We may not feel inclined to think of ourselves as lepers. It’s not an appealing image. But that’s the plain meaning of these ten persons in today’s Gospel passage. The ten lepers represent us.
In fact, we’re much worse off than lepers. Leprosy ends with earthly death. But the effects of sin—alienation and estrangement from God and neighbor—are unending, ever-lasting, without end if we die in mortal sin. Without a Redeemer to save us from sin, our suffering will not end with earthly death, but only begin in earnest.
Jesus saves the ten from leprosy with little more than a few words, such is His divine power. But Jesus saves all of mankind from the far greater penalty of eternal death. Jesus offers salvation to you not by speaking a few words, but by sacrificing up His complete self—Body, Blood, soul and divinity—to a Passion and Death on the Cross that He suffered out of love. He suffered this not out of compulsion, or to get something back in return, or to impress anyone, but simply and completely out of love for us. If this doesn’t inspire gratitude in each of us, it’s hard to imagine what might.
The just shall possess the land / and dwell in it forever.
During the last weeks of the Church year—which more or less correspond with the month of November—the Church asks us to turn our attention to what she calls the “Last Things”. Each Christian needs to focus his or her attention upon Heaven and Hell, death and judgment.
A lot of people like to think, and lead their lives, believing that only one of these four things even exists. Of course there is a Heaven. Heaven is the place where everyone goes when they die: this is what some people believe. This is what some people teach. But this is not what Jesus taught.
Jesus taught that people, if they do not follow Him, will go—not to Heaven, but to that other place, called Hell. King David, in composing today’s psalm, puts it this way: “The salvation of the just comes from the Lord.” Salvation—being saved, which is another way of saying, “getting to Heaven”—does not come from ourselves, but only from the Lord. If we try to get to Heaven by ourselves, or if we try to make our own Heaven, we will fail, and end up forever without God. We are responsible for doing many things, and at the end of our lives, we should be able to give an account of what we have done. Still, none of those things are what get us into Heaven.
Today’s Gospel passage shows us God’s passion for His temple, and His passion for the sacrifice offered there. In the confessional, priests often hear people confess anger. A priest might find it necessary to ask questions when someone confesses “getting angry”. In light of Jesus’ action in this passage, it’s important to remember not only that merely “getting angry” is not necessarily a sin. Also, even acting in anger is not necessarily a sin.
Acting in anger, or fostering anger in oneself or others, certainly can be a sin. But Jesus acts in anger in today’s Gospel passage, and with good reason. When reflecting on a state of anger, and actions that flow from it, it’s important to ask what the object of one’s anger is. This object can make all the difference in the morality of such an act.
While experiencing the passion of anger, Jesus purifies the Temple. In the passion of love, He purifies the temple of the human body of sin on Calvary, by offering up His own body in sacrifice. St. John the Evangelist makes this point clearly. When Jesus challenges His opponents, saying, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up”, the evangelist explains that Jesus “was speaking about the temple of His Body.” The Church’s belief in the great goodness of the human body is based in large measure on this Gospel truth. The Church’s challenging ethic of purity of body stems not from a belief that the human body is bad, but that the human body’s purity ought to concern us as much as the purity of the Temple concerned Jesus. Both temples ultimately belong to God, for His purposes and for His glory. The temple of the human body is meant for the offering of sacrifices, small and large.
The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all these things and sneered at Him.
“You cannot serve God and mammon.” This sentence of Jesus is sometimes falsely and simplistically interpreted to mean that you cannot have both God and money in your life. In other words, this false interpretation says that there’s a sort of competition in your life between God and money which is a zero-sum game. Or to use a picture metaphor: this false interpretation says that there’s a see-saw in your life: God and money are sitting at opposite ends of the see-saw. If one goes up, the other must go down. The holier you are, the less money you will have, and the more money you have, the less holy you must be. This interpretation of Jesus’ words is false.
Our spiritual well-being and our financial well-being are not in competition with each other. Rather, when Jesus plainly tells you that “You cannot serve both God and mammon”, the key is the word “serve”. “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” You can serve God, or you can serve mammon. But you cannot serve both.
The beautiful thing about serving God is that through this form of love, we become more like Him. After all, “God is love”, as St. John taught the first Christians. So in the very act of loving God, we become like Him: that is to say, we enter into His very way of life, His very way of being. This is as God wants, and in fact this is as each of you wants, in the deepest center of your heart, because God planted that desire there when He created your heart: the desire to serve Him through sacrificial love, and so become more like Him.
“And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently.”
“Our citizenship is in Heaven”. What would our lives look like if we believed these words sincerely? Saint Paul is exhorting the Philippians neither to place their faith in this world, nor to use the things of this world for their own sake.
If our citizenship is in Heaven, then we are sojourners in this world. To place our faith in this world is to sink our roots in this world, which can only tie us down when God chooses us to raise us to Himself: either briefly in prayer, or into Heaven after our death. How many persons spend a great deal of their time in Purgatory casting off their ties to the world?
If our citizenship is in Heaven, then the things of this world are means, rather than ends. What do we seek in this life? What we seek are our ends. Do we seek things that are of this world? Or is what we’re seeking of God? God gives us good things in this world to use as stepping stones, to draw others, and to be drawn up into our true citizenship in Heaven.
CCC 671-672: we wait for all to be made subject to Christ CCC 988-991: the just will live forever with the risen Christ CCC 1036, 2612: vigilant waiting for the Lord’s return
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There are three roles that God calls every Christian to carry out for the sake of His Kingdom. These roles are priest, prophet, and king. Each Christian will carry out these three roles in somewhat different ways, depending on his or her vocation. Nonetheless, on the day of your baptism God “commissioned” you, if you will, to carry out these three roles.
Immediately after a person is baptized, the priest takes the most sacred of the church’s three blessed oils—Sacred Chrism—and anoints the crown of the newly baptized person’s head. The crown of the head is called the “crown”, of course, because it’s the part of the head that—if you were a king or queen—would be covered with your golden crown. But in baptism, that’s in fact what you become: a king or queen.
In our American culture, the role of king is often looked down upon. Yet when we look into our Catholic history, we see many saintly kings. Saint Louis, for whom our Midwestern city is named, served France as King Louis IX. In addition to serving Christ in the people of his own kingdom, St. Louis also served Christ by defending the Holy Land. He wasn’t a ruler who sat in a situation room and ordered his pawns forward toward death. He was a king who led his troops into battle. He armored, saddled up, and faced death for the cause he served.
Yet the role of a saintly king can be summed up more simply by a single word: “shepherd”. In our culture, we might consider a king and a shepherd to be different roles, hardly synonymous at all. But in Sacred Scripture they often coincide. After all, the greatest king of Israel was David, who was a shepherd before he was anointed king. David illustrates that part of being a shepherd is the role of protector.
Of course, there is also another, gentler side to a shepherd. The shepherd also sees to it that his flock is provided nourishment. We can think of saintly kings like Louis IX of France or Stephen of Hungary, who spent their personal wealth to carry out the corporal works of mercy for the poor and destitute within their kingdoms.
Given all this, however, we must recognize that all kingship and shepherding flows from God. It’s by the grace of God that kings like St. Louis of France and St. Stephen of Hungary gave their lives for their people. It’s by the grace of God that you who are fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, protect and provide for those entrusted to your care.
The Lord God acts as protector and provider throughout our lives, in countless ways. But He does so most powerfully in the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Consider the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in terms of Jesus as our Eucharistic Shepherd and King.
The physical altar in the church’s sanctuary represents the Cross on Calvary. On the Altar of the Cross, Jesus offered His own Self in sacrifice for His flock: that is, for His Bride, the Church. On the altar in the sanctuary, Jesus’ self-sacrifice is truly made present through the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to protect us from the power of sin and death.
Yet God also calls us to the altar during Mass to be nourished by Jesus’ entire self. We are most thoroughly nourished by Jesus when we offer Him our entire self. If I hold something back from God—if I say that God can have part of my life, or some of my wants and needs, but not my whole life—then the sacrifice of Jesus won’t be able fully to dwell in me.
For Jesus’s life to change your life as He wants, what you bring to the altar has to be as complete a gift as what Jesus offers you from the altar. Only with a complete exchange of selves will you have the strength to be a faithful steward during the week, in all the sacrifices—large and small—that God asks you to make for others.
The Parable of Wise and Foolish Virgins (unfinished) by Peter von Cornelius (1783–1867)
Jesus’ first parable in today’s Gospel is heartfelt, offering us hope of God’s compassion for the wayward. Jesus offers a “moral” to the parable in explaining that “there will be more joy in Heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who have no need of repentance.”
Although Jesus’ “moral” seems straightforward enough, there is something about it that seems paradoxical. Wouldn’t it make sense for the “righteous” to rank higher in Heaven than the repentant? Why isn’t there such rejoicing in Heaven over the righteous? There are at least two responses that might be offered.
First, the “righteous” of whom Jesus is here speaking are defined by the righteous themselves. Yet such self-righteousness is a false righteousness. Only God can make a human person righteous.
Second, those who are righteous in the true sense of the word are so only through their repentance. A saint is a sinner who knows he’s a sinner. In this sense, all human beings in Heaven (excepting, of course, Our Lord and Our Blessed Mother) are righteous through their self-repentance. You and I as sinners rejoice that the Lord has not left us in our sins, but has offered us His grace, which is the means to righteousness in God’s sight.
… work out your salvation with fear and trembling.
Saints of the Church have noted that every aspect of the Christian faith is inevitably distorted twice, in opposite directions. Take St. Paul’s words in today’s First Reading as an example, where he preaches about the drama of the Christian spiritual life.
On the one hand, St. Paul commands the Philippians: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” This command speaks clearly of the centrality of human effort in the spiritual life. Salvation is not a “done deal” at one’s baptism. Salvation is assured only to the Christian who perseveres in God’s love to the very end of her earthly life. Unfortunately, there are some who have only considered this truth in isolation, claiming that salvation comes through human effort, to the exclusion of God’s help.
On the other hand, St. Paul preaches clearly about God’s centrality in the spiritual life. “God is the one who… works in you both to desire and to work.” There are, unfortunately, those who have exaggerated God’s role in the spiritual life, claiming that man cannot contribute anything good to his own salvation. When we listen with both ears, however, God reveals to us that the spiritual life is a drama: God is in the lead role, but asks us to follow Him in the acts that lead to Heaven.
Tuesday of the Thirty-first Week in Ordinary Time Luke 14:15-24
“Blessed is the one who will dine in the Kingdom of God.”
During the last weeks in Ordinary Time, as the Church year draws to a close, Holy Mother Church calls us to meditate upon the Last Things: Heaven and hell, death and judgment. During November, we also pray for the faithful departed, especially our beloved dead and the Poor Souls.
Often we wonder what our beloved dead—when they, we hope and pray, reach Heaven—will experience there. Jesus’ teachings and parables about the very human and earthly experience of dining gives us insight into the nature of Heaven, which is often described as “the Heavenly Banquet”. In yesterday’s Gospel Reading, Jesus invited a Pharisee to be more generous about inviting to his home those he might consider “undeserving”.
In today’s Gospel Reading, Jesus gives us a parable to reflect upon God the Father’s generous invitation to share in the “Kingdom of God”. It’s true that the Kingdom of God to a certain measure can be experienced while on earth. However, the fullness of the Kingdom of God, and the banquet experienced in that Kingdom, can only be known fully in Heaven.
In Jesus’ parable in today’s Gospel Reading, “A man gave a great dinner to which he invited many.” It’s easy to see how this represents God the Father inviting many to the Banquet of Heaven. “But one by one, [those invited] all began to excuse themselves.” That’s perplexing, and might make us wonder whether the parable still applies to God inviting people to Heaven. After all, no one would turn down an invitation to Heaven, we might think. Unfortunately, if we thought that, we would think wrongly. People reject God’s call to Heaven just as they reject God’s call to Sunday Mass, just as they reject God’s call to daily prayer.
Prayer, Sunday Mass, and the Eternal Banquet of Heaven: God invites us, step by step, to share in the fullness of His divine life. The excuses that we often give God for turning down His invitations are just as foolish as the excuses offered by those invited in the parable. Fortunately for us, God the Father continues to invite us each day of our earthly life. It’s up to each us of to respond to God’s invitation, and recognize ourselves in the words recited shortly before Holy Communion: “Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb” [see Revelation 19:9].
Reflections on the Sacred Liturgy 