Fourth Sunday of Lent • Year A
The incident was over quickly but it taught important lessons … lessons that the disciples understood only long after Jesus had left them. The first lesson teaches a matter of fact: all of us humans are blind in our own particular way. It is never easy for any of us to see where we should go or what we should do. We humans are born blind to the eternal reality of our lives and we cannot overcome that blindness without the help of God.
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time • Year A
Not many of you are “movers and shakers” … people of power followed constantly by the press to hear what you think or what you will do. For sure, not many of you come from the upper classes, those higher reaches of society where supposedly the “best people” dwell. But that means nothing. What means something is that you are among those who have been called to be with God for all eternity. God wants silly old you, to show the worldly wise that their wisdom is worthless if they take it too seriously. God wants powerless old you, as weak as you are, to show those who pride themselves on their strength that a human is nothing if not supported by God.
Baptism of the Lord • Year A
Jesus in his preaching made it very clear that we cannot make his message of universal salvation real for us unless we love God and love each other. But we cannot love what we will not understand. Jesus came to save all humans but all humans will not necessarily be saved… mostly because we continue to treat some of our brothers and sisters as discards of the human species, not worthy of our attention much less our love.
Feast of the Holy Family • Year A
St. Augustine said that “we make our times” … if our times are good or bad it is because we have made them so. No place is this more true than our family times. These are perhaps the most important and yet the most difficult of all the times of our lives.
Christmas • Year A
When Jesus was born, the only things he had going for him were his family and his Divinity. Oddly enough, his being God was little help in his human adventure. He had decided not to make much of his “being God” and thus throughout his earthly life he was treated like any other poor human. We are told that he “emptied himself” so that he could have the full experience of being human, the bad parts as well as the good parts. One of the good parts was in having a family. Jesus chose to be a member of a human family.
First Sunday of Advent • Year A
Humans – at least the Chosen People – had had plenty of warnings. For centuries prophets had promised that a Messiah, a Savior, was coming and that humans had best prepare for his coming. But over the years people forgot. They became busy about other things: getting through each day, going to work, having fun, studying for exams, getting married, having children, going to doctors. And after a while the only Savior that made any sense to them was someone who could make their daily life easier.
Solemnity of Christ the King • Year C
It was the end of the beginning … the end of that first phase of the story of human destiny. It had begun with such great hope … God making humans in his own image because he wanted to have someone else to love and to have that someone freely love him in return. But things went bad quickly. Humans envied God more than loved him. They tried to be God and consequently lost the grand possibility of being with God for all eternity. They became wanderers, forever blocked from that heaven that was their only possible home.
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time • Year C
Jesus was in the last year of his life and his battle with the leaders of the people, the Pharisees, was soon to end. They would have him executed and that would be that. Now in the last months of his life Jesus was concerned lest his followers continue to believe that the proud life-style of the Pharisees was to be the Christian Ideal. To make his point he told the crowds a story, an event that was not unfamiliar to any of them who had ever visited the central place of prayer in Israel … the great temple in Jerusalem.
Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time • Year C
Perhaps he had just learned that Judas, his business manager, was making a deal to sell him to his enemies for 30 pieces of silver. Perhaps he perceived that some of his followers were already thinking about how they could become rich in his service: devout in church but devious in business.
Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time • Year C
The proud pay no attention to the warnings of friends because they don’t think friends have any worthwhile knowledge to communicate. They pay no attention to divine threats because they are firmly convinced that they are the only divinity of any importance. They become trapped in their self-created heaven. Jesus made it plain that God will have no sympathy for such bloated spirits. He said to the listening crowds words like these: When the proud come to the gate of heaven so ‘filled with themselves,’ God will simply say, ‘Go away! I do not know you!’