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.

Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Last night, I encountered a person who used Hitler as an example of someone they could not forgive. Look, I completely understand the symbolic nature of the statement, but Hitler has not done anything personally to them (as far as I know). The person was simply trying to help me understand that forgiveness and mercy have limits, and Hitler embodied the limit for them. On reflection, however, it seems that forgiveness is rarely denied because of some abstract sense of limit but rather is denied out of a profound sense of being personally wronged. The "wrong" done to the father (God) of the sons (humanity) in today's parable from Matthew was personal because of the disobedience--one rather insidious and the other overt---damaged a personal relationship, not simply defied a category of acceptable behavior.   

    The context for Jesus' teaching in Matthew: Jesus has just finished his Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem and is letting everyone know the religious leaders will enter heaven after tax collectors and prostitutes. It's not a great way to start off Passover in Jerusalem, but this was personal.

     As the passage from Ezekiel suggests, today is all about what the Greeks refer to as metanoia, which is literally a “change of mind” but also implies a complete “change of heart,” a change that finds its fulfillment in action. Today’s parable is all about our actions lining up with our words.

     The hero of our parable refused the wish of his father to work in the vineyard at first but changed his mind and began work. The other sons put up no resistance but did not go work in the vineyard; they served only with their lips. Our hero’s virtue was his change of heart and his follow-through of working in the vineyard. This is the son that did the will of the father.

      There is another level important for us in today’s parable. The un-favored son did comply externally while inwardly they betrayed their word; the lone dissenting son’s actions were always transparent, always honest so that when his metanoia occurred, the virtue did not lie solely in words but found fulfillment in his actions. His actions were the transparent manifestation of his heart.

     Our obedience to God must come from a change in heart, not simply a change in mind that gives lip service to obedience. God’s mercy is always most profound for those whose hearts have been changed, not simply a change in “words.” All of salvation history reveals God’s actions, not simply God’s words. God’s Word, Jesus, was God’s action. The epitome of God's love is a person, not a text or a system of laws or creeds. While doctrine, stories, history, and other texts are part of our heritage and integral to our faith, we must remember all things are subordinated to the person of Christ.

     Our lives are the testimony of our faith, not how well we can quote Scripture and point an accusing finger of disapproval at our neighbor. We confront sin with compassion and mercy, the way God has confronted our sin. God’s mercy confounds us because His forgiveness is personal; His love is everlasting.

 

Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost

These parables over the last few Sundays are part of the “Five Discourses” of Jesus that help define the structure of Matthew’s gospel. The other discourses are The Sermon on the Mount, The Church, and the End Times.  Today’s parable is unique to Matthew’s gospel. 

Remember, parables were not so much moral lessons that we are familiar with in Western literature (i.e., Parable of the Tortoise and Hare, etc.). These parables were designed to convey a particular experience of our relationship with Christ/God. It isn’t so much striving to “get them” as letting them “get to us,” as theologian Robert Farrar Capon discusses in his book The Parables of Grace. Capon argues that the parables of Jesus are an icon of himself. They are “lights shining out of the house of faith itself, inviting us home” (3).

In today's parable, it seems that our landowner (God) is acting strangely in paying workers who were hired for a few hours for the same wage as those working a full day.  As in many of Jesus’ parables, there is something weird in the story. There isn’t anything particularly unusual about workers feeling as if they don’t get a just wage, but the rather strange practice of simply paying workers a full day’s wage for those working considerably less than a full day is strange indeed. Also, the landowner goes himself and hires workers towards the end of the day who everyone else has passed over; he is scraping the bottom of the barrel without seemingly needing to And what’s more puzzling is that he feels the need to entice these workers with a full day’s wage. I think it would be safe to say the landowner isn’t a very good businessman. And this gives us our first insight into the parable: The landowner’s actions are representative of God’s irrational generosity. Think of the Parable of the Sower, the farmer who broadcasts the precious commodity of seeds recklessly, with some of the seeds falling on good ground, some on rocky soil, and still others on hard dirt adjacent to the field; a pretty poor farmer!  God’s apparent foolishness is also on display as the father welcomes home his prodigal son with open arms and throws him an extravagant party after squandering his inheritance and turning his back on his family.

All of these parables tell us something essential about God, which Jesus highlights once again in today’s parable: God is hopelessly in love with his creation, evidenced by his divine dysfunctional behavior we call God’s mercy.  The common denominator in these parables, and especially in today’s parable, is God’s grace. A grace that pushes back at our notion of being able to justify receiving God’s love.

The really good news in our parable today is that the kingdom of heaven is not what you have achieved with your life’s work or how much of a failure to achieve moral goodness you have been; it's about where you are with your relationship with God right now. God never stops reaching for you; the moment you accept His embrace, you enter eternity.  

Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost

This week, we commemorated the attacks on September 11^th by remembering the fear, anger, and profound sadness that overwhelmed us some twenty-two years ago. For some, losing family or friends in one of the attacks becomes the occasion for feeling some of the pain again. Anger is also revisited for many.

I remember the powerful feeling of being vulnerable and then quickly transitioning to a blind anger that suggested we make a glass coffee table of the Middle Eastern countries hostile to the United States. Of course, I quickly realized how such an action would kill millions of innocent people. This anger surprised and frightened me. I soon witnessed this anger in my fellow citizens play out in attacks on anyone who appeared to be Middle Eastern, and I experienced how difficult it is to forgive.

Today’s gospel is very clear: If you seek forgiveness and mercy from God, you must also be merciful and forgive those who have sinned against you. The indebted servant is shown mercy in the parable, and the debt of ten thousand talents (3.48 billion dollars in today’s money!) is forgiven. Clearly, such a debt could not be paid in hundreds of lifetimes.  What follows is equally astounding. The servant who was shown mercy shows no mercy towards another servant who owes him about one hundred days’ worth of wages (100 denarii). Of course, word reached the lord, who had shown this servant mercy, and the lord reversed his decision, replying, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow slave, as I mercy on you?” 

The parable ends with Jesus remarking, “So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.”  

Notice that Jesus is not simply saying the act of forgiveness is sufficient, but that the forgiveness needs to be from the heart. In other words, it is not enough to fulfill the letter of the law; your actions must come from a deeper part of you: your heart.

If we go back and follow the parable’s narrative again, we notice a couple of elements. First, the original debt is impossibly large and physically impossible to repay. Secondly, the debt of the second slave to the first is manageable, although sizable enough to matter. What is important here is that Jesus is suggesting that before you forgive, you must reconcile; hearts must be changed. Anyone can shake hands and say “I’m sorry,” and still allow hatred and fantasies of revenge to fester until some new offense emerges.

So, are we to forgo gestures of forgiveness until we really mean it “from our hearts”? No!  But we should realize that the gesture must be a promise for earnestly pleading with God through the Holy Spirit to change our hearts. Last week’s Psalm 94 records God’s remarking his people had a “hardness of heart” despite having witnessed “all of my [God’s] works.” When we pray as we try and find forgiveness in our hearts, we pray that our hearts may be softened towards the one who offended us. We pray that God takes our “heart of stone” and replaces it with a “heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26).  Forgiving isn’t meant to satisfy our need to look righteous, to “come out on top,” but to foster a deep humility that even to forgive properly must be a grace bestowed upon us by God. As William Sloane Coffin said: “God’s forgiveness is more than a blessing; it’s a challenge.”

Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Although both Old Testament and gospel readings this morning speak of sin and the duty of confronting the sinner, it is easy to go no further than separating from the sinner and going about one’s business, content that the community is a better place without them. This rather myopic reading of Scripture “misses the mark” if we take it no further.

Ezekiel was a prophet in exile, well over a thousand miles from his home in what today is Iraq. As a priest, he no longer could perform his priestly function, so God appointed him to explain why they were in exile (faithlessness in practice) and a vision of a new Israel restored and closer to God.

Likewise, in the gospel, while it can seem that Jesus is simply preaching what to do with unrepentant sinners (treat them as you would tax collectors and Gentiles: separation), perhaps one could also consider the more important lesson of forgiveness than communal purity.

With whom did Jesus seek communion? He sought out those not included in traditional Jewish society: tax collectors and Gentiles, to name two outcast groups. Likewise, while today’s text discusses the seriousness of sin within the Christian community, its focus is on the extraordinary lengths a community should go to re-evangelize those whose actions separate them from the community. While we need to clearly identify sin, we should focus on forgiveness because sin can destroy communion and community.  The sins in today’s gospel seem to be the failure to reconcile, the great pride of self-righteousness, anger, and despair.

Jesus begins by announcing what to do “if your brother sins against you.” This isn’t some sin against the Law or a laundry list of do’s and don’ts; this sin is personal. If we had to approach everyone using this method for even serious sins, we would be spending most of our time confronting one another and very little time for anything else. This sin here is when we feel personally offended by someone in our community, our brother (or sister!).

 Personal grudges and long-simmering unresolved feelings of ill will are a much greater poison to a faith community than failure to live up to high moral standards. Taking personal offense at someone for living up to a moral code is not helpful. We should refuse to tolerate unresolved conflict, things that destroy communion.

One who refuses to forgive is living in greater sin than the action that occasioned the offense. Such stubbornness involves at least three serious sins: pride, anger, and despair. Our community of brothers and sisters, to follow Jesus’ model, should be a community whose personal conflicts should be resolved through mutual forgiveness and reconciliation. To read this story as simply one confronting another about sin—-though there is a place for this in the community—the real culprit here is latent anger, pride, and despair brought about by those who have been offended.

St. Paul, in today’s lesson, reminds us of the true hierarchy of righteousness:

“Love does no evil to the neighbor;
hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.”

We fulfill the law in loving our neighbor; forgiveness is the single greatest act that “loosens” sin; pride, anger, and despair keep sin “bound” and lead to death.