January 15, 2023 (Second Sunday in Ordinary Time)

by Fr. Bob Glynn, S.J.

[This text is an automatically generated transcript. Some edits have been made.]

A few weeks ago after the end of Mass, everyone was coming out. And someone stopped by and said to me, Oh, Father, do you have a copy of your homily? And I panicked for a moment because I thought, oh god, she wants to take it to the bishop. I live in this constant fear.

And then I was able, truthfully without even hedging at all to say, I never write my homilies down. So then she said, so it’s all in your head. And I said, I’m afraid not. You know, I don’t. I have this peculiar way and it always makes me a little nervous, like, here at Stanford. Father Dominic and Father Xavier, they put together very beautifully crafted homilies. I mean, I’m always impressed. They’re excellent. And they flow well, and you can see kind of the whole point and they and I think mine are just chaos.

Because—now, I’m taking you behind the scenes. This is how I do a homily. See, years ago, I used to write my homilies out and they were good. You know, people always liked them and all and I always didn’t. And in prayer, I realized that might be were good and they were intelligent and they had some very good ideas, but they really weren’t the fruit of my prayer. They weren’t that linked. You know, they were in my head. And so God and I made this little deal. OK, even though priests tell you don’t make deals with God, I do it all the time. It works. Alright. So you know, I said, God that I want this to really come out. I want it to be your message, not mine. And so, what we decided the two of us was that I would when it was my turn coming up on the Monday before I would read the scripture passage for the gospel. I’d read the other two, but I ignored them most of the time anyway. So read that. Then I say, Lord, whatever you want to me to get out of this, let me know. Then the second day I do the same, third day I do the same, fourth day, the fifth day, sixth day. Then the seventh day, I come out here and that’s what you get suddenly flowing out of my mouth. This is why I say I never quite know what it’s going to be and I am not lying to you. I know little bits and glimmers. Fortunately, I’ve already had this homily this morning at nine. So this one I know a bit more about that as we’re heading on.

But it has really most of the time been a very freeing experience for me. This week, it was hell on earth. Let me tell you, I had one thing after another and this damn rain and everything going on. I was running around and we had the guest speaker coming in. I was the host. I never go out to meals and here I’m taking people out to meals and this and that. The homily, the homily, the homily, the homily, and I knew that I wasn’t really praying, you know, because I was just thinking about the homily. And so then I thought, OK, what’s the thing that strikes you? I thought the Lamb of God, good. Lamb of God, what do I know about sheep? Remarkably lots, but I’m not going to share it with you now. All right. What do I know about sheep? Okay, and then I got very nervous about sheep and then I was worrying about goats and sheep and goats and honest to God, last night I thought, OK, please, because this is going to be chaos tomorrow. And when I got up, it was still chaos.

And then when I was coming here, I said, OK, I know what’s wrong here. This I just really have not been praying at all. I said, OK, let’s go back to the old method. And then the voice said it’s not Lamb of God dummy. It’s Behold the Lamb of God. So, OK. And oddly enough, you know, that phrase with the behold in it changed things dramatically, in the way that I was...well, I ceased to panic. I think, oh boy, what is he up to now? What I was up to was that this Behold, changes the focus of this whole thing. I was worried about these images and whatever, and what we’re worried about here is nothing. It’s John the Baptist announcing, Behold, the Lamb of God.

Now, John, who has been, you know, a tremendous preacher. I mean, it says all of you know, Jordan, all of Galilee is coming to see John by the Jordan River. John, was this connection to God that people found in John they experienced what they would not have called the spirit but what we would have called the Spirit at work in John. But John, at this point, a says when he sees Jesus, and he’s very careful to tell us I didn’t know him. I didn’t know at all he said I knew. Behold, look, there is the Lamb of God, the Spirit speaking through him to John a man of prayer, a man open to God’s presence in his life. And suddenly, John realizes this. John had all these disciples, and in this moment, he will say to His disciples, Behold the Lamb of God, and that experience inside of him, moves them. They want to be disciples, they want to follow someone, they want someone to connect them to the Lord, and they know that John has said, it’s not I who can do this. I’ve done what I can do, but there is the one now we know that they will follow and this is the moment in John’s gospel that is akin to Jesus going along the beach in the in the Synoptic Gospels, telling them they’ll be fishers of men.

Suddenly this happens inside of them. If they’re able to experience this, but the dangerous moment comes and it comes for all of us, and it came, in my preparations this week for preaching, when I stop focusing on the spirit, sensing how God is present and I begin to focus on the Lamb of God, who then I make to be me. OK, how am I going to make this work? How will we have a barnburner of a homily today so that everybody can say Oh, Father really knows what he’s talking about. Trust me Father does not Alright, so there’s no sense in pretending, hey, that this moment of discipleship is real discipleship for John. For the for the others, it has to become discipleship along the way, and our temptation, just like we know it is for the disciples—in the beginning, they know rightly, they sense the spirit, and they are disciples—and then along the way, they begin to get different little ideas. Would I say that the right hand and the left in the kingdom? Oh, no, you’re not going to suffer. All right. Yes. You know, glorify my sons. With you let us be transfigured with you, Lord…

It all becomes about me. So it’s no longer behold the one who offers himself for God who offers to bring us to the Father’s love becomes, oh, look, how am I becoming? And when we think about the Lamb of God, we think of the one who does miracles. We think of the one who knows everything. We think of the one who is perfect, and instead of being disciples, just like Adam and Eve, we want to become him. Because I want to be—and this is in the community—we live in this this context. We live in the Silicon Valley. We live in the heart of it at Stanford. We want to be perfect, the best, make the world you know, turn it around. I want to be perfect. I want to do miracles. I want everybody to think that I know everything. Well, then I have failed to find the Lamb of God, haven’t I? I lost the sight of the behold. I just found me.

[Due to technical difficulties, a portion of the homily at the end was not recorded.]