The Homily: Why the Ordained Preach
Jesus was a preacher. The Gospels show him preaching in the synagogues, on mountains, on plains, and in the Temple. He says he “was sent for this” ― to preach (Lk 4:43-44). And he was good at it. We see that “many who heard him were astonished” and that “people came to him from every quarter” (Mk 6:2 and 1:45). Simply conceived, those people who find Jesus’s preaching compelling and seek to make his message the pattern of their lives are called Christians.
One reason Jesus chose apostles was because he wanted everyone to hear his preaching. And so he “appointed twelve, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach” (Mk 3:14). The word “apostle,” in fact, comes from the Greek apostellein, which is “to send out.” And Jesus’s final word to the Twelve was the commission that they “go and make disciples of all nations … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19-20).
And so the Twelve carried Jesus’s teachings with them. Jesus even told them that they preached in his own name. After washing their feet, he said to them: “Truly, truly … he who receives any one whom I send receives me” (Jn 13:20).
But there was more than just the Twelve. There was also “the Seventy.” In Luke’s Gospel, we see that “the Lord appointed seventy others, and sent them on ahead of him … into every town and place” (Lk 10:1). In the Book of Genesis, we hear of seventy nations constituting the ancient world (Gen 10). In a sense, then, the number seventy represents the entire planet throughout its entire history. And so Jesus appoints the Seventy as co-workers with the Twelve so that his teachings may be heard everywhere and in all ages. He told them, like he told the Twelve: “he who hears you hears me” (Lk 10:16).
At Mass, after the Scriptures are proclaimed, priests offer a homily. What we must realize is that, even today, when we encounter the preaching of our ordained priests, bishops, and deacons, in a mysterious way, we encounter the preaching of the Twelve and the Seventy. We are in their presence.
It’s not that the ordained straightforwardly speak with Jesus’s authority when they preach homilies. It’s more complicated than that. The circumstances in which today’s ordained speak in Jesus’s name are specific and quite rare — ecumenical councils and such. And their lineage back to the Apostles and to Jesus does not even ensure the ordained will always faithfully re-present his teachings. In one sense, we only “hear Jesus” in a derivative way and when the homilist preaches what Jesus preached. Insofar as they head their own way, they obscure the voice of the Master. “What we preach is not ourselves,” St. Paul remarked, “but Jesus Christ as Lord” (2 Cor 4:5).
In another sense, though, we still do hear Jesus, the Twelve, and the Seventy even should our homilists fail to re-present his teachings. The very presence of the ordained provides a concrete reminder of the one who sent them, of that continuous line going back to the preaching of the Twelve, the Seventy, and Jesus himself. Every priest, deacon, and bishop can trace the lineage of their ordination back to Jesus and the Apostles. And so even when their preaching fails, the fact that the preacher is one of Jesus’s preachers ― the fact that he was sent out by him ― ensures for the congregation a form of enduring contact with Jesus. Even in bad homilies, then, the preaching of the ordained remains a paradoxical sign of Jesus’s nearness, a reminder of his primordial desire to speak to us.
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