You would have to excuse the rich man who just walked away from Jesus in today’s gospel if the lesson that he learned in this encounter was not “Sell what you have and follow me”. Instead, what he probably came away thinking was a more familiar lesson we all know: “If you don’t want to know, don’t ask.” We feel sorry for him, a basically good man who asks what he ought to do and can’t bring himself to do it, and is then told that it will be very, very hard for him to ever see the kingdom of God. Let’s leave aside the image of the camel and…
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If you have an iPhone, maybe you have used the virtual assistant it comes with, Siri. If not, I’m sure you have seen friends of yours who are now accustomed to speaking to their phones like they are human beings, giving Siri all sorts of assignments. My sister-in-law had gotten very accustomed to this, until one day when she asked Siri a fairly routine question, and she swears, Siri answered, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that for you right now.” I never really thought Siri was anything like a human assistant until I heard about that moment. It seems that even virtual assistants can drop the ball, and lose track…
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Back when I was growing up, I had six aunts who all lived in the same town, and of course they were in charge of pulling together the food for every sort of family gathering, from Christmas to the 4th of July to the occasional funeral. And a special fear had clearly been passed down to my aunts: the fear was, that at a gathering you were in charge of, you’d run out of food. We don’t know where this fear came from, whether it was something they got growing up during the depression of the 1920s, or whether it went back much further to pre-history in the mountains of…
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My mother was a very perceptive person with strong opinions about a lot of things. And she could be very quotable, in fact, some of her quotable quotes are still part of my interior life. At various times, when she saw someone getting out of line, doing or saying something that showed that the perpetrator didn’t understand his appropriate position in the universe, whether it was someone close by or even someone on the national scene, you’d hear her say, “Who does he think he is?” Or, if you were way out of line yourself, you might be unlucky enough to hear her say, with a penetrating look, “Who do…
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In these last weeks of the Easter season, we always hear some very famous and sometimes very difficult to understand passages from the Gospel of John, like the one we just heard about the vine and the vine grower. This is from what is often called the final discourse, that takes up four whole chapters in the gospel of John, a long monologue from Jesus to his disciples late in the night before his passion and death. And what he seems to be most concerned to give them in their last moments together is image after image of what their relationship with Jesus will be in the future. Partly, this…
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When you settled into your seats to listen to the first reading from the Old Testament, I wonder how many of you were immediately discouraged when the first thing you heard was about scabs and pustules. This is not what we want to hear about when we come here for a little inspiration. But, for better or for worse, the fact is, our ancestors in the faith thought that things like this were a serious issue for their community, and in those parts of the Old Testament that people skip through really fast when they decide one day they want to try to read the whole thing, there are many…
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If this gospel scene we just heard were a Hollywood movie, with these first two apostles suddenly dropping everything and knowing they just had to follow Jesus, we know how it would look. Jesus would appear on the scene and immediately we’d know who he was, there would be something mesmerizing about Jesus, probably very handsome, certainly more handsome than anyone else in the movie. You’d be able to tell from hundreds of feet away that there was something powerful about him, he’d look like he was calm and composed and somehow not of this world, with a far-away look. His eyes would lock onto these two followers of John…
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Suppose you flipped past the Discovery Channel some evening and you saw a documentary about a primitive tribe, just rediscovered by some anthropologists, who made their promises in a ritual where they slaughtered animals, smeared the blood on themselves, and on everything, and on the altar they set up to their god? If you didn’t change the channel immediately, it would be hard not to have a reaction that says: Thank God we’ve moved beyond that stage of evolution. Then, of course, you’d come here, and today, on this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are presented with the same problem. Readings with covenants of blood everywhere,…
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The gospels are filled with things that Jesus said that we sometimes wish he had never said. About taking up the cross and following him. About the difficulties of being concerned about money and success. About how treatment of the poor is how we are measured as Christians. All those difficult phrases that stay with us, and bother us, and help us understand him better, difficult as they are. But today, on this feast of Christ the King, in the gospel we hear something that I wonder if Jesus himself regrets having said. Not because it isn’t true, but because it has long been so easy to misinterpret him, and…
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No matter how many times we hear this story, something in it grips us. We know how it ends, we know it is a tragedy, but something in us wants to hear it anyway, the familiar details of how Pilate was too cowardly to follow his better instincts, and all the sad details of this death that was so avoidable. The reason why this story draws us in like few other stories isn’t always clear to us, but then, suddenly, unexpectedly, after years of hearing it, we find out why. We see someone we love, suffering for days or weeks from a painful final illness, or someone dying too young…