God extends mercy to guide us to the kingdom – Matt 21:28-32

Twenty-sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time; South Bend TV Mass, and Holy Cross parish.

“Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”  What would be your reaction to that?  Imagine you’re a chief priest, you’re standing in the Temple, your home base, the place you feel most grounded in the presence of the God who called you into his service, into leadership in his service, and this odd, homeless, wandering preaching who had just shown up in Jerusalem to great acclaim from the people has the nerve to say to you: “Tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.”  I’m sure we can imagine various responses, and, knowing how the story ends, we know that their reaction culminated in plotting to have this wandering preacher killed.  But, I’d submit there’s one proper response: gratitude.  Gratitude followed by conversion of heart.

God invites all to join the work and receive the reward – Matt 20:1-16

Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross parish.

We don’t know why those men were standing around the market place at the eleventh hour, about five o’clock in the afternoon.  The vineyard owner doesn’t know either, so he asks them, and they give almost a non-response, “because no-one has hired us.”  I call it almost a non-response, because it’s patently obvious: if anyone had hired them, they’d be at work in someone’s field or someone’s barn and not standing around a market place!  Maybe a more probing question might have been, “and why has no-one hired you?”  But the master doesn’t ask this, and so we can’t get to know.  We don’t know if they were seen as too old to be able to labor, or too young to know what they were doing, or too odd to be able to get on with the other workers, or if they looked sickly, or threatening, or if they slept in and showed up to the market place late, or if they were just unlucky.  All we know is that the master called, and they followed.

God gives all to let the light in – Jn 3:13-17, Phi 3:6-11

Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross; Holy Cross - St. Stan's.

Imagine a boy born in captivity, born in a cellar, trapped.  Imagine this boy has never seen sunlight.  He has only seen his murky world clinically and coldly illumined by artificial, ill-colored electric bulbs.  His mother has told him of sunlight, has told him of how wonderful it feels upon the skin, of how the clouds flow past it leaving their shapes behind, of how it fills a space with warmth and beauty, of how it’s like the lights he’s seen, but so much more, so much better, that with it, he’d be able to see colors as they really are, that he’d be able to distinguish blue from black (which yellow electric light can never allow) and see the beauty.  Slowly, she comes to realize that the blacked out window in the basement is low enough that she could break it.  It’s too small for either of them to be able to get out, but she could break it.  Who knows what her captors would do to her in response to this outrage against their control?  But she has to risk it.  Whatever it would cost, she’d dare to risk it, to let her boy see the sun, to show him that there is an outside, there is a force invisible to him more ancient and more powerful than the walls that confine them, a force able to truly illumine them, that need not be overcome and shut out by walls, a force that could pierce through that window that she would give all if needed to open, and let in the light that would delight, that would warm, that might just excite her son enough to turn to it, and seek the freedom it promised.

God appoints us as watchmen to bring us forgiveness – Ezek 33:7-9, Matt 18:15-20, Rom 13:8-10

Twenty-third Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross church.

Ezekiel was an exile, a displaced person.  He was an Israelite living in Babylon, because the Babylonians had come to Jerusalem, destroyed it, destroyed God’s house, the Temple, in its midst and forced them on the long march East to Babylon.  The people were bereft of the only ways they’d known God: the Temple, the kingship, the Land.  But, God did not desert them.  The people would discover that in their exile, God was in their midst too.  Just as, centuries later, the Church, bereft of Christ’s humane presence, would discover that wherever two or three gathered in his name, he was there.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself.  God did not desert his people.  God continued to send prophets, to call them back to covenant living, even when living in a strange land.

Christ leads us through suffering to eternal life – Matt 16:21-27, Jer 20:7-9, Rom 12:1-2

22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross - St. Stan's.

One year at Notre Dame’s baccalaureate Mass, I ended up being the person tasked with purifying the vessels. As I was purifying the main, celebrant's chalice, I noticed whose it was.  It was Fr. Sorin’s chalice, the chalice of the priest who my community’s founder had sent on the arduous trip across the ocean from France to the mission territory of Indiana to found a school.  It wasn’t the chalice he’d received at his ordination, but one he’d been given on one of his ordination anniversaries by a benefactor.  The precious metal alone must have been worth a pretty penny, the craftsmanship and artistry more, and the history behind it probably made it the most expensive thing I’d ever held, and certainly the most expensive thing I’d ever swilled water around in and drunk out of.  The most expensive thing I’d ever held, but not the most valuable: for a little while before I’d embraced fellow Christians, fellow humans in the sign of peace, and a shortly after that I’d held the body of my Lord briefly in my hand, before consuming it.  “What could we give in exchange for our life, or the life of anyone?”  Jesus asks.  Nothing, we could give nothing so valuable as a life.  What would he give for our life?  Everything.  He would give his clothing, his blood, his body, his very life, to lead us into eternal life.

Christ gives himself that death may be conquered – Isa 22:19-23, Matt 16:13-20

Twenty-first Sunday of Ordinary Time; Holy Cross parish.

Have any of you spent the last fifteen minutes wondering what Shebna did?  Shebna, who Isaiah talked about in the first reading, in not so glowing terms.  Shebna, who loses his role as master of the royal palace, a kind of chief steward or major domo for the king, and instead of severance pay gets thrust from his office, pulled down from his station, and stripped of his garb of honor, which gets handed over to Eliakim, his successor.  What did he do to deserve that?  Well, our reading began at chapter 22, verse 19.  If we’d have started at verse 15, we’d have heard all about it (and we’d also have heard rather more gruesome curses against Shebna than the ones we did!). 

God’s table of plenty heals with but a crumb – Matt 15:21-28, Isa 56:1, 6-7, Rom 11

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time; Holy Cross - St. Stan's.

In Dante’s comedy, after traveling through hell and purgatory, our hero eventually finds himself being taken on a tour through heaven.  Heaven, for him, is ordered, there’s lower-heaven and various grades of upper-heaven, each granting its residents an even more intense closeness to God from the last.  But, in a sense, the order is irrelevant, for all the inhabitants of heaven are incomparably blessed.  Dante starts his tour at the Moon, the lowest level of heaven.  Upon its pock-marked surface the first person he meets is Piccarda.  It takes him a while to recognize her, as her happiness has rendered her more beautiful than she ever appeared during her life on earth.  She is completely aware that there are higher levels of heaven above her, but she suffers not a jot for it.  She is happy.  Not just content, she lives a life of bliss.  She has been purified of all jealousy and wants nothing but what she has, for she only desires that God’s will be done.