For Tuesday of the Thirty-First Ordinary Week of the Church Year

Luke 14:15-24

Our Lord’s parable today makes two points among others.
First: many are called since God has thrown wide open the doors of his house for the whole world.
Second: not all accept the invitation.
The first point is that God does his part.
The second point is that he leaves us responsible for doing ours.
We must always keep these two points together.
In Christian history, perhaps every distortion, mistake or heresy in spirituality or morality involves the partial or complete denial of one of these two points.
First point, God does his part.
Second point, he leaves us responsible for doing ours.
How do we our part?
How do we move towards happiness in the banquet of God’s kingdom?
We do so by setting priorities.
When God invites, we leave everything to follow him.
When God commands, we leave everything to obey him.
When God promises, we leave everything to believe and hope in his promises.
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul, all your heart, all your mind and all your strength.”
In Christ, we recognize that God lavishes on us what is better than anything else: he lavishes on us his very own self.
All his soul, heart, mind, and strength!
We begin to enjoy the all, the fullness of God only by imitating him, by handing ourselves over to him in return.
“For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven.”
In exchange, we— for God’s sake and for his glory— we work our way on the road to heaven’s banquet.
Faith believes in such an exchange.
Hope wants it to happen.
Love makes the exchange.
We are free to reject the offer God makes us in his Gospel.
If we turn down his invitation, we leave ourselves shut out of the Kingdom of God.
The alternatives to his kingdom do not offer much that is genuine or anything that is lasting.
The world just as it is offers in itself no permanent or real foundation for hope, trust or love.
We may try to escape through pleasure and distraction that avoid looking either beneath or above the surface of anything.
The only way to lay a foundation for lasting and honest happiness is the work of faith, hope, and love in the wonderful exchange to which God invites us.
Here in the Eucharist, we are about to take that risk.
Here in the Eucharist, God opens for us the doors of the royal wedding banquet of heaven.
He sends out his servants, the angels, the saints and ordinary members of the Church to search for us.
He searches us out in the streets, highways, alleys and fields of our lives.
He searches for us in the poverty of our sins.
He searches for us when we are spiritually maimed, blind and lame.

Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town,
and bring in here the poor and the crippled,
the blind and the lame.

Go out to the highways and hedgerows
and make people come in
that my home may be filled.

He certainly expects us to be eager for his invitation.
We must take hold of what God freely offers, and count no other relationship, possession or activity so important that we cannot set it aside at the invitation of God.
At this very minute we are attending the Wedding Banquet of the Lamb of God.
If we attend with hope, with faith and with love, treasuring, obeying, imitating and living out what we receive, we shall also rejoice in it forever in the Kingdom of God.

For Saturday of the Thirtieth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

Luke 14:1,7-11

Everyone!
“Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Everyone!
Everyone including Jesus!
He came into our world first of all as a servant of his Father’s glory.
“Glory to God in the highest!”
That’s the first thing the angel army sang at his birth.
He was born to give glory to God in the highest.
Secondly, Jesus made himself the servant of the human race.
He is peace on earth to us— he is God’s good favor resting upon us, among us and within us.
For the sake of the Father’s glory, and for the sake of bringing us into peace with the Father, Jesus humbled himself, obeying for our sakes, obeying even unto death, death on the cross.
For humbling himself as a man, the Son of God received exaltation as a man: he rose from the dead.
By his cross, the Son of God fulfills honest humility in the name of the human race.
By his resurrection as a man of flesh and blood, he personally began the exaltation of the human race.
In flesh and blood he died on the cross, in flesh and blood rose from the grave, in flesh and blood ascended into heaven, in flesh and blood sits at the right hand of the Father— through and through he is at the service of his Father’s glory and our welfare.
In his Body and Blood, he humbles himself and exalts others.
He brings peace and favor to the human race.
He gives glory to the Father in the highest.
If we truly do the same, then we are already exalted in communion with him.

For Tuesday of the Thirtieth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

Luke 13:18-21

Today Jesus tells us the kingdom of God is like a small thing that a man or woman may use in an ordinary way, and it slowly makes a big difference.
A mustard seed, a man working his garden, shrubs and trees, bird nests, yeast and dough, a woman baking— we know these things, and they are not unusual.
The kingdom of God may not be so familiar.
God, the Almighty, the Maker of all, the King of heaven!
We’d like him to do much more than plant seeds and make bread, and we’d like it now, not later.
We want the promised end result now: the end of sin, the end of suffering, the end of death, the coming of the new heavens and the new earth, the unending fullness of life and beauty and joy without measure.
That’s the promise in which we put our faith.
That’s what we hope to have.
The work of faith and the work of hope both need the greater work of love.
The work of faith is to believe God and his promises.
The work of hope is to want God and what he promises.
What is the work of love?
Believing and hoping, a man who loves God is a man who plants the kingdom of God in his daily work.
Believing and hoping, a woman who loves God works the kingdom of God into her daily baking.
Love plants and mixes faith and hope into daily life and work.
It calls for wisdom that searches out the good.
It calls for justice in giving God and neighbor what one owes them.
It calls for courage that stays the course.
It calls for balance or right measure in the use of time and the good of the world.
Those are human virtues.
Indeed, they are the four pivotal or cardinal human virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
They are the work we do to make nature available for the work of grace that comes from God alone.
“Grace builds on nature,” and by working the natural human virtues we show up for grace to do its work.
The cardinal human virtues are the indispensable, earthly, human soil and flour into which we are to plant and mix what God alone can give: the kingdom of God and the powers of faith, hope, and love.
It is up to us men and women to commit the work of our daily lives to the unseen kingdom of God who tells us we are his partners in the work.
We may see some of the results in our own day, but then again, we might not.
None of us shall see all the results until God brings on the new heavens and the new earth.
Until then, Christ the King tells us what to do in his memory.
We are to be as food and drink served up and ready for eating and drinking.
Christ the King does so himself in his Eucharistic Body and Blood.
Here is the King whom we are to plant and work into the soil and the dough of our daily lives where he will one day reveal the fullness of his kingdom.

For the Twenty-Ninth Ordinary Sunday of the Church Year

[Though back from Europe since the fourteenth, I'm not all caught up yet with a backlog of meetings and work. Here's a reworking of a homily from the past.]


Mark 10:35-45

This is the tenth chapter of the holy Gospel according to Mark.
Earlier in this chapter, our Lord teaches things that challenge our own culture today, namely:

that in marriage “God made them male and female”;

that authentic marriage is for life;

that children are a blessing in the kingdom of God;

that wealth is a big stumbling block in following Christ and entering his kingdom;

that poverty and celibacy for the sake of Christ and his Gospel bring rewards now and in the life to come.

This chapter tells us that after the Lord’s followers heard those teachings they were amazed and afraid [10:32].
His teachings are demanding.
However, he does not spare himself.
In this chapter he said he himself would undergo torture and execution, but that he would rise from the dead.
Today he called his coming violent death “the cup that I drink,” and said he came “to give his life as a ransom.”
Having heard both the harsh demands of following Christ and the harsh destiny awaiting Christ himself, the apostles clearly seem to have tried to change the subject.
Two of them today asked the Lord for first-place thrones of glory, and the other ten jumped in for the competition.
Each of the twelve is looking greedily and past the finish line, but none wants to look at where the marathon starts or what way it takes.
Christ has already put in their faces the fact of his full sharing in our human reality of suffering and death.
Being God and also human, Christ gives suffering and death a new meaning and a new possibility.
In Christ, the pit of human suffering and death has become the home and the fountain of deepest union and intimacy between God and humanity, between spirit and flesh.
Natural human life is already both physical and spiritual.
Suffering and death are when we come face to face with the reality of being both physical and spiritual.
Suffering and death put in our faces the fact that the physical and the spiritual are sometimes in conflict, but are always together.
In response to suffering and death, our shattered culture today offers us false, temporary escapes.
Mindless partying, empty talk shows, drugs, recreational sex and relationships, contraception, abortion, and euthanasia!
At least the apostles wanted to compete for thrones of glory as their mistaken escape from the suffering and death Jesus was talking about.
Suffering and death have never gone away.
They shall end only when the return of Christ brings on the new heavens and the new earth.
Long ago God shaped the human body from the dust of the universe, and then breathed his eternal Spirit within us.
Not long afterwards, we chose to sin, and so began suffering and death.
Though we do suffer and die, we shall rise body AND spirit.
We shall rise from death, truly free in real body and spirit forever.
Today in his Gospel, the Lord tells us: YOU WILL DRINK MY CUP.
We do not ever escape from reality, both material and spiritual.
Suffering, death, the cross and the glory of the resurrection are bridged and reconciled in the person of Christ, bridged and reconciled by God AND man, because Christ is God AND man.
At the cost of his own life, Christ who is God and man used his freedom to serve the Father and the world.
Because of that, his human freedom rose from the dead never to be lost or diminished again.
By believing and following Christ, we face and serve reality and truth in the deepest and highest way possible.
We may suffer for doing so.
However, unless we do so willingly, we allow our freedom to collapse down to what is merely pleasurable, merely convenient, and merely comfortable.
There we shall stay.
Merely!
We shall lose our freedom and we shall not rise from death into glory.
If you were to go lie in bed, and move yourself only for what is pleasurable, convenient, or comfortable, your muscles would shrivel, and you would become a prisoner in your own body.
Even the freedom of our bodies requires that we push our bodies beyond what is merely pleasurable, convenient or comfortable.
It is the same with our spiritual freedom of spirit: we lose our spiritual freedom unless we push beyond pleasure, comfort and convenience.
Christ took his human freedom— our human freedom— to the limit.
He took our human freedom to the cross, through the cross and up into the resurrection.
“This is my body … GIVEN UP for you.”
“This is … my blood … SHED for you.”
The cross of Christ— and our willing share in it— opens up to us our salvation, our meaning, our destiny, our reality, our vocation, our obligations, our joyful consummation and fulfillment in glory.
There is no real other way.
To receive the Eucharist is to say “Amen” to a share in the cross for our own freedom, glory, and joy.

I am away in Rome from October 1 to 14.

For Wednesday of the Twenty-Fifth Ordinary Week of the Church Year

Luke 9:1-6

In this Gospel we see the beginning of the mission, of the “apostolate” of the Twelve Apostles.
It is a mysterious beginning because it also shows the end and fulfillment of all things.
As Christ sent his Twelve Apostles out for this beginning, he gave them power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases as they proclaimed the Kingdom of God.
At the end and fulfillment of all things, the Kingdom of God will make our bodies whole and fulfill our souls with freedom from sin and the sway of demons.
This beginning of the apostolate, of the apostolic mission, did not come from the apostles.
It came from the power and authority Christ put into their hands.
He sent them out carrying nothing they could call their own or the world could give them.
“Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.”
They went with nothing but the power and authority of Christ that freed bodies and souls.
That was the beginning, and so it will be at the end when Christ opens the fullness of his Kingdom in the world through the Apostolic Church.
In the meantime, we are to hold onto nothing except our own obedience to the power and authority that come from Christ.
Without his power and authority, and without our obedience to him, we shall have no beginning and no fulfillment for our bodies and our souls.
Here in his Eucharistic Body and Blood, the King our God is present empty-handed by the measure of the world— empty-handed and poor but for his power and authority, as well as his own obedience to his Father.
In his Body and Blood he hands over to us his dignity, power, authority, and obedience.
His Body and Blood shall be as nothing for us, unless we answer with our own obedience.
Obedience to Christ demands that we leave everything behind.
“Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.”
It is the same journey— the way of the cross— that Christ undertook in obedience and self-denial.
If we do the same, then at the end all shall be fulfilled.
By empty-handed obedience to his power and authority, we shall come to the freedom of our bodies, the freedom of our joy, our knowledge, and our will, the freedom of our whole being in the Kingdom of God.

I am grateful to those who donate to my monastery.