The “something greater than the temple” of which Jesus speaks today is, of course, Jesus Himself. As the Old Testament priests served in the Temple, so the disciples of Jesus serve in His Presence. It is in serving Him, and especially in offering priestly sacrifice through Him, that all Christian works find their meaning and are rightly ordered.
Here the virtue of prudence shows its place. Prudence is sometimes called the “charioteer of the virtues”. A modern analogy would be to see prudence as the steering wheel of a car. Prudence is neither the engine (which could be correlated with divine charity) nor the gearshift (temperance) nor the GPS (hope). Nonetheless, as simple as the role of the steering wheel is, the whole vehicle depends essentially upon it. Likewise with prudence.
The most basic level of moral decision-making is to shun evil and to do good. Prudence is hardly needed at this level. But the upper echelons of morality depend greatly on prudence, where the moral agent faces many good choices, and is tasked with choosing not merely the good but the best. If we realize that Christ—that “somethinggreater”—is always with us, then His Presence will guide our prudent choices.
CCC 543-550: the Kingdom of God CCC 309-314: God’s goodness and the scandal of evil CCC 825, 827: weeds and seed of Gospel in everyone and in the Church CCC 1425-1429: need for ongoing conversion CCC 2630: prayer of petition voiced profoundly by the Holy Spirit
One day a sidewalk preacher proclaimed the Good News to passersby. Most kept walking. One fellow, however, listened to him preach for a few minutes. At a strategic moment, the preacher paused and then said, “Brother, why don’t you join us Sunday at my church?” The fellow scowled and growled, “Not a chance: your church is full of hypocrites.” The preacher replied, “Don’t worry yourself about that. We can always make room for one more!”
Weeds and wheat are everywhere. Jesus’ first parable in Sunday’s Gospel Reading can help you sort through the weeds and wheat. Like the grain of wheat, this parable can bear much fruit.
Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote one of his three greatest works—On the City ofGod—on this parable’s theme. St. Augustine shows how complex and messy the world can be as weeds and wheat grow together in the same field.
St. Augustine’s masterpiece is actually a contrast between “the city of God” and “the city of man”. This contrast is similar to the parable’s consideration of the wheat and the weeds. But it’s not that Heaven is the City of God while earth is the City of Man: that would be a contrast that condemns this world in which we live. Nor is the Church the City of God while the state is the City of Man: that would be a contrast that presents the Church as flawless.
In the 21st century, the Church lives in a precarious setting. Not only are foundational moral truths being attacked by Western society. The Church herself is at pains to preach the fullness of Christ’s moral teaching. This difficulty stems in part from her credibility being diminished by the scandalous actions of some of her leaders. Mindful of this two-fold attack—from without and from within—we can consider Jesus’ parable.
We have to start with a question like the one raised by St. Augustine’s masterpiece. Who exactly are the weeds and who are the wheat? At the end of the long form of Sunday’s Gospel Reading, Jesus explains the parable: “the good seed” are “the children of the kingdom”, while the “weeds are the children of the evil one”. But how are we practically to apply this explanation to our own day?
Perhaps another saying from our Lord could help us. “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye” [Luke 6:42]. In other words, in seeking to apply the parable of the weeds and the wheat to our experiences today, each of us ought first to apply the parable to his or her own soul. After we start with the real weeds in our own souls, we can move on to consider the weeds elsewhere: in one’s family, parish, country, world, and even the Church.
Short of the Blessed Virgin Mary, there is no disciple without weeds in his soul. In your case as in mine, then, the parable first of all describes the tension within the individual Christian’s spiritual life. You are a “child of the kingdom” by the grace of God, beginning on the day of your baptism. Yet you are also a “child of the evil one” by your sins: actions, thoughts, and words, done and left undone.
Between the day of your baptism and the day of your death, you are free to cultivate your spiritual life. You are free to break up the hard soil of your soul through acts of penance and humility. You are free to soak the soil with tears of repentance and the Blood of Christ.
Yet you must also be patient, like the parable’s householder, who is God our Father. For you are free also to sin in this life, allowing weeds to proliferate in your soul. God, in His paternal love, does not force anyone to reform his life.
Jesus’ first parable in Sunday’s Gospel passage lets us focus upon three of the times that God, in His providential and merciful love, judges the human person. The first is when we present ourselves for judgment in Confession, the second is at the hour of our death, and the third is at the Last Judgment.
In his loving judgment, God—if you will—sifts the dead similar to the parable’s description of sifting. This parable highlights the importance of human free will, and its consequences. In the end, however, even more important is God’s free will, by which He offers forgiveness, redemption, and sanctification.
The Parable of the Tares by Domenico Fetti (1589-1623)
Our Lady of Mount Carmel Zechariah 2:14-17 + Matthew 12:46-50
“Here are my mother and my brothers.”
The Blessed Virgin Mary has many feasts throughout the course of the year. Some honor events in her life: for example, her Immaculate Conception on December 8, her birth on September 8, her Assumption on August 15, and her Coronation on August 22.
Other feasts of Our Lady honor her under various titles that she holds. Many of these titles come from places throughout the world where she has appeared to the faithful: for example, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima, and Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Today’s feast is different. Today’s feast honors Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Mount Carmel is a mountain in northern Israel, on which, in the late 12th century, Christian hermits began to live. In time, these hermits formed a religious order known today as the “Carmelites”. The rule—which is to say, the order of life—of the Carmelites fosters devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Each major religious order within the Church—for example, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and the Benedictines—has its own unique approach to Christian spirituality. Each of these approaches holds to the essentials of Christian spirituality, but each differs in ways similar to how different children within a family develop different personalities and temperaments, even though they all have the same parents.
One might say that Carmelite spirituality is best understood by means of the greatest saints of the Carmelite order. Three Carmelite saints stand out: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and St. Thérèse the Little Flower. Both the writings of these saints as well as their biographies—that is, their living out the Carmelite understanding of the Gospel—helps us understand Carmelite spirituality. On our parish website I posted a playlist of videos made by Carmelite friars about Carmelite spirituality. I hope that you’ll watch one of more of these. I hope that our parish family will grow in devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
The Hebrew word “Carmel” literally means “garden of God”. Carmelite spirituality helps us cultivate our soul the way that a gardener cultivates the earth. Rain comes down from Heaven to allow seeds to blossom. Likewise, God’s grace from Heaven nurtures the soul, and the Christian in turn cultivates the life of Christ within the Christian soul.
St. John Paul II, in a 2001 letter to the Carmelite family wrote some words for you to reflect upon throughout this blessed feast day:
“Contemplation of the Virgin presents her to us as a loving Mother who sees her Son growing up in Nazareth, follows him on the roads of Palestine, helps him at the wedding at Cana and, at the foot of the Cross, becomes the Mother associated with his offering and given to all people when Jesus himself entrusts her to his beloved disciple. As Mother of the Church, the Blessed Virgin is one with the disciples in ‘constant prayer’; as the new Woman who anticipates in herself what will one day come to pass for us all in the full enjoyment of Trinitarian life, she is taken up into heaven from where she spreads the protective mantle of her mercy over her children on their pilgrimage to the holy mountain of glory” [St. John Paul II, Message to the Carmelite Family, March 25, 2001; 3.]
Click HERE for a PDF copy of the Novena to Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the Litany of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
“… no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”
Today’s Gospel passage speaks to the power of divine revelation. Jesus speaks directly to His Father, something rare in the four Gospel accounts. Along with this exclamation, Jesus says, “no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”
But that’s not the only reference to divine revelation. In praising the Father, God the Son exclaims to Him that the reason for the Son’s praise is that “although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”
God the Son rejoices because His Father has revealed hidden things to the “childlike”. Here we have a complement to Jesus’ admonition that unless one becomes like a little child, he will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This entrance must be connected to those hidden things that escape the vision of the wise and the learned. The child has a capacity to see things as God wants them to be seen, and that includes the child who is God the Son, in all His divine humility.
“‘Will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to the nether world.’”
“Teddy Bear Jesus” remains one of the more persistent myths within lands that are culturally Catholic (as distinguished from those that are Catholic by personal conviction, sweat, and blood). This mythic figure became flesh and dwelt among us to tell us how wonderful we are, and that we just need to have more self-esteem. As popular as this myth is within so much of the modern Western world, it has no basis in the New Testament. Today’s Gospel passage offers a helpful antidote.
In your hand missal, the two sentences that Jesus addresses to Capernaum may be printed in italics, drawing attention to the fact that they are a quotation from the Old Testament. Specifically, Jesus here is quoting a very “un-teddy-bear-like” passage from the fourteenth chapter of the Prophet Isaiah.
What has prompted Jesus in today’s Gospel passage to thunder tides of woe against the cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Capernaum? Here is the more specific point for our reflection today: failure to repent.
Jesus has been preaching repentance because it’s a prerequisite for accepting the good news of the Gospel. No Christian should think that he doesn’t need to repent because he’s already been baptized, accepted the Gospel, and been saved. The gift of salvation first given in the Sacrament of Baptism certainly can be lost. But most importantly, we should remember that the motive for Jesus’ reproaches is the same as the motive for His carrying the Cross: love for each of us.
“Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”
There is a big difference between a bribe and a gift. A bribe is something we give to another while demanding something in return. A gift is an expression of love with no strings attached. A gift-giver expects nothing in return, but merely gives the gift as a sign of love that already exists between the two.
This week the First Reading comes from the book of the prophet Isaiah. A prophet at roughly the same time as Hosea, whose prophecies we heard last week, Isaiah preached to the people of Judah, the southern half of the Kingdom. Isaiah was concerned with the sort of sacrifices that the people were offering to God. They viewed God as someone with a lot of power whom they could bribe.
The people of Judah had been influenced in this regard by their pagan neighbors. Jesus in the Gospel Reading, however, warns us that no one else should stand between ourselves and God. This seems very self-evident, but can in fact demand a lot of us as Catholics. Not even members of our family may be chosen above God.
This is a hard saying. It would seem that Jesus expects us to pit ourselves against our family in order to choose Him. But Jesus didn’t come to earth wanting to divide people, any more than He wanted to die on the cross for the sake of dying. He knew, though, that there are some who refuse to choose God in their lives, and that these people can only find peace in their own hearts when they come to God. Rather than look at Jesus’ words as pitting us against others, we realize that Jesus is telling us that if we want to draw others closer to God, we first of all have to firmly establish our own relationship with God. Out of that relationship with God, we can work at drawing others closer to God again.
“[N]ot one [sparrow] falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.”
Jesus preaches today about Our Father’s providential knowledge and will. “[N]ot one [sparrow] falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge.” God knows all things. We know this abstractly, but perhaps we fail to consider all that this truth of our Faith means.
When we say that God knows all “things”, what sorts of things are we talking about? Facts that would win God a championship on trivia shows? Certainly God knows all objective facts about science, history, etc. But God’s knowledge is not trivial.
God’s infinite knowledge extends to what is most personal. God knows every action you have ever done or failed to do. God also knows every thought you’ve ever had, and every word you’ve ever said. He knows the hopes and desires of every human heart. He knows of every emotion you’ve ever felt, and of the circumstances that led to those emotions.
But in human earthly providence, knowledge leads to the will. God’s knowledge of you, as complete as it is—more complete, in fact, than even your own self-knowledge!—leads God only to love you more. At times, we hide ourselves from God, not understanding the depth of His providential knowledge and will. When we submit ourselves completely to God, we are more flexible in serving as an instrument of His peace.
O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
Today’s psalm especially draws out the spiritual themes of today’s Mass. Psalm 51 is unique among the 150 psalms: every Friday, it is the first psalm the Church prays at Morning Prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours.
The psalm’s importance is understood better when we realize that the very first words the Church utters each morning in the Liturgy of the Hours come from this psalm: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.” These words, the last sentence of today’s responsorial psalm, draw out a verse from today’s First Reading. All week long we have heard the prophet Hosea bringing the wayward Israelites back to their covenant with the Lord God. Today Hosea encourages them to make his words their own: “We shall say no more, ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands; for in you the orphan finds compassion.”
The temptation to make idols out of the work of our hands is always before us. Yet the Church calls us to humility. When we pray the Liturgy of the Hours, our first prayer each day comes from God even before it comes from our lips: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare thy praise.” Everything comes from the Lord, and everything is meant to return to the Lord.
Jesus Himself, only Son of the Father, is the embodiment of the wisdom expressed by the Psalmist and Hosea. He is the embodiment of self-sacrifice. His is the life that every disciple asks the Father for the grace to enter into. Even in the midst of the wolves and snakes of the world, when we lay our sins at the foot of the Cross, Christ can act within us.
CCC 546: Christ teaches through parables CCC 1703-1709: capacity to know and correspond to the voice of God CCC 2006-2011: God associates man in working of grace CCC 1046-1047: creation part of the new universe CCC 2707: the value of meditation
Humility is the foundation of the spiritual life. Through the virtue of humility, the Lord God can dwell more fully within us. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition tell us that growth in the spiritual life proceeds according to three stages. The first stage is called the “purgative way”, where purification takes place, and within which the virtue of humility is key. Jesus’ parable in today’s Gospel passage teaches us about this purgative way.
In the parable, “A sower went out to sow.”Now either this sower is foolish, or he knows something that we don’t know. If you were driving down a paved road and came up behind a farmer driving his tractor and drill, dropping seed for miles onto the asphalt, you’d be concerned. Doesn’t he know that he’s wasting his time, energy and money, in addition to ruining his drill?
But the sower in Jesus’ parable acts in a similar way: “… as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up.” Later in the same chapter of Matthew, Jesus explains “the parable of the sower. The seed sown on the path is the one who hears the word of the kingdom without understanding it, and the evil one comes and steals away what was sown in his heart.”
This is the first of four illustrations that Jesus paints in today’s parable. The first three illustrations are pictures of the sower laboring in vain, because of the path, rocky ground, and thorns. Only the fourth illustration describes seed falling on rich soil, producing fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.
Sowing on the path illustrates ignorance. In other words, this fruitless endeavor describes what happens when we lack the understanding that the Word of God reveals.
By contrast, to grow in humility requires a two-fold knowledge: that is, knowledge of God, and self-knowledge.
Knowledge of God is simple, because God is simple. God is Love. The Church recently, on Trinity Sunday, reflected on the mystery of the God who is divine Love. This reflection, of course, is meant to be like that of a mirror, not only a reflection upon one whom we adore. We reflect upon God as love because we, as His adopted children, are to be like Him, and so are meant to see ourselves in His reflection. That leads us to our need for self-knowledge.
However, self-knowledge is more complicated than knowledge of God because it has two contrasting parts. To be more specific, the fallen nature of man is divided, rather than being simple in the way that God created man “in the beginning”.
On the one hand is knowledge of oneself as a fallen person, as someone who has stumbled and fallen into the filth of one’s own actual sins. This is in addition to inheriting Original Sin, which leaves its traces even upon the baptized person.
On the other hand, there is knowledge of oneself as someone loved by God. One needs to know and reflect upon oneself as a person whom God has picked up out of sin, washed in the Blood of the Lamb, and raised to the dignity of His own child.
These three forms of knowledge, then—knowledge of God, knowledge of oneself as fallen, and knowledge of oneself as raised by God—are like three legs of a stool upon which one sits. Without any one of these three legs, one inevitably falls. But with all three, one can resemble the fourth illustration that Jesus verbally paints in Sunday’s Gospel Reading, where seed falls on rich soil and bears abundant life.
To put this in another way, we can listen to the first half of this Sunday’s Gospel Acclamation: “The seed is the word of God, Christ is the sower.” This sentence speaks of seed and sower. But we also have to consider the importance of the soil. All three of these are inter-dependent: seed, sower, and soil.
These three symbols of elements of the spiritual life represent the Word of God proclaimed, Christ the proclaimer, and the disciple who hears the proclamation and puts it into practice. For the disciple to do this requires humility, because the fallen person is constantly tempted to live life by his own lights and his own strengths, instead of depending each day on the light and truth that come only from God.
Reflections on the Sacred Liturgy 