Sunday

14th Week in Ordinary Time, Sunday, Cycle C

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Today’s readings are such a big sell for welcoming the Gospel when it is preached to us that we have to scratch our heads at why anyone would not accept it. The benefits are described as the peace and security you felt as a child on your mother’s lap (First Reading), joy (Second Reading), healing from illness (Gospel), liberation from the power of evil (Gospel), and our names being written in Heaven (Gospel).

It’s Paul who presents reveals the “fine print” of the arrangement: we have to be crucified to the world, and the world crucified to us. Our Lord in today’s Gospel describes the fate of those rejecting his disciples as worse than that of Sodom, which was the epitome of debauchery and depravity. It’s not easy to become crucified to the things of this world; it means not letting them have sway over us or they’ll only lead to our destruction. In faith and hope we have of focus on the benefits of welcoming Christ, following him, and making him known.

Let’s not only welcome Our Lord’s disciples into our world and our life, but become his disciples as well. The laborers are few.

Readings: Isaiah 66:10–14c; Psalm 66:1–7, 16, 20; Galatians 6:14–18; Luke 10:1–12, 17–20. See also Tuesday, Wednesday ,and Thursday of the 14th Week in Ordinary Time; 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B; Thursday and Saturday of the 26th Week in Ordinary time, and 1st Week of Advent, Saturday.

13th Week in Ordinary Time, Sunday, Cycle C

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A superficial reading of today’s First Reading and Gospel may give us the impression that Elijah is easier on his disciple than Our Lord is with his, but the Second Reading can shed a little light on the apparent difference. Paul reminds us in the Second Reading that life is a battle between the flesh and the Spirit; the Christian life presents a new way of living, living in a way that you are not enslaved to things and situations, but alive in the Spirit and focused on the spiritual goal. Even good things, if sought for the wrong reasons, can oppose a life of the Spirit.

A common denominator in today’s First Reading and Gospel is that the disciple asks to do something before following his master. The subtle difference is that, unlike Elijah, Our Lord can always read hearts and see whether that heart is speaking from the flesh or from the Spirit. Elisha is “liquidating his assets” and doing one last gesture of love for his family before departing; the hearts of disciples in today’s Gospel are only known to Our Lord, and it is in his response to them that we see a potential conflict between Spirit and flesh that he is trying to help them address.

The first disciple in today’s Gospel perhaps doesn’t understand that following Our Lord is a something lifelong: he’s not just headed to the Rabbi’s house instead of his own, he is committed to permanently follow Jesus, just as every Christian is called to do. The second wants to attend to important family business, but sometimes following Our Lord requires sacrifice and self-denial: in telling the dead to bury their dead Our Lord perhaps is telling him too that the family business he is concerned about can already be attended to by another member of his family. The last potential disciple wants to go home and say goodbye first: Our Lord sees something in that request that would put flesh over Spirit. Perhaps the disciple would go home and stay there. Following Christ is the best thing we can do for ourselves and our family, and we must never lose sight of that.

Whatever path Our Lord calls us to walk, not just priesthood or consecrated life, it is a path where we follow him. Let’s ask him today to show us the path we should take and how we should take it.

Readings: 1 Kings 19:16b, 19–21; Psalm 16:1–2, 5, 7–11; Galatians 5:1, 13–18; Luke 9:51–62. See also 10th Week of Ordinary Time, Saturday, Year II and 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Wednesday.

12th Week of Ordinary Time, Sunday, Cycle C

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The Church Fathers, contemplating the passage of John when the soldier pierced Our Lord’s side on the cross, see the blood and water flowing form his side as symbolizing the birth of the Church, the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the sacrament of Baptism. The Church is born through the sacraments of initiation. In today’s First Reading the prophet Zechariah speaks of the pierced one, and a fountain being opened to purify from sin and uncleanness. The pierced one is Christ, and the fountain of baptism flows from his Cross.

Paul in today’s Second Reading describes those who have believed in Christ and been baptized as clothed in Christ. Their ethnicity, social status, and sex are now clothed with something that puts an end to any enmity between them: they now share communion with God and with each other through Christ. The pierced one on the cross has become that fountain from which every reconciliation is achievable when hearts are open to it.

Christ’s suffering and death powers the cleansing waters of baptism. He washes all our sins away with his blood, if we let him. If we follow him in times of peace, let’s also take to heart his teaching in today’s Gospel to take up our own crosses every day in order to follow him.

Readings: Zechariah 12:10–11, 13:1; Psalm 63:2–6, 8–9; Galatians 3:26–29; Luke 9:18–24. See also Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Friday, and 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle B.

11th Week of Ordinary Time, Sunday, Cycle C

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In today’s Gospel Jesus teaches us that there is a big difference between letting someone into your your home and letting them into your heart. To learn this lesson we must consider the outlook of Simon the Pharisee and his other invited guests. Pharisee literally meant “separated one.” The people admired the Pharisees because they observed many ritual and moral rules—hundreds—to be ritually and morally pure: prayers, ritual washings, dietary laws, a code of conduct, studies, etc.. That gave them a great prestige in Jewish society because separated meant untainted, uncorrupted. With this attitude it is likely that Simon invited Jesus seeing it as doing Jesus a favor. He was probably checking out this “prophet” whom everyone was talking about. If we measure the signs of hospitality that Jesus says Simon didn’t do—they weren’t required—it shows Jesus was a guest, but not a special guest in Simon’s eyes.

When the sinful woman arrived uninvited upon hearing Jesus was in town, for Simon it was a cut and dry case, from his perspective: prophets and sinners do not mix. Being righteous before God meant separating yourself from sinners, avoiding them, looking down on them. Sinners were contagious. Anyone righteous before God would spot that a mile away. Simon had heard a lot about this woman too: we don’t know what she did, but she must have been a notorious sinner if even the Pharisees had heard of her. If Simon was looking for proof to “flunk” Jesus on his test of being a prophet, this was it: “If this man were a prophet, he would know who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him,that she is a sinner.” If Jesus didn’t know the woman, if he were a prophet, God would have told Him she was sinner and a source of ritual impurity at least, moral corruption at worst.

But Jesus read Simon’s heart, the hearts of the invited guests, the heart of the uninvited guest, and taught them that letting some into your home and letting them into your heart are two different things. The list of signs of hospitality Jesus told Simon about were not hospitality that was expected for a guest, but signs that showed how much the guest meant to the host. They were signs of esteem, appreciation, love. The sinful woman didn’t just try inviting Jesus over. Given her reputation, she probably thought he wouldn’t have accepted, being a righteous man. But it wasn’t just about fear of humiliation, or she wouldn’t have gone and walked into a house full of Pharisees who knew she was a sinner and probably would have beaten her and thrown her out. But she sought something the law by itself couldn’t give: forgiveness. St. Paul in the Second Reading today speaks of it as justification: becoming “just” before God, becoming righteous before God, is not about doing the works of the law alone: on their own they are worthless. It takes faith in Jesus to make us righteous before God.

Jesus didn’t deny that the woman had not only sinned, but committed “many” sins, so she went to him and showed that she appreciated what Jesus was giving her: forgiveness. Some have considered the Second Reading as a pretext for not worrying about being religiously observant, but what God is saying is that the “law”: the works you do, the code of conduct you follow, should be the way you show Jesus that you have let him into your heart, a way to show appreciation for not only creating you, but redeeming you. The Pharisees had forgotten about forgiveness, and God, in the Person of his Son, had to remind them that what God wanted was “mercy and not sacrifice.” They had used religious works for themselves, and to build up prestige, but also as a distance between them and God in their hearts. But forgiveness is shown by love. The more forgiveness, the more love. The Pharisees didn’t love much because they hadn’t been forgiven much. They were religious, they were observant of what they though God expected of them. And the ones who were hypocrites, whose hearts were far from God, showed hate for Jesus instead of love. All the way to Calvary. To see someone minister forgiveness on this earth was shocking to the Pharisees, which is why they murmured at Jesus’ words. God alone could forgive sins. If they had faith, they would have at least seen Jesus as the Messiah whom God sent to liberate people from their sins. And their faith would have grown to see Jesus was God, and resolved their difficulty. Jesus never stops inviting souls to come to His hearts not only to receive love and forgiveness, but to learn love a forgiveness as well.

Faith and love lead us to not only to go to where Jesus is, but to follow him. The Gospel tells us that the women who followed Jesus and the Twelve and supported them in their ministry had also let Jesus into their hearts in order to be healed. Their faith and love for Jesus grew, and was translated into good works. Love and forgiveness from Jesus becomes love and forgiveness for others. This is the best way to follow him. When we let Jesus into our hearts, not just into a corner of our house like maybe a salesman we’re trying to be polite to but hoping he’ll making his sales pitch and leave, we are transformed by his grace.

Ask Our Lord for the grace to see how much Simon is in you and how much of the follower who wants and shows forgiveness and love. Have you let Jesus into your heart completely or just a corner?

Readings: 2 Samuel 12:7–10, 13; Psalm 32:1–2, 5, 7, 11; Galatians 2:16, 19–21; Luke 7:36–8:3. See also 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Thursday and 3rd Week in Ordinary Time, Saturday.

Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Cycle C

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When I consider the Holy Trinity I remember a conversation over coffee I had with a friend at work before I entered the seminary. She was a recent convert and asked me, “Who’s your favorite – Father, Son or Holy Spirit?”

The Gospel reminds us today that all the Father has, all the Son has, and in turn all the Holy Spirit will declare to his disciples is common. With the Persons sharing everything in common it is easy to think that God is just giving us options to choose from. We can be attracted to each Person of the Trinity for some reason: the Father because he reminds us of our loving origins and always hearkens us to future rest in not just a place, but a home, a home made more than a dwelling by the family we share it with; the Son because he is a true friend and big brother, who was willing to give it all for us, and because he put a human face to God and reminded us of his solidarity with our daily lives and sufferings; and the Holy Spirit because we always feel a need to rise above and beyond the immediate things in our life, to be taken up by the impulse of inspiration, to feel and be free from the confines of day to day living.

However, we can’t forget that God is One in Three Persons, which is the hallmark of Christian faith, or we risk writing off God in one way or another by considering the Father as aloof, utterly transcendent and beyond our daily lives and interests, authoritarian; considering Jesus Christ just another rabbi or wise man, sharing some human teachings with us and giving good example, nothing more than a social worker; or considering the Holy Spirit as just another one of those flighty inspirations and sentiments that never results in anything, just a free spirit.

Today’s readings and Gospel remind us that everything we are, everything we hope for, and everything expected of us and that we expect from God comes to us from the whole Trinity. In the First Reading we see the Trinity relishing in the creation of the world – the wisdom of God is speaking and reminiscing of the moment of creation. He describes himself as the forerunner of God’s wonders, before the earth was made. And in these words we are reminded that God the Father made the world with his Son in mind, gazing upon him in eternity with love. The Son in turn, begotten by the Father, as we profess every Sunday in the Creed, delights over creation and the human race. This hearkens back to the first chapters of Genesis, when the Spirit of the Lord hovers over the face of the deep, ready to begin creation with “let there be light” and when he creates man, he breathes his own spirit, a Spirit of life, into man to make him a living being, wanting to create men in His own image and likeness. We see that spirit of play and artistic relish that reminds us of God’s total freedom to create us, without any need and restraint, and with us in mind as his true masterpieces, made in his image – by showing him to others, and likeness – by sharing the life he has in abundance.

In creating man the Trinity had an even more special masterpiece in mind, a masterpiece that would in part craft itself. He gave us the freedom to conform our lives to this masterpiece of life that he wanted to see brought about in each one of us. In faith and love we could trust in him to show us the way to be a true masterpiece, a masterpiece of moral beauty, truth, and love. When Adam and Eve sinned they chose their distorted image of God as the model to imitate, and the image of God was disfigured in them. As a result, just as God warned them before eating of the fruit, spiritual death ensued. Nevertheless, God’s relish in us and desire for our glory would not let the story end there.

So, as the Second Reading reminds us, God became man to show us that true masterpiece and image of God that he had in mind from all eternity for us. As Paul reminds us, through our Lord Jesus Christ we have peace and access to the glory of God again. God created the world with his Son’s image in mind, and Jesus, by becoming flesh, by becoming a man, shows us exactly what God had on his mind when he created us. That image of God found in Christ shows us how we can restore the image of God in us again that was disfigured by sin. By Christ becoming man our likeness is restored as well: The flow of spiritual life is reopened by Jesus’ Passion and death, and poured into us by the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, as we profess in the Creed every Sunday. Full of that divine life, we happily put up with the sufferings and struggles of daily life, knowing that the glory of God will come for us.

Finally, as the Gospel reminds us, God is not just the origin of our existence, but the purpose of it as well, the end toward which we’re all headed. It is not the end in terms being finished, it is the beginning of eternal life with the Trinity. Jesus became man and suffered and died to reconcile the world with God, the Father of mercies. He does this by sending the Holy Spirit. Jesus promised the disciples during the Last Supper that the Holy Spirit, which Jesus was full of from the beginning to the end of his earthly mission, would come after Jesus’ Ascension into Heaven to constantly keep Christ among us and give us life through the sacraments, as well as guidance and strength to be faithful to the image of God that Jesus Christ had restored in us. As the Lord, the giver of Life, the Holy Spirit continues to keep the Church united around Christ and proclaiming the Gospel to the world through her words and example. Jesus reminds us that the Holy Spirit will not say anything apart from what the Father and Son share. In this way the Trinity is and always will be united as the source of our existence, our hope, and our life.

This week, whenever you make the Sign of the Cross, make it a moment of thanks toward each Person of the Holy Trinity for the work of salvation and happiness that God’s bringing about in us.

Readings: Proverbs 8:22–31; Psalm 8:4–9; Romans 5:1–5; John 16:12–15. See also Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity.

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