Sunday Homily Text

Fr. Tom Lucas, S.J.

March 2, 2025

A sieve, a potter’s kiln, a piece of fruit from a healthy tree, a word of truth. Such simple images are presented to us today in the Book of Sirach. A sieve separates the husks from the good flour, and the husks and the weevils are discarded. The heat of a kiln will transform a well-made vessel of clay into a strong and durable container, but the heat can cause one carelessly formed to explode. A well-cared for tree produces healthy, life giving fruit because it has been tended, pruned, and watered, but the rotten tree crumbles away forgotten. A word of truth builds up, creates, affirms; the lie tears down, destroys, denies what is evident for the healthy eye to see. 

In the midst of so much shouting among leaders of nations, in the turmoil of chaos and misrepresentation, in the sufferings of the poor and oppressed at the hands of the powerful, these simple images remind us of the challenges we face as people committed to God’s creative and transforming work. 

I’ve been thinking about two old men this past week. First, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the magnificent Russian novelist whose truth-telling during the murderous regime of Stalin earned him imprisonment, internal exile to prison camps, and eventual banishment from his beloved Russia. Born an Orthodox Catholic, he was indoctrinated as a young atheistic communist, and as a soldier he lived the horrors and the dehumanizing experience of the second world war and the oppression that followed it in his own country. 

That experience was the sieve that sorted out his life, and allowed him to discard the lies he had been taught. He found his faith again, and a courageous voice to speak the truth of his deepest knowledge: the justice of God and the need for us to choose between good an evil: the line, he called it, that “the line separating good and evil that passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.” Following that line cost him freedom, health, and comfort. He suffered because he would not deny that truth. Why? Because, as he ended his Nobel Prize lecture in 1970, “one word of truth outweighs the world.”

I think of another old me, this one in a hospital not far from the Vatican, and the gasping breaths of a dying old man who calls himself Francis. He no longer has the strength to speak the words of truth he loves, yet the witness of his courage and his gentleness has transformed our church and our understanding of God’s mercy. The vessel of his body may be failing, but it has been filled throughout his life with the wine of compassion made from the good grapes of love. He has spoken by his actions even more than by his words, spoken the truth of humanity created in the image of God, humanity transformed by the incarnation of Christ into our human flesh, by God’s own word made flesh, God’s own heart become the heart of the world. Today’s Gospel reminds us of the need we have for wise guides, wise guides who have removed the planks from their own eyes so that that can help us by removing the splinters from our eyes so we can really see the enormity of the task before us. We give thanks that we continue to be given wise guides who have learned the truth from the master whose heart is the heart of the world, and whose mercy is without end. 

Today’s gospel tells us, “A good person out the store of goodness in their heart produces good, for from the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks. “

We give thanks for the echoing courage of Aleksandr, and for the fierce compassion of Francis, and for all those who have spoken and continue to speak works of truth that outweigh the world. Let our voices be one with theirs, as we affirm our faith in the Word Made Flesh, our teacher, guide, and Lord.