The Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Luke 2:41-51

… and His mother kept all these things in her heart.

Today’s Gospel passage is proper to today’s feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  The setting is unique within the four Gospel accounts:  Jesus is twelve years old, on the verge of entering into Jewish manhood (an entrance celebrated today with the ceremony of bar mitzvah).  If those scholars are correct who suggest that Jesus was conceived at the time of Passover, than today’s Gospel occurs right on the threshold of His thirteenth year of human life.  So this narrative, like that of Jesus’ Baptism, foreshadows His vocation as the one who by His death leads the sheepfold to the Father.

The specific link between this Gospel passage and today’s feast is the final phrase, in which St. Luke notes that Mary “kept all these things in her heart.”  Yet the culmination of “all these things” that are related in the passage are Jesus’ two questions:  “Why were you looking for me?  Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”

The setting makes Mary’s pondering all these things in her heart very poignant.  As Jesus enters into manhood, He makes clear not just “Who” His Father is (which Mary and Joseph obviously knew), but also that His Father’s Will (symbolized by the Temple) is His reason for being in this world.  With each new insight into her Son’s life, and with each of the seven swords that pierces her immaculate heart, Mary repeats time and again:  “Fiat.”

The Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus [C]
Ezekiel 34:11-16  +  Romans 5:5-11  +  Luke 15:3-7

The love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit ….

Catholics are very familiar with the Church’s devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the heart of her who was never touched by any sin, but rather is full of grace.  Jesus, too, of course, sharing in the divinity of His Father, is sinless, and so we could speak of and celebrate the Immaculate Heart of Jesus.  But today we are celebrating instead the “Sacred Heart” of Jesus.

To be “sacred” means “to be set aside for a special purpose.”  What, then, is the purpose of Jesus’ heart?  The heart is obviously a human element of who Jesus is.  It certainly expresses the love of God the Son, for as Saint John the Divine tells us, God is love.  As God, in his divinity, the Son of course has no physical heart—we can say only that the Godhead possesses a heart in a metaphorical sense—but in His humanity Jesus of course possesses a heart, beating within His Body, pumping His life-blood to all its parts.

What does it mean then to say that Jesus, as human, has a heart?  It means that He is capable of suffering.  To have a heart means to be able to be broken, to be weak, to be vulnerable.  This is the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love:  that He would carry a Cross and die upon it for us, in order to open the gates of Heaven for our darkened, sinful hearts.

This is the special purpose of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the reason for the Incarnation.  This is what Jesus’ heart was set aside for:  that it would be broken, that it would be pierced.  But far be it from us to simply worship the image of the Sacred Heart as an image to be given thanks.  The Sacred Heart is a person to be imitated.

We do not celebrate the feast of “the Sacred Intellect of Jesus”.  Nor do we celebrate the feast of “the Sacred Memory.”  We celebrate the “Sacred Heart” because the greatest of the capacities of God and man is the capacity to will, to choose, and God’s will always chooses love, because God is love, and because love consists in this:  not that we have loved God, but that He has loved us, and has sent His Son as an offering for our sins.

The Sacred Heart is a person to be imitated.  The heart pumps blood to the entire body, and as His Mystical Body’s members we share in that life-blood as we share in the offering for our sins that Christ sacrificed on the Cross and memorialized sacramentally at His Last Supper.  This sacred meal is “set aside”:  its purpose is our sanctification, that our hearts might become more capable of being broken for the salvation of others, and attain to the fullness of Love, Who is God Himself.

The Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time [C]
I Kings 19:16,19-21  +  Galatians 5:1,13-18  +  Luke 9:51-62

When the days for Jesus’ being taken up were fulfilled, he resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem ….

This Sunday, as we return to Sundays in Ordinary Time, Jesus sets out for Jerusalem.  The name “Jerusalem” literally means “city of peace”.  Yet Jesus knew that Jerusalem would be the place of His crucifixion and death.  When the event in today’s Gospel Reading occurred, Jesus knew that the easy life of His first thirty-some years was over.

The Church will be celebrating the Sundays of Ordinary Time until the Church year concludes at the end of November.  Over the course of these weeks, our Gospel passage each Sunday will follow this journey of Jesus towards Jerusalem as Saint Luke the Evangelist recorded it.

As Jesus heads resolutely to the City of Peace, He knows that His vocation is to bring peace to each human person.  Jesus at the Last Supper said, “Peace I leave you, my peace I give you” [John 14:27].  For Jesus, this physical trek towards Jerusalem symbolized the more important journey that he would later make on Good Friday up the hill of Calvary.  We cannot overestimate the importance of Jesus’ death.  Without that moment, everything in our own lives would be meaningless, because to paraphrase Our Lord:  “what would it profit a man if he could gain everything in this world, but not eternal life in the next?”

Within your life, ask yourself how seriously you take the two most important moments in your life:  the two moments that determine whether your life will be one of peace.  You speak of and pray about these two moments when you pray the “Hail Mary”.  The first is now, and the second is the hour of your death.  You don’t pray in the “Hail Mary” about the hour of your birth or the birth of your first child, nor about your graduation or the graduation of your last child; nor about the day of your wedding or about the day you bought your first house.  You don’t even pray about the day of your baptism.

The two most important moments of your life are now and the hour of your death.  Maybe we know other persons who live as if the moment of death will never arrive:  they live only for “now”.  The fact is, though, that every “now” of our life bears a direct impact on which eternal dwelling God will send us packing for at the moment of our death.  Everything we do now, or don’t do now, bears on that moment at the hour of death.

Each of us as a Christian does not control his or her life.  If you do believe you are in control of your life, the life you’re imagining as your own is certainly not the life God wants for you, and which Jesus died to give you.  If you are firmly resolved to prepare your self for the moment of your death, you will be firmly resolved in the “now” of every moment to follow what God is calling you to do.

The call God makes to men and women to embark upon various ways of life—to marriage, to consecrated life, and to the ordained priesthood—is definitely important for each person.  But those calls are not the only calls God makes.  Every day God calls us to follow Him in different ways by serving others.  If we worthily receive the True Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist, He will strengthen us at every “now” of the coming week to more closely follow Jesus, in order to live more fully, bearing the peace of our heavenly Father.

The Nativity of St. John the Baptist
Vigil Readings:
Jeremiah 1:4-10  +  1 Peter 1:8-12  +  Luke 1:5-17
Readings of the Day:
Isaiah 49:1-6  +  Acts 13:22-26  +  Luke 1:57-66,80

For surely the hand of the Lord was with him.

The Nativity of St. John the Baptist is so important a feast that there are two full sets of Scripture readings for Holy Mass.  One set is proclaimed at Vigil Masses on the evening before the feast day, unless June 24th is a Monday, in which case the Vigil is impeded by the celebration of Sunday Mass.  The second set of Scripture readings is proclaimed on the feast day itself.  Yet regardless of whether you attend Mass on the evening before or the day of June 24th, the Gospel passage that you hear will be taken from the first chapter of St. Luke’s account of the Gospel.

The Vigil’s Gospel passage comes from the beginning of Luke 1.  The Gospel passage for the feast day itself comes from the end of the chapter.  These two passages bookend the story of St. John’s birth.  As with the Gospel narratives of Jesus’ birth, the child to be born is the focus, but not the central actor.  In the Gospel passages for today’s feast, the central actor is John’s father, Zechariah.  St. Luke the Evangelist here contrasts Zechariah with the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Zechariah was an elderly husband, yet without children.  Mary was a young betrothed virgin.  Saint Gabriel appears to each of them separately, and tells each not to be afraid.  The archangel announces to each that a son is to be born.  Yet their responses differ profoundly.

The man persists in unbelief, while the woman believes.  Mary’s final word in response to St. Gabriel’s announcement is “Fiat”:  “Let it be done unto me according to your word” [Luke 1:38].  In response to Zechariah’s unbelief, St. Gabriel declares in a verse not long after the end of the Gospel passage for the Vigil Mass:  “behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things come to pass” [Lk 1:20].  That “day” is narrated in the Gospel passage for Sunday.

Saint Augustine in Sunday’s Office of Readings explains that “the silence of Zechariah is nothing but the age of prophecy lying hidden, obscured, as it were, and concealed before the preaching of Christ.”  Later in the same sermon, St. Augustine expounds the distinction between Jesus and His cousin:  “The voice is John, but the Lord ‘in the beginning was the Word.’  John was a voice that lasted only for a time; Christ, the Word in the beginning, is eternal.”

But if the voice must decrease, so that the Word may increase, what can be said of Zechariah?  He is not even a voice, but silence:  the silence in which the Voice is conceived, and a silence which you as a sinner must enter.

The silence illustrated by Zechariah is born of unbelief.  Every sinner is called into this silence.  Most of our fallen world is a modern Babel.  We are unfaithful to God’s Word, because we cannot hear it for the cacophony of the modern world.  We are among those of whom the Beloved Disciple writes in the prologue to his Gospel account:  “the Word came to His own, and His own people received Him not” [John 1:11].

Because it’s always so in this valley of tears, God calls fallen man into silence so that there we might recognize our sins, and hear and heed God’s Word.  The silence of Zechariah is what St. John of the Cross writes about:  “What we need most in order to make [spiritual] progress is to be silent before this great God, with our appetites and our tongue.”

This silence is a means to man’s true end.  This is the end for which God created man “in the beginning”:  to share in the divine life of the Trinity in a holy and eternal silence.  About this final silence, the end of all we are and do as disciples of the Word made Flesh, St. John of the Cross also speaks:  “the Father spoke one Word, which was His Son, and this Word He speaks always in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul.”

St. John the Baptist was born so that the Old Testament might die.  Yet such a death was meant all along in God’s Providence to be fulfilled by a new life, like the grain of wheat that dies in order to bear much fruit.  St. John the Baptist was born to preach the message of repentance:  the need to accept ourselves as sinner, and the need to accept Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away our sins and those of the whole world.

Wednesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 7:15-20

“So by their fruits you will know them.”

Twice in today’s Gospel passage Jesus uses this phrase:  “By their fruits you will know them.”  Jesus is speaking here about “bad fruit”, by which one can know false prophets.  In our own day, part of the scandal that members of the Church—laity and clergy alike—face is that considerable “bad fruit” has been borne by bishops and priests of the Church that Jesus founded.  How can one reconcile that such men who are validly ordained seem by their fruits to be false prophets?

Without taking away from any of the harsh reality that Jesus is describing in today’s Gospel passage, we’re mindful to read each passage in the context of the entire Gospel.  We’re mindful of Jesus’ Parable of the Barren Fig Tree [Luke 13:6-9], where the gardener (a symbol of our Savior) makes this plea:  “Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.”  These words give hope for reformation in the lives of those who have been truly called by God to service in His Church, but who have just as truly failed to bear fruit.  The Truth who is Christ can bring redemption to all, just as He will bring just judgment to all.

Tuesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 7:6,12-14

“How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life.”

Coming to the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, today we hear Him offer several brief proverbs.  It would be difficult to find a common theme among all of them.  Yet we could take any one of them and, brief as it is, commit it to memory and recite it throughout this day for reflection.

Of these proverbs, the second is best known.  The “Golden Rule” is taught to children early in life.  Of course it demands an ability to step back from a situation and reflect upon it from outside.  This is difficult if someone is used to acting impulsively, without reflection.

Perhaps today, though, we could reflect on the Golden Rule in a different light.  Reflect on the Golden Rule as Jesus lived it; or rather, as He died by it.  Reflect on the Golden Rule in the light of the crucifix.  What Jesus did for you on the Cross is what Jesus would have you do for His sake.  This is what He calls you to, in fact, as a member of His Church:  “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” [Matthew 16:24].

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 7:1-5

“The measure with which you measure will be used to measure you.”

Pondering the mystery of Christ, we find that God calls us to act morally along the same lines that we accept Christ:  first, in humble faith; then, with a burning desire to extend God’s love to those beyond our immediate reach.  Thus in the Ten Commandments we are called to serve both God and neighbor.  The first three command us to love God completely, above all others.  Then the last seven command us to serve our neighbor from our love for God.

In today’s Gospel passage we hear Jesus commanding us to love our neighbor in a specific way:  that is, by forgiving our neighbor.  Regarding to what extent—or even whether—we forgive any individual neighbor of ours, Jesus declares:  “The measure with which you measure will be used to measure you.”

We should be mindful that our sins, as infinite offenses against Almighty God, will not permit us finally to enter into His Presence unless we are shown infinite mercy by Almighty God.  So it is that we ourselves, strengthened by God’s own infinite forgiveness, must forgive others if we hope to live in God’s sight.

Saturday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 6:24-34

“You cannot serve God and mammon.”

These famous words from Jesus mark a clear divide between Heaven and earth, and between the spiritual and the material.  But to consider these words of Jesus seriously, we need first to address an underlying assumption.

The culture that surrounds modern persons in the West presumes that each person is his or her own boss.  Modern Western culture teaches children from an early age that they are not meant to serve anyone or anything.  In fact, both God and mammon serve me and my needs!

However, while the modern person may believe such ideas, so strongly reinforced as they are by modern culture, Jesus is offering a caution.  In fact, most of today’s Gospel passage is about the dangers of believing that mammon can serve oneself.

What begins in one’s mind as the idea of mammon serving oneself eventually ends in the servitude of the self to mammon.  The slave that mammon is thought to be becomes the master of the self.  This is the crippling servitude that Jesus is diagnosing, so to speak, through the examples He offers in this passage.

That we might live authentically, Jesus invites us to enter into a relationship with God as our Lord and Master.  This relationship of serving God is radically different than that in which one ends up serving mammon.  In the relationship that Jesus invites us to, through serving God, we become His “friends” [see John 15:15] and His “beloved children” [Ephesians 5:1].

Friday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
Matthew 6:19-23

“… where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”

Today’s Gospel passage from the Sermon on the Mount seems to have two distinct sections.  Nevertheless, a connection suggests itself.  The first section concerns wealth of different types.  The second concerns the human eye and light.  What does human vision have to do with human wealth?

In the first part of today’s Gospel passage we hear one of the more famous of Jesus’ sayings:  “where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.”  The truth of this saying is so plain that it would surely be recognized by persons of all types of religious faith (or even by those with little or no faith).  It’s not necessarily a religious saying.  It’s a saying about human nature.  Of course, as the medieval principle puts it, “grace builds upon nature.”  God wishes for our sake that He be our treasure, but we are free to choose something merely human to serve as our treasure (or rather, as it turns out, for us to serve).

Whatever we choose as the treasure of our life, there will our heart gravitate.  There will we spend the energies of our heart, mind and soul.  But how does one go about choosing one’s treasure?  This is where the second half of today’s Gospel passage comes into play.

How does someone choose his treasure?  Is this process of choosing purely random and spontaneous?  Or does it come about by virtue of where we train the gaze of our soul?  Part of Christian realism is believing that knowledge comes through the human senses.  What we choose to look at has a profound influence on whether we choose something earthly as the treasure we will serve, or whether we choose God’s self-sacrifice of Jesus in the Eucharist as our treasure.  Spend at least five minutes today, then, looking at a crucifix and reflecting upon Jesus’ self-gift as given specifically for you.