Caritas Christi Urget Nos

Tag: Jesus Christ

  • First Sunday of Advent

    First Sunday of Advent

    Today’s readings

    “To you, my God, I lift my soul,
    I trust in you; let me never come to shame.
    Do not let my enemies laugh at me.
    No one who waits for you is ever put to shame.”

    With these words of the proper entrance antiphon today, the Church begins the new Church year.  We stand here on the precipice of something new, a new creation, lifting up souls full of hope and expectation.  We come to this place and time of worship to take refuge from the laughing enemies that pursue us into our corner of the world.  And yet we wait for God on this first day of the year, keenly aware that our waiting will not be unrewarded.  This is Advent, the season whose name means “coming” and stands before us as a metaphor of hope for a darkened world, and a people darkened by sin.

    I sure think Isaiah had it right in today’s first reading, didn’t he?  “Why do you let us wander, O Lord, from your ways,” he cries, “and harden our hearts so that we fear you not?”  What a wonderful question for all of us – it’s a question that anyone who has struggled with a pattern of sin has inevitably asked the Lord at one time or another.  He goes on to pray “Would that you might meet us doing right, and that we were mindful of you in our ways!”  Almost as if to say, “Yeah, that’ll happen!”

    Whether it’s our own personal sin, which is certainly cause enough for sadness, or the sin in which we participate as a society, there’s a lot of darkness out there.  Wars raging all over the world, abortions happening every day of the year, the poor going unfed and dying of starvation here and abroad.  Why does God let all of this happen?

    On Thanksgiving, one of the topics of conversation at the dinner table was who was going to get up at what unheard of hour to go shopping on Black Friday.  I had absolutely no desire to join thousands of my closest friends at the crack of dawn to participate in a frenzy of consumerism.  But many did (and don’t worry; I won’t take a show of hands!).  But it seems like this traditional shopping day gets worse all the time.  This year, the news spoke of a Wal-Mart employee in New York who was trampled to death by people trying to get into the store.  A gunfight broke out at a Toys R Us in southern California and two people were killed.  What kind of people have we become?  Is this the way we should be preparing for Christmas – the celebration of the Incarnation of our Lord?  Why does God let us wander so far from his ways?  Why doesn’t he just rend the heavens and come down and put a stop to all this nonsense?  It’s no wonder the Psalmist sings today, “Lord, make us turn to you; show us your face and we shall be saved.”

    There is only one answer to this quandary, and that’s what we celebrate in this season of anticipation.  There has only ever been one answer.  And that answer wasn’t just a band-aid God came up with on the fly because things had gone so far wrong.  Salvation never was an afterthought.  Jesus Christ’s coming into the world was always the plan.

    I’ve been thinking about some of my favorite Advent hymns this week.  One of my favorites is “O Come, Divine Messiah,” a seventeenth-century French carol translated into English in the late nineteenth century.  It sings of a world in silent anticipation for the breaking of the bondage of sin that could only come in one possible way, and that is in the person of Jesus Christ:

    O Christ, whom nations sigh for,
    Whom priest and prophet long foretold,
    Come break the captive fetters;
    Redeem the long-lost fold.

    Dear Savior haste;
    Come, come to earth,
    Dispel the night and show your face,
    And bid us hail the dawn of grace.

    O come, divine Messiah!
    The world in silence waits the day
    When hope shall sing its triumph,
    And sadness flee away.

    As we prepare to remember the first coming of our Savior into our world, we look forward with hope and eagerness for his second coming too.  You’ll be able to hear that expressed in the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer today.  That second coming, for which we live in breathless anticipation, will finally break the captive fetters and put an end to sin and death forever.  That is our only hope, our only salvation, really the only hope and salvation that we could ever possibly need.

    We want our God to meet us doing right.  And so our task now is to wait, and to watch.  Waiting requires patience: patience to enjoy the little God-moments that become incarnate to us in the everyday-ness of our lives.  Patience to accept this sinful world as it is and not as we would have it, patience to know that, as Isaiah says, we are clay and God is the potter, and he’s not done creating, or re-creating the world just yet.  And so we watch for signs of God’s goodness, for opportunities to grow in grace, for faith lived by people who are the work of God’s hands.

    We wait and we watch knowing – convinced – that God will rend the heavens and come down to us again; that Christ will return in all his glory and gather us back to himself, perfecting us and allowing hope to sing its triumph at the top of our lungs, dispelling the night and putting sadness to flight once and for all.

    “To you, my God, I lift my soul,
    I trust in you; let me never come to shame.
    Do not let my enemies laugh at me.
    No one who waits for you is ever put to shame.”

  • Our Lord Jesus Christ the King

    Our Lord Jesus Christ the King

    Today’s readings

    You know, it’s always hard to proclaim this Gospel because I have to try to avoid looking to my left and right in order not to give the impression that this is the last judgment! But seriously, although I’ve heard this Gospel so many times, one thing has kind of leapt out at me this week as I’ve been thinking and praying about it. One detail I always have missed was that this was a judgment of the nations – it says, “all the nations will be assembled before him.”

    This idea that we’ll all be judged together is a pretty consistent one in Catholic theology. The Church always teaches that we come to salvation together, or not at all. That’s why it’s important that we spread the Gospel. That’s why it’s important that we live the teachings of Christ. That’s why it’s important that we drag our children in to Mass every week, or that we invite the neighbor or friend from work to join us at the Eucharist. Our Salvation depends rather heavily on the salvation of everyone else, and that’s not just the Church’s job, that’s everyone’s job. The world has to see why salvation is important, and if that’s going to happen it’s going to happen by all of us living lives of integrity and joy and faith not just here in Church, but also in our jobs, schools and communities. Everyone has to see the gift that salvation is.

    So the real significance of giving food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, care to the stranger and all the rest is that their salvation, and ours too, depends on it. So on this last Sunday of the Church year, we have to look back and see how well we’ve done this. Have we been good witnesses of the Gospel? Have we lived it? We want to dwell in the house of the Lord forever, and we have to take as many people with us as we can.

  • Thirty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Thirty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    The rather obvious and certainly oft-repeated application of today’s Gospel reading lies in the very literal interpretation of the word “talent.”  So we have been given many talents, and it’s up to us to use them wisely for the benefit of the kingdom of God.  Woe to the one who ignores his gifts and buries them out of fear.  And that’s a wonderful message.  I could go there.  But it’s wrong – that’s not what Jesus meant, and I think we have to dig just a little bit deeper.

    The word we have translated “talent” here does not mean what we think it means.  When our English ears hear that word, we think gifts, we think of abilities, of things we can do.  But that’s not what it means in the original Greek.  “Talent” here does not mean gifts, a talent was a unit of money.  It was actually rather a large sum of money, equal to something like one thousand days’ wages.  So think about it, even the man who only received one talent actually received quite a bit – he received what the average person would earn in a little over three years!  That’s a lot of money for anyone.

    The next thing we have to look at is who it was that was receiving such a large sum of cash.  On first glance, seeing what it is they have been given, we might think these are senior advisers to the master, people who would have been in charge of his estate and his business transactions.  But that’s not what it says.  It says he called in his “servants” – so we are talking here about slaves, slaves – not business advisers.  And so these slaves are getting ten talents, five talents, and one talent – all of them are getting a considerable amount of money!

    If we think of the master as God, and accept the talents simply as money, I think God comes off sounding rather harsh.  The poor servants differed in their ability; that’s pointed out in the story and certainly the master would have known that.  So why would God be so horribly harsh when a simple slave with limited giftedness does nothing with his gifts?  It makes us bristle, I think, to imagine God treating someone like that so poorly.  And maybe that’s as it should be.  Because I think our bristling tells us that we still have to dig deeper into this very interesting parable.

    So I think this raises a few questions for us.  Who is the master?  What do the talents represent?  Why would the master entrust such a large sum of money to common slaves?  Who are the slaves?  And what on earth was that third slave thinking when he buried such a wonderful gift in the sand?

    Well, first off, I do think the master is God here – God the Father.  Now the talents, they’re not abilities or gifts, and they aren’t simply money.  And I think it’s our first reading that gives us a clue as to what’s really at stake here.  That first reading speaks of the worthy wife whose value is far beyond that of fine pearls.  So this first reading is teaching us to value not someTHING, but someONE.  What, or rather who, could be that valuable?  And I think the answer here is that it’s Christ himself.  Those talents represent Christ, the Gospel he proclaimed, and the Kingdom he came to make manifest.  The Gospel says the Master called in his servants and entrusted his possessions to them.  What we have translated “entrusted” here means, in the original Greek, something more like “handed over.”  In just the same way, God the Father “handed over” his only Son to us, for the salvation of the whole world.  What could possibly be worth more than that?

    Now the slaves of course are the disciples, they’re you and me, people of every time and place who Christ has come to save.  We are slaves to sin, and we need a redeemer.  Some are more open to redemption and to the work of Christ and the call of the Gospel.  They might get five talents or ten, or maybe even a million – the riches of Christ can never be exhausted!  These go forth into the world, pouring out those riches of Christ into a world that desperately needs salvation, healing and hope.  As that message goes forth, proclaimed and lived by disciples ready to embrace it, they are able to earn five more, or ten more, or even a million for the kingdom.

    But some are not as open to Christ’s life and work and Gospel.  There’s too much at stake.  They worry about what might happen if our world totally embraced Jesus’ teaching.  They can’t get past what discipleship might personally cost them.  They are represented, of course, by Judas, the apostle who was so overwhelmed by Jesus that he gave in to despair.  And in Matthew’s Gospel, this is the cardinal sin, because in at least a dozen places, Jesus says “do not be afraid” in one form or another.  That was Jesus’ message in Matthew’s Gospel, and so this third servant, who was afraid of what the Master might be like, buried his treasure out of fear.  And the parable points out that that fear wasn’t even reasonable, since he dealt so wonderfully with the other two servants, rewarding their work by calling them to share in his joy.

    So today’s Gospel is a summary of the whole Gospel of Matthew that we’ve been reading with the Church this year.  We are told that the greatest gift is Christ, that we are called to live the Gospel, that we must take up the task before us without being afraid, that we are called to go out and invest Christ’s presence into a world that always needs to be renewed.  As we come here on this second-to-last Sunday of the Church year, we are brought to a summary of all that in order that we might look back and see how we’ve done that this year.  Have we treasured Christ as the greatest of all that we have been given?  Have we taken on the mission without being afraid, knowing that the gift we have been given in Christ can make up for anything that we ourselves may lack?  Have we accepted that wonderful gift and invested it in the world, proclaiming the Gospel by the way that we live, challenging the corner of the world we live in to take it up also, so that we might bring back another five or ten or a million talents?

    Or have we been afraid, thinking that the Master is demanding beyond reason, afraid to make a mistake, afraid of what living the Gospel would mean for us, afraid of what it might cost us?  Because if we have lived this way, we have failed the mission.  Everything we have will be taken from us.  There will be wailing and grinding of teeth.

    Here at the end of this Church year, we can renew our commitment, make a new year’s resolution, if you will, to live the Gospel and proclaim the kingdom in the year ahead.  It doesn’t have to be huge.  It doesn’t cost us anything, because everything that we need has been given to us.  Maybe proclaiming the Gospel means doing some kind of service for us.  Reaching out at a homeless shelter like Hesed House or at a soup kitchen or Loaves and Fishes.  Maybe it means leading a small Christian Community so others will hear the Gospel.  Maybe we’ll help teach a religious education class, or sing in the choir, or become a lector.  Maybe we’ll make an effort every day to put prayer in the course of our work day, and try to be people of integrity in our business lives.  On this Donor Sabbath Sunday, maybe we’ll register for organ donation so that lives will be saved even after we’ve gone home to our reward.  Maybe we’ll read the Scriptures each day before we go to bed, even just a few verses, so that the Lord can change our lives and hearts.  Throughout this Church year, we have received the greatest gift we’ll ever get – Jesus Christ the Lord himself.  Now it is up to us to bring back the gift with interest, taking a world of watching people with us. The Psalmist sings of our reward today: “For you shall eat the fruit of your handiwork; blessed shall you be, and favored.”  Come, share your Master’s joy!

  • Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Thursday of the Twenty-eighth Week of Ordinary Time

    Today’s readings

    When I was in seminary, one of the big courses we had to pass with flying colors early on was called Christology.  As the name might suggest, Christology is the study of Jesus Christ, but perhaps more specifically a study of the Church’s theology about Jesus Christ.  That course covers what we believe about Christ, the history of the Church’s belief about Christ, and the history of the many schisms and heresies that developed around Christ through the early years of the Church.

    When I read this morning’s first reading, I was so taken by the feeling that it was a reading about Christology as a whole.  If you want to know what we believe about Jesus Christ, just reread this reading a few times and reflect on it.  That’s your homework, by the way!  So what I’d like to do is to point out as many of the beliefs covered in this reading as I can, to give you food for thought.

    The first part is the standard St. Paul kind of greeting in which he says “grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”  Foundationally, this prayer says exactly what we believe: grace and peace come from the Father and the Son.  He goes on to say that we have all been blessed by the Father in the Son with every spiritual blessing.  God has chosen to send his grace, peace and blessing to us through Jesus, because it is Jesus who can relate to us in our human nature.  Through Jesus, he says, we have been chosen and called to holiness, loved and adopted as sons and daughters of God.

    Because of that love and adoption, God would not leave us in our sin.  No, through Christ we are also redeemed, forgiven and lavished with grace.  It is through Jesus also that God makes known all the mysteries of life and grace.  All of this had been set in motion before the world began, but given to us in time, here and now, through the One who was with him in the beginning and who stays with us until the end.  And at the end, everything in heaven and on earth will be summed up in Christ.

    As St. Paul says in another place, through Christ, with Christ and in him all things are.  Through Christ everything continues in being right up until the end.  And so thanks today go to St. Paul, the master theologian who reminds us of the great heritage and hope that we have in Christ.  And thanks be to God for the grace that is ours in every moment.

  • Friday of the Second Week of Easter

    Friday of the Second Week of Easter

    Today's readings [display_podcast]

    For any movement to succeed, it must take on a life beyond that of its present proponents.  It has to have a past and a future that are directed by a momentum beyond their own devices.  One might say, there must be a movement of the Holy Spirit in order for a movement to succeed.  Which is what Gamaliel was trying to tell the Sanhedrin.  If this Christianity thing was just a flash in the pan, then why get upset about it?  But if it was a bona fide movement of the Holy Spirit, then getting upset about it wasn’t going to do any good anyway.  Which is, of course, what happened.  God’s will is done regardless of what human beings think of it.

    We see that movement developing in today’s Gospel reading.  But it was too soon, and it was a movement not based on the Holy Spirit.  The people were beginning to clamor for Jesus the miracle worker, the one who would feed thousands with just a few loaves and fish, the one who would heal their sick and cast out their demons.  And Jesus came to do those things, but not just those things, not even primarily those things.  Jesus did not want to lead a movement that missed the point, that missed the grace.

    As is often the case, the Psalmist is the one who helps us to see the point and see the grace.  The one thing the Psalmist seeks today is to live in the house of the Lord all the days of his life.  That’s the point of the movement that Jesus intended, that’s the point of the movement the Apostles were part of and the Israelites couldn’t stop.  The whole point of our faith is to lead us to the house of the Lord both now and in eternity.  That is the one thing we gather together to seek this holy day.