St. Benedict, Abbot
Isaiah 6:1-8  +  Matthew 10:24-33
July 11, 2020

“[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.

Friday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time [II]
Hosea 14:2-10  +  Matthew 10:16-23
July 10, 2020

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.

The Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time [A]
Isaiah 55:10-11  +  Romans 8:18-23  +  Matthew 13:1-23

“And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path, and birds came and ate it up.”

references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for this Sunday by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

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.

Thursday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time [II]
Hosea 11:1-4,8-9  +  Matthew 10:7-15
July 9, 2020

“Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words—go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.”

The Scriptures and Tradition of the Church use many images to describe God.  The reason for this wealth of images, of course, is the fact that God is infinite:  no one image does justice to the depth and richness of God who is love.  Likewise, there are many images used to describe the peoples whom, throughout salvation history, God has desired to draw to Himself.  The tribes of Israel and the Mystical Body of Christ are described by varied metaphors.

However, we also have to confess that it takes many images to describe God’s People for a another, very different reason.  There are so many ways in which God’s People sin, and fail to live up to the relationship to which He constantly calls us.  It takes many different images and metaphors to describe the infidelity of the People of God.  So it is in Hosea, as the prophet describes Israel with the image of a spouse, as well as the image of a child, capturing the ingratitude of one who fails to give thanks for the sacrifices that the father has made.

One of the metaphors that Hosea uses speaks to us especially as followers of Jesus.  Offering the Lord’s prophecy to Israel, Hosea says, “Yet, though I stooped to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.”  The “child”—in the singular—is the nation gathered together and nourished through the Law and the Prophets, yet the Lord recognizes that “they”—all of them—were unfaithful to Him.

Even more so did our Heavenly Father offer His own divine Son for the sake of His people, only to be met with rejection.  The sacrifice of Christ Jesus is both healing and nourishment for the People of God.  This is an important reason to prepare for Holy Mass with great devotion:  spending time in private prayer and devotion, considering how many joys and sorrows we have to offer to God, that we might be both strengthened and healed.

Wednesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time [II]
Hosea 10:1-3,7-8,12  +  Matthew 10:1-7
July 8, 2020

“Go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Today’s Gospel passage speaks about reaching out to those who are hurt and sick.  We hear Jesus sending his twelve apostles to go out and heal “every disease and every illness.”  More than just a prophet, Jesus has authority not only to call back the repentant to Himself, but also to heal them.

When Jesus sends the apostles, His instructions are for them to go to “the lost sheep of the House of Israel”.  In our own day, there are many fallen-away Catholics, and of course we pray for them.  But we can do more for them than just pray.  With the sort of love that Jesus held in His Sacred Heart when He looked at the crowds and said, “the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few”, we can reach out to those who have fallen away from the Church.

We can offer gentle instructions to those who don’t know how to start again to live the Faith:  to begin again to receive the sacraments, the gifts of grace which come to us through the apostles and their successors.  It’s the bishops’ responsibility—and the responsibility of those priests who work under their bishops—to bring lost sheep back into the fold through the sacraments.  But often, it will be ordinary Christians who point those lost sheep in the right direction.

Tuesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time [II]
Hosea 8:4-7,11-13  +  Matthew 9:32-38
July 7, 2020

“The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few ….”

The cry that we hear Jesus utter in today’s Gospel passage—“the harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few”—is one that we usually associate with the need for vocations in the Church.  But Jesus also speaks through these words about the harvest of one’s heart and the fruits of one’s soul.  In each person is a soul created by God, and each soul is capable of being completely filled, as much as it is able:  that is, to be “perfected” by God’s grace.

Unfortunately, this “harvest of the soul” is neglected by so many of us by our actions and our inaction.  We are not willing to believe what the Church teaches about God calling every human person to be a saint.  The Church at the Second Vatican Council spoke strongly about the “universal call to holiness”.

God gives each one of us many gifts, but only when we talk with God and are strengthened by Him do we learn how to use those gifts correctly, in accord with His plan.  Through our prayer, and God’s grace, our minds and wills can be formed, so that we can be more perfectly the saints God wants us to be.

Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time [II]
Hosea 2:16,17-18,21-22  +  Matthew 9:18-26
July 6, 2020

“Courage, daughter!  Your faith has saved you.”

In today’s Gospel passage are two people who see how God wants to be in their lives in time of need.  In our day and age, most prayers that are offered to God are prayers of petition.  Perhaps that’s always been the case.  In fact, our knowledge of that fact doesn’t mean that we ourselves don’t have lengthy lists of petitions that we’d like to offer to God.

It’s true that petitionary prayer—in which we ask for something from God—is not as selfless a form of prayer as adoration, or even as selfless as thanksgiving or contrition.  But God does desire that we present our petitions to Him.

Consider the woman in today’s Gospel passage.  She had suffered for many years.  She interrupts Christ right in the middle of His trying to help someone else.  We should make that woman’s faith our own:  not simply her faith in Christ’s power, but also her faith in His patience and compassion.  There is no true need in our lives that we should not offer to God.

Of course, not every petition is answered as we wish, as are the petitions of this woman and the official.  Sadly, some Christians stop offering their petitions to God—or even stop believing in God—when He doesn’t provide the responses they want.  But growth in prayer requires the acceptance of God’s “No”’s, and learning through them to trust more deeply His providential Will.

Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time [II]
Amos 9:11-15  +  Matthew 9:14-17
July 4, 2020

“Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?”

It’s the disciples of St. John the Baptist—and not the saint himself—who appear and speak in today’s Gospel passage.  Nonetheless, today’s passage offers us similarities and contrasts between these two cousins:  one of them the voice of the Word, and the other the Word made Flesh.

One of the more obvious contrasts concerns fasting, and the fact that John’s disciples fast while Jesus’ do not.  But John’s disciples misunderstand the reason for this difference.  They misunderstand the relationship between John and Jesus.  Perhaps they thought of them as two equally inspiring religious figures.  Perhaps they thought of them as two equally valid paths leading to God’s righteousness.

In fact, John leads to Jesus.  John himself preached this clearly, but his disciples did not hear John clearly.

The last four sentences of today’s Gospel passage offer two mini-parables as a way to see these differences between John and Jesus.  Jesus is the new wine that must be poured into new wineskins.  This parable echoes His first public miracle at Cana [John 2:1-12].  To follow Jesus, a new approach to God must be accepted.  To be a disciple means to follow John in the constant need for penance and repentance.

St. Thomas, Apostle
Ephesians 2:19-22  +  John 20:24-29
July 3, 2020

“… bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”

The Scriptures for the Mass of St. Thomas’ feast actually focus on him very little.  It’s not uncommon for the First Reading on the feast of an apostle to be either written by him or at least refer to him in passing.  However, today’s First Reading from St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians does not mention Thomas.  Its focus is the Church.

What is the Church, and what is her relation to Christ?  One might argue that today’s First Reading was chosen for this feast because it refers to the Church’s “foundation of the Apostles and prophets”.  But St. Paul links these apostles and prophets directly to Christ.  This foundation is related to Christ who is the Church’s “capstone”.

This capstone—Christ—is the Church’s source of unity.  The last sentence of today’s First Reading uses the word “together” twice.  It’s through Christ that the Church’s members are “held together” and grow “into a temple”.  In Him the Church’s members are “built together” as “a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.”  You yourself are a member of this great work of God!  Give thanks today for God’s gift of the Church, and for the spiritual growth that God offers you through this “dwelling place”.