Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost

 Once again, Jesus is faced with religious authorities, this time the Pharisees, who want to pose a question to confound Jesus. He is asked, “Which is the greatest commandment?” Jesus’ answer is standard for a learned Jew of the time. The greatest commandment for any faithful Jew would be taken from Deuteronomy 6:5, the first words of the Jewish Morning Prayer: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” These verses are nothing new, but Jesus links the first with a verse from Leviticus (19:18) to suggest that they are inseparable. To fulfill the commandment to love God, one must also love one’s neighbor as oneself. Seeing the dependence of loving God with loving one’s neighbor would have been a new take for his scholarly interlocutors on traditional texts.

Why do we find it easier to “love God” than loving one’s “neighbor”? The simple answer is that God is so far beyond our understanding that he can be an abstraction wholly outside our experience. God is the mystery of the Trinity, the one who is omnipotent, omnipresent, and all-loving, etc. We can impose any form, any mythical set of attributes, and effectively create a God to our liking. We can even use Scripture to proof-text a God to our liking. We can reference the angry God leading his faithful into battle if we are vengeful. If we want something tamer, we can have the God of the Twenty-third Psalm leading us beside the still waters, refreshing our souls. As Christians, we have Jesus as Emmanuel, “God with us”. But that doesn’t always make it easier.

If trying to discern who God is from the Old Testament is complex, the New Testament in general and the gospels in particular can be equally challenging. We have the person of Jesus: the rabble-rouser overturning tables in the Temple during Passover and the compassionate Jesus healing a sick child. We have Jesus declaring in Matthew 5:9, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God,” and the Jesus who says five chapters later in Matthew 10:34: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Admittedly, these are taken wildly out of context, but they offer the many extremes and, even with context, the often tricky sayings of Jesus that are difficult to reconcile. This difficulty has also led to many choosing the Jesus they wish to follow; those who are peacemakers favor Jesus in Matthew 5, while those who are more bellicose have highlighted Matthew 10:34. What is a Christian to do?

Rather than seek a God, or a Savior, that fits who we are, let us struggle to sit with the contradictions we find and seek the collective wisdom of the Church and of the many Saints who have lived the gospel, those who have been canonized and those in our lives who resonate deeply with us as being holy. We should abandon fashioning anyone in “our image” since our image (like the image of Caesar in last Sunday’s gospel) belongs to God. We should allow sacred stories to challenge us and demand personal change first before societal change. Let me suggest a life of prayer and a life of the Sacraments are excellent places for Catholics to begin to live from the mystery rather than living outside the mystery. We never “figure it out,” but instead, through the disciplines of prayer, the Sacraments, and wise counsel, we become people in a fuller relationship that is Christ; it is a relationship, not a study, not simply a philosophical problem we need to confront. It is, ultimately, ourselves we need to confront and allow God to form us daily in His image from which we have been created.

We love God, then, only when we have learned to love like God, revealed in Scripture, yes, but also in a life formed by prayer and in sacrificial service to a world desperate for some Good News.

Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost

 

God's Currency

I remember getting a brand new baseball mitt in junior high school, only to have it stolen out of my P.E. locker the next day. It was eventually recovered, taken off of a kid who had written his name, letter by letter, across the back of the mitt as if to reaffirm his ownership. The rather ostentatious claim to ownership notwithstanding, the mitt was mine.

Such is the claim made by Caesar (Tiberius) in today’s gospel. In Jesus’s famous dictum: “Then render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and render unto God what is God’s, ” he avoids the tricky situation of answering the question of the Herodians and Pharisees as to whether or not it is in accordance with the Law to pay the tax required by the Romans of all citizens. If Jesus answers “no,” then he will gain favor with the people but commit a treasonous act and be punished by the Romans. If he says “yes,” he loses favor with the people and affirms he supports the Roman occupation. Instead, Jesus suggests that the coin’s temporal worth is owed to the temporal leader, Tiberius Caesar, and that God is entitled to what is His. Of course, what is God’s is also “stamped” with God’s image: humanity.

            The coin might belong to Caesar, but Caesar belongs to God. What we lay claim to so often has our image, in one form or another, all over it. But likewise, all that we are should have God’s image revealed. In Acts 17, St. Paul proclaims in the Aeropagus defends Christianity to the philosophers by proclaiming, “In him [God], we live and move and have our being”; as even some, your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.”

              St. Augustine’s sermon on this passage from Matthew develops this idea: 

“Just as Caesar seeks his image in your coin, so God seeks his image in your character. Give back to Caesar, he says, what belongs to Caesar. What does Caesar look for from you? His image. What does God look for in you? His image”(Sermon 113A).  

 What we possess is God’s image as our true character; we are the coinage of God, each and every one of us, ultimately rendering our lives back to God, having either spent God’s currency wisely or foolishly. God's currency, of course, is love. This is our true wealth and is inscribed indelibly in God's image. When we love, we gift others with God's wealth and, in turn, render unto God what is God's.

Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost

 

Look Who's Coming to Dinner!

What possible reason would a person have not to attend such a great banquet as described in Matthew’s gospel today? In an earlier reading, the passage from Isaiah recounts some of the memorable great feasts by the kings of the past, all very well attended, and suggests that someday Zion will host a great feast hosted by God that breaks down the human boundaries of nations, and the “veil” of mortality that covers all peoples; God will send invitations to all of humanity.  God’s salvation is ultimately universal, not exclusive to a particular tribe; it looks as if Isaiah is suggesting that in the future, some people will be coming to dinner whom God’s people would not consider inviting to a banquet today.  This is part of the link to Matthew’s banquet.

Cast in this context, Matthew’s parable in two parts (originally two different parables) combines two important sets of symbols: the symbols of a great banquet and the wedding feast. The parable, though, seems a bit bizarre and strange. However, if we consider an earlier banquet scene in the ninth chapter of Matthew, we might see this parable take on a more sensible presentation.

Jesus, in inviting “sinners and tax collectors” to dine with him, is suggesting the time has come for such a banquet, but the religious leaders are having none of this. In such a scene earlier in Matthew, the Pharisees ask the disciples, "Why is your Teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?" Outraged, it is safe to assume they wanted nothing to do with eating with the likes of whom Jesus invited to dinner. God’s kingdom is being established, but the folks showing up, hungry and not accustomed to such invitations, eagerly accept, while the well-sated religious leaders rebuff the idea of sharing a table with such scoundrels.

The wedding garment has its symbolic value of representing the purity of God’s grace, much as it is used in both Isaiah and Revelation. God’s kingdom clothes and feeds in abundance, but some reject the offer by refusing to dine with those invited or refuse to wear the garment provided. And this, I think, is the core of Jesus’ message: Communion with God is communion with those whom God loves and values- those in most need of God’s hospitality. What God is offering is an eternal banquet.

The guests, not the food, keep away some who are invited. The sinners and saints, both invited, create a mix that thwarts the notion of a “pure” church and embraces a kingdom where “tax collectors and sinners” are offered communion, as they are, in order to become what they receive, the Body of Christ.