A November Homily

31^st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Wis 11, 22-12, 2 / 2Thess 1, 11-2, 2 / Lk 19, 1-10

In the liturgical calendar the month of November begins with the feasts of All Saints and All Souls.  And the last Sunday in November is the feast of Christ the King.  It marks the end of the Church’s liturgical year.  So this month – as also this time of year – would have us reflect on basic things.  Always around this time of year I feel the need as a Jesuit to reflect on something very basic and final: the martyrdom of six brother Jesuits in El Salvador.  November 16 will mark the twenty-fourth anniversary of their deaths.  I want to remember them with you.  And I want to offer their example as a model for how to live and how to die as disciples of the Christ we name this month as King of the Universe.

We need to remember what happened.  We remember that November day in 1989 when elite troops of the Salvadoran army arrived on the campus of the Jesuit university in San Salvador.  These troops, especially their officers, had been trained here in the United States.  They headed directly to the Jesuit residence.  Summarily six Jesuits were shot through the brain – a graphic army protest to the kind of thinking these Jesuits had pursued.  They had spoken out publicly on behalf of the poor and had demanded social justice for all Salvadorans.  After killing the Jesuits, for good measure the soldiers also killed their cook together with her daughter.

There was a member of the Jesuit community who was not killed.  Jon Sobrino, a theologian, had been away in Thailand giving talks.  I know Jon.  We were students together in Germany.  When he returned to El Salvador, he reflected on the slaughter and martyrdom of his brother Jesuits.  “Why?”, he asked, “why kill these men?”  Jon’s answer was so simple and clear-eyed.  They were killed because they had taken to heart Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.  Like the Good Samaritan, these university professors and parish priests had practiced works of mercy and compassion – and for that they were killed.  Like the Good Samaritan, they had seen the obvious needs of the people around them.  They had not avoided nor closed their eyes to what was blatantly wrong there in front of them in the lives and struggles of their Salvadoran brothers and sisters.  And they responded.  Their response was to call into question the basic power structures of society.  They thought basic thoughts and did basic things:  like speaking out publicly – like calling the powerful into question – like calling the powerful to account.  They responded in those ways because love always confronts un-love.  It threatens our hate and confuses our indifference. 

A year later, at the first anniversary, Jon Sobrino prayed publicly at the graves of the martyrs.  He prayed: “Rest in peace, my six Jesuit brothers.  May your peace give us hope, and may your memory never let us rest in peace.”  I remember their martyrdom today so that we may grow in hope but also that we may have unsettling memories.  I don’t mean the unsettling memories that come from guilt.  They will take us nowhere.  I do mean learning to recognize in these Jesuits what love can do when lived to the end.  What will unsettle us is the recognition of what we can become – the recognition of what God can actually make of us.  It is our hope that will unsettle us.

There is no hope for a love that rigidly focuses on its own advantage.  Let us dare to hope – dare to love – and dare to live for others and, if called upon, to die for others.  Let Christ really be our king!

 

Fr. Pat Earl, SJ