When our goal is discipleship and living for Christ, we cannot let anything get in our way. The Israelites had put up with Athaliah and the priest of Baal and their temple long enough. They had to wipe these enemies out and anoint a king of the Lord’s choosing, a king in the line of David, so that they could be in relationship with their God. Athaliah and her ilk were the darkness in the eye of Israel. What is the darkness in us? Whatever it is, we must wipe it out ruthlessly so that we can be in relationship with our God. God is our treasure, and there alone we find our hearts.
Category: The Church Year
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Wednesday of the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time
Fasting, almsgiving and prayer are all staples of the Christian disciple’s life. They are praiseworthy things, to be sure. But Jesus reminds us in today’s Gospel reading that they are not things to be done for praise. No one should even know that we have done these things, because in receiving praise for them, we have received our only reward. Far better to make fasting, almsgiving and prayer so much part of our lives that no one even notices. Except, of course our Father who is hidden. And our Father, who sees what is hidden, will repay us.
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Monday of the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time
My grandmother on my dad’s side was a holy woman and loved to read the Scriptures. Except for the Old Testament. She used to say that the Old Testament was bloody and murderous and not very edifying. It’s easy to understand what she meant when you read the readings we’ve had in the first reading for the last week or so. The readings tell about some pretty evil things going on. When you’re done with the reading, you almost feel like you need a shower.
But these readings are here for a purpose, and the Church wants us to read them for a reason. The story we have been getting is one of salvation rejected by the ones who need to be saved. We have to back up just a little bit. The whole deliverance from slavery in Egypt, which we read about in Lent, symbolized the deliverance from the power of sin. Wandering through the desert for forty years symbolized the purification that we go through on the way to salvation. Crossing the River Jordan symbolizes baptism, which wipes away our sins, and entering into the Promised Land symbolizes the salvation from sin, which we all seek.
But this is where it all goes wrong. When the chosen people crossed into the Promised Land, they were instructed to wipe out all the people who inhabited the land – and not just the people, but the livestock and the cities and everything in them. They were supposed to do that because God knew that if they lived among these people, the chosen people would be tempted to follow false gods and to turn away from him and do every kind of evil. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened: they did not wipe out the people; instead they lived among them. And they turned away from God and followed the false gods of the people of the land and they did every kind of evil.
Those tempting people are represented in today’s first reading by Jezebel. Even her name has become a symbol of all that is wrong with humanity. Literature often calls evil women “Jezebels” because of her. Naboth the Jezreelite was a just man; he earnestly sought the one true God and honored the covenant. He was not interested in giving up his vineyard, his ancestral heritage which had been given to him and his family by the one true God. Giving that up to Ahab would have meant doing exactly what God did not want the people to do: turn away from him toward every kind of evil.
Unfortunately, Naboth’s vindication does not come in this life; he loses his life to the evil Jezebel and her scheming. His own fellow citizens conspire with her and are complicit in her sin – they had turned away from God and would do it again in a heartbeat. But Ahab and Jezebel’s sin is not rewarded either; we’ll hear about that tomorrow in the first reading.
The question for us today is this: what is the Jezebel in our lives? What tempts us to give up the salvation of our heritage and turn away from our God? Whatever it is, we absolutely must put it to death – wipe it out – so that we can live in the promised land of our salvation.
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Wednesday of the Tenth Week of Ordinary Time
Giving the right example is incredibly important for the disciple. We don’t want to lead anyone astray either through carelessness or through bad intent. That’s why Elijah decided to have it out with the prophets of Baal once and for all. He proved conclusively – through the power of God – that there is no god but our God. And woe to those prophets of Baal who were later put to death for their actions. In the same way, Jesus laments those who lead his little ones astray. Today we examine all of our actions and purify our example that God alone may be glorified.
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Monday of the Tenth Week of Ordinary Time
Sometimes God’s blessings can be challenging. For example, we might not think that those who are meek and those who mourn are blessed. And we certainly wouldn’t celebrate the blessings of those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, would we? It’s even more challenging when we remember that the word “blessed” in Scripture could also be translated as “happy.” Would we think of those people as happy? Probably not, but God does.
Elijah the Tishbite knew this blessing of God too. The prophet’s job is always a demanding one. It’s one of great blessing, because the prophet is called by God and formed from his mother’s womb. But it’s also a great challenge: people don’t usually want to hear what a prophet says – after all, if they were open to the message, a prophet probably wouldn’t be necessary – and quite often the prophets were chased out of town, beaten, and even murdered. Elijah’s job was going to be challenging, but it would also be blessed: God provided for his needs at Wadi Cherith and at the end of his life, whisked him off to heaven in a chariot of fire.
So it’s important for us to remember, I think, that while God never promises to make our lives free and easy, he does promise to bless us. He will bless us with whatever gifts we need to do the work he has called us to do, the work for which he formed us in our mother’s womb. The happiness of the blessing might not come in this life, but we who do God’s will can look forward to our reward, which Jesus promises will be great, in heaven.
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The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
During World War II, the officers of the Third Reich’s secret service forcefully recruited many 12- and 13-year-old boys into the Junior Gestapo. The harshly treated boys were given only inhumane jobs that they were to perform without rest or complaint.
After the war ended, most had lost contact with their families and wandered aimlessly, without food or shelter. As part of an aid program to rebuild postwar Germany, many of these youths were housed in tent cities. There, doctors and nurses worked with them in an attempt to restore their physical, mental and emotional health.
Many of the boys would awaken several times during the night screaming in terror. But one doctor had an idea for handling their fears. After serving the boys a hearty meal, he’d tuck them into bed with a piece of bread in their hands that they were told to save until morning. The boys began to sleep soundly after that because, after so many years of hunger and uncertainty as to their next meal, they finally had the assurance of food for the next day.
On the last day of my dad’s life a little over three years ago, I gave him Holy Communion for what would be the last time. He was able to pray with us, and was so grateful to receive the Sacrament of Jesus’ own body and blood. We call that last Communion Viaticum which, in Latin, means “bread for the journey.” Like the former Junior Gestapo boys who slept soundly because they knew they had food for the next day, my dad was able to rest in Christ knowing that he would be able to eat at the heavenly banquet table.
On this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are called to take comfort in the many ways God feeds us. We know that when we pray “give us this day our daily bread,” we will receive all that we need and more, because our God loves us and cares for us. But to really trust in God’s care can sometimes be a bit of a scary moment.
It was certainly scary for the disciples, who asked Jesus to “dismiss the crowds” so that they could go into the surrounding cities and get something to eat. They were afraid for the crowds because they had come to the desert, where there was nothing to eat or drink. They were afraid for the crowds because it would soon be dark and then it would be dangerous to travel into the surrounding cities to find refuge and sustenance. And, if they were to really admit it, they were afraid of the crowds, because all they had to offer them were five loaves of bread and two fish – hardly a meal for the Twelve, let alone five thousand.
But Jesus isn’t having any of that. Fear is no match for God’s mercy and care and providence, so instead of dismissing the crowds, he tells the disciples to gather the people in groups of about fifty. Then he takes the disciples’ meager offering, with every intent of supplying whatever it lacked. He blesses their offerings, transforming them from an impoverished snack to a rich, nourishing meal. He breaks the bread, enabling all those present to partake of it, and finally he gives that meal to the crowd, filling their hungering bodies and souls with all that they need and then some. Caught in a deserted place with darkness encroaching and practically nothing to offer in the way of food, Jesus overcomes every obstacle and feeds the crowd with abundance. It’s no wonder they followed him to this out of the way place.
The disciples had to be amazed at this turn of events, and perhaps it was an occasion for them of coming to know Jesus and his ministry in a deeper way. They were fed not just physically by this meal, but they were fed in faith as well. In this miraculous meal, they came to know that their Jesus could be depended on to keep them from danger and to transform the bleakest of moments into the most joyous of all festivals. But even as their faith moved to a deeper level, the challenge of that faith was cranked up a notch as well. “You give them something to eat,” Jesus said to them. Having been fed physically and spiritually by their Master, they were now charged with feeding others in the very same way.
Christ has come to supply every need. In Jesus, nothing is lacking and no one suffers want. All the Lord asks of the five thousand is what he also asks of us each Sunday: to gather as a sacred assembly, to unite in offering worship with Jesus who is our High Priest, to receive Holy Communion, and to go forth to share the remaining abundance of our feast with others who have yet to be fed. After the crowd had eaten the meal, that was the time for them to go out into the surrounding villages and farms – not to find something to eat, but to share with everyone they met the abundance that they had been given. So it is for us. After we are fed in the Eucharist, we must then necessarily go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord by sharing our own abundance with every person we meet.
You might do that by participating in a small faith community or a bible study, sharing the Scriptures and our own living faith with your brothers and sisters. Maybe you would do that by becoming an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion, and dedicating yourselves to the ministry of distributing the precious gift of the Lord’s own Body and Blood each Sunday, or even volunteering to bring Holy Communion to the sick and homebound. But you could also do that by volunteering bringing food to the Glen Ellyn Food Pantry, or by volunteering to package meals at Feed My Starving Children. Sharing our abundance of spiritual blessing doesn’t have to be very elaborate. You might just bring a meal to a friend going through a hard time or visit a neighbor who is a shut-in. Jesus is the font of every blessing, and it is up to us to share that blessing with everyone in every way we can. We too must hear and answer those challenging words of Jesus: “You give them something to eat.”
What we celebrate today is that our God is dependable and that we can rely on him for our needs. Just as he was dependable to feed the vast crowd in that horrible, out-of the-way place, so he too can reach out to us, no matter where we are on the journey, and feed us beyond our wildest imaginings. Just as the Junior Gestapo boys were able to rest easy as they clutched that bread for the next day, so we too can rest easy, depending on our God to give us all that we need to meet the challenges of tomorrow and beyond. The challenge to give others something to eat need not be frightening because we know that the source of the food is not our own limited offerings, but the great abundance of God himself. We need not fear any kind of hunger – our own or that of others – because it’s ultimately not about us or what we can offer, but what God can do in and through us.
In our Eucharist today, the quiet time after Communion is our time to gather up the wicker baskets of our abundance, to reflect on what God has given us and done for us and done with us. We who receive the great meal of his own Body and Blood must be resolved to give from those wicker baskets in our day-to-day life, feeding all those people God has given us in our lives. We do all this in remembrance of Christ, proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes again.
May the Body and Blood of Christ bring us all to everlasting life.
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Friday of the Ninth Week of Ordinary Time
I love the Scriptures. They speak to us of the very essence of God. The Scriptures aren’t words dictated by God, but rather, the Holy Spirit inspired the authors of the Scriptures with the truth that comes from God himself. All Scripture, as Saint Paul reminds us today, is “useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”
What is wonderful about the Scriptures is that, even though they were written over many centuries, they all resonate in harmony with each other. Even the New Testament does not clash with the Old Testament. In many ways, the Church Fathers have taught us that the Old Testament is the precursor to the Gospel, the prophecy and history that prefaces the coming of Christ. All of the Scriptures were always part of God’s plan for us, and they are the textbook for living the Christian life.
Over the years, Catholics have been accused of being unfamiliar with the Scriptures, which was true in the past. But that has changed recently, and many Catholics have become friends of Scripture, and have studied and prayed with these words as was their intent. I had a seminary professor who used to tell us to be sure that we let the Scriptures wash over our lives each and every day, even reading just a few verses before bed if we hadn’t had time to read them all day long.
So today we are grateful to God for the revelation he has given us in holy Scripture. May we all immerse ourselves in them, constantly striving to come closer to God through the study of his word.
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Wednesday of the Ninth Week of Ordinary Time
Jesus clarifies for us that God is a God not of the dead, but of the living. God is all about life. He gives us the great gift of life on this earth, and we must zealously defend and respect life. He gives us the hope of life eternal in the kingdom, and we must zealously pursue it. The project of our lives here on earth is to get to eternal life in heaven, and we have to focus on getting there. Because that is what our God – the God of the living – wants for us.
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The Most Holy Trinity
Today’s feast has us gathered to celebrate one of the greatest mysteries of our faith, the Most Holy Trinity. Today we celebrate our one God in three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. You have probably heard me tell one of my favorite stories about Saint Augustine with regard to the Trinity. The story goes that he was walking along the beach one day, trying to figure out the nature of the Holy Trinity. As he walked along, he came across a little boy who had dug a hole in the sand right next to the shore. With his little hands he was carrying water from the ocean and was dumping it in the little hole. St. Augustine asked, “What are you doing, my child?” The child replied, “I want to put all of the water of the ocean into this hole.” So St. Augustine asked him, “But is it possible for all of the water of this great ocean to be contained in this little hole?” And the child asked him in return, “If the water of the ocean cannot be contained in this little hole, then how can the Infinite Trinitarian God be contained in your mind?” With that the child disappeared.
Indeed, the greatest minds of our faith have wrestled with this notion of the Holy Trinity. How can one God contain three Persons, how could they all be present in the world, working among us in different ways, and yet remain but one? Even the great Saint Patrick, who attempted to symbolize the Trinity with a shamrock, could only scratch the surface of this great mystery.
I think the Trinity isn’t the kind of mystery one solves. And that’s hard for me because I love a good mystery! When I have the chance to just read what I want to read, it’s almost always a mystery novel. I read Agatha Christie all the time growing up, and I’ll often go back to some of her stuff even now. My love for mysteries probably explains why I like to watch “Law & Order” and “CSI.” It’s great to try to figure out the mystery before the end of the book or the end of the show. But, if you like mysteries too, then you know that the mark of a good mystery is when it doesn’t get solved in the first six pages. It’s good to have to think and rethink your theory, right up until the last page.
The kind of mystery that is the Holy Trinity is a mystery that takes us beyond the last page. This is one we’ll take to heaven with us, intending to ask God to explain it when we get there, but when we get there, we’ll most likely be too much in awe to ask any questions. And so we are left with the question, who is this that is the Holy Trinity? How do we explain our one God in Three Persons? Who is this one who is beyond everything and everyone, higher than the heavens, and yet nearer than our very own hearts?
One of the best minds of our faith, Saint Thomas Aquinas, has described the Holy Trinity as a relationship. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. And this makes sense to us on some levels, because we all have been taught, and we all accept, that God is love. And not just the kind of paltry love that our pop culture and society calls love, but love in the deepest of all senses, the kind of love that is self-giving and that intimately shares in the life of the other. God is love, but God is better than the best love our feeble human minds can picture. The love that is God is a love so pure that it would wholly consume us if we gave ourselves to it completely. Just as difficult as it is for our minds to describe the Holy Trinity, so that love that is God is impossible for our minds to grasp.
But this picture of God as a relationship is important to us, I think, because we need to relate to God in different ways at different times. Because sometimes we need a parent. And so relating to God as Father reminds us of the nurturing of our faith, being protected from evil, being encouraged to grow, and being corrected when we stray. If you’ve had difficulty with a parent in your life, particularly a father, then relating to God as Father can also be difficult. But still, I think there is a part of all of us, no matter what our earthly parents have been like, that longs to have a loving parental relationship. God as Father can be that kind of parent in our lives.
And sometimes we need the Son. Relating to God the Son – Jesus our brother – reminds us that God knows our needs, he knows our temptations, he’s experienced our sorrows and celebrated our joys. God in Christ has walked our walk and died our death and redeemed all of our failures out of love for us. God the Son reminds us that God, having created us in his own image and likeness, loves what he created enough to become one of us. Our bodies are not profane place-holders for our souls, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and that very body was good enough to become the dwelling place of God when he came to earth. Maybe you’ve never had a brother or sister or never were close to yours, but in Christ you have the brother above all others who is present to you in all your joys and sorrows.
Sometimes, too, we need a Holy Spirit. Because we often have to be reminded that there is something beyond ourselves. That this is not as good as it gets. As wonderful as our world and our bodies can be, we also know they are very flawed. The Holy Spirit reminds us that there is a part of us that always longs for God, no matter how far we have strayed. The Spirit reminds us that our sins are not who we are and that repentance and forgiveness are possible. It is the Holy Spirit that enables us to do the really good things we wouldn’t be capable of all by ourselves, the really good things that are who we really are before God.
It might seem like this mystery of the Trinity is a purely academic discussion. Does the Trinity affect our daily lives or make a difference in our here and now? Is all this discussion just talk, or does it really make any difference? Obviously, I don’t think it’s just talk. Instead, the Most Holy Trinity must be shared with people in every time and place. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit wants to relate to all of us, be present to all of us, and call all of us to discipleship through common baptism, and it’s up to us to point the way to that Trinity of love that longs to be in loving relationship with all people.
Sometimes the hymnody of our faith can express what prose alone can’t get at. The great old hymn, “Holy, Holy, Holy” by Reginald Heber sums up our awe of the Trinity today. Join me in praising God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit by turning to #474 in the Gather hymnals and singing that last verse:
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth and sky and sea.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
God in three persons, blessed Trinity. -
Thursday of the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time
One of the voices that can never be silenced in us is the voice that cries out seeking to see. We spend our whole lives crying out as Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel: “Master, I want to see.” And just as the crowd and even the disciples could not silence his desires, so nothing will silence that desire in our own hearts and souls. We want to see the truth, we want to see Jesus, we want to see the world as it really is, we want to see our way out of our current messed-up situation, we want to see the end of suffering, we want to see peace, we want to see wholeness, and maybe most of all we want to see ourselves. As we really are. As God sees us. This is our lifelong task.
St. Augustine spoke of that very same task in his Confession. He said, speaking to God: “I will confess, therefore, what I know of myself, and also what I do not know. The knowledge that I have of myself, I possess because you have enlightened me; while the knowledge of myself that I do not yet possess will not be mine until my darkness shall be made as the noonday sun before your face.” He goes on to say that he can try to hide from God if he wanted to, but it would never work. Hiding from God would only result in hiding God from himself. God sees the depths of our being, so if we try to hide all we really end up doing is running away from God who knows us at our very core.
The writer of our first reading had this idea in mind when he said:
You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood,
a holy nation, a people of his own,
so that you may announce the praises of him
who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.God is calling us all out of darkness today. He wants us to see him, and ourselves, as we were created to be. He wants us to be a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own. He created us from glory. And we won’t experience that glory until we go through the rather painful experience of bringing all of our darkness out into the light. Maybe we’re not ready for that yet. But we can pray to become ready, and to be open. We can pray in the words of Bartimaeus: “Master, I want to see!”
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