At almost every moment of the Mass there is vocalization. Someone, or everyone, speaks or sings. There may be a few moments of silence, or of music without words. But mostly, the air vibrates with words, and those vibrations are heard. Sometimes they’re also listened to.

Most of the words spoken or sung at Mass are also present in written form—in hymnals, missals, lectionaries, Bibles, and bulletins. Some of the Mass’s words are read from these books, while others, lodged in memory, are taken from there, particularly the formulas used at every Sunday Mass: Gloria, Creed, Paternoster, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, and so on. Whatever the balance between words read aloud and words spoken from memory, reading and reading materials are always ancillary and dispensable at Mass. In principle, memory, vocal cords, and ears suffice for what needs to be done with words.

Mass is in fact a scene hospitable to those who can’t read. Because they aren’t tempted to read, they are better equipped than the literate for full participation. Freed from distraction by the written word (turning pages, fingering screens), they can, without diversion, hear what’s said, look at what’s done and who’s doing it (particularly at faces and eyes), smell incense and flowers and people, touch and taste the consecrated elements, and so on. There are, for priests and people, better things to do with the eyes at Mass than read. To read words of the readings or the prayers as they’re spoken doubles exposure to them, and that throws both hearing and reading out of focus. It’s as if one were talking to a friend face to face while at the same time looking at a portrait of her hanging on a wall behind her head, or hearing her speak in front of you while watching her words be turned into text on a screen held in your hand. Better to dispense with the reading, which is inessential, and open the ears for hearing, which is not.

The homily shows the orality of the Mass clearly and in concentrated form. Even if the homily’s words have been written down by the preacher, and even if he reads his homily from a script (which he should not—the people deserve direct address by eye as well as voice), the people rarely have access to a written text as they hear the homily (which they should not: they need to look at what’s happening, as well as hear it). Homilies make illiterates of us all. We receive them aurally or we don’t receive them: from the preacher’s lips to our ears.

A homily is an oral artifact. It exists as a homily only for the time it takes to be spoken in the Mass to which it belongs. Nothing written is truly a homily, therefore; neither is anything otherwise recorded or livestreamed. Such bodies of words are merely the traces of homilies—visible light from dead stars. There are things to be learned from such traces; they aren’t nothing, and can contain wisdom, elegance, and other goods. But just as it’s impossible to receive a holographic image of a consecrated host as Christ’s body, so is it impossible to hear the words of a homily as homiletical outside the time and place of their delivery.

This already suggests that the paraphrasable content of a homily cannot exhaust what’s homiletical about it, for that content can be extracted from the time and place of the homily’s performance and then dissected elsewhere. This leaves open the question of how much, and in what way, the paraphrasable content of the words spoken in a homily contributes to their homiletical work. That contribution might be large or small. But it does mean that what homilies are and do can’t be reduced to the meaning of their words.

Who speaks when a homily is given? The preacher, clearly. But not only him. Also Jesus. Jesus’ person and speech are veiled by those of the preacher, for Jesus does not appear or act in the world unveiled—not since the Ascension. When a preacher gets up and begins to speak he does so in persona Christi, with the full authority of the one for and as whom he speaks. 

Preachers speak as Jesus did in the synagogues of Galilee and Judea. They explain, with evident authority, the Scripture just heard by the people gathered. They provide, ideally, an expositio viva of that Scripture: a living or lively commentary that helps hearers allow Scripture’s words to enter them, undo them, and remake them. Jesus spoke to the people with love, certainly; but love can sometimes seem bitter, astringent, even agonizing, and that may be true of preachers’ words, too. 

Jesus speaks in every homily, then, but that does not mean he is always heard—even when the homily’s words are listened to and understood. It’s possible, for example, to listen to a homily and hear only the words of a confused and self-regarding preacher retailing heresy, just as it’s possible to taste in the host only a dry, unnourishing wafer. It’s also possible to listen closely to a homily’s words and hear only yourself: your own judgments, your own preferences, your fat and greedy ego chewing on what’s said for your own purposes, which will usually include your own glorification. Hearers’ ears may be closed. It’s also possible, even common, for preachers to veil what Jesus says so heavily that it’s scarcely audible. They can, and do, speak so as to stage their own persons, or to demonstrate their wit, or their humility, or their acumen, or to seek the congregation’s love for themselves rather than for Jesus. 

But these failings of hearers and preachers can’t alter the situation and the scene, which is liturgical. The people are gathered to hear Jesus speak to them, and that is what happens, whether they like it or not, and no matter how many obstacles they place in the way. From Jesus’ lips to their ears, today and here.

It’s possible to be more precise about why the paraphrasable content of the words of a homily doesn’t suffice to make those words homiletic, and why recordings and transcriptions of homilies aren’t homilies.

Wittgenstein writes, in Zettel (§717), “Gott kannst du nicht mit einem anderen reden hören, sondern nur, wenn du der Angeredete bist.” (“You can’t hear God speak to someone else, you can hear him only if you are being addressed.”) This is perceptive and helpful. The remark, on its face, isn’t about what God says (the words God uses, let’s say), but rather about the conditions under which whatever words God uses can be heard as God’s. Were you to overhear someone say to someone else, “I forgive you for what you did,” you could know who said what to whom and the paraphrasable content of what was said. You might take note of the words and tell other people about them. But you couldn’t, in that situation, find yourself forgiven; the words couldn’t perform for you the act they performed for their addressee. You’d have overheard the words used, but you would not have received the force, or effect, of those words: what those words do wasn’t done for you.

We can apply this to the words spoken in homilies. Suppose that these, spoken by Jesus, do one thing only, though in an endless variety of modes: perform the transformative gift of Scripture to the congregation, collectively and individually, with a sharpness that lays bare everything of significance about the lives of those who hear them, and can, when heard, transform those lives. The words of homilies, on this view, have as an essential property a particular kind of performativity, like—but deeper and more comprehensive than—“I forgive you,” or “I promise you,” or “I am with you.”

This can be condensed even further. In the words of the homilies he gives, Jesus communicates always and only himself, as fully as words permit. This is how Paul Celan describes what poems do in Mikrolithen sinds, Steinchen (§267.3): “Im Gedicht geschieht nicht mitteilen, sondern sich mitteilen.” (“In a poem, what happens isn’t communication, but self-communication.”) The poem gives itself. That’s what makes it a poem. In a homily, what happens isn’t teaching, or the communication of information, or wit, or wisdom; it’s Jesus communicating himself verbally, reflecting in the verbal register what he’s about to do in the Eucharist. The words of homilies, so taken, perform something that doesn’t survive extraction and report. That isn’t to say that nothing survives extraction and report, but the self-communication of Jesus does not. 

Seeing homilies in this way is concordant with Pope Francis’s classification of homilies as sacramentals. He is even capable of mentioning Martin Luther with approval on this matter, as he did in January 2023, speaking, apparently extemporaneously, to a gathering of diocesan liturgical directors in Rome. It’s suggestively supported, too, by the fact that when the New Testament shows Jesus teaching, which it often does, it typically isn’t in a liturgical context. We mislead ourselves, for example, by calling Matthew 5–7 the Sermon on the Mount. Matthew categorizes what Jesus says there as teaching (docere in the Vulgate), and it’s clear that he and the people are far from a synagogue. When Jesus speaks in that setting, Matthew prefers the language of preaching (praedicare), and the tone and mood and voice of what Jesus says when he preaches is very different: “Paenitentiam agite; appropinquavit enim regnum caelorum” (Matthew 4:17). (“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”) This is in a different register than the speech of the Sermon on the Mount.

It should be noted that neither Scripture nor tradition is consistent in making a distinction of this kind between teaching and preaching. But the materials for the distinction are there, and since the conventional wisdom of our time about homilies assimilates them closely to teaching, which is entirely capable of extraction and report, it may be useful to consider homilies in a different way—as performative proclamations addressed to, and to be heard by, precisely those gathered to hear them. Celan, again on poems, in words that can also be applied productively to homilies: “Im Gedicht wird etwas gesagt, doch faktisch so, daß das Gesagte so lange ungesagt bleibt, als derjenige, der es liest, es sich nicht gesagt sein läßt” (§266.1). (“In poems [or homilies] something’s said, but in such a way that what’s said remains unsaid so long as those who read [or hear] them don’t permit it to be said to them.”)

What is it like to permit what a preacher says to be said to you? To make sure that what Jesus says in a homily does not remain “unsaid”?

Consider the case of hearing a homily in a language you don’t understand, which is common enough. Of the five thousand or so homilies I’ve heard in my life, at least a hundred have been like this—in Khmer, Arabic, Russian, Finnish, Tagalog, Tamil, and other languages of which I know nothing, or almost nothing. This would be a waste of time if the paraphrasable content of what a preacher says were the only thing that mattered. But it isn’t a waste of time. Jesus still speaks in such a situation, and still does what he always does with words, which is show himself as fully as hearers are able to receive him. He’s there, talking to you. You can still, even when you don’t understand anything that’s said, open your ears. If you do that, you’ll hear the cadence and rhythm of what the preacher says, and you’ll see his expressions, his gestures, a panoply of sound and movement as hospitable to didacticism and instruction as the shadowplay of a marionette theater. You’ll take no notes, metaphorically or actually; you’ll be in the linguistic open, placed there not only as an illiterate—as we always are before homilies—but also as an infant, a non-speaker. There are advantages to all this. Jesus can communicate himself to you in sound and gesture as a lover or a mother can. What he says, when the sounds he makes elude lexical understanding, can work on you as poems or incantations or spells do.

You can, if you look for it, find an online recording of Paul Celan reading his early poem Todesfuge in German. Listen with your eyes closed. If you understand no German you’ll be in the situation I’ve just described: naked before the sounds, before the words, all ears for them. The poem will work on you nevertheless, its work intensified in some ways (not all) just because you don’t understand its words. You’ll hear its rhythm, its repetitions, the expressiveness of the voice of the man who composed it, its bleak rise and fall, and the threads of gold weaving through its despair that make it not despairing but something else, something possibly graceful.

Contrast this case—of hearing a homily in a language you don’t understand—with that of hearing one in a language you understand well, which you’ve been speaking and reading and writing for decades, which gives you the linguistic sea in which you swim. Sometimes what the preacher says to you in a language you know well may also show you Jesus giving you himself, precisely because you can understand what’s said. But there are drawbacks to this situation. You may be diverted by your understanding into judgments about the preacher’s inadequacies or mistakes, consideration of what you know that he doesn’t, of how you’d do this so much better than he does, of the theological implications of what’s being said. You may also (this is often my own case) find that what the preacher is saying takes you into the echo chamber of other things you’ve read or heard like this. The well-read, the hyper-literate, those whose profession is language, are especially subject to these and similar drawbacks.

It’s a mistake, then, to think it’s always better to hear a homily in a language you understand than to hear one in a language you don’t. That mistake depends on the view that homilies are principally didactic, that what counts about them is mainly their paraphrasable content, that they’re there to teach you something you need to understand. That, I’ve tried to show, isn’t so. We do many things with language other than that. Wittgenstein, in §23 of the Philosophical Investigations, lists more than twenty such uses, a list that includes singing rounds, telling jokes, cursing, and praying. Jesus, a greater authority than Wittgenstein, is a virtuoso of speaking with a force that exceeds the didactically paraphrasable. Better to say that there are advantages and disadvantages to hearing homilies in both a language you understand and a language you don’t.

A part of every Catholic’s homiletical diet should be hearing homilies in unknown languages. That’s especially so for Catholics who live where literacy is valued highly, and who are therefore disposed to think that understanding what you hear, in the sense of being able to take notes on it, provide a paraphrase of it, gloss it, improve upon it, and so on, is a proper part of being spoken to. Those Catholics need a corrective, and making illiterate infants of themselves, at least every now and then, provides one. It may permit Jesus’ self-communication in words to be heard more clearly, just because listening is impossible.

Pope Francis is exercised by the pain priests and deacons suffer in preparing and delivering homilies, and by the pain laypeople suffer in listening to them. That’s evident in Evangelii gaudium (§135). Both pains can be lessened by the line taken in this essay.

As to the pain of listening: that’s dissolved into hearing, into being present with open ears to receive Jesus’ self-offering in words, his loving gift of forgiveness, reconciliation, encouragement, and undoing. All hearers need do is let this happen. Their preparation should be only this: pray before Mass that you might not be diverted from Jesus’ self-gift in the homily, pray that your ears might be open to hearing the fullness of the sound of what’s said, and pray for the preacher, that he might stand aside for Jesus.

As to the pain of preparing and delivering, that’s dissolved into standing up and letting Jesus speak. All preachers need do is let this happen. Their preparation should be only this: read the lections well in advance of having to preach on them and read them again, and again. Punctuate these readings with prayers that you might get out of Jesus’ way in providing a lively exposition of them. Take notes if you must. Write out a homily if you must. But be quite sure, if you do either, that no such scripts make it into the pulpit with you. And when the time comes, stand up and speak, looking your people in the eyes with love: from their eyes to your lips, from your lips to their ears. That is the homiletical scene.