It’s frustrating sometimes, but it’s a fact that even the most brilliant theologians don’t know very much about what our life with God in the future is going to be like. All we have are hints and images, and we get some of the most powerful ones in today’s gospel. First, today we hear again the only image that Jesus uses more than once to describe eternal life, we’re told it’s a banquet, a wedding feast even, one where God is virtually at the table with us, a celebration of our presence together that doesn’t end. It’s the world reunited and transformed. I think that’s something that is appealing to…
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Jesus was asked a lot of questions as he walked from town to town during his life, and he answered all of them, but he answered them in his own way. At first, it might seem like he always avoided the questions, because he rarely answered the question people thought they wanted answered. But he had his own way of doing this. He wasn’t like a politician who says “I’m glad you asked that question” and then proceeds to answer a totally different one. What Jesus does is answer the real question, the important life or death question, not the nitpicky religious question that frankly are usually the ones that…
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The current Catechism of the Catholic Church has 2,865 numbered sections, and in this edition it runs to at least 700 pages. In the index you’ll see that it covers topics from the Trinity to ordination to bioethics, and you can pull it down off the shelf to settle almost any argument about Catholic theology and customs and practices. If you want to know what the Catholic church teaches, a lot of it is right here. But here’s the problem with having that big a book as our catechism. It can make what you need to know and believe to be a Catholic Christian seem much more complex than it…
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If you ever visit Rome and go to the basilica of St. Peter’s, the first time you see it, no matter how jaded you are, you’ll be overwhelmed by its size and scale. In the midst of all the spectacle, you may not even notice that in the center, carved around the bottom of the dome in what seem like ten-foot letters, are the words Jesus speaks in today’s gospel: You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church. All this, because Peter answered the question from Jesus in today’s gospel: Who do you say that I am? I hear, by the way, they have made it…
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“This is a great mystery,” Paul says in the second reading, “a great mystery, and I am applying it to Christ and the Church.” The mystery, of course, is what he could possibly mean trying to draw a parallel between marriage and the relationship God has with us, members of the church. The first thing that has to be said is that if it is true, as our tradition claims, that the church is the bride of Christ, there must have been any number of late nights over the past 2,000 years when Jesus asked himself if he married the wrong woman. It’s not just that we fight and pick…