Wed. Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time—Cycle I

A reflection on 2 Corinthians 8:1–9; Matthew 5:43–48

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Do you have those mornings when you get up and don’t want to give an inch to anyone? I have days where my patience with life is thin, and it takes a bit more than one full cup of my industrial-strength coffee to be on speaking terms with the waking world. The last adjective I would use to describe myself in those times is “generous of spirit.” But generosity of spirit is vital to the Christian life, and that is part of the message in today’s readings.

In 2 Corinthians, St. Paul exhorts the people of Corinth to demonstrate their spirit of repentance by giving generously to the support of the saints in Jerusalem. This passage just goes to show you that capital campaigns enjoy a long tradition in our Church. No doubt we would have met our goals much sooner if St. Paul had been involved in our fund-raising efforts. All kidding aside, though, St. Paul speaks here to our obligation as Christians to aid those who are less fortunate—giving from our need, not from our excess. If we give only of what we have in excess, we’re simply giving someone what they should already have. If all goods are given to us in stewardship, then our obligation is not to hoard but to act justly and to give all people what is due to them—at very least, the basic necessities for life.

This principle is what the Church calls the universal destination of goods. Paragraph 2405 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says specifically that “Those who hold goods for use and consumption should use them with moderation, reserving the better part for guests, for the sick and the poor,” and the same teaching has been presented in encyclicals from Pope Leo XIII through Benedict XVI. I am my brother’s keeper—not the state or the US government. I am personally to see to the welfare of those in need. Sometimes I do better than others.

The gospel passage today comes from Matthew’s “Sermon on the Mount,” which is essentially a recasting of the giving of the Law on Mt. Nebo—a reinterpretation of the Mosaic Law by the giver of that Law, the Word Himself. Matthew wrote for a Jewish Christian audience, which is why his version of this sermon varies so dramatically from the sermon as presented by Luke. In this particular instance, Jesus is countering a contemporary interpretation of Jewish Law. He wasn’t alone in this particular interpretation. In fact, another influential rabbi of His time, Hillel, taught something very similar: “That which is hateful to you, do not to others.” Jesus inverts that and gives us what we now know as the Golden Rule: “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” But here, Jesus goes even further. We’re not to return good for good. Even sinners and tax collectors do as much. This is not a quid pro quo. We’re supposed to return good for evil. We’re supposed to love those who treat us with contempt and those who wish us harm. We’re supposed to pray for those who persecute us. We’re supposed to love others as God has loved us.

The Jews held up the Law as their standard of conduct. Jesus is telling His disciples that it is not enough to follow the Law and to conform our lives to it. In fact, He frequently condemns the literalistic application of the Law touted by the Pharisees. Jesus’ standard is Jesus Himself. God blesses the righteous and unrighteous and makes the sun and the rain fall on both. Jesus forgives those who crucify Him.

That is generosity of spirit, and that is what we are called to do. If the disciples’ standard for behavior is God, God who is love, then our spirit must be guided and inflamed by that perfect love.

Tues. Week 9 of Ordinary Time—Cycle I

A reflection on Mark 12:13–17

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The Pharisees and the Herodians were trying to trap Jesus in the story Mark tells today. Both groups represent the clear interests of the times in First Century Judea. The Pharisees, of course, represent Jewish religious authorities over and against the various Jewish factions, and the Herodians represent the puppet Tetrarchy put in place by Rome. They are often presented as being on the two opposite sides of the question, but in reality, both parties submitted to Rome and paid the census tax. They are trying to get Jesus to reveal Himself as a Zealot, one of a party of patriotic Jews from the Galilee who resented Roman rule and refused to pay taxes to a pagan ruler. Pharisee and Herodian probably agreed on little else, but the Pharisees were perfectly happy to coax Jesus into the Herodians’ pit, where the Herodians could then take over and condemn Jesus as a revolutionary. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” as the Arab proverb goes.

Of course, Jesus outwits them. He knows that they simply want to draw Him into controversy for their own ends. He does not deny the tribute owed to the government, but He also affirms the obligation we have to God. We have things of this world and things of God. We need to be able to distinguish between the two and meet each obligation appropriately.

What a challenge that is these days, when government regulations and doctrines of faith seem to be at odds in so many ways. We’re told to keep our faith to ourselves, not to legislate morality, to keep our noses out of people’s bedrooms. Oddly enough, many of the same people who say we should stay out of their bedrooms still think we should pay for what happens there. The old rule about never discussing politics and religion in polite company has become more about not mentioning the two in the same breath, and of course not allowing religion to taint our political opinions.

We can also be pulled in this direction by our own patriotic impulses. I will be the first to admit that I have always had this patriotic streak in me. I grew up with stories of George Washington and John Paul Jones, of the colonies and the War of Independence. I grew up with a sense of self as an American—with pride of being in this blessed country with a unique commitment to personal freedom. But that belief in personal freedom can often be twisted into an idolatry of license over liberty: a belief in the right to do whatever we wish instead of the right to follow our faith-formed conscience. Pope Leo XIII warned Cardinal Gibbon in 1898 of the dangers of what was then called Americanism—a focus on individual initiative over obedience to authority, a tendency toward assimilation into this country’s generally Protestant culture, and a division between Church and State that puts them essentially at odds to each other.

We as Catholics, of course, need to remember that we are called first to obey Christ and the Church He founded. To paraphrase St. Thomas More, we are citizens of this nation, but of God’s first. Sometimes, we get those two obligations switched around, giving allegiance first to the political ideologies of our times, then subordinating our faith to them. This happens on both sides of the political spectrum, and it unfortunately reverberates into our communion and causes divides. We attempt to enact our view of heaven on earth through our own obscured vision. Like Tobit in our first reading, we’re so convinced by our own virtue that we’re unaware, in our moral blindness, to the virtue of others.

But we’re not called to remake heaven on earth. We are called to be heavenly on earth.

Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia, formerly of Denver, wrote a book a few years ago titled Render Unto Caesar, in which he argues that our role as Catholics and US citizens is to inform our lives by our faith and the teachings of the Church, and to carry that faith out into the political and social realm. That is the job of the laity, and that is one way in which we can take part in this New Evangelization. We can live our faith in active witness in our public lives, proclaiming the Gospel in both our words and deeds.

Wed. Sixth Week of Easter

I graduated on Saturday, and I have to say it feels really weird not to have a thesis or major paper looming in my future. I have one more paper to write for canon law (my last for diaconal formation), but other than that, I just have my own personal projects.

Oh, and homiletics. I have a few more of those in the next few weeks. Here's a reflection I gave off the cuff yesterday at sung vespers with the chancel choir (mostly boys between the ages of 7 and 15). Actually, I can only approximate what I said because I went in only with my personal reflections on the readings and no notes.

Acts 17:15, 22—18:1
John 16:12–15
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In the reading from Acts, Paul is talking to the Athenians, and he recognizes that they are a pretty sophisticated bunch. They had a lot of great philosophers—people like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—guys who had really big brains. Paul pointed out that they had discovered through reason, by using their brains, that there was One God, and Plato even came to recognize that that One God had a certain aspect of threeness to it, similar but not quite like the God we know to be One in Three.

But the Paul goes on to say what the Athenians can't know by reason—that God has revealed Himself to us, and that He rose from the dead. So Paul is saying here that we know God by both faith and reason. We need both.

In the gospel reading, Jesus explains how this revelation works and how it is guided by the Holy Spirit—the paraclete or advocate. Now in our Church, we believe that we have two streams of revelation: sacred scripture and sacred tradition. Sacred scripture is, of course, the words we have in our bible, while sacred tradition is what the Church has lived and practiced for the 2000 years of its existince: our prayers, our liturgies like this one, our devotions, the way we live our daily lives. And we also have something else—the teaching authority of the Church, what we call the magisterium, which in interprets scripture and tradition but is always at their service, never changing what is passed down. These three pillars are like three legs of a stool. If we have only one leg on our stole—scripture—our stool isn't very stable. But with all three we have a solid foundation. All of these are led by the Holy Spirit to lead us.

Now our Church teaches that we can find bits of the truth in many traditions, just as many of our Protestant brotehrs and sisters also teach bits of the truth, but the Holy Spirit guarantees His guidance of the teaching authority of our Church, which Paul calls elsewhere the "pillar and bulwark of Truth."
 

Last Homiletics Assignment: Palm Sunday—Cycle C

For my last homiletics assignment, I drew Palm Sunday, which means I got a double dose of gospelly goodness! And it worked out pretty well. Because I had four readings with which to work, I decided to focus on the gospel accounts, and added only a passing reference to the epistle: Luke 19:28–40; Philippians 2:6–11; Luke 22:14–23:56.
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Jesus has a one-way ticket to the cross, and He is selling seats for the tour. That is the story that we hear in these two gospel accounts from Luke.

As Jesus makes His way into Jerusalem, the people proclaim Him king and even the stones apparently recognize who He is. Yet in one week, many of these same people will call for Jesus to be crucified. When we place these two Gospel passages side by side, we sense a bit of funny business here. The rocks know who Jesus is, but the people who were expecting an earthly king, don’t. Even Peter, whose very nickname means “stone” or “rock,” doesn’t fully recognize who Jesus is, even after he, John, and James saw Jesus transfigured on Mount Tabor. I think Luke is putting us on, showing us that Jesus’ closest apostles are dumber than rocks when it comes to Jesus’ true identity.

Now, we can’t really blame them or the people of Jerusalem. Jewish tradition had conditioned  them to expect a political, military savior who would throw out the Romans and re-establish the Kingdom of Israel. Even Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is itself an allusion back to Solomon’s entry into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, an allusion everyone would have instantly recognized. The people were expecting an earthly king in the line of David. No one told them that the Messiah would be a Heavenly King, much less the Son of God. In a way, you can almost understand why so many in Jerusalem then turned on Jesus. Judas, one of the Twelve, was so disenchanted that he betrayed Jesus to the Jewish authorities. Maybe he thought he was doing his part? Maybe he thought, yes, then Jesus will reveal who He truly is.
And Peter, the rock who says, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” the one we think gets it, he still denies Jesus three times. He has an idea of who Jesus is, but somehow he misses the mark. He only gets part of the story. He doesn’t see the big picture.

But we know the rest of the story. We know the greatest tragedy that befalls the God Incarnate and humanity—His crucifixion.  We also know the greatest triumph that comes through the cross. We know that He dies and is resurrected and will come again. We know Jesus as the Son of God, the one through whom all creation was made, the one whose sacrifice atoned for our sins. We know Jesus better than the stones did, right?

Don’t we?

Sometimes, I’m not so sure. I think our idea of Jesus, and of God, is far too small. We forget about what He can do with a few measly loaves of bread and two fish, of what He can do with a jar of water, of what He can do with spittle and mud, or with bread and wine—which He transforms into His body and Blood. He is the God of surprises. He is the God of transformations. But we still act as if He can’t heal or multiply or unify.

Jesus prayed that we may be one (John 17:21). But we’re a church divided, both physically and spiritually. We divide ourselves and align ourselves with one faction or another. I suppose that is simply human nature:

• boys vs. girls
• sophomores vs. freshmen
• Boise State vs. Idaho
• gay vs. straight
• black vs. white
• left vs. right

We come up with these divisions, these reasons why we’re right and they’re wrong, and naturally, Jesus sides with us. We project onto Jesus all of our preferences, our thinking, our desires, our world view, and our biases.

We remake Jesus in our own image and fashion for ourselves a god, a false idol, that looks and thinks just like us.

When scripture talks of idolatry, it may be talking about worship of a god fashioned out of wood or stone, or maybe a god we have fashioned of some other material good like money or fame. But the idols that can be most harmful to us are the false images that we create of God. These false idols are the ones that lead us to point our fingers at that sinner over there—that ominous “them” that constantly threatens our peace of mind.

Do you ever wonder who “they” are? “They say this,” or “they say that,” and whatever it is that they say, it doesn’t fit with our image of Jesus. And so we divide. We build our little fortresses. We cast out the sinner so that we can be pure. But if our first response is to point the finger at them, we don’t really get Jesus’ point, do we?

We’re so fixated on that speck in our brother’s eye that we miss the plank in our own, and neither of us sees any better for it.

We’re so busy dividing up this earthly pie that none of us will ever be filled or satisfied.

We fail to see that when we point our finger at them, three fingers are pointing back at us.

But fortunately Jesus is not like us, and thank God for that. Jesus forgave and said, “Go and sin no more.” He accepted people where they were, then said, “Come with me and have life more abundantly.” He came to heal the sick, not those who were well. He dined with sinners and tax collectors.

In other words, Jesus came and lived and ate with people just like us. I’m not saying that Jesus didn’t hold an objective moral law, or that we shouldn’t call sin what it is, but He saw that the law was a guide, and that we have to be willing to travel with each other and bear each other up on the way.

Sometimes the crosses we bear are each other.

The two gospels today tell us that the road ahead is not without struggle. Jesus promised us that we would find suffering on that road. Jesus showed us that there is only one way to the Father, and that is through the cross.

Oddly enough, He called this burden light and this yoke easy. How do we make sense of this? The cross—the scandalous, shameful, humiliating implement of His death—is light and easy? It’s no wonder we have a hard time knowing Him. He stands our expectations on their heads and tells us exactly the opposite of what we want to hear. As Paul’s letter to the Philippians says, He emptied Himself to suffer death, even death on a cross, and the Father highly exalted Him for it. If we believe only in the image of Jesus that we fashion in our imaginations, we have made Him too small…

…just like the people of Jerusalem.

We have to empty ourselves to be open to who He truly is.

And we have to embrace the cross. We have to put away our desire for ritual purity and be willing to do the hard work needed to build the Church. We need to accept that not all of us live ideal lives, and we need to exhort each other to keep going, to keep striving for holiness, to keep traveling with Christ, and to be uniters rather than dividers.

If we want to make it to Easter, then we have to reckon with Good Friday.

If we want to have it all, we only get it by way of the cross.

Reflection—Christ the King, Cycle B

This reflection was written for my homiletics training and addresses John 18:33b–38, Daniel 7:13–14, and Rev. 1:5–8. I included John 18:38 because it contrasts with the theme of the Gospel and really helped me to delve into the irony of Pilate's question.
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“You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
These words Jesus speaks to Pontius Pilate. Pilate has the earthly authority to send Jesus to His death, but Jesus doesn’t seem concerned that He may pay for his words with His life. He simply speaks the truth. What we do not hear in today’s reading is Pilate’s response to Jesus—three simple words: “What is truth?”
What is truth?
Did Pilate want to know the truth? I don’t think he could have cared less. Pilate wanted to assess the facts of the matter, to determine whether this Jesus of Nazareth was a threat, a criminal, a nuisance, or if these Jewish leaders were manipulating the facts for their own reasons. He didn’t care about truth. He wanted facts. But instead he got the truth.
We get a lot of facts in our daily lives, a lot of data. The news is full of facts, and the pundits all along the political spectrum are happy to provide their interpretations and opinions of what the facts reveal. More often than not, the facts are simply used to further their own agendas. The same facts are used to explain why we need high taxes and more government as well as why we need to eliminate taxes and reduce the government. There are legitimate arguments on both sides of every issue based on the facts, and it just takes a clever person to bend the facts to their will.
Facts are useful things. Facts can tell us a lot about what is, but they don’t tell us much about what ought to be. They don’t tell us the truth. The truth is sometimes not very useful and can often be downright inconvenient.
You can measure things and produce a fact. You can weigh things and produce a fact. You can record sounds and videos of events and see a sequence of facts. The facts are used by many who argue against the existence of God because facts can be verified scientifically. Many apologists for secularism and atheism try to tell us that morality can exist apart from a belief in God simply by assessing these empirical facts. But anyone who knows how the world works can see that we don’t know what we ought to do based solely on facts.
There must be a standard to measure against to determine what we ought to do. Facts can only tell us what is. They cannot lead us to a moral life and they do not, on their own, tell us what is the truth.
The facts are used to justify just about any grave evil in our world:
• The reason we why can’t feed the hungry
• The reason why we can’t protect the unborn
• The reason why we have to allow same-sex marriage
• The reason why our Catholic hospitals have to provide coverage for contraceptives and abortifacients
• The reason why have to go to war yet again
But what is truth?
The truth is something that doesn’t come from this world. The truth predates our empirical studies and rational philosophy. The truth was established long before modern physicists hammered out the theory of quantum mechanics, long before our constitution was hammered together by a bunch of fallible men after a nasty civil rebellion, long before a misguided priest hammered a list of 95 theses on the church door of the Wittenburg Castle, long before a Roman emperor accepted Christ and hammered a stake in the heart of paganism, and long before Roman soldiers hammered spikes through the hands and feet of an innocent man and before the procurator named Pontius Pilate sent that man to his death after asking him a simple question: What is truth?
The truth was there in the beginning: the Word with God, the Word Who is God. And He became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus came to testify to the Truth because He was the only one who could truly witness to Himself, the Truth enfleshed.
You see, Pilate didn’t recognize the Truth as He stood there staring Him in the face. He didn’t recognize the difference between what is and what ought to be. In fact, Pilate was a slave to the “is”—to the powers of the world and to the politics of his situation. He knew that this man Jesus was innocent—a fact. He knew that the Jews would riot and possibly start a rebellion—a fact. And he knew the fact that a certain emperor in Rome would not want to hear that the procurator in Jerusalem was unable to keep the peace. So Pilate crucified the Truth to serve his master.
But the truth is not some thing. The truth is some body. The Truth is Jesus Christ. The Truth is the Word, the Logos, the immediate eternal thought and image of the Father. The Truth is here with us in His sacred word, and in a few minutes He will be with us again in His body, blood, soul, and divinity.
That is the truth.
How many of us live with this truth in mind? How many of us treat this truth as the absolute driving factor in our everyday plans and decisions? How many of us live as if one day we will have to face the Truth?
Daniel recognized that there would come a day to face the Truth, when one like a Son of Man would come with everlasting dominion and eternal kingship. The Book of Daniel points forward like all of Old Testament scripture to the revelation of Christ the King. Roughly 300 years later, the beloved Apostle John predicted the same return of the Son, the firstborn of the dead who freed us from our sins by His blood. John was the first to write that word logos in reference to Jesus, a word taken from the Greek philosophers who knew that there must be one transcendent Truth, even if they didn’t know who or what it was—that unknown god that the Athenians had memorialized on the Areopagus (air-ee-o-pah-gus) as mentioned in Acts 17:23. John looked the Truth in the face, dropped his fishing nets, and gave his entire life to Him.
We sometimes treat our personal opinions as if they are the truth, but then we turn around and claim, “Well what’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me,” as if truth can be one thing and its opposite at the same time. And we live these contradictions as well, claiming the right to pick and choose what we believe to be the truth.
• Whether life begins at conception
• Whether it’s okay to have sex outside of marriage
• Whether it’s okay to deny basic needs to someone on the street.
• Whether it’s okay to torture enemy combatants or disregard their dignity as human beings.
But our personal opinions are not the standard for our conduct. We have as our standard a man, the Son of Man, the king not of this world, the Truth incarnate. Our standard is not the factual brutishness of this world, but the fact that the Truth came to die for us—the fact that our king humbled Himself to be one of us; the fact that He desires mercy and not sacrifice, that He says we will be blessed when we are persecuted, that He says we should love our enemies and not just those who will love us back.
Today we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of our liturgical year. While we profess with our lips that Jesus Christ is King, the real question is whether we recognize the Truth and make it king in our lives—that we seek the Truth in all that we do, and we not only profess the Truth but make it the guiding factor in our actions, that we preach that Truth, the Gospel, in our words and deeds.
Will we be ready to face the truth? Have we put the Truth foremost in our lives? Will we recognize the Truth when we come to see Him face to face?
Do we belong to the Truth and listen to His voice?

Papa Francesco

Habemus papem! Deo gratia!

Wow. What a surprise! I had a lot of names tucked in to different papal competition tiers (just kidding), but Bergoglio was not one of them. But the more I read about him, the more I see how well he matches the needs of this time.

I am already seeing the narrative emerge that he was somehow a rival of Pope Benedict XVI because he was the runner up in the last election, as if he intended a challenge to Cardinal Ratzinger (who had no desire for the job). As it turns out, Cardinal Bergoglio was one of the strongest supporters of Ratzinger in that conclave. I can hear the popping sound of MSM talking heads exploding even now. They simply don't get the Church.

St. Francis of Assisi is my and my daughter's confirmation saint. I pray that this pope will give an example to the world that will draw them to Christ—like the example he has given to the people of Argentina in his love of the poor.

Reflection on Luke 11:14–23—Gathering and Scattering

Today, I presided over my first communion service to fulfill a requirement for formation. This is the reflection I gave on today's gospel reading.

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What does it mean to be “dumb”? Maybe that’s a dumb question. One can be dumb, as in clueless, and one can be dumb as in silent. One can be deaf and mute literally because of physical impairment or figuratively because of willfulness. In the context of this gospel, we can see that the healed man is physically unable to hear the good news, and unable to transmit it. He is cut off from others, cast out, scattered from communion. Jesus reaches out to the dumb man in this gospel and gathers him back into communion.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, are willfully dumb. They attribute Jesus’ power to Beelzebul, who was a Philistine god and one whose name was particularly offensive to Jews of the time. This tactic is what philosophers call “poisoning the well.” You associate someone arbitrarily with something so commonly repulsive that people can’t help but shrink back. We see this all the time in our political discourse. How many times was our Pope emeritus Benedict tarred with such a brush for the accident of his birth and early life in Nazi Germany? Sadly, it’s such a common tactic because it so frequently works.

What did Jesus do to warrant such a charge? He did something undoubtedly good. He gave someone who was cut off from most human discourse the ability to hear and speak. To credit such good as the work of evil is itself offensive. Scripture warns about such speech in Isaiah 5:20: “Woe to those who call good evil, and evil good.” We see the this at work in our news and in our political speech, when evils that the Church condemns are proclaimed to be good because they are expedient: contraception, abortion, euthanasia. We hear popular figures denigrating Mother Theresa because of her radical ministry to the poor and dying in Calcutta. We hear our Catholic bishops slammed as misogynists because of their opposition to various modern trends. We hear messages on left and right of our political discourse condemning the wisdom of the Church as antiquated or naïve or oppressive. Of course, we should expect the Church and its teaching to be a challenge to us. It is, as Jesus was in His time, a sign of contradiction.

As Jesus frequently does, He turns the tables on the Pharisees. If Jesus drives out demons by the power of demons, Satan’s divided house cannot stand for long. The Pharisees reveal that their own houses are divided if they make such claims. Their sons also cast out demons. Does Beelzebul also aid them? Jesus warns the Pharisees, “He who is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”

We also are in a time when the forces of this world attempt to scatter rather than gather, even forces within our Church. In this uncertain time before the conclave, the forces of those who scatter will try their best to scatter us. We need to resist their efforts. Instead, we can gather with Christ. We are not deaf or mute. We can hear the Word, and we can share it with others. That is, after all, the mission of the laity: to make the Word present in the world in our words and deeds.

During this interregnum, it is good that we come together to celebrate this Eucharist, even when we can’t do so in its highest form, the Mass. The Eucharist is what draws us into communion with Jesus and each other, if we let its grace touch us. During this time of uncertainty, let us put our trust in Jesus’ promise, in the gift of His Body and Blood, and in His Divine mercy.

Danke, Papa. Auf Wiedersehen

IC asked us to share our favorite lines from Pope Benedict XVI. This is from his address to the College of Cardinals at the pro eligendo summo Pontifice prior to the last conclave. There's one phrase that sticks out (and I'm guessing everyone will recognize it), but I remember being struck by the beauty of the context in which it occurs. I was already a fan of Cardinal Ratzinger, but this homily exemplified just how different he was from the media's portrayal of him:

Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.

However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an “Adult” means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth. We must become mature in this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith – only faith – which creates unity and takes form in love.
 

I have loved his books written before and after his elevation, particularly The Spirit of the Liturgy, Introductuion to Christianity, and Salt of the Earth, and of course, his three books on Jesus of Nazareth (the third of which I'm still reading). I will miss him greatly.

Rite of Election and an Added Blessing

Wednesday Evening was the Rite of Election for our deanery. I had just finished up sung vespers in the downstairs chapel (with a required video shoot for my homiletics training) and had to join the catechumen that I am sponsoring upstairs. We have 32 catechumens and candidates in our parish RCIA program. The largest parish in our deanery has somewhere close to 130! So we've got some good programs going in our area.

I am doing some short presentations this year—not the full sessions that I have done on scripture and revelation in the past. However, I'm happy to be involved in whatever way I can be. It's one of those ministries that is close to my heart.

I received an additional blessing by being there. As part of our diaconal formation, my class was requirered to attend a Marriage Encounter weekend. It was probably not quite fair for the other attendees as more than half of the couples were in formation. (We were told that we should not act like a club that weekend and to spend time with our spouse rather than our group.)

Anyway, there was one couple I noticed who did not seem to be doing well. The wife was particularly upset after one of the breakaway sessions, and they did not finish the weekend. I prayed for them at the time because they seemed so clearly unhappy. Every now and then, for some reason, that couple would come to mind, and I would say another prayer for them.

Flash forward to Wednesday evening.

I saw a woman and was trying to place her. She was a candidate, so probably either converting to the faith or finally getting confirmed. Then I remembered the couple, and I saw that her husband... the same... was there as well. Not only were they still together, but they are both coming fully into the Church this Easter Vigil. And they looked happy.

Reflection: The Sign of Jonah

Daily Readings: Jonah 3:1–10; Luke 11:29–32
This reflections was given in the context of sung vespers, so it is shorter than what you would normally here at daily mass.

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Jesus calls the crowds that surround him an evil generation. They are evil for various reasons, but foremost because they demand to see a sign from Jesus to prove His authority. At this point in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus has been in active ministry for some time healing the sick, casting out demons, even feeding thousands with a pittance—five loaves and two fishes. They demand to see a sign from Him who has given sign after sign. In this chapter, He has just cast out a demon that caused a man to be mute. Yet those Pharisees who witness the sign claim it is the work of a demon casting out another demon. How many more signs would such people need? We already know the answer. Jesus tells us later in the story of Lazarus and the rich man, where Father Abraham says to the rich man: “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.”

The only sign Jesus says he will offer is the sign of Jonah. Jonah’s sign was to be swallowed up by a whale, only to emerge again three days later. And Jesus, crucified and dead, went into the belly of the Earth and emerged again three days later. Jesus will be a sign to this generation, greater than Jonah and greater than Solomon, but Jesus already knows that the hearts of the Pharisees are hardened and will not hear him. He is a sign of contradiction, and they contradict Him at every opportunity.
The people of Nineveh only needed to hear the words of Jonah to know that he spoke God’s truth, and they repented. The Queen of Sheba only had to hear Solomon’s words to know that he spoke with God’s wisdom, and she gave Solomon vast treasures. To the heart that is ready, the truth is always available, always accessible, and it calls us to return everything to the source of truth—God. These Pharisees were not ready, and their hearts were not open to the truth. They were blinded by pride to the point that they called good evil and evil good. So they rejected God incarnate and the obvious signs He gave to them.

So we find ourselves in today’s culture, where good is called evil and evil, good. Gluttony, lust, envy, and greed are celebrated in popular television, movies, and fiction. Selflessness, chastity, temperance, and true charity are derided as old fashioned. How can we hear the voice of truth in the noise of our twisted culture? And when we hear the truth, how do we recognize it for what it is? When we have been taught to value those things that pass away, how can we hear and accept the truth that leads us to what will not pass away?

We can start by paying close attention to the guide that Jesus gave us—our Mother the Church. It takes some effort these days to hear Her voice. Catholics used to grow up in somewhat self-contained communities, where a Catholic identity was encouraged and fostered, but that isn’t the case these days. We’ve spread out and mixed in, which in itself is not a bad thing. But we have also become too willing to allow ourselves to be defined by politicians, by the news media, and by popular trends. We have forgotten that the school of faith is our family, the community of saints, and that we learn virtue by studying virtuous lives. Is it any wonder that we mistake evil for good if we don’t study what is best in our Catholic tradition?

Next, we need to re-evaluate the things that we value. If we put more emphasis on what we own, what we wear, and what we eat than we do on how we treat others, we have missed the mark. We have lost track of what it means to be a Christian. We need to model our behavior on our Savior’s example. In this same gospel, He asks his disciples, “Why do you say ‘Lord, Lord,’ but not do what I say?” Why do we say “Lord, Lord,” and not follow His example?

Finally, we need to remember that nothing we have is gained solely by our own efforts. No good we do is done apart from the grace that God has given us. And no one of us is more esteemed in God’s eyes. We are all sinners and, with God’s grace, wanderers on a path seeking the truth. What we are now we see darkly, but then, face to face.