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.
Category: Prayer
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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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Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time [ Cycle B]
When I was growing up, sometimes we would ask Mom what was for dinner, and she would often reply, “I don’t know; it’s not three o’clock yet!” We were blessed, though. We could count on the fact that there would always be something for dinner and that it would be good. We just had to be a little bit patient and wait to find out what it was.
It seems like the Israelites might have benefitted from that lesson. They are out wandering in the desert and of course, they are hungry. I think we can understand that. But what is hard to understand is the content of their grumbling about it. They say that they would rather be back in Egypt, eating bread and the meat of the “fleshpots.” Why on earth did God have to drag them out into the desert only to kill them by hunger and let them die there? They would rather be in slavery in Egypt than be in the situation in which they find themselves. This is a complete rejection of God.
And it’s a shocking rejection, to be quite frank. The slavery they were subject to was not some kind of minor inconvenience. It’s not just that they were a little underpaid for their labor. No, they were beaten if they didn’t meet outrageous quotas, any kind of discontent would have cost them their lives. They lived in fear all the time, not knowing what new cruel joke their oppressors would subject them to. And so they cried out to God, who heard them, and delivered them.
And the deliverance wasn’t some tiny little act of mercy. God basically made a laughing stock of the pharaoh, who had made a laughing stock of the people Israel. He gave pharaoh a dose of what he had given the people. God made the plight of the Egyptians so bad that they were glad to be rid of the Israelites and basically helped them pack for the journey, giving them all of their gold and silver valuables to take with them. When the Israelites could not figure out the way they should go, God provided a column of cloud by day and fire by night so that they could see the right path. When the Egyptians pursued them and gained on them, God opened up the Red Sea for the Israelites to pass through, and then closed it back up over the Egyptians, swallowing up their armies, their horses and their chariots.
But now they’re a little hungry, so they’d like to return the gift, thank you. And when you think about it, this is really illogical. Is God, who was powerful enough to overthrow the Egyptians, and to deliver his people through the Red Sea, not powerful enough to feed them besides? Of course he is, and God will certainly feed his people when it’s time, and will not let them die of hunger and thirst in the desert.
Today’s Gospel provides a similar situation. The people have enjoyed the food that Jesus provided in last week’s Gospel, and they are looking for more of the same. He has retreated with his disciples, fearing they will try to make him a king, and they pursue him. When they catch up with him, Jesus engages them in dialogue. This dialogue is important for us to hear, because it unpacks the meaning of last week’s miracle. Jesus, of course, recognizes that they have pursued him not for any religious or spiritual reason, but because he fed them and they are looking for more of the same. But the real feeding he intends is not just barley loaves, but instead something a little more enduring.
They ask him how they can accomplish the works of God, which is a fair enough question. That’s really the purpose of our lives too. But they probably mean that they want to know how they can live the law, which is not nearly as deep as Jesus wishes to go. He tells them that the best way they can do God’s will is to believe in him – the one God sent. So they have the audacity to ask him what kind of sign he can do so that they can believe in him. Can you believe that ? He just finished feeding thousands of people with five loaves and two fish, and they want to see a sign? I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to think they wouldn’t recognize a sign from God if it came up and bit them in the nose!
Jesus, instead, would redefine hunger. Like I said, he wanted to go much deeper. Barley loaves and manna are nice, but they are nothing compared to what Jesus really longs to give them – and us, by the way. He makes a very bold claim at the end of today’s Gospel that tells us just exactly what he has in mind: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” They may have to toil very hard for physical bread, bread that will perish, bread that doesn’t last more than a day or so. But Jesus would have them work for bread that lasts for eternity, the bread of life. And all they have to do to work for it is to believe.
The question is not whether Jesus will feed them, the question is whether they can accept it. And in the next few weeks, we will explore that more closely. But what I think we see in today’s Liturgy of the Word is that we have to be clear about what it is we hunger for. And that question is very pressing on all of us today. Every one of us comes here hungering for something. Our hungers may be very physical: some here may be unemployed or underemployed, or perhaps our hunger is for physical healing of some kind. But perhaps our hungers are a bit deeper too: a relationship that is going badly, or a sense that we aren’t doing what we should be or want to be doing with our lives. Our hunger very well may be very spiritual as well: perhaps our relationship with God is not very developed or our prayer life has become stale. Whatever the hunger is, we need to be honest and name it right now, in the stillness of our hearts.
Naming that hunger, we then have to do what Jesus encouraged the crowds to do: believe. That is the work of God that we are called upon to do. Believe that God can feed our deepest hungers, heal our deepest wounds, bind up our brokenness and calm our restless hearts. Believe that Jesus is, in fact, the Bread of Life, the bread that will never go stale or perish, the bread that will never run out, or disappear like manna in the heat of the day. Jesus is the Bread that can feed more than our stomachs but also our hearts and souls. The Psalmist sings, “The Lord gave them bread from heaven.” And we know that bread is the most wonderful food of all, because it is the Body of Christ. Amen!
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Thursday of the Seventeenth Week of Ordinary Time
The Israelites wandering in the desert would seem to have had the spiritual life easy. How could they possibly miss God’s presence? There was a cloud to lead them to the Lord by day, and fire by night. But just like the stuff that ended up in the net in today’s Gospel, some people got it and some people didn’t.
The same is true for us. How hard can it be for us to see the Lord’s presence in our own lives? Even now, some people get it and some people don’t. And more than that, even the faithful among us sometimes get it and sometimes don’t. I often think it would be good to have something as hard to miss as a column of cloud or fire to keep me on the straight and narrow. Well, in a way – a much better way, actually – we do: we have the Church, the Sacraments, and the Word of God, prayer that beckons us by day and by night. But even that doesn’t always light the way for us. There are so many distractions.
The issue is urgent. The Kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us today, will be like the fishmongers sorting out the fish from the seaborne refuse. We don’t want to get thrown out with all that vile stuff. So, may God lead us all to be among those who get it, those who follow the way marked out for us. After all, we have something way better than clouds by day and fire by night, don’t we?
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