In our overly-litigious society, Jesus’ words that we are to make an effort to settle the matter on the way are a good call to refocus. This call shifts the emphasis from winning to healing, and it calls us to do some hard things. In order to settle the matter, we will have to communicate and be open to the fact that we may be in the wrong. If we are open to settling things the way Jesus would have us do it, we might find ourselves growing in maturity and faith, and becoming better people in the process.
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Thursday of the Twenty-ninth Week of Ordinary Time
Some people would say that Jesus was a peaceful man. And that is a basically true statement. But I think that we have to understand that peace wasn’t necessarily his primary interest, at least not peace in the way that we often see it.
Because sometimes I think we misread what peace is supposed to be. We might sell peace short and settle for the absence of conflict. Or even worse, we may settle for peace at any price, swallowing our disagreements and never coming close to true healing in our relationships. There are families in which never a harsh word would be said, but the underlying hostility is palpable. There are workplaces in which there are never any arguments, but there is also never any cooperative work done. Sometimes there are relationships where fear replaces love and respect.
And this is not the kind of peace that Jesus would bring us today. This is the One who came to set the earth on fire, and his methods for bringing us to peace might well cause division in the here and now. But there is never any resurrection if we don’t have the cross. And so there will never be any peace if we don’t confront what’s really happening. The fire has to be red hot and blazing to burn away all that is unhealthy if there is ever to be any new growth.
And so today we have to stop settling for a peace that really isn’t so peaceful. We may just have to have that hard conversation we’ve been trying to avoid. Of course, we do it with love for our brothers and sisters, but out of love we also don’t avoid it. Our words and actions must always be guided by the fire of the Holy Spirit, but we must never choose to neglect the Spirit’s guidance and instead just settle for something that is really not peace. We have to work for true healing in all of our relationships.
The Psalmist tells us today that “the earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.” That goodness resides in all those people God has given us in our lives. This day, we are called to relish their goodness and work for lasting peace with all of them.
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St. Isaac Jogues, John de Brébeuf and Companions, Martyrs
St. Isaac and St. John were among eight missionaries who worked among the Huron and Iroquois Indians in the New World in the seventeenth century. They were devoted to their work and were accomplishing many conversions. The conversions, though, were not welcomed by the tribes, and eventually St. Isaac was captured and imprisoned by the Iroquois for months. He was moved from village to village and was tortured and beaten all along the way. Eventually he was able to escape and return to France. But zeal for his mission compelled him to return, and to resume his work among the Indians when a peace treaty was signed in 1646. His belief that the peace treaty would be observed turned out to be false hope, and he was captured by a Mohawk war party and beheaded.
St. John worked among the Iroquois and ministered to them amid a smallpox epidemic. As a scholastic Jesuit, he was able to compose a catechism and write a dictionary in Huron, which made possible many conversions. He was eventually captured, tortured and killed by the Iroquois.
St. Isaac, St. John and their companions inspire us to take up the mission: to make Christ known, relying on the treasure of grace he brings us and promises us, and accepting that this world’s glory is not worth our aspirations. This will not be easy, of course, in a culture that largely rejects the promises of heaven in its pursuit of instant gratification. But perhaps the witness of these French Jesuits would help us to bravely witness to the Truth with the same zeal for the mission that they did. Our mission may not be to a culture so different to us as the Indian cultures were to these men, but that mission is none the less vital to the salvation of the world.
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Saint Luke, evangelist
Saint Luke, of course, is best known for contributing two major works to the New Testament: the third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. In these works, we can see the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, along with his proclamation of the kingdom and the many graces he came to pour out on humankind, and also the life of the early Church, the first community as they strove to make the person and teachings of Jesus present to every creature on earth. Luke traveled with Saint Paul, and along the way interviewed many eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life and recorded them all meticulously.
Luke introduces his Gospel with these words: “Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I too have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received.” The Acts of the Apostles is introduced similarly, and addressed to Theophilus as well. We don’t know who Theophilus was, but he appears to have been a convert to the Way, and may even have been a powerful person or a rich benefactor. But what’s interesting is his name: Theophilus, which translates roughly as a “lover of God.”
That makes these wonderful works accessible to all of us, who presumably are also lovers of God. We have been reading from Luke’s Gospel on most of the Sundays of this Liturgical Year, and I always love this cycle of readings. The third Gospel speaks to me in different ways than the others do, and it includes details, glimpses of Jesus that are particular to Luke alone.
“Your friends make known, O Lord, the glorious splendor of your Kingdom,” the Psalmist says today. And that is very true of Saint Luke; we have much for which to be grateful to his faith, his preaching, and his meticulous investigation and recording.
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The Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time [C]
Prayer is one of the most important elements of the Christian life, of the life of a disciple, and yet it is also, I think, one of the most difficult to master. When I’ve mastered it, I’ll let you know – although it might be from beyond the grave! Still, it’s something that we work at every day of our lives, and the working it out should be one of our greatest joys. In today’s Liturgy of the Word, we have just one element of prayer, and that is the element of persistence in prayer.
Now I’m going to be real careful here. Lots of people give some lousy advice about prayer: if you just pray hard enough and long enough, everything will eventually work out all right. I’m not going to tell you that, because things often don’t work out perfectly no matter how much we pray, and they almost never work out the way we’d like them to.
So why even bother praying? Well, hang in there, we’ll get to that.We have a wonderful image of prayer in our first reading. I invite you to raise your arms with me if you’re able, and leave them raised until you can’t any more. This is what Moses had to do to keep the Hebrew army in a winning position against Amelek and his warriors. The minute Moses lowered his hands to rest, things went ill for the Hebrews, but as long as his hands were raised, things went okay.
Now, again, I proceed cautiously here, because I don’t think things always work out perfectly as long as we pray. But there’s an element of this analogy that is very important, I think. And that element is that sometimes it’s hard to be persistent in prayer. Sometimes you get tired. Maybe your arms are not yet weary, but they might soon get there.
I can think of a few times in my life when I’ve grown weary of praying. One of them was in my late thirties when I was trying, once again, and once and for all, to figure out what God wanted me to do with my life. I prayed and prayed and prayed, and it didn’t seem like God was answering at all. I finally grew weary of prayer and told God that he should give me a big challenge and whatever it was, I would do it. Then one day, the day of the Easter Vigil that year, I got a letter in the mail from a friend and it made everything crystal clear. Six months later I was in seminary.
Sometimes in our weariness we have to let go of what we think we would like God to do for us and just let God be God. But how are your arms doing? Are you weary yet? Well if so, you’re in good company. Moses found that to really be persistent in prayer, he needed friends – Aaron and Hur – to hold him up. That’s true for all of us, I think. There comes a point when we need to admit that we need friends to hold us in prayer, to take some of the burden of prayer when persistence has become difficult. If you haven’t already, you can put your arms down now.
I honestly don’t really know what to make of the gospel reading. I mean, are we really supposed to think that God is an unjust judge who has no respect for anyone? Obviously not. I think that we’re supposed to see in this little parable that if even an unjust judge – one who neither fears God nor respects any person – if even that judge will eventually give in to the widow pleading for just judgment, well then how much more will our God who is infinitely just and doesn’t just respect us but loves us beyond all imagining, how much more will he pour out his blessings of justice on all of us?
Which isn’t to say that he will definitely answer our prayers the way we want them answered. Those persistent prayers will be answered in God’s way, in God’s time. He may say “no” or he may even allow something evil in order to make something good of it. We may have to bear the burden of disease or the sadness of the death of a loved one, in order that we might be healed in other ways, that we might come to know God’s love in the midst of our burdens.
When we persist in prayer, sometimes it the change that happens is not the situation, but ourselves. We may grow in grace in some way that we would not otherwise experience or even expect. We may grow in our capacity to love, or in our awareness of the needs of others, or in our ability to be steadfast in the midst of chaos. All of these give honor and glory to God, which after all, brothers and sisters, is our ultimate purpose in life.
So let’s get back to that question that I asked at the beginning of the homily. Why even bother praying if we’re not going to get what we want. I think we pray for three reasons. First, we pray to grow in our relationship with God who is our friend. As in any relationship, we open ourselves up to conversation, watching for God’s response, accepting God’s will and his desire that we grow in love for him.
Second, I think we pray because God genuinely cares about us. If we are to grow in love, we have to know that he is open to us and desires that we communicate our needs, our hopes, our fears, our deepest longings to him. It’s not that he doesn’t know these things already, but the process of expressing them in prayer helps us to know those needs in deeper ways and helps us to be aware of God’s action in our lives.
Third, I think we pray because that’s how we grow in holiness. The more that we bind ourselves to God by receiving his mercy and grace and knowing his love for us in prayer, the more we become new people, new creations.
The Psalmist reminds us today that “Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” Every prayer may not be answered in our time and in the way that we’d like. But by persisting in prayer, we will eventually and always become something better.
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St. Teresa of Avila, virgin and doctor of the Church
Saint Teresa was a virgin, mystic, nun, reformer of the Carmelite order, and foundress of the Discalced Carmelites. When she was a girl, her father sent her for a time to live in an Augustinian convent, until she became ill about a year or so later. During her illness, she began to contemplate the prospect of living a religious life, and eventually decided to join a convent of Carmelite nuns, which her father strongly opposed. After she turned twenty-one, she did join, and her father gave up opposition to it. She was known to be a woman of prudence, charity and personal charm, and so many people came to be devoted to her charism. She struggled, though, with personal prayer until her early forties. Persevering in prayer, she found that she more and more enjoyed being in the presence of the Lord, and really began to grow in friendship with him.
“You are worth more than many sparrows,” Jesus tells us in today’s gospel. This Teresa truly took to heart, resulting in a friendship with God that was her strength and a glorious inspiration for others. And so today, we might examine our own prayer life, our own relationship with our God. And we pray that that friendship would be as wonderful as Teresa’s was.
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Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
I love that there were short verses for the psalm today, and we got to repeat this refrain from the Psalmist over and over. If you think about it, and if you really enter into it, it becomes a kind of mantra, a way to center ourselves and open ourselves up to the Lord in this Eucharistic celebration.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
Because we are all in need of the Lord’s mercy, aren’t we? Whether it is sinfulness, addiction, illness or infirmity, anxiety, worry about a family member, uncertainty about a job or the economy as a whole, we all have to realize that so much of the time we are in desperate need of the Lord’s love and mercy.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
And we come to the point that we know that the only thing that can help us is the Lord’s mercy. We may have tried so many times on our own to cure ourselves or make the pain go away or focus on the positive or not cause waves, we know that of ourselves, ultimately, we are unable to fix the things that really vex us. Sin takes hold, circumstances beyond our control confound us, powerlessness causes frustration. And then, all of a sudden, we remember the One we were trying to hide from, or with whom we didn’t want to bother with our troubles. But in the face of our own powerlessness, we must turn to the one whose power can overcome all.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
And so that powerlessness eventually, inevitably intersects with the loving power of our merciful God, who desires so much more for us than we would settle for. And then we really do let God’s mercy come to us. Because it was always there in the first place; never withheld. We had just to let it come to us, had to be open to it, had to be in the place where we could receive it and come to the point where we could acknowledge our need for it and our gratitude for receiving it. And when we at last arrive there, and that mercy comes to us, how overwhelmed we can be, how transformed, how loved we can feel, how cared for. God’s mercy is always there, we have just to let it come to us.
“Let your mercy come to me, O Lord.”
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Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time
So, what’s the big deal about seeking a sign? Don’t we all need a sign from God every now and then so that we can be sure we are on the right path? Otherwise, how are we supposed to know the will of God?
Well, yes, signs are necessary and helpful events in our spiritual journey. And Jesus was never stingy about giving signs. After all, he healed the sick, raised the dead, and fed the multitudes. Who could have possibly missed the signs and wonders he was providing? The thing was, the people, especially the religious authorities, were cynical and hard of heart, and they soon forgot the wonders he had done. So they wanted to see Jesus do things they were pretty sure he couldn’t do; in other words, they were asking for a sign not from an attitude of faith, but an attitude of cynicism.
And Jesus had no intention of playing that game. These people would get no further sign, at least not until the sign of Jonah. So what did that mean? Well, as we remember, Jonah was swallowed up in the belly of a big fish for three days, then disgorged on the shores of Nineveh. Jesus was foreshadowing that, in the same way, he himself would be swallowed up in the grave for three days, then raised to new life. These cynical people would just have to wait for that great sign, and even then, they certainly wouldn’t believe.
And so, yes, we can ask for a sign. We can ask God to help us to know we have discerned the right path. But we always must ask from the perspective of our faith, being open to whatever God shows us, being open to silence if that’s what he gives us, ready to follow him, sign or no sign, wherever we are led. God is always there, even in our most difficult quandaries, ready to give us confidence by his presence.
And never forget that we have already received the sign of Jonah, and that sign is incredibly good news for all of us!
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Saturday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time
“Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus has just been given a great complement and he responds to it kind of brusquely, I think. Earlier in this eleventh chapter of Luke, Jesus has taught the disciples to pray, teaching them what has become known as the Lord’s prayer. Then there is the discourse on the need for persistence in prayer that we heard on Thursday. Then a teaching on demons. And now this. From this point on in the chapter, Jesus will turn up the heat on the people’s prayer life. Nothing less is effective. Nothing else is acceptable.
And so we hear the same invitation: “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” We have been taught how to pray. We have been given tools in Scripture and in the Church. So the question is, have we observed that teaching? Has our prayer become persistent? Is it the life blood of our relationships with God and others? Does prayer sustain us in bad times and give us joy in good times?
Observing the word of God takes many forms. Most likely, we think of the service we are called upon to help bring about a Godly kingdom on earth. And that is important, make no mistake about it. But that same word calls us to a vital relationship with our God, a relationship that raises the bar for all of our other relationships. That relationship with God can be a blessing to us and to our world. But we can only get there by prayer. We have to make time for the one who always makes time for us.
“Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”
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Wednesday of the Twenty-seventh Week of Ordinary Time
There is a deep-rooted desire in each of us for connection with our God. This is not surprising, since God made us for himself. Some people, of course, are more aware of it than others; you all would not be here for Mass this morning if you were not aware of it. The answer to that connection, as we have been taught, is prayer. And the kind of prayer that Jesus teaches us today is not an ethereal prayer to a distant deity. Instead, it is a prayer of love to God our Father, relying on his will for us, begging his forgiveness, and asking him to make of us a repentant and forgiving people.
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