Good morning, everyone. Always a great joy being able to be with you here at St. Charles Borromeo. I think some of you probably know by now that my Sundays are numbered. I’m going to be heading up to the Trappist monastery of the lady of Getz. I’m sorry, Our Lady of Genesee – hope I know where I’m going – The Abbey of Our Lady of Genesee https://www.geneseeabbey.org, which is in upstate New York, about 45 minutes south of Rochester. And I’ll be planning on entering the Trappist community there. So I do cherish these last remaining Sundays with you here.

So today is the feast of the Assumption, the solemnity of the Assumption, a great Marian feast. And whenever we celebrate a Marian feast, I think maybe two things, as a priest, come to mind.

The Eucharist makes us Catholic Christians, but we can only understand the Eucharist by thinking like Jews. We see this very clearly in today’s Gospel. 

The great insight of the Jews was that God loved them. This runs throughout the entire Old Testament. At the very beginning they understood that creation was not an accident or a cruel joke as most ancient peoples believed but the act of an all loving and all-powerful deity. The first humans did not find themselves in a wasteland but rather in Paradise, a place of perfection. They saw as well the meaning of Sin. God forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for then they would die. They are in paradise, what would they know of evil? The sin of Adam and Eve, as ours, is to think we at we can do better than God. Our creation would be better than his. They ate and died.