Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Category: Ordinary Time

  • The Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The story goes that one day, Saint Teresa of Avila was wheeling a cart across a bridge over the river. At one point along the bridge’s passage, a wheel of the cart got stuck in the planks, and Teresa had to wrestle the cart to get going again. In the struggle, the cart tipped over, and its entire contents spilled out and into the river. As she looked at all her stuff floating down the river, she said, “Well, God, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s no wonder you have so few of them!”

    I am guessing that we have all had at least one time in our lives when we have felt like Saint Teresa in that moment.  I confess that I have had a week like that: my mother was without power in her house from Sunday to late Thursday, my aunt has had to go to a nursing facility at least for a month, I have a friend of the family who is at the end of his life, we have had a number of funerals over the last couple of weeks, and the heat has certainly taken its toll on staff relations.  So I can just imagine how Saint Teresa felt with all her stuff floating down the river.

    Not that I’m Saint Teresa, mind you; I can only aspire to her level of holiness and her friendship with God that made such a conversation possible.  But I know how an accumulation of nastiness can drain one’s reserve of faith.  And it’s a great danger.  Last week’s Gospel showed how the faith of two people led to great healing: Jairus’s daughter was resuscitated from the dead, and the woman with a hemorrhage was cured after twelve long years.  But today’s Gospel shows us how a lack of faith prevented Jesus from doing much in the way of healing at all.

    And so today, maybe we can take away two role models for having faith when it seems hard to do.  Saint Paul struggled with a “thorn in the flesh” – whatever it was for him – and remained faithful.  Saint Teresa grappled with the frustrations of daily living and remained a very holy woman.  May they be our intercessors when our reserve of faith is waning and the heat of the day is overwhelming.  And as the Psalmist models for us: may we be those who keep our eyes fixed on the Lord, pleading for his mercy.

  • Monday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The immediacy of discipleship is of paramount importance.  The call of our baptism is more urgent than anything else in our lives.  Or, at least, that’s how it should be.  Just like anything else in life that requires something from us, discipleship can take a back seat to other things that come along.  Whether it’s the kids’ soccer game at one point in our lives, or lack of energy at another point, or so many life issues that come along, we can be derailed rather quickly from following God’s call the way we should be.

    That’s how it was for the scribe in Jesus’ day.  There was no way he could ever tear himself away from the things that tethered him to this world.  Even assuming that his offer was genuine, it’s unlikely that he ever could have made good on his promise to follow Jesus wherever he went.  Jesus wasn’t letting any grass grow under his feet; he had to go where people needed healing, where people needed to hear the Gospel.

    We can too easily be tied to the things in this world that are dead.  But our call is to live the life of the Gospel.  May we all hear God’s word today and follow him with urgency.

  • The Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    The Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    I spent a good bit of time visiting people I know in the hospital this week.  My godmother had some serious surgery, which she came through quite well, praise God, but it looks like she will be recovering in the hospital a bit longer than she would like.  I also visited with one of our family’s long-time neighbors who has contracted a disease that the doctors aren’t sure how he got and don’t quite know what to do about.  And so as I hear about the miraculous healings of Jairus’s daughter and the woman with the hemorrhages, I find myself thinking, “how nice for them.”

    And I’m sure many of us have similar reactions.  How often have we had to watch a loved one suffer, and think, why can’t God heal him or her?  The very first words of today’s Liturgy of the Word reach out and grab us: “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living.”  And perhaps we already knew that.  Perhaps we know that God does not intend our death or our suffering, but the really hard thing for us is that he permits it.  Why is that?  Why would God permit his beloved ones to suffer so much here on earth?

    That’s a question for which I would love to have an answer.  I think maybe it’s one of those things we will finally understand when we get to heaven and see the big picture.  But for now, it can be a real stumbling block.  I would suggest that today’s readings are offered to us not to make us feel bad when we don’t experience immediate healing on our terms and timetable, but instead to remind us of the many ways God does heal us.

    I’d like to take a minute to talk about some of the things that unite the two stories that we have in the Gospel.  First, we have the story of Jairus.  And I’m struck by how impatient I would be if I were him.  The story tells us that Jesus had just returned from the other side of the lake where he was for a time ministering to the Gentiles that lived there.  I’m thinking that Jairus had to be waiting for him to return the whole time, watching his daughter get sicker and sicker.  Then, while he and Jesus are rushing to his daughter’s side, they are detained by the whole incident of the woman with the multiple hemorrhages.  If I were Jairus, I’m pretty sure my head would have exploded.  But it turns out that Jesus has time enough to heal them both, and probably even Jairus as well in some ways.

    So again, I think there are some aspects of the two stories that link them together.  The first, perhaps strangely, is the number twelve.  The woman with the hemorrhages suffered for twelve years, and Jairus’s daughter was twelve years old.  This is not coincidental.  The number twelve has biblical significance.  When we hear twelve in Scripture, we might think of the twelve tribes of Israel, or even of the Twelve Apostles.  Matthew’s account of the feeding of the multitudes mentions that there were twelve baskets of leftovers.  In these contexts, the number twelve stands for a kind of universality, encompassing all people or the whole known world.  The twelve tribes took up residence all over the holy land, which was the whole world for the ancients.  The Twelve Apostles were meant to bring the Gospel to the whole world, and the twelve baskets were meant to feed everyone in the world.  So the number twelve in the contexts of these two healings alert us to the fact that Jesus intends healing for everyone in the whole world.  That’s what he came for, and that’s why he was out expelling demons at the other side of the lake, in Gentile territory, in the Gospel passages preceding today’s reading.

    The stories are also linked by desperation.  I’ve already spoken of how long Jairus was waiting for the healing of his daughter, and how he had to watch her get sicker and sicker.  But the same was true of the woman with the hemorrhages – that’s plural by the way, not just one hemorrhage – because she had suffered for twelve long years at the hands of many doctors.  For both of them, those with power have been unable to do anything, and the time for healing is now or never.

    Another way the stories are linked are by un-touchability.  The woman with the hemorrhages was someone that could not be touched, or the person touching her would have been ritually impure: unable to worship with the community and an outcast, just as she was.  Jairus’s daughter became untouchable when she died.  Anyone who touched a dead person would be similarly ritually unclean.  But Jesus touches them both, because nothing can be an obstacle to his love.

    The final thing that links them is faith.  We might say that what brought Jairus and the woman to Jesus was desperation, as I’ve outlined earlier.  But Jesus recognized their faith, and if it weren’t for faith, no miracles would have happened.  That occurred in Jesus’ hometown: no miracles could be accomplished because of their lack of faith.  But that’s clearly not an issue here.

    And this is perhaps the most salient point of today’s Liturgy of the Word.  I’ve known so many people who have been through a lot: either medically, or emotionally, or these days especially financially.  And the ones who have survived have credited it to their faith.  Maybe things didn’t turn out exactly the way they would have preferred.  Perhaps real healing took way longer than they would have liked.  But all of them would tell you that their faith made them positive that God was present with them, and helped them to know that, however things turned out, they would be okay.

    I am struck by the Eucharistic imagery at the end of today’s Gospel.  Jesus comes to the home of Jairus and finds his daughter asleep in death.  He reaches out to her, touches her, and raises her up.  Then he instructs those around her to give her something to eat.  We gather for this Eucharistic banquet today and Jesus comes to us, finding us asleep in the death of our sins.  Because we are dead in our sins, we can hardly reach out to touch our Lord, but he reaches out to us.  He takes our hands, raises us up, and gives us something to eat.

    We come to the Eucharist today with our lives in various stages of grace and various stages of death.  At the Table of the Lord, we offer our lives and our suffering and our pain.  We bring our faith, wherever we are on the journey, and reach out in that faith to touch the body of our Lord, taking him into our hands.  We approach the Cup of Life, and whatever emptiness is in us is filled up with grace and healing love, poured out in the blood of Christ.  As we go forth to glorify the Lord by our lives this day, all of our problems may very well stay with us, remaining unresolved at least to our satisfaction.  But in our faith, perhaps they can be transformed, or at least maybe we can be transformed so that we can move through that suffering and pain with dignity and peace.  And as we go forth into the week ahead, perhaps we can hear our Lord saying to us the same words he said to the woman with the hemorrhage: “go in peace, your faith has saved you.”

  • Monday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Pride is, perhaps, the most insidious of the sins with which we have to deal.  And I say “we” because yes, we all have to deal with it at some level at some point in our lives.  Pride keeps us from seeing that we’re headed down the wrong path.  Pride also keeps us from asking for help, or even from accepting help, when we’re in trouble.  Pride, as the saying goes, goes before the fall, and it can land us in some serious difficulty if we don’t work hard to eradicate it from our lives.

    In today’s Gospel, Jesus clearly wanted to make sure his disciples were not bogged down with pride.  Perhaps he was trying to keep them from following the behavior of the Pharisees, or maybe he even saw traces of pride at work in them as a group.  Whatever the case, he warns them clearly that pride has no place in the life of the disciple.

    Now, to be clear, he is not telling them that they can never pass judgment on anyone.  Judging is a part of law and order, without which no society can survive.  Also, he knows full well that rightly-disposed believers can and should stop others from heading down an erroneous or dangerous path.  What he is saying, though, is that the rod we use to measure the other is the same measure that will be used on us, so it would be well to make sure that our motives are pure in all cases.

    It’s a chilling prediction, I think.  I shudder to think of the measure I use on others being used to measure me.  But if I measure with love and charity and genuine concern, I know that I can accept that same measure on myself.  It’s a good thing that’s the kind of measure God wants to use on all of us.  And he will, if we lay down our pride.

  • Monday of the Ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Ninth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    A man planted a vineyard, put a hedge around it,
    dug a wine press, and built a tower.
    Then he leased it to tenant farmers and left on a journey.

    Today’s Gospel reading is one of those parables that we hear often, but I think we can be puzzled by it and so just put it aside, spiritually speaking.  One of the details that I often miss is this little introduction: the surprising part is the action and mayhem that takes place in the body of the parable, so this detail is hardly even noticed.

    But look what it gives us.  A man plants a vineyard.  The “man” of course is God, who has planted a vineyard for us to grow in and thrive and work.  We are the “tenant farmers” to whom he leases the vineyard.  With the vineyard, he puts a hedge around it, digs a wine press and builds a tower.  Everything we need for the work of the vineyard to be accomplished is given to us.  The question before us is how industrious will we be, what will we accomplish to give God glory?

    We could be those who ignore the messengers and not give God his due.  Or we could even go so far as to kill the heir, as the religious leaders of Jesus’ time certainly did.  But we disciples aren’t like that, instead, we need to tend to the hedge, press the grapes and bring the harvest to the tower for God’s glory.

  • Friday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Friday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    Today’s readings give us a look at an age-old argument over the concept of justification by faith alone.  Not only does James have to deal with it in his community, but during the protestant reformation, this concept was a major stumbling block which has only recently been healed – somewhat.  As tends to be the case with arguments like this, the quibble is largely over semantics.  I think we agree with the basic concept.

    The quibble was that some people felt that they could earn their salvation by doing enough works.  This degenerated particularly in the years prior to the reformation to a feeling that one could literally buy salvation by giving money to the Church.  The corruption that was bred in that atmosphere is largely what caused the rift in the Church.

    The truth is this: nobody can ever work hard enough to earn his or her salvation.  There is no way we can ever even begin to atone for the enormity of our many sins, or get to heaven by our paltry human efforts.  Only God can give us salvation, and it is just that: a gift.  Completely undeserved, totally unearned; it is only by the will of God that we are saved.  But we have to be receptive to the gift, and the way that we get there is by faith.  People of faith have a relationship with God and the Church which makes it possible for them to receive the gift that God wants to give them.

    But there is also a certain amount of truth that says that faith spurs us on to action.  Indeed, any kind of so-called faith that allows a person to sit idle and not respond to the needs of others is a fraud.  A faith that says I don’t have to gather with others to worship because I can do that just as well on my own is no faith at all.  Faith spurs us on to action in charity and worship, because that is what faith does.  So, as Saint James well says today, faith without works is useless.

    Jesus was pretty clear on that point, and we see it in today’s Gospel: “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”  Denial, taking up the cross, following after Jesus – which really means doing what Jesus did, all of these are works that a person does because he or she has been moved by faith.

    We need both faith and works, but only those works that are genuinely spawned by our lively faith.  When we have embraced both aspects of salvation, we will be very near to the kingdom of God!

  • Monday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    St. James today encourages us to consider it all joy when we experience trial.  I don’t know about you, but that’s not the emotion I usually find in frustrating or fearful circumstances.  And considering that the people to whom James was writing were probably being persecuted, they probably weren’t overjoyed at their trials either.  But the spiritual principle is that when one’s faith is tested, ones learns perseverance, and learns to trust in God.

    But that presupposes that we will remain faithful in the midst of trial.  The minute we stop looking to our Lord for help in times of difficulty, perseverance and trust in God go right down the tubes.  The Pharisees in the Gospel had not yet learned faithfulness.  They kept their eyes on the minutiae of the Law instead of on God, and so they lost sight of faith and everything that was of true importance.  They were fearful; they wanted a sign, but they would never get a sign because they were always looking in places other than God.

    Faithfulness is a difficult thing.  When we are tested, it’s so easy to want to throw in the towel and leave behind everything we believe in.  I have been there myself, but thankfully I still had prayer and people praying for me.  I think we’re all in that place at some time or another in our lives.  It’s easy to be faithful when there are no trials, but faith in times of trial produces the perseverance and lively faith that gets us through life.  And we definitely should consider that all joy.

  • The Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]

    The Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]

    Today’s readings

    In ancient days, a diagnosis of leprosy was a death sentence.  And that’s not just because they didn’t know how to treat the disease.  They didn’t, but what was really horrible is the way the lepers were treated.  First of all, they were called lepers – not people – so being labeled as such stripped them of the personhood, and put them on the same level as a virus that needed to be eradicated.  They were cut off from the community, so they would have no community or even family support.  They were forbidden to worship with the community, so they must also have felt cut off from God.  And so it went for those who contracted leprosy: sick and alone, they were left to survive as best they could, or just to die.

    The worst part of it is that most of the time people didn’t actually have leprosy: the ancients’ lack of scientific knowledge led them to label as leprosy any kind of skin ailment.  The rules for dealing with people with these diseases were based on fear: they didn’t want to contract the disease themselves, so the “clean” ones ostracized those with disease, treating them as if they didn’t exist.

    Jesus, obviously, didn’t agree with that kind of way of “treating” the illness of leprosy.  He didn’t really have any more scientific resources at that time to treat the disease, but it wasn’t the disease he was concerned about.  No, he was concerned about the person, not the illness.  And so he does not take offense when the leper breaks the Levitical law that we heard in our first reading and actually approaches Jesus.  Jesus, too breaks the law by reaching out to touch him and saying, with an authority that comes from God himself, “I do will it.  Be made clean.”

    The thing is, we don’t treat lepers very well today, either.  I don’t mean people who have the actual disease of leprosy – that is actually very treatable, even curable, in this day and age.  What I mean is that there are a lot of leprosies out there.  Some people tend to ostracize a loved one when they contract a difficult disease, like cancer.  They can’t bear the thought of death, or they don’t like hospitals, or they feel powerless to help in these situations, so they stay away.  Hospitals and nursing homes are full of people who never receive a visit from family or friends.  Our pastoral care ministers could probably tell you many heart-breaking stories with that theme.

    And leprosy doesn’t apply just to sick people.  People who are different in any way are subject to ostracization: people who have different color skin than us, people who are not Catholic or not Christian, people who are homosexual, people who are poor or homeless.  All of these we treat from a distance, keeping them outside the community, outside of means of support, outside of the love of God in just the same way the ancients dealt with lepers.  We have a tendency to label people and then write them off.

    I don’t know about you, but I’m glad God doesn’t treat broken people that way.  Because then I might be cut off because of my many sins.  We all have something in us that is unclean, and it would be woe for us if God just wrote us off.  He doesn’t.  He reaches out to touch us to, exactly where we are at, without fear of contracting the illness of our sin himself, and heals us from the inside out.  “I do will it.  Be made clean.”

    Our religion, thankfully, has rituals for the things that infest us.  When we are sick, there is the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick.  When we are sinful, there is the sacrament of Penance.  We call these the sacraments of healing, because they do just that: give us God’s grace when we are sick or dying, and his forgiveness and mercy when we have sinned.

    Many people misunderstand the sacrament of Anointing of the Sick.  No longer do we think of that as something to be done at the last possible moment.  It should be done as soon as it is known that a person is gravely ill.  We rely on doctors to tell us that.  It should be done before someone has serious surgery.  It should be done when a person is suffering from mental illness of any kind.  It might be done more than once: when a person is first diagnosed, for example, and then again when they are near death, or when the illness is worse in any way.  It should be done at a hospital or nursing home, or in a person’s home, or even here at church.  Wherever the person is or is most comfortable.  We are also having a Mass with Anointing of the Sick during Lent here in church.  The sacrament provides grace to live through an illness, or mercy on the journey to eternity, sometimes even healing if that is what God knows to be good for the person.  Please don’t wait until a person has just moments left to send for a priest, don’t be afraid to ask us to anoint you before surgery, and don’t assume that if you’re in the hospital, we will know – they can’t really tell us that any more.

    As for the Sacrament of Penance, there are many opportunities to celebrate that sacrament: Saturdays at 4pm, during Lent we will have a Penance Service, and we’ll also have Confessions before the Mass of the Anointing of the Sick I just mentioned.  You can also always call a priest for an appointment if you need to.  The problem can sometimes be that a person feels embarrassed to go to Confession if they’ve been away from the sacrament for a long time.  Don’t be.  It’s our job to help you make a good Confession, and we are absolutely committed to doing that.  Your sins don’t make us think less of you; in fact I always have deep respect for the person who lowers his or her defenses and lets God have mercy on them.

    These are wonderful sacraments of healing.  God gives them to us because he will not be like those living in Levitical times.  Just as he reached out to the leper in today’s Gospel, so Christ longs to reach out and touch all of us in our brokenness, in our uncleanness, and make us whole again.  As the Psalmist sings today, so we can pray: “I turn to you, Lord, in time of trouble, and you fill me with the joy of salvation.”   Praise God for Jesus’ words today: “I do will it.  Be made clean!”

  • Thursday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The women in today’s Liturgy of the Word give us contrasting views of the spiritual life.  In our first reading, the women give us the example of what not to do.  Solomon, known for his wisdom and dedication to God by building the temple, is soon seduced by the foreign women he had married to abandon God.  They entice him to abandon the worship of the one, true God in order to worship and adore their so-called gods.

    Marrying into the families of the foreigners among them was a real problem for the Israelites.  When they did this, they were soon led astray and picked up the pagan customs of the world around them.  It’s kind of a metaphor for what can go wrong in our spiritual lives.  If we keep our eyes on Christ and follow the way he has laid out for us, we can progress in our devotion.  But the minute we start looking at other things, we can soon be distracted from the straight and narrow.

    On the other hand, we have the wonderful Syrophoenician woman in the Gospel.  She knows exactly where to look for salvation and she persists in it.  When it seemed that Jesus was not interested in helping her daughter, she persisted because she knew that Christ alone could heal her daughter and expel the demon.

    Once again, there’s a deeper message here.  I don’t think any of us believes that Jesus wasn’t interested in healing the woman’s daughter.  I just think he knew her faith and wanted to give those who were in the house where he was to see that faith.  The story gives us, too, the opportunity to asses our own faith in God, not looking to other things or foreign gods to bring us salvation.  If these women teach us anything in today’s readings, it’s that we need to be focused on our God alone.

  • Monday of the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Monday of the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    “O LORD, how many are my adversaries!” That is what the Psalmist cries out today. And well he might, because we see those many adversaries in today’s Liturgy of the Word.

    The casting out of the demon Legion is a chilling one for us, I think, because it’s really our story. How many of us have had a pattern of sin, or at least a bad habit, in our lives and have struggled long and hard with it? How much that pattern or vice looks like Legion in today’s Gospel. Just as the man possessed had been chained many times, only to have those chains broken by the force of the demon, so we have tried to put away our sins and vices many times, only to have them break through once again, with seemingly more strength than ever. We find that we are just not strong enough to subdue it.

    And the demon is right – he is Legion – there are so many of these things that infest us throughout our lives. The man possessed is a figure for the entire world, infested by a Legion of demons that cannot be restrained. They are afraid, and put in their place, by only one person and that is Jesus Christ. They are afraid of the Christ and know that his power will eventually do much more violence to them than just being cast into a herd of swine that drowns in a sea.

    David knew he was a sinful man, and just in case he forgot, God sent Shimei to remind him. David found the humility to let the man do his work, and he took responsibility for his sinfulness, trusting only in the mercy of God. That’s the call for each of us today.  If we are frustrated by our sins and vice, we should stop trying to put chains on them to try to hide them or subdue them. It’s time for us to let Christ cast them out – Legion as they may be – and give us the peace that the man possessed found in today’s Gospel.