Some of the great Catholic theologians of the Middle Ages had a strong opinion about why God couldn’t ever change. And here was roughly the way their reasoning went. God, by definition, is greater than any category of anything we can think of. Therefore God is so vast, that it’s really impossible for us to say that there’s anything that God is not. And if there’s nothing that God is not, then how could God ever change? Because by definition, if you change, you become something you weren’t before. That would mean God wasn’t complete to start with. So therefore, by logic, God can’t change. QED, as they said in…
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This is one of those difficult gospel readings that has a way of catching us by surprise here on a quiet summer weekend, when out of nowhere, probably when we are hoping for some lighter content, we hear from a frustrated Jesus that we barely recognize. Jesus is clearly upset today that people around him are not hearing what he is really saying, maybe even his closest disciples don’t get it, he is telling them that his message is stronger medicine than everyone seems to think. And as a result we get Jesus saying some things that just don’t fit with the way we like to picture him. The man…
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I grew up in a big extended family that had only recently arrived in the United States, and like a lot of people with that kind of a history, my world growing up was divided into two parts. There were the people who were in my extended family and the people who weren’t. The people who were in the family were the people you were told you could trust, they were the people you helped before anyone else who might need helping, they were the people you spent all your time with, whether you wanted to or not. And as I got older, some of them definitely fell into the…