Homily for the Solemnity of Assumption, Year B, 2024

God Took Her Body and Soul into Heaven

Friends, after the completion of her earthly life, God took the Immaculate Virgin Mary, body and soul into heaven. I find this statement in the Bull, "Munificentissimus Deus" (Most Bountiful God), defining the Dogma of Assumption to be fundamental to the Church's teaching on the Assumption of the Immaculate Virgin Mary. It highlights the fact that the Assumption of the Immaculate Virgin Mary is the work of God, as suggested by its title, "Most Bountiful God." This point is also emphasized in the Magnificat, "The Almighty has done great things for me, Holy is his Name." Mary is conscious of God's actions in her life. She isn't obsessed with her perfection, but like Fr Michael Casey puts it, she lives with the insecurity of God's mercy. It is about God. It isn't about her. This is holiness, making one's life all about God, wholly unto the Lord. Since God was the beginning and end of Mary's life, it is quite reasonable to conclude that God would not have allowed her to experience corruption. In other words, God recognizes Mary's cooperation with his plans and purposes. After all, it is God's plan for us that we make our whole life about him.

There is something very freeing about God's plan for us. First, it helps us to live with a sense of accountability. If my whole life is about God, then I have to be accountable to him. I have to constantly seek what he wants. This art of seeking frees us from self-absorption that too often enslaves us and makes less ourselves. We aren't meant to be self-absorbed, but to be other focused. For our being, as John Paul II says, increases in the measure we give it away for others. Thus, in the other to whom our being is given, we find God, and he makes himself known there. This is what happened in the Gospel reading today. Mary immediately set out to visit Elizabeth as soon as the Archangel Gabriel left her. She didn't keep the Good News of the Annunciation to herself. No, no, she had to "give it away," that is, tell it to her cousin Elizabeth. And the event that unfolded thereafter couldn't have been staged. Elisabeth immediately recognized God's presence in Mary. "Why should I be honored with a visit from the Mother of my Lord. " Here, Mary's being has increased. She isn't merely the Mary, Elizabeth's cousin, but the Mary, the Mother of God.

Second, making our whole life about God affords us the capacity to rejoice. That is, we can actually take delight in what God has done, is doing, and will do. There is only one sadness, not recognizing God's saving work. He is at work in strange places and people. Often, he surprises us. The joy is to recognize his work, to recall them, and to live with the hope that he will do them again. The Magnificat emphasizes this point, "The Almighty has done great things for me, and Holy is his Name." Such recognition places us in contact with God and keeps us in a filial relationship with God that enables us to call God, Abba, Father. But more importantly, it frees us from our perfectionism, which very often makes us anxious, sad, and even rejects God. Mary accepted God because she recognized the saving work of God. "My soul magnifies the Lord. My spirit rejoices in God, my savior." She isn't her own savior. God is. This is the point of today's Solemnity. You and I have to take it home as we live each day in our concrete historical situation and confront the reality of life. We have to remember that God is our savior. He saved Mary. He will save us.

Fr Francis Afu

Homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B 2024

We Become What We Eat

Friends, Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher and a renowned atheist, is right in claiming that we become what we eat. This claim, in some ways, serves as a critique of René Descartes, who famously said, "I think, therefore I am." Descartes was interested in offering a rational argument for existence, "things as they are," while Feuerbach was shifting the philosophical conversation away from thinking, from establishing the foundation of things as they are to things as they can become. In the words of Saint John Newman, Feuerbach was moving from the notional to the real. Since becoming is the core of the real. Things aren't simply what they are. Rather, they are constantly becoming something more or something less. For instance, from Descartes' perspective, I think I am a man. Therefore, I am a man. This suggests a finality to the definition of the thinker. However, such a finality is more notional than real. Because, in the real, I am a man, but I am becoming more of a man or less of a man depending as Maurice Blondel put it on the choices I am making in any given time and place. If I choose to eat healthily, I become a healthy man.

These themes of choice, eating, and becoming are masterly woven into John's Gospel of the Bread of Life narrative. Jesus is very emphatic about becoming. Besides, John's author doesn't let becoming slip out of his Gospel narrative since for him, believing is not merely professing a creed, a teaching, but becoming one with the Word who became flesh and lives among us. To that effect, he quotes Jesus, saying, "I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world ... This is the bread come down from heaven; not like the bread our ancestors ate: they are dead, but anyone who eats this bread will live forever" (John 6:51-58). The bread that was eaten by our ancestors made them become less who they were meant to become - living beings. Instead of living forever, they are dead. They became dead men and women. But the bread that he, Jesus, is offering is that which when we eat, we will become living men and women. Because "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him." We become living beings because him, whom we eat, is alive.

Jesus doesn't coerce nor retract what he has said. But he makes the point that whoever we want to become is a choice we all have to make. Like Joshua in Joshua 30:19, Jesus puts before us two choices, becoming dead or becoming alive. John's author emphasizes this with the aside, "Then the Jews started arguing with one another: 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ they said. Jesus replied: ‘I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you." In other words, choose to eat me, that you may become me. There is no indifference here. As Maurice Blondel states, not choosing is itself a choice, but one that deprives us of becoming alive, that is, becoming Christ-like. This begs the question, who is Christ? He is God who, out of love for us, became one of us so that we can become one of him. This aligns with Saint Augustine's famous saying that our hearts are restless until they become rest in God. The reason being, it is in him, we live, move, and have our being (Acts 17:28). Therefore, in the words of Saint Augustine, "Behold what you are - the Body of Christ; become what you receive - the Body of Christ."

Fr Francis Afu

Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent, Year A 2026

Listen to Him

Friends, the word “listen” as it is used in today’s Gospel Reading is covenantal. Matthew uses the Greek ἀκούετε (akouete), from ἀκούω (akouō), to echo the Hebrew shema—“hear.” But in the Transfiguration as narrated in Matthew 17:1-9, Matthew is doing far more than telling us to pay attention to what Jesus will say, says or said. “Listen” is a covenant verb that gathers up the entire biblical story of how God forms a people, reveals His Son, and reorients human lives. In this case, the Father's command in the Transfiguration, “Listen to Him,” becomes an invitation to let Jesus be the one who interprets our reality, because He is the definitive interpreter of God. In addition, He is the one through whom God now speaks. Seen in this light, the Father’s declaration, “This is Beloved Son,” is not only an affirmation of Jesus’ identity. It is the revelation of our identity. For in Him, we discover who we are, whose we are, and what our lives are for. Furthermore, “to listen to Him” is to let our identity be shaped by His revelatory act of being the Word of the Father. In other words, to listen to Him is to receive and internalise the Word, let Him reorder our lives, and act from the Word.

Abram, in the First Reading, becomes the first to listen. As we heard, “Abram went as the Lord directed him.” He not only received the promise of blessing and the mission that all the families of the earth would be blessed through him; he also allowed that promise to reorient his entire life. Later, in the book of Genesis, Abram's name will be changed to Abraham, the father of nations, because he listened and allowed the promise to interpret his life and shape his identity. Notice that Abram listened to the promise, but not to the Word, because the promise itself anticipates the Word. It was not the Word in its fullness, for the Word had not yet become flesh. But it was revelatory in that it points forward, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” The repeated “I will” reveals a future held in God’s hands, and Abram listened his way into that future. And his act of listening is counted as faith, making him our father in faith. But now Matthew invites us not to listen forward, but to listen from fulfilment, to listen to Him, Christ. For in Christ, we see that the promise is fulfilled in the Word, and the Father has kept His Word.

Josephine listened to Him some forty years ago. Amid family pressure, career opportunities, and even threats to life, she chose to keep her pregnancy. It was the hardest decision she ever made, she later said, after seeing the son she could have aborted become a priest. At his ordination, tears ran down her face—not because he had become a priest, but because she listened to the word of the Word, “thou shalt not kill.” That word reoriented her entire life, cost her a promising career, and continues to shape her in ways she never imagined. But her joy today is not simply that her son became a priest, but that through his priesthood, many lives have also been given a chance to live. For Josephine, “Listen to Him” became exactly what Matthew means: to receive and internalise the Word, let Him reorder our lives, and act from the Word. And as her story shows, such listening often comes with a disorienting cost. However, as the Greek akouete reminds us, listening means letting Jesus interpret our reality, not limiting ourselves to what is obvious, but trusting what is quietly being prepared beneath the surface of our ordeal. It is the future no eye has seen, hidden in the present, which Christ reveals in time when we allow Him to be the interpreter of our lives as we listen to Him.

Fr Francis Afu

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent, Year A 2026

If You Knew the Gift of God

Friends, I am particularly interested in John’s use of the word “gift.” He qualifies the word with a possessive proposition, “of God.” The phrase “the gift of God” can therefore be read as John’s way of locating the origin of the gift and its character. John is saying that this “gift” comes from God and is of God, meaning it conveys God’s attributes of eternity, mystery, mercy, and, above all, love. This is why Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God.” Besides, when we take any of these attributes, say, incomprehensibility or mystery, we discover that they point toward a relational meaning. Such divine qualities cannot be grasped from a distance. They can only be understood through participation in the very life of God. Thus, “the gift of God” is a gift that demands participation. Without entering into a relationship with God, the gift cannot be recognised or received as God’s gift. This is the hinge that swings open the door to the meaning of today’s Gospel. Jesus allows himself to be encountered by the Samaritan woman. The woman responds—question by question—participating in the life that Christ is revealing, and the mystery before her and her townsfolk unfolds, until they come to believe.

In today's Psalm, the psalmist constructs this hinge in the opening lines of each of the three verses. In the first, the hinge is “Come, let us sing joyfully to the Lord.” The word “come’ is an invitation to gather and to enter into a relationship that joyfully acknowledges the Lord as the Lord. It calls us to sing songs that recognise the Lord as the rock of our salvation, that is, our healer. This act of proclaiming, singing and rejoicing is the psalmist's own way of responding to God and participating in the mystery in front of him. The second hinge repeats the call to gather but moves deeper, naming the purpose for which we gather: to worship. The psalmist sings, “Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the Lord who made us. For he is our God, and we are the people He shepherds, the flock He guides.” Worship, here, is not merely external performance, a ritual “it,” but a “relational ‘we,” in which spiritual reality flows from God’s own life within the worshipper. This is what Jesus means by worship “in Spirit and in truth”—the truth that we belong to God and are created for worship. The third is a summons; do not harden your hearts now that you have heard the invitation to worship.

In the First Reading, we meet a community that stands in sharp contrast to the psalmist’s joyful gathering. Instead of coming together to worship, they come together to complain. As the saying goes in Australia, they gather to whinge. Their gathering is no longer oriented toward God, so it collapses in on itself. They complain, they accuse, they sabotage one another. Even Moses is caught in the spiral. He begins to panic under the weight of their hostility and fear. This is the consequence of not gathering as a relational “we” that belongs to God and was created for God. And so, the conflict in the First Reading mirrors the conflicts and dramas of our own day, when communities, families and individuals forget the One who holds them together. Nonetheless, amid his distress, Moses does something the people have forgotten how to do: he remembers God. He turns toward the One who called them, and he cries out for help. That single act of turning toward God rather than away becomes the hinge that opens the way for God’s intervention. Moses gathers himself before God, and God responds. The Samaritan woman does the same: she gathers around Jesus, and in that encounter she, her townsfolk, like Moses, come to know “the gift of God”—the gift that satisfies, heals, and transforms.

Fr Francis Afu

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent, Year A 2026

You Were Once Darkness

Friends, in the Second Reading, Saint Paul reminds us that you and I were once darkness. Notice that Paul does not say we were once in darkness, as though darkness were a thing, something out there, external to us. Instead, he says, “You were once darkness.” He personifies darkness and, in doing so, reveals darkness as an identity we had inhabited. In this sense, darkness is not merely an absence of light, but the inner refusal to be illuminated by the light that God offers in Christ. It is who we become when we turn away from the light. John’s Gospel expresses this with profound clarity, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men … the true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world. He was in the world … yet the world knew Him not. He came to his own home, and his own people received him not … but to all who receive Him … he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:5-12). Later, in John 3:19, Jesus names this refusal directly, men and women preferred darkness to light. This preference for darkness—this turning away from illumination—substantiates Paul’s personification of darkness. It confirms that the darkness he speaks of is not a cosmic void but a human response, a resistance to the light that seeks to heal, reveal, and transform.

The Pharisees in the Gospel exhibit this Pauline darkness. They could not see the good that God had done, nor could they recognise the new person the blind man had become through God’s grace. They could not bring themselves to accept that it is better to do good on the Sabbath than to cling to their own rules. This is the darkness of seeing only ourselves and our own certainty. It is the darkness that comes when we make ourselves the centre and close our hearts to anything beyond us. It is a darkness born of what I would call moral perfectionism, a life spent trying to look good rather than allowing God to make us good. The point, as the Pharisees show, is that they were so curved in on themselves that they no longer knew any better. This is not only darkness; it is a tragedy. Samuel could easily have been caught in the same darkness, but he was not, because he remained in conversation with the Light and became light. When he entered the house of Jesse, he was certain he knew whom God had chosen: “Surely this is the one.” But he let go of his certainty—his darkness—and allowed himself to be illumined. In that light, he could see not himself, but God, and what God desired: David.

However, Saint Paul goes on to say, “But now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of the light.” As darkness is personified, so too is light. And Paul is clear that we do not become light by our own strength or moral effort. We become light in the Lord. Like Samuel in today’s First Reading, we become light by remaining in conversation with the Lord, the Light of the world. Put differently, it is in prayer that we are enlightened and recreated to become light. In prayer, we bring our real selves—our shadows, our darkness—into the presence of the real God, who is Light. And since darkness cannot overcome light, but light overcomes darkness, God transforms our darkness and makes us shine with His radiance. This is the matrix of Lent—the Lenten discipline of prayer illumines us. But Paul does not stop at us becoming light. He summons us to live as children of the light. It is not enough to be illumined; we must allow the Light to shape our lives. Perhaps this is why Jesus urges us to pray without ceasing. Thomas would readily agree. Having once been darkness because of alcohol addiction, he discovered the transforming power of prayer when he hit rock bottom. Through honest prayer, his resentment gave way to love, his anxiety to trust in God, and his darkness to the light that heals. He, like many of us, was once darkness, but now he is light, living gracefully as God’s son.

Fr Francis Afu.

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A 2026

Untie Him and Let Him Go

Friends, all three readings give us vivid images of death, the grave, and rising from the dead. Each author begins with the conventional understanding of death and the grave as finality; however, they deliberately set God’s action against that assumption. In the First Reading, God’s action is wrapped in a promise: “I will open your graves and have you rise from them and bring you back to the land of Israel.” In the Second Reading, the focus shifts from physical death to existential and moral death—from the grave as earth to the grave as the body—and the author weaves into this condition God’s action of raising the one dead in sin to new life in Christ through the indwelling of the Spirit. The grave is no longer an end but a medium through which God works. Nowhere is this tension clearer than in the Gospel Reading, in the death of Lazarus and the exchange between Martha and Jesus. Martha is precise in her description of her brother’s condition—he has been in the tomb for four days. As she says, “Lord, by now there will be a stench.” Jesus does not dispute her assessment; He redirects it from despair to hope. He responds not by confirming what she believes is possible, but by inviting her into what He believes should be expected: “Did I not tell you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?”

The glory of God in this instance is not an abstract phrase but a concrete action—God manifesting Himself within us. As seen in the Gospel reading about Lazarus, this glory unfolds through a deliberate, methodical act of God. He meets us where we are and in what we have become: dead men and women. Then He calls us out, by name, from our graves—whether a physical grave like Lazarus or the moral and existential graves described by Paul in the Second Reading. But the key point is this: He calls us out. He does not leave us there because the grave is not our destination. He is our end. We proceeded from Him, and we shall return to Him. Our sins and deviations are not what define us. He does not hold them against us; instead, He feels the pain and harm we have suffered along the way. And He comes to make all things right, including our death. No wonder Paul exclaims in 1 Corinthians 15:55, “Death, where is your victory? Death, where is your sting?” And in verse 57, he adds, “But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” That victory is new life—more precisely, restored life. For the life God gives, much like energy in the Law of Thermodynamics, is not destroyed but transformed.

However, the Gospel author adds an important nuance to God’s action. While it is God who restores life—who transforms it—it is the community that must participate in releasing that restored life from what binds it. This is akin to what Johann Baptist Metz calls dangerous memories: those lingering, painful, constricting remnants of the past that hold a person back from flourishing. Even after Lazarus is raised, he remains wrapped in the cloths of the grave. In a real sense, he is still bound—unable to walk, unable to live, still entangled in the signs of death. And so, Jesus turns to the community and commands, “Untie him and let him go.” The miracle of life restored is God’s work; the work of unbinding belongs to us. This command is not restricted to the community of Lazarus’s time. It is a command God gives today. We are to reenact and participate in untying those whom God has already raised from their deaths and graves. And here the Gospel writer offers a profound twist: the community itself experiences restored life precisely in the act of unbinding Lazarus. This is the Christian drama. We become more fully ourselves, we flourish, and we live the resurrected life not in isolation, but by participating in the life and liberation of the other. Therefore, as we approach Easter, let us heed the command, “Untie him and let him go.”

Fr Francis Afu

Homily for the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, 2026

Unwilling to Expose Her to Shame

Friends, in a world that measures worth by performance and demands that we constantly prove ourselves and virtue-signal our morality, Saint Joseph stands as a quiet but powerful sign of contradiction. He refuses to be shaped by the expectations of his time. As we heard in today’s Gospel Reading, he chooses not to expose Mary to shame. Behind that simple line lies an entire world of pressure, family members, neighbours, and the religious culture of his time would have expected him to defend his honour by publicly naming Mary as an adulteress. After all, how else could she be pregnant? If Joseph had lived by the logic of our world, where virtue is often displayed rather than lived, he would have taken the moral high ground, signalled his righteousness, and allowed Mary to bear the full weight of public shame. But Joseph is a sign of contradiction precisely because he refuses this path. He opts instead for an informal divorce, unwilling, as Matthew tells us, to expose her to shame. In this, Joseph reveals what Matthew means when he calls him a just man. His justice is not retributive but relational. He gives Mary her due not because of what she has done, but because of who she is: a bearer of God’s image. Joseph’s justice is the justice of someone who sees as God sees.

Matthew subtly presents Joseph as one who already embodies the heart of chapter 25 of his Gospel: “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.” His righteousness is not the righteousness of public opinion but the righteousness of compassion, discernment, and reverence for the mystery of another’s life. It is a righteousness that listens, that waits, that refuses to collapse a person into the rumours that swirl around them. It is a righteousness that wrestles with God in the quiet, seeking truth amid noise and the pressure for quick resolution. The image that best captures Joseph’s righteousness is that of oil resting at the bottom of a large tank of water. At first glance, one might conclude there is no oil at all, simply because it has not yet risen to the surface. Joseph is not in a hurry to draw conclusions. He is willing to wait, to let time reveal what is true. In this image, the oil becomes a symbol of truth—truth that will rise in its own time, truth that Joseph receives only because he gives Mary the benefit of the doubt, and refuses to act prematurely. Justice, in this case, becomes a space in which the other is allowed to come to terms with the reality unfolding within them. Justice becomes hospitality to the truth that is still unfolding, making room for God to act.

In Joseph, God does act: the angel speaks, the truth rises, and Joseph receives what he could not have grasped had he rushed to judgment: “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son, and you will name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” Had Joseph bowed to the pressure of his religious culture, had he named Mary an adulteress and exposed her to shame, the consequences for her would have been grave, and the mystery God was bringing to birth in her would have been obscured in human eyes. This is the tragic logic of hurried judgment. It is what happens when we label others and force their story into the categories that make us feel secure. In such cases, we risk hindering the very work of God unfolding in them—and in us. We can only imagine how many families, lives, careers, and even vocations have been torn apart by this mindset, by a culture that demands the constant signalling of virtue, a culture that prizes looking good over being good. But Joseph shows us another way. His justice is the justice of a man attuned to God’s timing; a man whose patience becomes the very place where divine truth is disclosed. It is a justice that places every person in a posture where God can act and make all things right

Fr Francis Afu

Homily for Palm Sunday, Year A 2026

Telling Christ’s Story

Friends, as we gather to celebrate Palm Sunday, I would like to tell Christ’s story. What we have heard in the Passion Narrative is part of that larger story, and to appreciate it, we must see the context in which it unfolded. Christ was born, as we heard some months ago, to a people under Roman occupation. The religious landscape at the time was, to say the least, reactive and fractured: Scribes, Pharisees, chief priests and the people were locked in internal struggles, each anxious to justify its relevance and secure its survival. That fracture bred distance and avoidance; people scattered and inward serving, building walls to protect themselves from others. The culture of the time, as reflected in some ancient sources, helps us see the spiritual cost of such distance, a cost Dostoevsky’s Demons dramatises in Nikolia Stavrogin. Charming and magnetic, Stavrogin could be mistaken for a saint if appearance were all that mattered; yet his incapacity for reciprocal love and intimate relationships with others leaves his heart sealed. Pope Francis, citing Romano Guardini in Dilexit Nos uses Stavrogin as an image of a closed heart. He is distant, turned inward, and as such, without a heart, he could not love. Dostoevsky suggests that such heartlessness is a form of evil, since it creates a void where love should be.

The point is that love was missing. Not love as a philosophical or literary concept, which the ancient world had in abundance, but love as an incarnate presence, God dwelling among His people, and being with them intimately. And so, Matthew’s Gospel takes on this notion of love and frames it as bookends. He opens his Gospel with the narrative of Christ’s birth, and introduces Jesus as Emmanuel, God-with-us and closes his Gospel with Christ’s promise, “I will be with you until the end of time.” Matthew constructs Jesus’ story both as revelatory—revealing the Father's love for His creation by bridging the distance between God and creation—and as a lived reality, in Jesus’ concrete acts of love for real people rather than abstract humanity. He even died for them and for us, not because we were perfect but because he loves us and desires our freedom and flourishing. Here, love is self-giving and other-focused. It is the love that seeks the best in people, not necessarily when it is obvious. In fact, out of love, He endears Himself to us in our worst. As Saint Paul frames it, what proves that God loves us is that He died for us precisely when we were at our worst. The point is that it may be easy to die for someone who is perfect, but God’s love contradicts this convention.

This is a beautiful story. Its beauty is not in how neatly it is written and narrated, but in how it unfolded. It is a beauty that lurks in every encounter Jesus had with the sick, the dying, the outcast, the public sinner and the authorities whose hearts were sealed against the love He offered. Remember His meeting with the woman at the well. Even though He knew the woman had had five husbands and that the man she was living with was not her husband, He still loved her. He spent time with her despite public sensibilities and, step by step, led her to bring out the best in herself, making the point that she is not the sum of her sins and failings but a daughter of God, loved into being. And how about Judas, the man He knew, would betray Him, and Peter, the one who would deny Him! He could have pre-emptively killed them before they acted, but He did not. Love does not take life; it gives life and gives it abundantly. And so, He let them live, and, as Matthew’s Gospel narrates, He remained with them—the very people who betrayed and denied Him—until the end, offering them life that only He can give. This sacrificial nearness, unlike heartlessness, though it hurts and even dies, does not retaliate. Instead, it heals and raises up even the perpetrators of the evil it suffers. This is Christ’s story.

Fr Francis Afu