Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XXI per Annum C
21 August 2022

For the past few weeks, and for one more still, we are hearing in the second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews.  Two weekends ago Hebrews chapter 11 provided us with a litany of heroes of the faith, passing through Old Testament figures like Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses.  That litany concludes however, not with an Old Testament figure but with the hero who is Jesus Christ, the “leader and perfecter of faith” (Heb. 12:2), the faithful son of the Father and the only perfect model to imitate.  And more than only a model to imitate, the Lord Jesus is God, the source of our faith, and the Savior whose self-gift on the Cross and whose resurrection gives us hope of a glorious reward.

Hebrews chapter 12, from which we hear these few weeks provides three images for our understanding of what the Christian life is like.  Last week’s image is that surrounded then by so great a cloud of witnesses – the Old Testament heroes of faith – we should have the perspective that Christian life is an endurance race.  And so, we strive and persevere in running the race, cheered on by the heroes who have gone before us, their support and encouragement being like fans in a stadium surrounding us and urging us on to the finish line.  This image and lesson of the endurance race gives us focus and hope.  Motivated by a generalized protestant influence and, in some cases, even an anti-catholic bigotry, some will challenge and question and even reject our catholic appreciation of the communion of saints and the power and appropriateness of intercessory prayer – that we ask the saints to pray for us and we ourselves pray for one another.  In the race of faith we have hope because we are not alone.  How could one reject the communion of saints and the support of intercessory prayer when the Bible gives us such an image from Hebrews of being surrounded by a great multitude?  We Christians run a race of faith in a stadium surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses – Old and New Covenant saints alike – and we’re supposed to believe that appeal to the saints and intercession diminishes the role of Jesus?  Not at all.  The finish line is Jesus himself and his kingdom.  He is the one mediator who can bring salvation, yes.  But, he accepts the involvement of others in this race.  Our life with him is that of runners surrounded in a stadium, or that of a family, not just a “me and Jesus relationship”.  The focus this image of the endurance race provides us is critical too.  Often in life’s struggles and in our weakness and exhaustion we grow frustrated.  The struggles and weaknesses are our own, they are the failures of people around us, they are the sins of our secular world, and the scandals and sins even within the flock from others in the Church.  Our reaction to such disappointments and our exasperation reveals we are approaching Christian life as merely a sprint.  Can’t the race be over, Lord?  No, there are still some laps to go.  And so strive and focus on your running.  Remove the things that cling to you and weigh you down and slow down your pace.  Most especially strive in the endurance race by being healed of sin.

The second image from Hebrews chapter 12 gives us the perspective that Christian life is a process of growth toward maturity, a growth and process of maturity that is guided through the discipline, administered lovingly, from our heavenly Father.  Our sufferings and difficulties are valuable for training in holiness and so we should accept them for the good God can accomplish in us through them.  Hebrews gives us this lesson centuries before the modern age and its tendency to award everyone a blue ribbon for participation, centuries before the chronic allergy to discipline.  Perhaps our experience of discipline growing up can complicate our acceptance of this lesson.  Hebrews is not condoning discipline poorly administered.  But it is possible and valuable to have discipline administered not out of exasperation and annoyance but out of love.  Such discipline well-administered is an act of love.  It helps the one disciplined not give in to lesser things.  It helps us become the best we can be and avoids settling for urges and lower motivations.  The common phrase used in reference to physical activity that we accept so readily is true here in the spiritual marathon of discipleship too: “No pain, no gain.”

The third image from Hebrews chapter 12 about Christian life is that it is a joyous liturgical assembly raised aloft on God’s holy mountain where we are in the midst of angels and saints in worship of God.  Given this joyful gathering after passing through life’s hardships, we are encouraged to strive and not to forfeit our heavenly reward.  While we have much to endure in a long race and much suffering to accept as a sign of God’s love for us, we are not engaging and striving for something that is impossible or too far off for us.  God Himself has brought the finish line, the reward, close to us.  We are not going after something too far.  It has been brought near.  That is one incredible consequence of the Incarnation.  God has come near to us!  He has taken on our flesh.  And thus, Jesus is near and remains so.  He beckons us to him.  The witnesses surrounding us cheer us on.  Don’t we recognize that?  We barely stretch upward to reach our goal before we discover that here is the liturgical participation in the far greater and generous movement God makes toward us.  We must strive, yes, and use our freedom to cooperate with God’s discipline and grace, but the gulf between us and God has already been bridged in His generous movement to us in Christ Jesus.  It is he – the Lord Jesus – who is our focus, our finish line, our reward.  The stadium in this endurance race is filled with the cheers and prayers of saints who have endured, who know how to endure, and who know that with God’s grace  and the support of their prayers we too can endure!

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XX per Annum C
14 August 2022

The Gospel presents an image of Jesus that can seem out of place or unlikely.  Certainly, many people in our day, including many Christians, find today’s Gospel image of Jesus incomprehensible.  It is the image of Jesus who announces that he has come not for peace but for division.  In modern culture there is great emphasis on the values of “unity” and “tolerance”, though those ideas often lack substance in the modern mind and are used simply to mean that differences and divisions should be overlooked in order to keep everyone together for the sake of keeping together.  The idea that the Lord comes to stir things up is often outright dismissed as an impossibility.  But then we have to face today’s Gospel passage.

In the Gospel the Lord refers to his mission.  He notes that he has come to set the earth on fire and he notes that there is a baptism that he is in great anguish to accomplish.  The reference to baptism calls to mind the image of water.  And so, we have the symbols in today’s Gospel of both water and fire.  In the ancient world, and especially familiar to us in the Scriptures, water and fire are symbols of destruction.  We can think of the early events of creation in the Book of Genesis, of the disorder that sin brought into the world and how God’s response in the days of Noah was to send a great flood to destroy things and begin anew.  Being plunged into, or immersed into, water is a symbol of being overwhelmed and drowned.  Judgment.  Destruction.  And fire is also a clear symbol and is especially evocative of judgment and the end of things when Scripture makes reference to the world being consumed and dissolved by fire.

So, there is one obvious purpose when the Lord uses symbols of water and fire.  He means to communicate that he has come to claim God’s sovereignty over His creation.  That sovereignty and its demands for fidelity, especially from creatures like us with freedom, means we have a choice to make.  And by it we will be judged.  We must acknowledge God’s rights and primacy over us and all creation.  We cannot prefer other things or other relationships to the one He has made with us.  The primacy of relationship with God is brought to the fore by that image of division within family.  We cannot live rightly with God or truly follow Him while also preferring other relationships ahead of him.  Rather, the claim of sovereignty by the Lord means a father will be divided against his son, a mother against her daughter and so forth.  We who call ourselves disciples have to weigh carefully the demands and the gift of being in relationship with God while also noting and taking care so that other relationships are nurtured, but do not become the excuse for disobedience to God.  With the very common tendency to want to “fit in” in modern life we need to take this Gospel to heart because it can be very easy to be swept along with the mentalities of those who adopt a false Gospel that makes no demands on us.

The desire to fit in and to not be challenged, or to not be challenging, was a reality seen in the time of the Prophet Jeremiah too.  Jeremiah received the tough mission to speak God’s word and to proclaim the infidelity of God’s people.  He preached that God’s judgment would be seen in the destruction of the Temple.  And for delivering those words, Jeremiah’s contemporaries complain that he is making them feel demoralized because they want to hear nice sounding words.  And so, they set out to kill him to silence what they do not want to hear.  There is really not much different today when the Church, or when you and I, try to stand for some truth of the faith or some truth of the moral order.  One lesson of today’s passage is that we cannot dismiss God’s sovereignty or His judgment in our lives, in the lives of others, and His judgment of the world.  That reality means we must face our own need for conversion and to shake ourselves out of the slumber of preferring other relationships to the one God generously establishes with us.

In no way dismissing the lesson of God’s primacy and judgment, I want to suggest also another lesson from the images of water and fire.  This lesson is not the strange and cryptic sounding message of judgment and of destruction.  I think another application can be made to our mission and responsibility as disciples.  The Scriptures show that the Lord’s suffering and death for us are called his baptism.  Rather than water, he is immersed and plunged into the guilt of our sin.  He does this on our behalf and out of divine love for us.  Having endured his baptism, his Cross, the Lord, like Jeremiah, is drawn out from the mud, the mire of our sins and our tendency to want to soften the demands of discipleship.  Having suffered and died for us, he is drawn out from the place of death in his resurrection.  And from his resurrected body in heaven the Lord sends forth the Holy Spirit who comes in tongues of fire at Pentecost.  What if these odd sounding words from Jesus in today’s Gospel can also be heard as a reference to that sending of the Holy Spirit?  In other words, Jesus endures his baptism and comes to set the earth on fire.  For us looking back in history on those words we can say that he has already done so by sending the Holy Spirit.  And you and I are recipients of that purifying and enveloping fire.  What if we hear those cryptic sounding words – “I have come to set the earth of fire” – as an indication of our mission?  Through his Church we each have received baptism and later confirmation.  We are called to understand the primacy of our relationship with God and the share we have in enveloping the world with the truth of the Gospel.  How will the world be set aflame if not through us and our zeal, dedication, and excitement to live the faith and to share with others what that means?  Jesus’ use of fire imagery is not all that unfamiliar to us.  While I certainly mean to avoid inappropriate and negative meanings, there are popular idioms today by which we speak of “lighting something up” or “being lit”.  When someone is worked up in a good way or excited, we say they are “on fire.”  And we have the convenient fire emoji to go along with sharing that description in text messages.

Yes, the work of being part of the Lord’s setting the earth on fire is part of our mission.  If we ourselves are on fire we can’t help but light up others.  That work will be challenging, certainly.  Our age, as every age, does not want to hear moral or religious demands.  Our age does not want to hear words that shake things up and expose the lack of substance in just “getting along”.  We may face opposition like Jeremiah.  But judgment will come to us if we do not pass on the fire.  And when we find ourselves overwhelmed, plunged in the mire of opposition, or just plunged in the mire of our weakness and sin, we cry out with the psalmist: Lord, come to my aid!  And we have confidence in the Lord’s response evoking images of Jeremiah: “The Lord heard my cry.  He drew me out of the pit of destruction, out of the mud… [and] he made firm my steps.”

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost - Traditional Latin Mass

Dominica VIII Post Pentecosten (Extraordinary Form)
31 July 2022

   This is one of those parables that likely has us scratching our heads and thinking, what am I missing here?  Is the Lord really presenting sin and wrongdoing as a commendable trait?  Did I just hear that correctly?

   In today’s parable we hear that the unjust steward is commended.  He’s called “wise.”  We are encouraged to make friends with dishonest wealth.  If sin is being celebrated and we are told to imitate it then… the last one out today please turn off the lights because we are wasting our time here.

   Parables are famous for surprises and reversals.  We can easily hear the things that make the steward sinful, his self-interest, his cheating of his master, his injustice in possessions that are not his own, his dishonesty.  We can make an easy mistake thinking that our Blessed Lord is celebrating or commending this same wrong behavior.  But we miss the point.  There is subtlety we can miss if we are not careful to pay attention to what the Lord is teaching.

   What is commended, encouraged, and set forth as an example to follow is the prudence of the steward in his effort to establish security for himself and a safe dwelling and livelihood when he knows his master is about to take it all away.  This parable is clearly making a reference to the most important dwelling for any man to secure: the eternal dwelling of heaven!

   In this strange-sounding parable, the idea is that if the children of this age are so motivated, so wise, so prudent to take decisive action when they are in a bind and face losing everything, how much more should God’s children be wise, prudent, motivated, and decisive when what is at stake is heaven, and not merely money, food, or a house?

   Once you get past the surprise of thinking you are hearing the Lord commend sinfulness, the clear lesson here is that the things of this life will fail – the parable even explicitly says so – and yet still we take decisive action to guard such things and we try to store them up.  But it passes away and does not follow us to the next life and does not benefit is there.  Meanwhile what lasts is ignored.  So be wise, prudent, motivated, and decisive to secure heaven and real treasure.

   Don’t be confused.  It is not being unjust or dishonest that is being set forth in the parable as an example to follow.  Rather, what we are being called to model and copy is the prudence of the steward to take decisive action to attain godly life and salvation.

   What spurs us on in this call to be prudent and prepare ourselves for lasting treasure is that our master is not a taskmaster.  As the epistle to the Romans declared we are not in bondage and fear, but rather we call out to a master who is Abba, that is Father!  And so we are called to be prudent and wise in preparing for our eternal dwelling.  And we are called to have confidence that the master who calls us to stewardship is the God who has first bestowed upon us His love and all the goods we have.  And so claimed for and marked by Christ in the waters of baptism, in sacred anointing in confirmation, and in our constant renewal in confession and Holy Communion we are “sons of God; and if sons, heirs also; heirs indeed of God, and joint hears with Christ.”