I Don’t Want to Contradict the Lord, but You Should Not Try to Pick Up Snakes; You Should, However, Expect To Work Miracles
Ascension of the Lord
One day last Spring my good friend Father Brendan and I were barreling down a hill on bikes in the George Washington National Forest when suddenly my friend riding in front of me came to an abrupt stop. I came around the corner and saw him staring at the ground in front of him while creeping backward slowly on his bike. It didn’t take me long to see why: in the middle of the trail was a large though seemingly docile timber rattlesnake.
Now, on the authority of today’s Gospel and both of us being priests, we should have had nothing to fear, as we just heard Christ say those who believe “will pick up serpents with their hands.” Not wanting to find out whether Jesus was being serious about that, we waited a few minutes for Mr. Rattlesnake to vacate the trail and then carried on with our ride snakebite free.
What Jesus says in the Gospel his believers will be capable of all sounds pretty out there: driving out demons, handling snakes, speaking new languages, drinking deadly things unharmed, and healing the sick. I don’t know about you, but I’m batting a lifetime 0-5 on those fronts and, while I would love the peace of mind knowing that rattlesnakes in the woods will no longer be a problem for me, I don’t honestly see that changing anytime soon.
How do we account for the truth within Jesus’ words, if we aren’t meant to take them literally?
Saint Gregory the Great, writing in the 5th century, gives us a helpful, spiritual explanation: they “who have left earthly words, and whose tongues sound forth the Holy Mysteries, speak a new language; they who by their good warnings take away evil from the hearts of others, take up serpents; and when they are hearing words of pestilent persuasion, without being at all drawn aside to evil doing, they drink a deadly thing, but it will never hurt them; whenever they see their neighbors growing weak in good works, and by their good example strengthen their life, they lay their hands on the sick, that they may recover. And all these miracles are greater in proportion as they are spiritual, and by them souls and not bodies are raised.”
I want to underscore Gregory’s last point: these miracles are greater because they are spiritual. When we think of miracles, we think first and maybe exclusively of miracles at the physical level: the blind being able to see, the lame walking, the dead being raised, and so on. Yet miracles can also be spiritual, and because the spiritual is higher than the physical, these miracles are greater and more remarkable: that we speak the language of the faith; that we encourage others to turn away from evil; that we come to the aid of others in their sin and brokenness without contracting their sickness in ourselves; and that we strengthen others to live better by bearing witness to Christ with our lives. All of these are the result of the work of grace, which is to say they are the fruit of God’s initiative and transcend what is possible in the natural order and are, therefore, rightly called miracles.
It sounds almost too corny to stomach, but the saying is true: we can see miracles every day and all around us. The world is never without God’s intentional intervention, for Christ promised to be with us always until the end of the age—a promise he fulfills by abiding within his Church, his spiritual body of which we are members. When the Holy Spirit enables us to live and do the work to which he calls us, miracles take place in us and through us, and Christ fulfills the promise made to his believers as he ascended to the Father’s right hand.
Yet beyond the ordinary miracles that God daily works among us, he also gives extraordinary infusions of his love and power that are meant to draw the attention of not only a few individuals but the entire world. And in the lives of the saints, we not only find many stories of spiritual miracles like what Saint Gregory described, but also of miracles more exactly like those listed in the Gospel. What happens to the saints is so captivating that their lives should stop us in our tracks and force us to re-evaluate how we see God working in and around us.
It became very clear to me visiting Mount St. Mary’s a couple of weeks ago that they make a very big deal out of one alumnus of the seminary, a priest from Oklahoma, Stanley Rother. If I am to become part of this community, I figured I better learn more about his life than what I knew. Father Rother was ordained to the priesthood in 1963 and was sent in 1968 to the mission parish his diocese ran in Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. As a seminarian, Stanley had struggled with Latin and was kicked out of the first seminary he attended for failing to master the language; but as a priest, he was able to learn the unwritten Mayan language of the people and worked to have the Missal and the New Testament translated into it for those he served to better understand the Mass and the faith. While there, he built a hospital and began a farming co-op and ministered to thousands at his parish of Saint James the Apostle. In those days, the Guatemalan government kidnapped and executed priests and catechesis—suspecting them of being Communists for their concern for the poor—and toward the end of his life Stanley knew that he was on the government’s short list for assassination. He came back to the United States for a brief time to discern what God was calling him to do. After making a retreat at his alma matter, Mount St. Mary’s, he decided to return to his parish in Santiago Atitlán; and in the middle of the night on July 28, 1981, Father Rother was killed in his rectory. Pope Francis declared him a martyr and he was beatified in 2017.
Not all of us are called to the same kind of witness that Blessed Stanley bore. As Paul tells us, “grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. And he gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.” But as the specific members of Christ’s body that we are, he calls us to live “in a manner worthy of the calling you have received” by cooperating with his grace to work miracles of whatever kind his providence has ordained.
It is by this that Christ remains present in the world. It is by this that he fulfills his promise to be with us to the end of the age. And it is by the holy Eucharist, in which he truly dwells, that we are fed and grow to full stature in him. If we allow grace to transform us, God will transform the everything. So let us be people who believe in him and believe in what is possible on account of him in us, for the building up of the Church and the salvation of the world.
Homily preached May 11/12, 2024 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and Saint Thomas Aquinas Parish, Hampden