WwtW: Salvation visits us

This week's bible study notes, OT, Week 31, Yr C.  We had an interesting discussion about how the text leaves us with lots of questions about Zacchaeus, but crystal clear about who Jesus is: Salvation.

1^st Reading:    Wisdom 11:22-12:2

Context.          Wisdom is a book written in Greek from the Diaspora shortly before the birth of Christ.  It is directed to educated Jews living in heavily Hellenized areas (such as Alexandria, where it was probably written) to encourage them to remain faithful and keep on loving their revealed tradition.  There are pulls and pushes moving them away from this: the pull of compelling Pagan philosophy and science; the twin pushes of social anti-Semitism and existential questions of theodicy.  The book admits that Jews can admire pagan ‘wisdom,’ but should not be jealous as they have true Wisdom.  Wisdom is from God and touches all subject matters, including the apparently profane.  The second half is a meditation on the Exodus.  It provides hope for current Jews suffering in Egypt and a historical basis for claims that God helps the just and punishes the wicked.

God shares the harvest with us – Rom 8:18-25, Ps 126

Wednesday of Ordinary Time, Week 30; Holy Cross Parish.

As the cold sets in, and we look back the rather mild summer we enjoyed, it can be hard to even remember last year’s summer when we baked and roasted and our fields were parched.  And while our lawns have recovered, Michiana farmers are still feeling the hit of the summer of 2012.  Sowing seed is an anxious time when your livelihood depends on it, because you just don’t know what will become of it.  Your own efforts to tend its growth will amount to nothing in the weather doesn’t cooperate.  In the religious myths of Ugarit and Egypt, sowing season was linked with a festival mourning the death of a god who was buried with the seed and would be reborn with rejoicing with the harvest.  While Israel would not (at least officially) have bought into the mythology, our psalmist can still refer to a shared recognition that sowing is a time of tears, of anxious uncertainty, and rejoicing will have to wait until the harvest.

God exalts us through humbling us – Luke 18:9-14; 2 Tim 4:6-8 16-18

Sunday Year C, OT Week 30; Holy Cross Parish.

Thank God I’m not like that Pharisee!  Oh… wait… oops.  It’s hard not to find some of him in each of us.  You see, that Pharisee was a good person, a generous person.  He fasted twice a week, much more often than was required.  He ignored all the various exemptions concerning what kinds of income you didn’t have to pay tithes on and tithed on his total income.  He fasted, gave alms and here he was in the Temple to pray – a model believer!  Well, almost.  Because he goes through the motions of addressing a prayer to God – beginning it “O God, I thank you…” – but our narrator, Jesus, tells us what’s really going on: “he spoke this prayer to himself.”  And while he says “thank you,” his prayer merely lists his good deeds (genuine good deeds!) and the misdeeds of other mortals: entirely lacking is any mention of God’s deeds.  All the good that God has inspired him to do… all that should be a living icon reminding him of the goodness of God, of God’s gracious acts of creation, of deliverance from captivity and exile, of God’s care and providence, God’s mercy.  But no, this Pharisee takes his own good deeds and instead of letting them serve as an icon of God’s goodness, he makes them into an idol.  “These good deeds of mine, these are what I put my hope in, what I treasure, what I worship.”  What must have started as love of God, and still bears the marks of an impulse towards that, has become idolatrous self-love.  The gift has been seized as a possession, and the giver given no more than lip service.

God speaks life– Rom 6:19-23

Thursday of OT Week 29, St. Antony Claret; Holy Cross Parish.

I think sometimes we crave a little more peace and quiet in our lives.  Certainly, living with undergraduates last year, I often did, and then I’d spare a prayer for parents of young children!  But, there’s a limit to how much quiet we’re able to handle.  The quietest room on earth is Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis.  It’s called an anechoic chamber: double walls and insulated steel, foot-thick concrete and fiberglass wedges make it 99.99% sound absorbent.  The human ear can detect nothing inside it.  The longest any human has managed to stay inside is 45 minutes, and that was a NASA astronaut used to spending time in space.  That amount of pure silence becomes so unnerving, that people start to hallucinate.  It’s so engrained in your brain that it’s going to receive stimulation that if it doesn’t receive any, it starts to make it up.

WwtW: God rescues and exalts us

This week's Bible Study notes.  Sunday, Year C, Week 30.

Gospel:           Luke 18:9-14

Context.           We come to the final stretch of Jesus’ long journey to Jerusalem (9:51-19:48; Wks 13-31), with a section (17:11-19:27, Wks 28-31) summarizing what Jesus has taught previously on the journey and inviting response.  Appropriate response will not be found from the disciples, who are as lacking in understanding as they were at the start of the journey.  Instead, the appropriate response is found in a leper, a widow, a tax collector and (skipped) children.  This passage is closely linked to last week’s reading about the need to pray always.

God conquers our death – Rom 4:20-25

Monday of Week 29; Holy Cross parish.

How could Abraham have kept hoping?  He had been promised a great line of descendants, but he and Sarah were too old for this to be humanly possible.  Wouldn’t you start to doubt your memory, doubt yourself, doubt if your understanding of God’s will for your life was really accurate?  In the verses just before where our reading began, Paul uses strong language, describing Abraham as being as good as dead, as regards his chances having a child.  But as regards faith, we read today, he was very powerful.  More precisely, he was empowered, gifted with power by God.  God had poured into Abraham the power of faith, the power to trust, to cling to hope.  God, we read, has the power to do what he promised, and he shared his power with Abraham.  Abraham, as good as dead, was powerful at trusting, at ascribing glory to God, at confessing in praise that God will raise the dead.

WwtW: The kingdom's still coming, but God's listening now

Yesterday's Bible Study Notes; OT Year C, Week 29.

2^nd Reading:  2 Tim 3:14-4:2

Context.          Second Timothy is one of what are called the “Pastoral Epistles” (the term, as far as I know, was coined by Aquinas).  They are presented as letters from Paul to individual church leaders, in this case, Timothy.  Many scholars think they are the product of a Pauline school, writing in the name of their founder as a mark of respect (much as church documents are ghost-written today).  Regardless of the circumstances of their composition, they are concerned with the continuation of the Church beyond initial proclamation to more settled institution.  Timothy is the only person mentioned in the Bible whose grandmother was a Christian.  The pastorals share a common basic message: hold fast to sound teaching, and you will live a worthy life, though with hardship; good order, structure and hierarchy are needed in the Church; keep on converting people, and look attractive to outsiders in order to do this.

God’s kindness is catching – Rom 2:1-11

Wednesday of Week 28; Holy Cross Parish.

My first day of work as a hospital chaplain was full of people who caught me off guard.  One was Kay, who told me she knew why she was in the hospital.  Expecting a description of her presenting symptoms, instead I heard: “I’m here to be kind to everyone who comes into my room, so as you can all go heal people.”  Kay knew that kindness is catching.

God reveals Himself as He heals us – 2 Kings 5:14-17; Luke 17:11-19

Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C, Week 28.  Holy Cross Parish.

He was scared.  I was sitting with Br. Thomas, a Holy Cross brother 30 odd years my senior, and I knew he was scared.  They’d found out why he’d lost his appetite and hadn’t been able to keep food down: it was because of the cancers in his GI tract.  He’d been told about how the course of chemo would go, how hard it would be, and he was scared.  We talked, I tried to offer comfort, to just be there, and we prayed, we prayed for healing.  I next visited him right after we’d received a new prognosis from the doctor: the cancer had spread much more aggressively than they’d first thought.  The chemo was now useless, there was nothing to do but manage the pain before he died.  Given how scared the prospect of chemo had made him, I’ll admit that I was scared to go back into his room and be with him, but I went.  He was breath-takingly peaceful.  God had healed Br. Thomas.  He hadn’t taken away his cancer, but he had cast out his fear.  It wasn’t the healing I wanted.  But I couldn’t deny God had healed.  I couldn’t blind myself to the clearly manifest work of God’s hand.  I had to swallow pride, fear and sorrow to do it, but I couldn’t not give thanks.  At Brother’s funeral Mass a month or so later, together we offered the sacrifice of the Mass, our deepest form of thanksgiving.

Mary helps us find Jesus -- Luke 2:41-51

School Mass for Our Lady of the Rosary; Luke 2:41-51; Holy Cross School.

As this was a Mass for children, the homily was a lot more dialogical than a text can reproduce.  They gave good answers!

[What have you lost?  How did you feel when you lost it?  Have you ever found something?  That feels pretty good, huh?]

Mary found Jesus!  She had lost her son; she had lost the Son of God!  But she found him!  Can you imagine the joy!  But that joy must have been tinged with a sobering realization: my little boy’s growing up.  He’s getting more independent.  He’s a young man.  And not just any young man, he’s holding his own with the teachers in the Temple.  He’s in sixth grade, and he’s holding his own with the teachers in the Temple!

WwtW: God shows Himself in His healing action

Bible Study notes for OT C, Wk 28.

2^nd Reading:  2 Kings 5:14-17

Context.          Kings (one book that got divided because it was too long for one scroll) is the completion of the history of Israel, from the giving of the Law in Deuteronomy, ending with the Exile.  It is theological history: not history in a modern, or even classical Greek, sense, but an act of preaching that seeks to answer the question, “given what we know about what happened, what was God’s role in this?”  God gave the Law, the Land, the Kingship, the Priests and the Prophets to guide his people and is displeased when they reject his gifts.  Our story is part of a sequence of ten wonder-stories, showing the power of the prophet Elisha.  Naaman is a foreign commander suffering from a skin disease whose wife sends him to Elisha.  Rather than see him directly, Elisha sends a messenger telling him to wash seven times in the Jordan.

God has life-changing-ly urgent good news for us – Jonah 3:1-10, Luke 10:38-42

Ordinary Time, Tuesday of Week 27.  Holy Cross Parish.

Language is a slippery thing, and Hebrew has always felt especially wily to me, even more so than English.  The way we hear Jonah’s oracle to the Ninevites (“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed”), it sounds like pretty unambiguous bad news to us (for the Ninevites at least).  There’s a phrase in Italian, all translators are traitors (which, fittingly, sounds much better in Italian than in English).  The translators here (one of whom was one of my Hebrew teachers, by the way) have certainly captured in English one of the meanings the Hebrew can have, the meaning the Ninevites seem to have reacted to.  But, the English dries out what is slippery in the inspired Hebrew, and sucks some of the life out of it.  Because, left as it is, we would have an unfulfilled prophecy.  We would have a prophecy with a specific time limit on it, that didn’t come to pass.  We’d be reading about God getting in wrong.

Bulletin Column: Quotable popeables

HCSS Bulletin Column, 10/5-6/13.

Friends,

Last week, we received wonderful news: Bl. Pope John XXIII and Bl. Pope John Paul II will be canonized next year on April 27^th, the Feast of Divine Mercy.  This news especially moved me, as that is the day after my anticipated ordination to the priesthood, the day on which I will preside for the first time at Mass.  In a particular way, this news renewed my eagerness to ask these two great Popes to keep me in their prayers as I prepare to serve the people of God as a priest.  Their gifts to the Church were (and continue to be) immeasurable, but each of them has contributed a quote that I often pray with and has proved a means by which the charity of Christ has urged me on to persevere in the Christian life and my ministry.

God carries others to Him through our consent to being carried – Luke 10:1-21

Ordinary Time, Week 26, Thursday.  Holy Cross Parish.

Throughout the Fall, the Daily Mass lectionary takes us passage by passage through Luke’s account of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  Sometimes, a feast day will come up that leads us to depart for a day from this continuous reading and instead incorporate into our Mass a reading more closely linked with the feast.  When that happens, as it has the last couple of days, we end up skipping some of the continuous reading.  It’s like changing the channel to check a sports score and then going back to your movie.  Today, we switch back to our continuous reading of Luke and, if it were a movie, we’d notice that the scene has suddenly shifted.  Up until this point, we’ve spent almost five weeks reading about Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, his home territory.  We turn away for two days, and he’s started moving: he’s turned his face to Jerusalem and begun the journey that will take us the next seven weeks to read about.  And that’s important background, because it matters to remember that all we’re about to read is being spoken by a man who knows he’s walking to his death, who’s willing to do this out of love for us, who’s inaugurating the pilgrimage we now walk, through death to everlasting life.  When he sends out the seventy-two on a difficult journey, he knows what he’s asking.

WwtW: God freely gives us faith

Wednesdays with the Word Bible Study notes for OT C, Wk 27.

Gospel:           Luke 17:5-10

Context.           We continue Jesus’ long journey to Jerusalem (9:51-19:48; Wks 13-31), and wrap up the section of it which is an extended response to the question “who will be saved?”  (13:10-17:10; Wks 21-27).  He is concerned to form community and set boundaries, but in a completely topsy-turvy way that will confound any sense of privilege.