We hardly need a homily to give us the secret meaning of a gospel like this one. It’s not very subtle. It’s an unforgettable image, what the reading describes as a great chasm after death, a chasm between all the people we could have helped and us, but with the roles now reversed, the poor rewarded, the rich with nothing. It’s a nightmare of eternal life that we’d like to think would shake us up, give us enough of a cold sweat to change some priorities, like when the ghost of Christmas yet to come finally put the fear of God into Ebenezer Scrooge. And yet the point of this…
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This gospel today has such extreme language that of course we have to conclude that we can’t really take it literally. As one great preacher pointed out about this reading, it’s not like any of us have ever seen a congregation with even a few one-eyed or one-handed Christians who clearly took Jesus’s guidance about how to deal with their sinful tendencies. And as far the idea about people who discourage people from following Jesus being better off drowned, well, I can think of several such people who drive people away from the church, and as far as I know they are unfortunately not tied to a rock at the…
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For people in public life, there are a lot of embarrassing things you can do these days. You can steal money, or have a secret romantic relationship, or tell an obvious lie. But it seems these days that one of the most embarrassing things you can do is to change your mind. I’m not talking about a little talking out of both sides of your mouth, where you tell one group of people one thing they want to hear and another group something slightly different that they want to hear. That’s still acceptable – in fact it’s almost a job requirement to be in politics, I guess. What I’m talking…
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Psychologists have a video that they use in experiments to illustrate something about how humans observe things. They assemble a group of people to watch this video, but before they show it, they tell the group that the point of their watching is to notice people in the video throwing a ball to one another, and their assignment is to count the number of times this happens, the ball changing hands. After the video, they ask people what number they counted, and most people have a pretty accurate number. Then, the person showing the video asks everyone, “How many of you saw the gorilla?” People inevitably think he’s crazy —…