Interesting and frank homily from a local priest on the gospel of Zechariah and Elizabeth having their son John the Baptist despite their advanced age:
“A question I get from parents a million times is, ‘but we did everything right - what happened?’ Or they frame it as, ‘our kids don’t go to Mass..what did we do wrong?”
When they say they did everything right they add, ‘we sent them to Catholic schools and a Catholic college’ and I’m always tempted to say - but thank God have always resisted - ‘the answer is implicit in what you said...you sent them to Catholic schools’.
The gospel says Zechariah and Elizabeth were righteous, that they did everything right and still he had no child. Ironically, Zechariah only did something wrong after he received the grace of a child, by his doubting of the angel.
The core of our faith is ‘grace’, a blessing, an unmerited gift. Grace means that not everything we do, whether right or wrong, matters. God has His plans. It was only after Zechariah gave up his plan for his son and accepted God’s plan for John (by writing, ‘his name is John’ instead of after himself) that he got his speech back.
Back in the day the church only had masses on Sunday. It was decided that we would add the Saturday vigil since many Catholics who worked on Sundays, like taxi drivers and restaurant workers, would be able to therefore attend mass. The expectation was that mass attendance would go up. But it was immediately shown that there was no increase whatsoever, that some people who previously went on Sundays just changed when they went to mass. The church did the right thing but it bore no fruit, and didn’t achieve the intended result. Zechariah was faithful for many decades but still received no child.
St Paul wrote that he planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God makes it grow.”
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