with others. Of course I also need silence and reflection to know myself and my own illnesses. They are both necessary to be human. I also need contact with nature which is also part of the human community that heals me.

We are not saved by ourselves. Community, sharing with others, giving ourselves away for the sake of others – all these are life-giving, healing ways to be the child of God we have been created to be.

Let us not, therefore, regard ourselves and others as bad but as ill. Take a tip from Greg Boyle. Let us cherish others as well as ourselves.  We are all basically good but perhaps sick, scarred, and needy.

 Fr. Timothy Joyce, STL, OSB