TEXT OF A HOMILY BY RT REV. MSGR. CLETUS TANIMU GOTAN AT THE 40TH PRIESTLY ORDINATION ANNIVERSARY OF MOST REV. DR. MATTHEW ISHAYA AUDU, CATHOLIC ARCHBISHOP OF JOS AT TUDU UKU, KARU LOCAL GOVT AREA, NASSARAWA STATE ON THURSDAY 27TH JUNE, 2024.
Jer 1:4-10; 1Tim 4:12-16; Lk 4:16-22
Your Eminences, Your Graces, Your Lordships, Monsignori, Reverend Fathers, Major Superiors and members of various religious institutes here represented, State functionaries here present, Royal Fathers, Papal Knights and Medalists, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ,!
If you have never attended an ordination Mass, I hope one day you will. It is a beautiful and moving liturgy. If you have attended one perhaps you will remember this very special moment immediately following the proclamation of the Gospel when the cathedral falls silent and then one person steps to the microphone and says: “Let him to be ordained a priest come forward!” The soon to be ordained man’s name is called, and he stands up and says: “Present!”
On June 23rd, 1984 the person at the microphone said: Let him to be ordained a priest come forward: “Matthew Ishaya Audu!” and a good looking, gentle, and humble young man with dark hair stood and said: “Present!” . That word “Present!” was not merely a statement of physical location but also of commitment that Rev. Audu made that day. Forty 40 years ago that day he said “Present!”. “Present!” wherever and whenever the people of the Church call me: “Present!”. At countless Masses, confessions and anointings of the sick. “Present!”. At parish meetings, fairs, and missions: “Present!’
At the joys of baptisms, confirmations, and weddings: “Present!”
At times of sorrows, tragedies, sicknesses, and shattered dreams: “Present!”
At the losses experienced in times of deaths, funerals, and broken relationships: “Present!”
At the loneliness of being home-bound, distraught, or forgotten by others: “Present!”
At whatever hour the phone may ring and someone needs a priest at home, nursing facility, or hospital: “Present!”
Rev. Audu, whose original dream was to be an engineer had this dream truncated by the Lord who wanted him to be a religious instructor presiding over Sunday services in this church. Here he is presiding today in the same church as Archbishop having said yes to the call to the priesthood. He has lived and continues to live that “yes” uttered so clearly that day 40 years ago. And so we thank you, AB. Audu, and we honor you for being “Present!” We thank God for the number of people whom in your priestly ministry you taught the way of God, baptized, confirmed, comforted and restored in the sacrament of penance, people whom you blessed their unions and comforted in the sacrament of the sick and prayed for at their death…Thank God for the number of priests you ordained, the religious professed under your care and the lay faithful whose faith has been nurtured by your apostolate. Thank God for the Churches, schools, hospitals, care homes, families and other pastoral institutions you built and the grace of your presence representing the Church, first in Lafia Diocese and now in the Archdiocese of Jos.
From my very sketchy knowledge of your ministry in this part of our country, I know you have been there as a friend indeed to the weak and the poor, and a good listener and wise adviser to many. Your generosity to those in need is legendary because you believed that it was better to give and be fooled, than not give and leave someone in real need. Your long and loving ministry has endeared you to everybody and enriched this geographical circumscription in ways we will only know fully in eternity.
It is true that we are celebrating and honoring Bishop Audu for 40 unbroken years of priestly service in the vineyard of the Lord: all of what he has done and, with God’s grace, will continue to do as a priest. But truly it is not about him but about Jesus whose priest he is and who once said: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you, and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain…(Jn 15:16). Archbishop Audu has every reason to thank God for His goodness and faithfulness and we give thanks to God with him for the many moments of joy when his ministry of God’s Word, took flesh in the hearts and lives of those he has served. We give thanks for the people in his live, living and dead, at home and abroad without whom Archbishop Audu would not have been who he is today. May God rest his parents and the deceased members of his family and all who have died in perfect peace. We remember here the generation of SMA priests and missionaries like: Fr Tony Cussen SMA, Fr Kevin Carroll SMA, Fr Bob Moland SMA and Bishops Donal Murray CSSP and Athanasius Atule Usuh all of blessed memory, those simple catechists and pious men and women who acted as Simon the Cyrenian on the journey and some of whom have preceded us marked with the signs of faith. We thank them and his family alive, the Church, his classmates to whom he is well bonded many of whom are here today and indeed all the people of God who nurtured his faith and provided the stage, the place, the environment in which he invested his life, time, talent and treasure at the service of God.
Like the rest of us, I am sure Bishop Audu must also have known many times of loneliness, heartaches and heart breaks and must even have been broken at some points. He had to abandon the famous Technical Advancement School, Kaduna due to serious financial difficulties. He had to cope with parental opposition on his chosen vocation and the usual burden of collusion and misunderstanding with colleagues in the field. Even from the point of leadership, which has become an uncharitable norm where one does not expect applause, but pelting, casting of aspersions, and where many vilify you even for things you think you’re putting your best to better the system or path. Indeed, leadership, even in the church, is a burden you must have a wide and strong shoulder to accommodate the bad, the good and the ugly!. Instead of allowing these weak points in his background to bring him to the ground Archbishop Audu has positively converted his to strengths which are visible in him today. We should never forget that God gave unto Abraham three categories of children: Those like the stars of the sky, who brighten you during the darkest days…Those like the sand by the seashore who are washed and can’t stain you… and the last category, are the ones like the dust of the earth, who can stain and stick to your legs on the journey of your life and you ought to wash regularly.
The text from Luke 4:16-22, proposed for our meditation, tells us of an important event in the ministry of Jesus. It tells us about His mission, a kind of a job description, a manifesto or what we might call today his “mission statement” which is loaded with food for our instruction if we care to learn. The text connects us to a very familiar passage from Isaiah 61:1-2, a vision of what the Messiah’s kingdom would look like when he came to restore Israel. The people of Nazareth were very excited that their hometown boy would be the one to make this happen. They must have found it comforting to hear one of their own read about a Savior, a Messiah, One who would bring good news to their poor, proclaim liberty to captives, give sight to the blind, and set the downtrodden free. They thought this would happen some day far off in the distant future. They were shocked when Jesus set the scroll down and said, “Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
The people of Nazareth must have been very eager to hear what this alleged hometown miracle worker was going to say about the coming day of the Lord, after all the captivity from the Romans with their military presence and oppressive taxation for which they were all waiting expectantly. They would have wished Jesus to say something like “I have come to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the release of all those in bondage… the year of the Lord’s vengeance and the setting up of the nation of Israel over all the other nations of the world.” But, unfortunately, He said nothing about restoring the glories of Israel, nothing about conquering enemies or laying waste their lands. No, it is about letting the poor of this world hear the Good News of God’s love for them. It is about healing and reconciliation. It is about liberating those who are tied down by any form of enslavement. It is about helping people to see clearly the true meaning of life. It is about restoring wholeness to people’s lives and to societies. It is about the inauguration of the Kingdom by its King.
This mission is as relevant today as it was at the time of Jesus. We should commit ourselves to fulfilling His mission particularly in this our world where millions of people suffer, many experience the devastation of war, the sorrows of oppression, the decimation of disease, the slow death of starvation, and the indignity of poverty. Beyond the physical conditions, millions of people live in spiritual darkness, crushed by a load of sin and habits that torment them. The light of truth has not yet dawned in their lives.
Let us consider the various people Jesus dealt with in His day. Think about the woman at the well; about the man born blind or the man in need of healing at the pool of Bethesda. Consider the woman caught in adultery. These are the people that Isaiah is describing in our text this morning. And, when you think about it, these are the very people Jesus is dealing with today. Jesus’s message to the hearers at Nazareth and to us is the same. We are these people! You and I are the people Christ came to serve. We are the poor, we’re the captives, we’re the blind and the oppressed. Jesus has deliverance for all of us no matter who we are and no matter what our situation!
The celebration today should make us stand back to evaluate our lives each at his or her duty post. Nigeria, our constituency has been a flash point in terms of insecurity in recent times and we are still counting our losses. We priests and pastors here in Nigeria have a serious work to bring all our people to be all hands on deck, not only to recover our wasted opportunities but also to turn around the fortunes of our country after all these years of independence; to overcome the multi-dimensional challenges facing us and heal the wounds inflicted by the corruptive indulgence of our wicked bothers and sisters at different levels of governance some of whom have converted our general welfare into their own personal economic comfort and that of a few. While we have today many claiming to be born again, filled with the Holy Spirit, working under anointing, they are stealing the country blind, robbing their own people of every resource and hurting the poor, the ignorant and the weak.
This celebration is an invitation to us all to rethink our values. You that have built houses upon houses, bought castles and mansions, acquired land upon land, with properties unending, having foreign and domiciliary account upon account in every currency and every bank…Tell me now, how many people beyond your close family have you helped, empowered, supported, educated, promoted? What have you achieved for the common good? That is the measure of your worth before God and humanity. I call on all in positions of leadership to repent and rescue the fatherland, this country.
To tackle these problems we all need some attitudinal change, a value reorientation for a reformation of mind to always see good as good and bad as bad. We all need a conversion, a change of mindset, and a change of conduct and above all the fear of God as a sine qua non for the way forward. We need to be on the same page, irrespective of our differences condemning whatever is wrong wherever, in whomever and in whatever form it comes and irrespective of our usual sentiments of region, tribe and religion, which have held us in bondage for decades. To succeed, to borrow the words I heard for the first time from Archbishop Kaigama, long ago, we must all become tribally blind, regionally blind, politically blind, and religiously blind. Our religions are worth their names only when they help us positively by making a Traditional Religionist a better worshipper; the Hindu a better Hindu, a Muslim a better Muslim, and a Christian a better Christian.
In a country, such as ours, thirsting for justice, honesty and fair play; a country in which bribery, indiscipline and embezzlement of public funds are not unknown; a country in which nepotism, abuse of office and neglect of the poor, the sick and the unknown have not been absent, our leaders under whatever name, must all show a difference by proclaiming in open daylight the message of salvation worked for by Christ together with ever greater incarnation of that gospel in daily life. This was how the early Christians made deep and positive impressions on the public who were able to see them silently witnessing to the resurrection by the way they lived and, because of this “every day the Lord added to their group those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47).
Your Excellencies, my Lords spiritual and temporal, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, You will agree with me that here, we live in an environment which has seemingly turned its back on God; an environment where people live as if there is no God, and where it is easy to condemn others for sins committed, but it is not easy for us to examine our consciences and see the logs in our eyes and make adjustments in our lives. When we look around us there are issues that demand change and the establishment of God’s kingdom. Unfortunately, most times we do not see them because we are encountered with self. We, for example, still look forward to that time when the followers of Jesus will abandon a closed-circuit, selfish, sacristy Christianity; the time when our Christians will proclaim Christ in the market place where we meet other human beings who are not Christians, not of the same tribe or ideology with us but whom God in his infinite wisdom has placed in our travel package. We look forward to the time in our country when, for example, the intelligent student of poor parents will win scholarship on merit and the not so intelligent child of the rich and powerful will be rejected also on merit. We look forward to the time when the unknown villager who is involved in a car accident gets the same quick, efficient, and devoted attention in the general hospital, which should be general but is seemingly generally reserved for the rich and powerful or for those who are connected to somebody who knows somebody. We should pray and work for the time when the poor man can confidently have recourse to the police or the law court as to his secure means of protecting his rights. This is when we can say, we witness to the liberating influence of the Gospel message at our duty posts.
Archbishop Audu, as you begin this fifth decade of your priestly ministry, here in Tudu Uku your Nazareth, you are entering the later part of your life’s journey. We thank you that you answered the call to become a witness to the resurrection, using your skills to model for us what it means to follow Christ all these years. I wonder if it has ever crossed your mind to look at the scene where some of us are expected to hand over to others sooner or later. I am sure that you have since noted the serious paradigm-shift in Christianity today from the mission-Christianity some of us were brought up in to the Pentecostal thing we now see. The shift has no doubt brought personal and economic reawakening of Christian self-empowerment as advantages to many. It has also however, been carried too far to produce a fake Christianity devoid of the cross, a life of power-demonstration to the utter detriment of character-building. We are now left with a Christianity which operates like a supermarket where buyers enter into the Pentecostal mall, where they observe the competing wares on display and pick a number of items of their choice.
Like in a supermarket, many of our Christians today have become shoppers in the mall who patronize various churches. Thus it is easy today to find a Christian who goes to the Catholic Church to fulfill correct traditional liturgical worship; to the Anglican Church for wedding; to the Deeper Life Bible Church for a dose of holiness teaching; to the Apostolic Faith for classical church music; to Winners Chapel for prosperity; to Christ Embassy for healing; to Cherubim and Seraphim Church for prophecy; to Celestial Church for ritual cleansing; to Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries for prayer and deliverance from real and imaginary enemies and at the Redeemed Church’s Holy Ghost Night for teaching words of knowledge and miracles, etc. only you can guess why they go into some fellowships with funny names like the Laboratory Church of God; Occupy till I come Liberation Ministry; Run for your life International Chapel; Mountain of Swelling Problems Interdenominational prayer Ministry; Elshaddai Shall not Die Ministry etc. This prevailing culture tends towards denominational syncretism.
No wonder now we are left, with some who call themselves Christian and Catholics but cannot differentiate what our Church teaches and holds to be true from what they have been indoctrinated with in other Churches. They have embraced what someone has referred to as a “cafeteria, part-time, syncretistic and political Catholicism”- choosing what parts of the faith they want to follow and discarding others. There are many who profess the Creed but confine its influence only to participation in the Liturgy on Sunday which the fathers of the Second Vatican Council once warned against when they said: “The greatest error of our age is the separation between faith and life.” A practical atheism is spreading like wild fire, by those who profess the ancient Christian Creed at Mass but fail to live it during the rest of the week as they are seated in the Church on Sundays, as we are, only to be seen coming out of the traditional shrines on Mondays. Church buildings are packed full on Sundays but God is seemingly pushed out of our lives on weekdays. The Sacrament of confession has been left for the youths and little children, with only a handful of confused adults who come to discuss with the priest at the Confessional what they should discuss in the parish office. The regular preaching of our Pastors and daily administration of the Sacraments do not go beyond the surface of our skin. Where does this leave us as a Church and country? They lead us nowhere except as a land of religiosity without righteousness, a land of churches without Christ, clerics without courtesy, collections without compassion, crusades without contemplation, followers without fidelity, flamboyance without fellow-feeling and fluency without fellowship.
In spite of all these challenges, Your Grace, God’s grace and power have sustained you during these 40 years in the past, will see you through the present and guide you into the future. Though today is a celebration of your life, it is also a challenge issued by you and your life, and by God – to the rest of us. It is the challenge to let ourselves be used by God, as you have let yourself be used by Him, so that we might make a lasting difference in His world and among His children. It is the challenge to us to be people of faith and works. For, just as faith without works is dead, so too works without faith risks being only an empty shell, without the living beating heart of God within them. It is a challenge for us to ask ourselves regularly whether, in the state of life we live, we are putting Christ first, whether we are seeking eternal life with him above all else.
My dear fellow priests and pastors, the Lord still needs us in our Parishes to raise parents who really care about their children, parents who spend time with them, and who still care for them even when they disappoint them. In our schools we need teachers who know their pupils and who take a personal interest in their well-being. In our hospitals we need doctors and nurses who care about their patients and who do not treat them as objects. In public life we need people who care about the welfare of others rather than their own selfish interest. And last but not the least of all, we need men of God, priests, who are willing to give a loving service to all including parents, teachers, doctors, nurses and civil savants. We need to imitate Christ the good shepherd who, cared about people, especially the weak, the wounded and the lost. The evidence is there on every page of the Gospels. We should draw great comfort from this. This is the kind of Savior we have. Someone who really cares about us, even to the point of giving his life for us.
Jesus from the Cross says to Mary, pointing at John: “Woman, behold your son!” and to John: “Here is your mother!” (cf. Jn. 19:26-27). In that disciple, we are all represented: the Lord entrusts us to the loving and tender hands of the Mother, that we might feel her support in facing and overcoming the difficulties of our human and Christian journey; to never be afraid of the struggle, to face it with the help of the mother. . . May Our Lady, Our Mother, continue to assist you, bishop and indeed all of us her priests in our ministry. May she be revered as a loving Mother for all the faithful. May she lead us all to Jesus Christ, the Great High Priest. Thank you once again for your many years of dedicated service to the People of God. May God give you the health and the strength to serve many, many more years as His priest at His sacred altar. There is an old Latin expression that priests often toast to one another at a time such as this which in English means: “to many more years.” And so in closing, it is my honor on behalf of all of you, and personally to salute Archbishop Audu by saying to you, Ad multos et salubrissimos annos!
May God remember you today: Like Noah;
Protect you like Daniel. Heal you like Naaman;
Favour you like Moses; Prosper you like Isaac.
Anoint you like David; Answer you like Elijah;
Use you like Paul; Intervene for you like Esther
and Fight for you like the Israelites. In Jesus mighty name I pray.
