This Sunday is the third in a series of five Sundays where we’re hearing some parts of the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s gospel, and I think it was going pretty smoothly until today. Here’s a brief refresher. First we heard the Beatitudes, about how the meek and peacemakers and mourners are the blessed ones, that’s how God is, all wonderful. Then in last week’s gospel, we were told we are the salt of the earth, we are the light of the world that shouldn’t be hidden. Also wonderful. But then there’s this week, when after these beautiful words about how God sees us and where we’re going we’re…
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I’m going to ask you to take a moment and think back before Christmas, if you can, and think about the last time we heard about John the Baptist here in the gospel readings. That was back in Advent, and there was a lot about John the Baptist. We hear about him then because he was someone who felt called by God to be on the lookout for God alive and active in this world. He believed that God was sending someone to us, someone who would change everything. And John had attracted huge crowds and gotten them very excited, telling them that he, John, was not that person, but…
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John the Baptist is one of the saints that everyone knows, but I think it’s fair to say that he is not anyone’s favorite saint, and it isn’t hard to see why. He seems primitive, coming from the desert looking like someone who has lost his connection with civilization. He seems threatening, talking about fire and wrath. And here in December, he really doesn’t seem very positive or upbeat or Christmassy. That’s because every year, he is trying to tell us something that is hard to believe and hard to focus on. John is the saint who tells us both that something is coming but also that something is wrong.…
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I think I speak for many Catholics when I say that gospel readings like the one we just heard really aren’t our style. All this talk about end-time persecutions, and wars that mean the world is just about over. This sounds like the kind of talk we usually leave to what we think of as more fringe-y Christians who think the end of the world is coming very quickly, and they are often people who seem to want it sooner rather than later, because it’ll be so great to be proved right about the winners and losers. But for the rest of us, we usually think something more like, I’ve…
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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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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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Like many people as they get older, I tend to think of myself in my mind as much younger than I am, but the reality all comes out now and then and it’s usually when I mention an entertainer or a politician who was active when I was young and I of course know all about, whereas everyone under 30 in the room looks at me like I just mentioned that I know someone from ancient Rome. Today I’m going to give you just that experience, since I want to start with a brief story about the old 20th-century comedian Jack Benny. Jack’s character throughout his career was that he…
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About a week ago I had what I thought was a terrific party at my house. It was celebrating a happy occasion and a great person, and over the course of an evening there were dozens of people there, everyone someone I really liked. It was a celebration of how much we all had in common, and it made me feel pretty good about the world. Today in the gospel we have a different sort of dinner party, but unlike mine there’s a sudden drama that gets acted out in the middle of this one. A person comes in who doesn’t act like anyone else. It takes place in the…
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In Jesus’s last few days before his passion and death, and again when he appeared to the disciples after his resurrection, he seemingly said one word more than any other: peace. “Peace I leave with you,” he says today, “my peace I give to you.” And to a group of tense and frightened disciples who were confused about what the next day was going to bring, they must have been welcome words. A sense of peace was what they wanted and needed. And yet, after these beautiful and reassuring words, the disciples didn’t get very much peace. Immediately after this passage, Jesus says, “Arise, let us leave this place,” and…
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There are a lot of things about Jesus it’s relatively easy to believe. For example, we can believe that of all good people, he was the best. We can believe that no one else in history embodied the love of God so completely. We can believe that of all the great saints the world has produced, he is the one most worth following. But what is hard to believe is this: When Thomas the disciple says that he can’t believe Jesus is alive unless he sees him with his own eyes, I think we all know in our hearts the frustration he is talking about. We wish we could see…