Homilies preached by Father Altier on the Feast of the Martyrdom of Saint John The Baptist

Just as Our Lord was going to have to offer himself as a sacrifice, so John the Baptist had done the same. And so these two, who were related to one another by blood, are completely united with one another not only in life, but also in death. Ultimately, because of their union in death, they are united in the fullness of life.

Wednesday August 29, 2001

Twenty-First Week in Ordinary Time

Reading (Jeremiah 1:17-19)

Gospel (St. Mark 6:17-29)

Today as we celebrate the Feast of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, it strikes us, initially, as something that most people would not want to be celebrating. Yet, we recognize that this was the greatest act of witness to Christ that John the Baptist performed. Of all the things that John did in preparing the way for the Lord this was the greatest because he was willing to give complete witness of his entire life for the Lord. As he offered himself, he showed the way of the Lord. Not only was he going to be the forerunner of Our Lord in his birth, he was also going to be the forerunner of Our Lord in death. Just as Our Lord was going to have to offer himself as a sacrifice, so John the Baptist had done the same. And so these two, who were related to one another by blood, are completely united with one another not only in life, but also in death. Ultimately, because of their union in death, they are united in the fullness of life.

But as we consider this feast, we need to look at what happened. John spoke the truth, and because he spoke the truth a woman who did not want to hear the truth became angry. Herod, who was a very weak man himself, was willing to offer whatever it would take to get his own way. We need to look at this and learn a lesson for ourselves because we all have weak spots; we all have places where we are blind. We might ask ourselves: "Who is the Salome¢ in our lives?" or "What is the Salome¢ in our lives?" Salome¢ was the young girl who came in and performed a rather erotic dance that thrilled Herod to the point that he was willing to say, "I will give you anything that you want," even when it violated his conscience.

Now, of course, we recognize there were two weak spots: first of all, this girl and the dance that she performed; and then, that attachment to human affection. We are told it was because of the guests that were there that he was afraid to say "no." Even though he knew that what she had asked for was wrong, he was willing to violate his conscience and do something that he knew was completely wrong because he was afraid of what other people would think of him.

How often we do the same. We need to find our own blind spots so that we can strengthen ourselves against them, so we will be able to recognize that we, too, are weak. Then, we need to learn from John the Baptist and from the promises of Our Lord. He gave them to Saint John the Baptist and to Jeremiah and He give us the exact same promises. He will strengthen us. He will make us that fortified wall, that wall of brass against the people. He will give us the strength and the grace to do His Will, to do whatever it is that He commands us, and to speak His Word if we are willing.

Now, at that point, we may have just found where our first major weak spot is. Most of us really do not want to do that (speak His Word) because we know what the cost is going to be, or at least we fear what the cost might be. If we really go out into the world and live our faith, if we really have to speak up if the Lord asks us to do so, maybe we will even have to say something to family members, or people who are close to us, or people that we have to work with. That frightens us because we know what is going to happen the next time that we see these people. They are not going to be too amused with us. We are going to be shunned and rejected; so we tend to pull back from God in order to fit in with the people.

That is what Herod did - it is not what John the Baptist did. We even have a saying in America, which would go right along with this: "It is not worth losing your head over it." Well, for John the Baptist, the truth was worth losing his head. And Jesus Christ is the truth. So we need to ask ourselves: "What is worth it?" Is it worth losing our soul, or is it worth losing something else? If we are going to waffle when it comes to the truth, we are compromising our salvation. We may lose our soul over it, and to compromise the truth is not worth losing your soul.

On the other hand, we can learn from John the Baptist: He gave his life in witness to the Truth. That is the part that we need to learn, as well. Nothing is worth losing salvation over. But the Truth, who is Jesus Christ, is worth anything and everything - even to the point of losing our own lives. How much are we willing to give for the Lord? We are getting up early in the morning and coming here for Mass; you are already giving up much for the Lord and that is very pleasing to Him. But now, we need to go to the next step and ask ourselves: "Where do we draw the line? Where do we say, 'This is enough, I won't do anymore. I do not want to give this much because of what it is going to cost.'" John the Baptist did not draw a line. He said, "Jesus is worth anything, even to the point of losing my life." Are we willing to do the same?

Note:Father Altier does not write his homilies in advance, but relies solely upon the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Thursday August 29, 2002

Martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist

Reading (Jeremiah 1:17-19)

Gospel (St. Mark 6:17-29)

In the readings and in today's feast we see two extremes, two opposites if you will. We see a righteous man who is speaking the truth and who is living the truth. And as we hear in the prophet Jeremiah that God is going to make him "a fortified city, a pillar of iron, and a wall of brass against the whole land", he is to go out and speak whatever it is that God wants for him to speak. Now this is not an easy task. All you have to do is look at what Saint John the Baptist had to preach. You know it was not a popular thing, and, therefore, not necessarily an easy thing on the natural level. The grace was there. He knew what God's Will was, and, because this was a man who was filled with the Holy Spirit, he was able to fulfill the Will of God in the face of all the opposition that may have been there.

At the very end, as we hear in the Gospel reading, he was preaching against King Herod. This was not Herod the Great who killed the little boys in Bethlehem and wanted to kill Jesus, but this is Herod's son. Herod marries the wife of his own brother; he is committing adultery with this woman. The woman wants to shut John the Baptist up because he keeps trying to tell her that what she is doing is wrong and the guilt that is there on her part. And it is easier to get rid of the messenger than to change, so she wants him dead. But Herod, on the other hand, likes to listen to John the Baptist and did not want him dead.

We see in both of these situations of Herod and Herodias what occurs with sin. Father John Hardon, the late Jesuit priest, had a rather extraordinary statement that he would use rather frequently. He said simply, "It is impossible," and then as Father Hardon would do, he would say, "I repeat - impossible - for anyone who is in the state of mortal sin to see clearly and to think clearly." It is impossible if you are in the state of mortal sin to be able to think clearly. Well, that is what we see today. Herod, who is clearly in the state of mortal sin, is filled with lust after a little girl who comes in and does some unfortunate dance before him and all the people in the court to the point that he says, "I'll give you anything that you ask." Herodias, because of her sin, simply wants this man dead because she thinks that as the queen she has the power over life and death and she thinks it is okay to order such things - as though the death of John the Baptist is going to make what they are doing in their so-called "marriage" something which is okay. As long as no one is bothering them about it, it must be all right. Now, she not only had to live with adultery, she had to live with murder. But, in the immediate, it seemed like the thing to do. You see how the clarity of thought is completely clouded because sin gets in the way.

When we choose sin over righteousness we are not going to be able to think clearly; we have got our priorities wrong. So what we see, then, is the importance for ourselves of making sure that no matter what the area of sin is in our lives - even if it is not mortal sin - it needs to go. It gets in the way; it clouds our vision. Not completely so, as in mortal sin, but nonetheless, even venial sin becomes a stumbling block for us. Every little attachment becomes a stumbling block because we do not want to give it up. And if God wants it gone because it is in the way, we hold onto the attachment rather than to God. We start pulling away from God and giving into areas of sin because we like the wrong thing better than we like God. That is the part we need to look at.

We can learn from the example of Saint John the Baptist to seek the Will of God and to do it in all things, to live a life of righteousness. Now you could say, "Great! If I live a life of righteousness I could get beheaded." Praise the Lord! You go straight to Heaven if you get martyred. But what difference does it make? We are all going to die anyway. If it is today or if it is fifty years from now, who cares? We are going to die anyway. And if you die for doing what is right then you are in great shape. But if you die doing wrong, what is your eternity going to be? If we choose sin in this world, what are we choosing for eternity? You see, the choices we make here are going to have an impact for the rest of eternity. Even if we are choosing imperfections and venial sins over God, we are choosing a lower place in Heaven. If we choose mortal sin, we choose eternity in hell. The choice is ours.

We need to pray to the Lord to be able to see clearly, to be able to make the right decisions, to be able to live a righteous life, to reject sin in all its forms, and to be able to choose what is right and do the Will of God in all things. That has to be the way our lives are ordered: to seek God above all else and to get rid of anything that does not lead us to God, or which leads us away from Him, or stands in the way between us and Him. That is what we need to learn from today's readings, from today's feast. Not if you live a good life that you are going to suffer - the Lord already told us that; we knew that. But rather, to live the good life knowing that if we live a life of righteousness there is nothing that is going to come between us and God.

We can be that fortified city, that pillar of iron, that wall of brass as Saint John the Baptist was: to do the Will of God, to speak the Will of God. And it does not matter if we wind up in prison for it or if we wind up dying for it, that voice will continue to speak just as Saint John the Baptist's voice continues to speak today. Even though he has been dead for 2,000 years, we still hear his voice. And so we see the example and it is very clear the choice we need to make. It is only a question of whether we are willing to do it. If we choose sin, the mind will be clouded and we will be unable to think clearly. If we choose what is right, choose virtue, then we are choosing God, and we are choosing to love Him with our whole heart and soul and strength now and for eternity.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Friday August 29, 2003

Martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist

Reading (Jeremiah 1:17-19)

Gospel (St. Mark 6:17-29)

When we think about the irony of the story that we just heard in the Gospel reading, we have a young woman who comes in and performs a dance, a dance which is filled with sensuality and strikes to the very heart of the lust of the king and some of his guests, and thereby he offers her anything she wants. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know of very many young women who would want the head of somebody on a platter when she is offered anything that she wants. She could have had jewels; she could have had wealth; she could have had whatever she wanted. Instead, she asks that somebody would be murdered and she wants the head on a platter.

It shows how skewed one’s thinking can become when one becomes totally embroiled in sin, when one is caught up only in oneself and no longer seeks the Will of God and no longer looks out for what is best, but only is interested in one’s own self-interest. That is where we get ourselves into all kinds of trouble. We are no longer able to think clearly. We make very, very foolish decisions and it is all about the self. Tragically, at the time, the devil is shrewd enough that these truly stupid decisions we make look like pretty good decisions to us until after it is finished and then we realize that that was really stupid. But somehow at the time we can actually be convinced that this would be a good thing for us, just like a young woman could be convinced that receiving somebody’s head on a platter would be a good idea.

Yet, if we look at this from the other side, here we have the man whom God had chosen to be the harbinger of Christ, to proclaim the coming of Our Lord into this world, to be the one who would set the stage for Our Lord’s public life by preparing the hearts of the people to receive the Lord. And now he also is going to lead Our Lord in death to prepare everybody for what is to come. If they would take the man who is “the greatest man born of woman” and they would kill him, then it is no big stretch to be able to think that they would kill God Himself, which is exactly what they did. Every prophet has to die in Jerusalem. They all did, and almost all of them were killed. And it is only afterwards that they proclaim them to be great prophets. Once again, one sees how, at the time, it looks like a good idea to put to death this person “who is driving us all crazy because he just keeps telling us that what we are doing is wrong. So if we make one more wrong choice and put him to death then we won’t have to hear him speak any longer.” The problem for them is that his death speaks more eloquently and much more loudly than anything that ever came out of his mouth, as profound as those things may have been. It is precisely this last witness to Our Lord which was his greatest, and for 2,000 years that witness has been speaking to us.

Now when we hear that first reading when Our Lord, speaking to Jeremiah, says to him that he will make him a pillar of iron and a wall of brass and a fortified city against the whole land, and He says, “They will fight against you, but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord,” we might be tempted to look at that and say, “The Lord didn’t really deliver Jeremiah the way we think that He should. And He didn’t deliver John the Baptist either. After all, if God allows them to be killed, how can we say that God is delivering them?” The greatest deliverance of all is the one that delivers us from this life and gets us to Heaven. So I suspect that the day on which Saint John the Baptist was martyred was a day of great happiness for him – a great tragedy for the world, but a great happiness for the saint because it meant that he was freed from this world and from all that held him bound in this world and he was delivered. And so God has kept His promise – not always the way that we think God should keep His promise because we do not always understand what God meant when He said things.

But like Jeremiah, John the Baptist was indeed that fortified city, the pillar of brass, and the wall of iron. No one was able to prevail over him. No one was able to silence him. It did not matter that Herod put him in prison, he kept preaching. It did not matter that Herod had him put to death, he still preaches. That has not stopped and it will not stop. So today as we celebrate his martyrdom, just as we celebrated his birth back a few months ago, now we celebrate his birth into eternity. His birth in this world brought great rejoicing and people wondered who this child would be. His birth into eternity brings greater rejoicing because now we know who he is. And as he preceded Our Lord in death but had to wait to follow Jesus into Heaven, so now like the rest of the martyrs beneath the altar crying out in the Book of Revelation, he awaits the day of retribution when his blood will be made up for.

But he is also continuing to preach to us, to teach us about the courage we need to have to stand fast in the midst of a sinful society, in the midst of a society that has thrown itself headlong into sensuality, into lust, into selfishness, into all of the things that we see with Herod and his guests. And if it costs us our life in this world – praise God! – because it purchases for us eternal life with Jesus Christ and that is the only thing that matters. What a gift if God would deliver us from the present darkness and bring us into the fullness of light and life. That is what Saint John the Baptist had. Being locked up in a dungeon was probably a reminder to him of what it is like being in this world. And being freed from this world through death, he is able to glorify God in a way that he never could when he was alive in this world.

So it is a great day of rejoicing for him and for the Church. It is a day for us to reflect upon what he has done and who he is, and to prepare ourselves to follow his example so that we will be faithful to Our Lord in this world and we will be able to be with Him forever in the next.

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

Monday August 29, 2005

Martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist

Reading (Jeremiah 1:17-19)

Gospel (St. Mark 6:17-29)

Today we celebrate the feast of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist. This particular thing is something that is of great interest because we know from Sacred Scripture that Our Lord has told us that Saint John the Baptist is the greatest man born of woman. Now you would think, if that were the case, that God – especially after having bestowed upon him so many extraordinary graces to be able to know who the Messiah was and point Him out to the people, to baptize the people and prepare them for the coming of the Messiah – was going to protect him, shield him, make sure that nothing happened to him. You recall Our Lord Himself telling us that we might be hauled into synagogues and before magistrates and so on, but He said, Not a hair on your head is going to be harmed. When we hear these words and then we look at what happened to John the Baptist, we have to ask ourselves, “What happened? Why didn’t the Lord protect him?” It is because his martyrdom was the greatest act of witness to Jesus that Saint John the Baptist had ever performed. Instead of looking at it and saying, “But I thought God was going to protect him,” we have to look at it the other way, first of all, recognizing that God did protect him. He kept his faith strong right to the end, He gave him the grace to offer his life in witness to Christ, and He brought him to heaven. What greater protection can there be?

We would like to think this means that nothing is going to touch him. Why would we think that? Look at the Cross. Look at the Son of God hanging on the Cross, and then say, “Do we think that we should not have to do anything like this?” The promises God makes are absolute and irrevocable. The difficulty is that sometimes we do not quite understand them the way God intended them. We look at this promise and we think that therefore we should not have to suffer. We think that we should not have to endure martyrdom because God made this promise that not even a hair on our head would be touched. But that is a little different from the way He would intend it, so we have to learn to see things from His perspective.

But we also need to learn to see the value, the dignity, of martyrdom and of suffering. While it is not something that most of us are going to stand in line for, it is something that we have to understand the importance of. The old saying is: The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians. We know from the Cross that it is only through suffering and through death that the greatest good in the world has come about. And it is going to be through suffering and through martyrdom that the greatest good in the world is going to continue to come about, not only that the martyrs get to go straight to heaven, but that many souls will be saved because of the uniting of their sufferings to that of Christ.

It is quite an interesting phenomenon to see how things change with time. Back in the 4th century, Saint Augustine actually had to preach homilies to the people telling them that not everybody had to be a martyr. The people wanted to be martyred! He was trying to explain to them that there are different people in heaven who were not martyrs; there are married people and there are the virgins and there are all these different categories of people; not everybody has to be a martyr. Now we have to stand here and say, “Well, some people will be martyred.” And our 21st century response is: “It’s not fair.” The question really has to do not with what is fair but with what is proper. What is proper is what the Church has recognized right from the very beginning. What is not proper is our mindset on the whole thing.

If we are looking at it and saying, “It’s not right. People shouldn’t have to do this,” that is not true. People are willing to do this out of love. For those of you who are parents, all you have to do is ask yourself, “What would you do for one of your kids? If your child were in the immediate line of danger, would you put yourself in the place of that child? Would you risk your life to save the child’s life?” I hope and pray and trust that the answer to that is “yes” because you love your children so much, not because you want to get hurt, not because you want to die, but because you love your children. Well, we are called to love God above all with our whole heart and soul and strength. That is what the martyrs show us, that they love God so much that they are willing to suffer and die for Him.

Now for those of us who run away from the suffering, and those of us who would absolutely cringe at the possibility of martyrdom, we need to ask ourselves, “How much do I really love the Lord? If I am unwilling to accept even a little bit of suffering for Him then I must not love Him very much.” The martyrs loved Him so much that they were perfectly united to Him in His suffering and in His death so that they could be perfectly united to Him in His resurrection and His glorification. That is what we are all called to do as well, to love the Lord so much that we would be willing to do anything for Him. If we find that we are not willing to do anything for Him then we need to start really working on our love for God because that is what is lacking, not the promises of God, not anything from His side, but rather only from our side. So that is what we need to look at very, very seriously, and ask ourselves, “How much do I really love God? Do I love Him enough to suffer for Him? Do I love Him enough to die for Him?”

*This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.

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