CatholicPreacher
Saturday, March 29, 2025
Friday, March 21, 2025
Third Sunday of Lent
"...whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall."(1Cor. 10:12)
St.Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians gives us an enticing frame for today's gospel. Paul is writing to the wealthy and sophisticated church at Corinth, which he founded and nurtured as a spiritual father---the father of a spiritually adolescent community.
Paul admonishes the folks at Corinth to be careful of being spiritually proud. Many believed that simply by partaking of the sacraments they were being given the fullness of salvation rather than the orthodox teaching that the sacraments are a process of salvation, the "food for the journey". He alludes to the Jews in the Exodus who "...all drank the spiritual drink . . Yet God was not pleased with most of them, for they were struck down in the desert." The sacraments must be approached with humility, a sense that they indeed confer grace, not a sense of entitlement.
Jesus's call to repentance likewise uses allusions to the past folly of those who presumed favor with God, but he goes further by using a parable of an unproductive fig tree. The landowner wants the fruitless fruit tree uprooted, but the gardener intervenes and suggests a little individualized attention---to take a "wait and see" approach in the hopes that the tree will be producing within a year. Clearly, this allegory positions Christ as the Gardner and God the Father as the landowner; the fig tree is Israel. Though the three gospels contain a story involving fig trees, Matthew and Marks are similar (withering curse of a fig tree by Jesus), the story in Luke---aside from the figure of the fig---is different. The "fruit" of Luke's fig tree is associated with the expectation that Israel will be righteous before God and that they will live out the covenant; however, they have turned away from righteousness as primarily demonstrated by how they treat the most vulnerable. Luke's gospel is focused on justice for those ignored and outcasts.
Jesus's deeds in the following chapter after his call to repentance are a wonderful illustration of how Jesus was fulfilling the Covenant: he healed and liberated a woman who was crippled and "incapable of standing erect." Most telling was his calling "the leader of the synagogue" a hypocrite for objecting that healing cannot be done on the Sabbath. Jesus replies rather forcefully: "Hypocrites! Does not each one of you and the sabbath untie his ox or his ass from the manger and lead it out for watering. This daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has bound for eighteen years now, ought she not to have been set free on the sabbath day from this bondage?" This was the repentance the previous chapter was calling Israel to: Repent to heal and heal to repent; forgive to be forgiven. Healing was not an option for Jesus, it was the core of his ministry. Repentance means, literally, to turn 180 degrees.
The repentance of this Lenten season asks us to become amazed at the injustice in the world, but working for a cause can be just as insidious in leading us away from healing others as becoming obsessed with preserving orthodoxy (Jesus healed on the sabbath!). Jesus tended to the woman first. His priority wasn't to make a point; the woman wasn't a visual aid. Jesus responded to the need as it presented itself and then tended to the dried-up fig trees in the synagogue.
For our Lenten meditation, let's consider ourselves in this scene not as Jesus, and perhaps not even as the crippled woman, but as part of the crowd of orthodox observers who are upset at Jesus' violation of the Sabbath. If we can sit with this for a few minutes, we can clearly and unequivocally proclaim: "We're not there yet!"
Saturday, March 15, 2025
Second Sunday in Lent
On a Journey, but Not Alone
Friday, March 7, 2025
First Sunday of Lent
and “With their hands, they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday: What We are Given
It has always fascinated me that Ash Wednesday is so
popular. In some places, the act of imposing ashes on the forehead of the
faithful has become separated from the Mass of which the ashes are a part. Some
churches use the distribution of ashes as a kind of outreach ministry to the public,
complete with “drive through” ash distribution where you can get a cross of
ashes on the forehead without ever having to leave your car. Who has time to attend
Mass these days, especially on Wednesday?
As well-intentioned as these outreach methods are, they miss
a fundamental point; convenience and accessibility have little to do with true
evangelization. Good news that does not require conversion isn’t “good.”
Simon Tugwell, in his book The Way of Imperfection, discusses
why popularity isn’t as fundamental as conversion in our faith. He writes,
“Christianity has to be disappointing, precisely
because it is not a mechanism for accomplishing all our human ambitions and
aspirations, it is a mechanism for subjecting all things to the will of God. .
. .When people turn away from the church, because they find more satisfaction
elsewhere, it is important not to assume that we, as christians [sic], ought to
be providing such satisfaction ourselves; it is much more urgent that we take
yet another look at what is it that we have genuinely been given in the church.”
What have we been given? On Ash Wednesday, we are given the gift of remembering that “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” But wait, aren’t we essentially body and soul, and isn’t it the body that returns to ashes while the soul ascends to heaven? This is a popular understanding of our soul and body, but we often forget the body after death, which contradicts what we affirm every Sunday in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting”. Our bodies are part of our resurrection. How that will happen is anyone’s guess, but I imagine God, who created us, will not find it particularly difficult to restore our bodies. While our bodies do “return to dust”, it is the dust of our creation. We return to the essential matter from which God created us. Ash Wednesday asks us to remember where we came from and from whom we came. Christ’s death and resurrection from the dead are integral to the imposition of ashes, and his sacrifice to reveal this “resurrection of the body” (Apostle’s Creed) is made real at all Masses. The resurrection is given to us even as the ashes are traced on our forehead as a cross. To focus on the ash without discerning the nature of the cross is to forget the gift given to us by Christ.
So, for those who go to Mass on Ash Wednesday: Come for the ashes, but stay for the
resurrection.
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Feast of the Presentation of the Lord
The Re-Presentation of Our Lord
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”[c]
Saturday, October 12, 2024
The Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
All things are possible for God
I grew up with this Bible story of the Rich Young Man's entreaty for eternal
life. Sadly, the Young Man cannot part with his possessions. Jesus then
uses this as a teaching moment, not to excoriate the rich, per se, but to show
how powerful we cling to that which impedes us from entering the Kingdom.
There is a popular
story that attempts to deflate the hyperbole of a camel struggling to go
through the eye of a needle. Without any historical evidence, some claim that
there was a lesser gate in the wall surrounding Jerusalem that was opened at
night, and to be able to move a camel through it, the camel had to crouch and
kneel; it becomes inconvenient, but far from impossible. The rich feel better.
Both
the Jerome Biblical Commentary (Catholic commentary) and
the Interpreter's Bible (Protestant) dismiss this "urban
legend". What is telling isn't that this myth of the "eye of a
needle" has had so much traction. This parable, however, isn't a story
about the rich, but a story about the nature of faith.
The power of hyperbole is essential for this parable. It is
more comfortable to believe that God rewards Christians who "do their
duty", who obey the ordinances of the institution; however, Jesus is
asking us to live this impossibility of dispossession---to get
rid of anything that stands in the way of living the gospel.
Sometimes this can be rather a spectacular grace, but often,
it is "whispering grace", grace that comes through a "chance
encounter" with a stranger, or a growing sense of being loved by others
who have experienced God's grace. We then enter the Kingdom. We breach
the impossibly narrow gates we've constructed to keep God's riches out.
Later in this gospel passage, Jesus declares to his
disciples: "Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of
God". The nature of the Kingdom isn't an earthly institution we can control
or enter through our wits to gain an advantage. The Kingdom is
ubiquitous. It is all around us. The Kingdom is revealed when we
open our eyes to the grace of our poverty in Christ. There is no greater
act of downsizing than committing oneself to following the way of
Christ rather than the commands of the Church.
The wealth we need to jettison is the wealth of the false
faith that is too often the false security of the institutional Church rather
than the will of God. When the institution doesn't reveal the Good News,
we must live the Good News, not by fighting the church, but by modeling to the
church what the Good News looks like. We must live for the sake of Christ
and the gospel, not the institutional grace of following rules and spending
time trying to enter the Kingdom with what we mistakenly believe is essential.