Wednesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time [I]
Romans 13:8-10  +  Luke 14:25-33
November 6, 2019

   …love is the fulfillment of the law.   

In today’s First Reading, Saint Paul speaks about the second of Jesus’ two great commandments.  As you know, Jesus taught His disciples that the Law of God could be simply expressed in two great commandments.  Before Jesus, with the Ten Commandments that God had given Moses, and the hundreds of moral prescriptions developed by rabbis to explain them, Jewish morality had become complex, and to many, overwhelming.  Jesus profoundly simplifies matters for His disciples.

Love God with your whole heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus teaches us that these two sum up the entire law of God.  St. Paul in our First Reading explains that “love is the fulfillment of the law.”  Love is not simply the summary of the Law, but its fulfillment.

When we are young, our parents make sure that we memorize the Ten Commandments.  It’s important to memorize these ten, as each of the ten touches on a key manner in which we must love God and our neighbor.  But we should not lose sight that all of them are about love.  Today’s First Reading helps us focus on what it means to love our neighbor as our self.  Pray for the grace to bring your love for your neighbor into focus through your love for God.

Tuesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time [I]
Romans 12:5-16  +  Luke 14:15-24
November 5, 2019

   … persevere in prayer.   

Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans touches on nearly every theme of the Christian life.  Today’s passage from Romans proclaims the mystery of the Church as Christ’s Body.  The diversity of the Church’s members serves her unity.  The Church’s diversity is willed by God for the sake of her unity, to foster that unity.

From this consideration of the Church as one body with many members, St. Paul moves to a rapid-fire consideration of many virtues that mark the Christian life.

Many of the virtues that ought to mark a Christian’s life come through simple fidelity to one’s calling from the Lord.  Yet we know that each person is called in many different ways.  Whether one reflects on a calling that takes the form of a vocation such as marriage or consecrated life, or a more specific and perhaps temporary calling based upon work, such as teaching or works of mercy, these varied callings are “near occasions of grace”, so to speak.  They all and always find their proper measure within the setting of the Church.

Other virtues that ought to mark a Christian’s life come from struggles and challenges common to all Christians.  Many of these struggles are due to sin.  St. Paul addresses these also in today’s First Reading.  “Endure in affliction.”  “Persevere in prayer.”  “Bless those who persecute you.”  Through these common challenges, we are called to have compassion on our brothers and sisters in Christ.  We are called to recognize our common struggles as sinners:  children of Adam and Eve.  Thanks be to God for the New Adam, Jesus Christ, into whose life He calls us.

St. Charles Borromeo, Bishop
Romans 11:29-36  +  Luke 14:12-14
November 4, 2019

   “For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”   

Although Jesus’ words today take the form of a command (“do not invite…”) to us as His disciples, we can reflect today on His words through a process of inversion.  That is, we can consider ourselves as those invited to a banquet.  The one inviting us is the Lord Jesus.  The banquet is the sacramental celebration of the Last Supper:  the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Shortly before the distribution of Holy Communion, the priest—holding aloft the Sacred Host—proclaims that “[b]lessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”  The response of the faithful is, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof… .”  In this, both priest and faithful gaze on the One who has called us to Him.  We are “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind” of whom Jesus speaks in today’s Gospel passage.

For God Himself, of course, it’s not that He will be blessed because of our inability to repay Him.  It is from the Lord’s own divine goodness—eternal and infinite—that He bestows on us the blessing on being called to the banquet of the Eucharist.  Although we are unable to repay the Lord “in kind” for this invitation, we can nonetheless repay Him with our lives:  with the self-gift of our own body and blood, soul and humanity as Jesus’ disciples.

The Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
Wisdom 11:22—12:2  +  2 Thessalonians 1:11—2:2  +  Luke 19:1-10

   So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus….   

Out of the 52 Sundays of the Church year, more than thirty are Sundays in Ordinary Time.  When we reach these “Thirty-something” weeks, the Church’s liturgical year is drawing to a close.  During these final weeks, the Church focuses on what are called “the Last Things”:  that is, realities commonly associated with the end of the world.  The Last Things are Heaven, Hell, death and judgment.

Nonetheless, the Gospel on this 31^st Sunday in Ordinary Time is not dramatic or apocalyptic.  It’s a simple story about Jesus and a fellow of short stature named Zacchaeus.  Yet the simplicity of this story helps us relate to it.  We might be impressed or even awed by dramatic stories about the end times, but it’s hard—once we return to the ordinary grind of daily life—to convince ourselves that such stories have much to do with us.  But the story about Zacchaeus is easier for us to relate to because it’s such a humble story.

Look at Zacchaeus.  He is a rich collector of taxes.  Each of us, like him, is attached to worldly things.  Zacchaeus (meaning you) wants to see who Jesus is, but Zacchaeus has two strikes against him.

The first strike against Zacchaeus is the crowd, because everyone wants to see Jesus.  It’s easy to get lost and to feel unloved when you’re in the middle of a crowd.  You might ask, “How can Jesus love everyone?”  The second strike against Zacchaeus is his small size, which may represent the size of our souls.  You might feel unworthy of God’s love and ask, “How could Jesus love me, as small as I am?”

That’s why Zacchaeus climbs up into a sycamore tree to see Jesus.  This is all Zacchaeus wants:  simply to see Jesus.  But that’s not enough for Jesus.  This reveals to us an important point about the spiritual life.  God always wants more for us than we want for ourselves.  The question, then, is whether we’re willing to do what’s needed to accept what God wants for us.

This brings us to the turning point in Sunday’s Gospel passage.  When Jesus reached the place where Zacchaeus had climbed the tree, Jesus looked up and said, “Zacchaeus, come down quickly; for today I must stay at your house.”  Jesus takes the initiative to reach out to this individual.  Likewise, just as he reached out to this little sinner, he is trying to reach into your life.

This passage illustrates the point and purpose of the spiritual life:  that God would dwell within us, and from within, transform us.  This is the point of listening to God in the Liturgy of the Word at Holy Mass:  to come down from our self-regard and allow Jesus to enter our home—to enter our soul—in order to transform us from within through the grace of the Eucharist in Holy Communion.

In the last sentence of today’s Gospel passage, Jesus offers Zacchaeus hope.  Zacchaeus knew that he was coming up short in life, but he didn’t know if Jesus would offer him what he was lacking.  Jesus responds by declaring, “the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.”

The Commemoration of All Souls
Wis 3:1-9  +  Rom 5:5-11  +  Jn 6:37-40
November 2, 2019

   The souls of the just are in the hand of God.   

The belief the Church celebrates today is part of the “communion of saints”.  That’s a familiar phrase—we recite it in the Apostles’ Creed—but the “communion of saints” isn’t just those who are canonized saints in Heaven, but also the members of the Church who are in Purgatory, as well as those on earth.  Today we who are members of that third group pray for those in the second, so that joined through prayer, we all may become members of the first.

Sometimes we feel torn like Saint Paul.  While it’s better to be in heaven, God wants us here on earth for His purposes.  Those purposes call each of us to help others in many ways.  One of the most important of these is prayer for others, which is formally called “intercession”.

Even in heaven, saints are given missions by God.  Saints are not simply fixed on God, without regard for others.  Saints in heaven pray for the rest of the “communion of saints”.

We on earth are like the saints in Heaven in this regard.  While we might want to fix our attention on God alone, God wants us to offer our lives for others, because this is often where we find God revealed in our lives.  So it is through our prayers of intercession, both for fellow pilgrims on earth, and for those in Purgatory.

Does this take away from God?  No.  God wants us to turn to each other.  Intercessory prayer is a form of Jesus’ command to “love your neighbor as yourself”.  If it’s valid in God’s eyes to pray for oneself, why wouldn’t it be to pray for others?  When a family suffers a tragedy, they draw closer together.  Part of this occurs through prayer, and they all are stronger afterwards, and more closely knit together.

Our prayer for others draws us closer to those we pray for.  Those in Heaven, in Purgatory, and on earth are drawn closer together through intercession.  When we intercede for another—or ask someone’s intercession—we don’t believe that that person is God.  We ask another to take our prayers to God.  When we call our mother and ask her to pray for us, we’re doing the same as when we kneel and pray a rosary:  we are asking our mother to pray to God for us.

Through all prayers of devout intercession, the Body of Christ grows stronger.  In the person of Christ, God and man are united.  Within Christ, we live as members of his Body.  Within Christ, we build others up, and so find God’s love for us.

All Saints’ Day
Rev 7:2-4,9-14  +  1 Jn 3:1-3  +  Mt 5:1-12
November 1, 2019

   See what love the Father has bestowed on us, in letting us be called children of God!   

“Children of God.”  That’s what it means to be saints:  to be children of God.

We all know that a child resembles his or her parents, for good and for ill.  So in telling us that we can be called “children of God”, St. John the Beloved Disciple is telling us that there’s something in us that resembles God, that is inherently good, since of course there is nothing bad in God.  Only from Adam and Eve do we inherit Original Sin and its consequences.

As we celebrate the feast of All Saints with the Church throughout the world, we ask:  “What does it mean to be a saint?”  “What is that something in us that resembles God?”

At the moment that each of us was conceived, as our parents shared in the power of God the Creator, that very God called each one of us into existence, and gave us life.

But it’s not the fact that we are alive that makes us children of God, for God could have given each of us any form of life He wanted.  He could have made each of us a plant, or a lower form of animal on the ladder of created things.  All these things have life, but they are not children of God.

We’re tempted to think that it’s our gifts of personality, intelligence, social status, our salaries, or the size of our homes that makes us who we are.  Sad to say, in the eyes of other people that may be true:  other people may rate us as persons according to these things.  But God’s ways are not our ways.

In the eyes of God, what makes you human is your capacity to be transformed:  your capacity to be transformed into something other than what you began life as.  This doesn’t simply mean the ability to change form:  all animals change shape and size from being an embryo, to an infant, to a youngster, to an adult.  Each of us is a human being throughout, and is the same person throughout.

But to put this in a single word, human life is marked by the possibility of “transcendence”.  As humans, God has given us the power to change our position on that ladder:  we can climb that ladder, and reach for Heaven.  We can approach God and become like Him.  As children of God, we resemble God to the extent that we are holy.

The Virgin Mary with the Apostles and Other Saints by Fra Angelico [1395-1455]

Thursday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time [I]
Romans 8:31-39  +  Luke 13:31-35
October 31, 2019

   If God is for us, who can be against us?   

The words of Saint Paul at the beginning of today’s First Reading are as simple as they are profound.  “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  In the verses that follow, St. Paul reminds us of the length to which God’s love for sinful man took Him.  St. Paul continues to ask rhetorical questions, exploring God’s love for us from a somewhat different perspective each time.  “Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones?”  “Who will condemn?”  “What will separate us from the love of Christ?”

St. Paul concludes his scriptural rhetoric with a tour de force statement of faith:  “neither death, not life, nor angels, nor principalities, not present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God”.  St. Paul does not mention, of course, that there is one thing that can indeed separate one from the love of God, and that is one’s one will.  But in light of this, we see our task as disciples to submit our sinful will to God’s Hand.

In today’s Gospel Reading Jesus takes to task those in Jerusalem’s past who chose to work against God’s love by killing the prophets.  He sees them as foreshadowing His own death.  Yet when Pharisees try to get rid of Jesus by telling him that Herod is threatening His life, Jesus explains in terms of His own earthly vocation what St. Paul proclaimed in lofty terms in today’s First Reading:  “I cast out demons and I perform healings today and tomorrow, and on the third day I accomplish my purpose.  Yet I must continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day”.  Not even Jesus’ crucifixion on Calvary can separate us from God’s love.  In fact, Jesus’ crucifixion is the door to God’s love for us.

Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time [I]
Romans 8:26-30  +  Luke 13:22-30
October 30, 2019

   “‘Depart from me, all you evildoers!’”   

Christ in today’s Gospel touches upon one of the great temptations faced by those who serve Him.  Repeatedly He tells us that our motivations are as important as our words and actions.  Indeed, bad motives can cancel the “good” we think do and say.

There should be only one motive for serving God in Christ, and that is the sincere desire to return the love He pours out on us and to do His will out of that love, not just for our good but also for the good of others.  God is interested in the condition of our hearts, not just an impressive list of our deeds.

Sin enters into the serving of Christ when it is used as a means of self-aggrandizement or to line pockets with “green.”  While such people may perform well their hearts remain focused on themselves.  They dazzle audiences with their cleverness and charisma and say only what pleases the listeners—denying or downplaying sin, rationalizing wrongdoings, emphasizing God’s love while failing to mention God’s irrevocable truths and the justice by which we must live.  Theirs is the “wide door” against which Christ speaks.

The Wedding Banquet by Alessandro Botticelli [1445-1510]

Tuesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time [I]
Romans 8:18-25  +  Luke 13:18-21
October 29, 2019

   “To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God?”   

Today’s Gospel passage presents two brief parables in which Jesus specifically focuses our attention on “the Kingdom of God”.  It might seem a simple question, but what exactly is this Kingdom?  Is this Kingdom meant to be the Church’s life on earth?  Is this Kingdom in fact Heaven, which is to say, being in the presence of God?  In the latter case, the Church on earth only foreshadows the full glory of the Kingdom of God.

The Second Vatican Council spoke directly about the connection between the Church and the Kingdom of God.  The Council explained that this connection is a relationship of service, stating:  “While helping the world and receiving many benefits from it, the Church has a single intention:  That God’s Kingdom may come, and that salvation of the whole human race may come to pass.”  What this quote does not explain is whether one ought to hope for the coming of this Kingdom on earth, or whether it’s only possible for this Kingdom to be realized on the other side of death’s door.

In any case, the sacrifice that Christ makes of His Body for the sake of the Church is a paradigm.  It is a paradigm for understanding the sacrifice that the Church makes for the sake of the Kingdom.  This mission of the Church is inherently future-oriented, calling forth from Christians the virtue of hope, as they look forward to the Church’s final fulfillment at the Lord’s Second Coming.