How wonderful it is to be known by God. Today the Psalmist prays, “O LORD, you have probed me and you know me; you know when I sit and when I stand; you understand my thoughts from afar.” Being known by God implies also being cared for by God. Why would God busy himself about our business if he did not care for us? Being known by God also means we can be ourselves from him. We need not hide anything, indeed, we cannot hide anything. This doesn’t mean we need not grow, and change, and repent as necessary. But it does mean that God meets us where we are and intends to take us with him to glory. As the Psalmist also says today, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; too lofty for me to attain.” The good news is that we need not attain it ourselves. This God who knows us and cares for us, is the one that helps us to do everything.
Category: Ordinary Time
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Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time
Today our Liturgy of the Word gives us the last of the readings from St. John’s Gospel that we call the Bread of Life Discourse. We’ve been reading from that one chapter of John – chapter six – for five weeks now. It all began with the feeding of the multitudes. Jesus took just five small barley loaves and two fish and fed five thousand men, along with women and children, and not only that, provided twelve baskets full of leftovers besides. The crowds then caught up with him the next day, looking for more. So Jesus took that opportunity to unpack the real meaning of what he was trying to do, and challenged them to believe in him if they really wanted to do the works of God. He said that the bread that came down from heaven during Moses’ days was nothing compared with the bread that God wanted them to have – a bread that gives life to the world, a bread that meant they would never hunger again.
So Jesus was making it clear here that he wasn’t just giving them physical bread, but instead a food that was a taste of the heavenly banquet in the kingdom of God. And Jesus himself was that bread; those who believe in him and partake of that bread will live forever, having eternal life as God intended. “The bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” And in last week’s Gospel he made it clear to us. He wasn’t just talking in metaphors, but instead he really did mean that he was the bread of life and people actually had to eat the bread that was him. This began to trouble people.
And that leads us to where we are today. Jesus gave them a wonderful meal in the feeding of the multitudes, but now he wants them to have even better bread. So now they have to make a decision and take action. Will they accept the hard teaching that they need to eat his own Body and Blood to have eternal life, or will they turn away? Some of them indeed do turn away, and Jesus lets them go. But for the Twelve, Jesus’ words might be hard but they recognize them as the only hope they have. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have words of eternal life.” Peter speaks for them, but they all elect to stay with him.
The choice of the disciples in the Gospel story is reminiscent of the choice that Joshua put to the people. Joshua took over leadership of the people after Moses died, and he is now showing his leadership style. He will not be a leader that forces the people to do one thing or another. Instead, in the first reading, he points out the many wonderful things God has done for the people. This is the God who led them out of Egypt and sustained them through the desert journey. This is the God who led them into the Promised Land, the land he promised their ancestors he would give them. And now that they have received the many benefits of God’s mighty promises, it’s time for them to make a choice. Will they serve the so-called gods of the pagan inhabitants of the land, or will they serve the Lord their God, who gave them so much. For Joshua, the choice is easy: “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
And now the question is ours. We have all of us been on a five-week-long Eucharistic retreat. If you’ve missed any part of it, I encourage you to go back and read all of the sixth chapter of John. It will take you five, maybe ten minutes if you read it nice and slow. And as we stand here at the end of it all, we too have to make the decisions we hear in today’s Liturgy of the Word: decide today whom you will serve; what about you, will you also leave?
It’s a critical question for us. Because there are lots of entities in our world that are vying for our servitude. Will we serve the so-called gods of the people in whose country we live? We who are disciples are aliens here; this is not our true home. So what’s it going to be? Are we going to serve the gods of relativism, of greed, and the culture of death? Will we turn away and no longer follow our Lord? Or will we recognize with the disciples that there is no one else to whom we can turn and say with Joshua, “we will serve the Lord?”
At one point or another in every disciple’s life, he or she has to answer this question. For me, it came in my early thirties, when I had been going to Willow Creek Church with some friends. I was attracted, as many are, to the music and the preaching and I had many good experiences there. There came a point in which I felt like I had to make a decision between the Catholic Church and Willow Creek, and I spoke to Father Mike, of blessed memory, about it. We went back and forth for a while and finally Father Mike put it very bluntly: “I don’t think you would ever stand in that chapel and say Jesus wasn’t present there.”
Shortly after that, I went to Willow Creek while they had their monthly Lord’s Supper service. And that was part of the problem: it was monthly, not every week, certainly not every day. And it wasn’t Jesus: it was just bread and wine that was a mere symbol of the Lord’s Body and Blood. They had to project the Lord’s Prayer on the screen, because people didn’t just know it. And the speaker in his sermon, apparently an ex-Catholic, made light of the Sacrament of Penance. And in that moment, I knew Father Mike was right. Christ is present in the Tabernacle, he is present on the altar, present in the sacraments, and there is no way in the world I could ever live without that. I couldn’t turn away, and I would serve the Lord in the Catholic Church. Who would ever guessed it would have led me here today!
So here at the end of our study of the Bread of Life Discourse, the question for all of us is this: what does the Eucharist mean to us? It’s a poignant question because in April of this next year, on Holy Thursday, our diocese will begin a year of the Eucharist, in which we will celebrate and re-dedicate ourselves to the great gift God gives us in the Eucharist. This question means for us: is the Bread of Life good enough for us, or are we feeding ourselves on something less satisfying? Does the Blood of Christ quench our thirst or do we seek inebriation from the offerings of this world? Will we too turn away, horrified at the idea of eating the flesh and blood of our Lord? Will we, and our households, serve the Lord?
The Psalmist has been inviting us these past few weeks to “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” And that’s quite all we need, isn’t it? We disciples will come to the Eucharist today, and go forth with our households to serve the Lord, our Lord who alone has words of eternal life.
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Wednesday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time
We spend a lot of time, too much time really, looking at other people and what is going on with them. We can be so worried that others will end up with something better than what we have, that we may very well miss the great blessings that are set out for us. None of those migrant workers were cheated, indeed the landowner was fair to all of them. But he went beyond fair; he also recognized the plight of the poor. In case you missed it, that is the Gospel, brothers and sisters in Christ. He decided to give more than he had to to those who might have otherwise gone without anything. He recognized his duty to the poor, and we would all do well to follow his example, because that’s what Christ expects of us. We are also expected to be thankful people. If we have worked all day by the sweat of our brow to earn what we have, then we should be grateful for the grace of honest work. If we received a gift we could never earn, then we should be grateful for the grace freely given. But we must never sully it by looking at what others have received, lest we miss noticing the graces we have received and miss the opportunity to be thankful.
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Tuesday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel reading follows immediately after yesterday’s in which the rich young man went away sad, not knowing how he could attain eternal life, because he had many possessions. Today, Jesus explains to his disciples what was going on. “Amen, I say to you, it will be hard for one who is rich to enter the Kingdom of heaven.” And it’s not going to be hard because God is setting up the obstacle; it will be hard because we have placed an obstacle between ourselves and God. Jesus isn’t bashing rich people. And it’s not just rich people who will have trouble going to the kingdom. It’s going to be hard for anyone who has an obstacle between themselves and Jesus. So whether that obstacle is riches, or our work, or our lifestyle, or whatever, we need to let go of all that. It’s going to be hard for us to get into heaven with obstacles in our way, “but for God all things are possible.” If we let go of our obstacles, if we make a real sacrifice for the kingdom, then the kingdom is ours.
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Monday of the Twentieth Week of Ordinary Time
So the question today is, what is it that holds us back? The rich young man seemed to have it all together: he acknowledged Jesus as the good teacher, so he must have been familiar with what Jesus said and did. He kept all the commandments, so he certainly had a religious upbringing and was zealous to follow the law. But, with all that, he still knew that something was lacking. “What do I still lack?” he asks. When Jesus reveals that the next step in following the Gospel involves letting go of his worldly possessions, he finds that to be somewhere he can’t go. He had many possessions, and he wasn’t yet ready to give them up.
So back to my first question. What holds us back? Is it many possessions? Maybe, but maybe not. It could be our work, or power, or what the neighbors might think. It could be that we don’t want to get out of our comfortable boats and follow Christ according to the way he is calling us. Whatever it is, it involves letting go – giving up what is not God and clinging to him alone. It’s not that Jesus didn’t want the rich young man to have money. He wanted him to have eternal life. And whenever we cling to what is not God, we are in effect giving up eternal life.
There’s the old joke about the man who fell off a cliff, and on the way down he snagged a precarious branch to hold on to. But there was no way he could get to safety, so he called out for help: “Is anyone up there? I need help!” Suddenly he heard a voice in response to his pleas: “Let go.” He thought about that for a minute and said, “Is there anyone else up there?”
We have to be ready to let go of whatever holds us back from accepting the life that God wants for us. What he has is so much better than whatever it is we’re holding on to. So the question is, will we give up what is holding us back, or will we give up eternal life?
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Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time [B]
Today we have set before us two tables. One is the incredibly rich banquet of wisdom, and the other is, I don’t know, the fast food of foolishness, I guess. The question is, at which table have we been eating?
We see in today’s first reading the personification of wisdom. Wisdom is seen as a female character who has made preparations for a luxurious meal. Meat has been prepared, and that was a luxury in biblical times. Wine has been mixed, probably with spices to improve its flavor and make it a bit more potent. But the invitation has gone out not to the rich and powerful, but the simple and those who lack understanding. These are the ones who are called to the banquet of wisdom to partake of this incredible meal. They will feast on the rich meat of understanding and be carried away by the potency of the wine of enlightenment. But coming to that table requires turning away from foolishness, and it is only by doing so and eating at this table that one can live.
The second reading, too, speaks of this choice, but with a tone of warning: be sure to live not as foolish persons but as wise – watch carefully, St. Paul warns, how you live. He acknowledges that the days in which the Ephesians were living were evil ones, something to which, I think, every generation can relate – no generation ever fails to experience evil in some way at some time. And so, to combat evil, they – and we – are warned to aspire to right conduct. Try to understand the will of God, which is the project of all our lives. Don’t live in drunkenness, whether caused by wine or just by immersing oneself into the foolishness of the world around you. Instead, we are called to be people of prayer, following God’s will, singing God’s praise, “giving thanks always and for everything.” The word thanks here is, in Greek, eucharisteo, of course, meaning we are to live as Eucharistic people, aware of God’s blessings, and thankful for the grace we have received.
All of this serves as a fitting prelude to the choice Jesus’ audience is facing in today’s Gospel. They have been mesmerized by the feeding of the multitudes that we heard about a few weeks ago. And they have been hanging in there as Jesus has unpacked the meaning of that event in the time that has followed. But now, they have to come to terms with all of it. Many are repulsed, understandably, I think, at the notion of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of another person. And so now they have to decide if this is something they can live with. Next week, in the Gospel, we will see how that shakes out. But ironically, as we now know, this is something they cannot live without.
As we come to worship today, we have been dining at one of the other of the tables ourselves. Have we been dining at the table of foolishness? Have we tried living by mere human wisdom; put our security and trust in material things; relied on temporary and superficial appearances and even put off feeding our spirits to another time? Have we surfed the web to find wisdom, and gotten bogged down in the nonsense that lurks there? Have we glued ourselves to television and hung on the words of Oprah and Dr. Phil, or been lost in the banal world of reality TV? Those of us who are well educated may have thought book learning would give us answers to life’s imponderables. Perhaps the results have left us still hungry; like trying to fill our stomachs eating lettuce soup. We may feel some initial satisfaction, but it soon passes and all we can think of is where we can find food. We have been dining at the wrong table.
And so wisdom calls out to us simple ones to pull up a chair to the right banquet. Feasting on the richness of wisdom leads us inevitably to the banquet of the Lord. Will we be repulsed at the idea of eating the flesh and blood of our Lord, or will we set aside the so-called wisdom of the world and embrace the real wisdom of God, which is so far beyond our understanding? Jesus says to us today that we can become part of God, indeed that is the whole point. We were created to become part of God’s life, to be caught up in him, and to be part of him. But the problem is, our dining on the fast food of foolishness, the so-called “wisdom” of this world, has left us sinful and sorrowful, with an emptiness that cannot be filled up in that way.
And so God did the only thing he could do. If we could not be part of him because of our foolishness, he decided to become part of us. He sent his son Jesus into our world to walk among us, to live our life, to walk on the earth as we do. Jesus ultimately gave himself for us, offering his body and blood for our salvation, giving us this great nourishment so that he could become part of us in a similar way to the way all food becomes part of us. As we dine at the table of the Lord, our God who wanted us to become part of him becomes part of us, and so we are caught up again into his life as we were always supposed to have been.
Jesus fed several thousand people with five loaves and two fish a few weeks ago. But that was nothing. It was a mere drop in the bucket compared to what he wants to do now. Now he wants to give himself so that we can be one with him:
For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.People who content themselves in eating the food of this world – even if it’s manna from heaven – will still die. But those – and only those – who eat the bread that is Jesus will live forever. That’s what Jesus tells us today. Because it is only by Jesus becoming part of us that we can become part of God, which is the fulfillment of our destiny as creatures of our God. This is a hard teaching, and we may struggle with it in the same way the crowds struggled with it when Jesus said it. But this is Truth; this is the wisdom of God; this is the way we get filled up so that we never hunger again.
And so which table will we choose now? Please God let us follow the Psalmist’s advice: Taste and see the goodness of the Lord!
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Wednesday of the Ninteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Living the Christian life never means that we just calmly except anything another person does. But we do need to follow a certain procedure in dealing with those sins against us. It’s not right, for example, when we are wronged, or when we perceive we are wronged, to immediately email everyone we know and slander them. Nor is it okay for us disciples to talk about a brother or sister in the Lord behind their back. When someone wrongs us, we owe it to them to give them the opportunity to make amends. We bring the matter to their attention in charity, and open up a pathway to forgiveness. If they choose not to take it, we can escalate the issue as our Lord describes in today’s Gospel, but we never have the right to ruin a person’s good name without cause. Christ has given the keys to forgiveness to the Church as a gift. But that means that we who are the Church have a responsibility to forgive, just as we have been forgiven.
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Friday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
Today’s Liturgy of the Word asks us to ponder the question, “what do we have to do to remain in covenant with God?” And the question, I think, is an important one. We would want to respond to God’s gracious act of covenanting with us first. We see in today’s readings that he chose us first, and calls us out of love for us. Moses recites the mighty acts of God in which he remembered the promises made to the people’s ancestors and kept them, even though the people certainly didn’t deserve it. Even though they often sought to break the covenant, God kept it anyway, loving the people even when they were unlovable.
But what should our response be? For Moses and the people Israel, the response was to keep the law. The law itself was a wonderful document, given to the people out of love, to help them walk the straight and narrow, and to remain in relationship with God and others. Moses contends that no other nation had gods that were loving and wise enough to provide something like that for their people.
Jesus, of course, takes it several steps further. “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” Following the law was the first step, but it was pretty basic. Even if the people obeyed it – which they often did not – it was still a matter of will mostly, and not heart. Jesus calls us to make the same sacrifice he did: lay down our lives for one another out of love.
“For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” And isn’t that the truth, really? When we get so caught up in ourselves and our own pettiness, how quickly life slips away and we wonder what it all meant. But when we lose our lives following Christ and loving God and neighbor with reckless abandon, well, then we have really found something.
God loved us first and best, and always seeks covenant with us. The law is still a good guide, but the cross is the best measure of the heart. How willing are we this day to lose our lives relentlessly spending the love we have received from our God with others?
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Wednesday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
We have an interesting dichotomy in today’s Liturgy of the Word. First, we have the people Israel, who, as you know if you’ve been following the story these last couple of weeks, have been saved miraculously from abject slavery in Egypt, led through the desert and through the Red Sea to safety, fed with bread from heaven, and hydrated with water from the rock. They have continually been in God’s presence and have been led by a column of cloud by day and fire by night. But they have time and again rejected God and refused to have faith that he would deliver on his promises. Today, at the precipice of the Promised Land, they reject him yet again. And then we have the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel, who has absolutely no claim on God’s mercy. The Canaanites are the pagan people thrown out of the Promised Land to make room for God’s chosen people. That she would even believe in God is a miracle, and yet her faith today is relentless. Today’s readings embody the question of faith for all of us. Will we give up on grace when we are faced with tough times, or will we choose to believe, against all odds, that God will hear our prayers and say, “Let it be done for you as you wish”?
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Monday of the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time
What I think the folks in our first reading need to learn – all of them – is that the spiritual life is always about the big picture. The Israelites, as I mentioned in my homily yesterday, have completely rejected the God of their salvation. God had taken them from abject slavery in Egypt, in which they were oppressed beyond anything we could possibly imagine, and led them through the desert, through the Red Sea (covering the pursuing Egyptians in the process), and into safety. He is going to give them the Promised Land, but they, thank you very much, would prefer to return to Egypt so that they no longer have to sustain themselves on the bread that they have from the hand of God himself. They would rather have meat and garlic and onions, and whatever, than freedom and blessing from God. What a horrible, selfish people they have become.
And Moses is no better. He alone has been allowed to go up the mountain to be in the very presence of God. No one else could get so close to God and live to tell the story. God has given him the power to do miraculous deeds in order to lead the people. And yet, when things get tough, he too would prefer death than to be in the presence of God.
And aren’t we just like them sometimes? It’s easy to have faith when things are going well, and we are healthy, and our family is prospering. But the minute things come along to test us, whether it is illness, or death of a loved one, or job troubles, or whatever, it’s hard to keep faith. “Where is God when I need him?” we might ask. We just don’t often have the spiritual attention spans to see the big picture. We forget the many blessings God has given us, and ask “Well what has he done for me lately?”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus feeds the crowds until they are satisfied and have baskets of leftovers besides. God’s blessings to us are manifold, and it is good to meditate on them when times are good, and remember them when times are bad. God never wills the trials we go through, and he never forgets or abandons us when we are in the midst of those trials. God feeds us constantly with finest wheat. That’s the big picture, and we must never lose sight of it.
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