Numbers 21:4-9 + John 8:21-30

This is not an easy gospel to hear. It reflects the sense of urgency that Jesus must have felt at this point in his mission. Time was short. Jesus faced increasing opposition from powerful men – and they were men – who were determined to preserve the status quo even if doing so included sending him to his death. Everyone knew what became of rebels, agitators and wannabe prophets: They went to the cross. Indeed crucifixion had been crafted – carefully and thoughtfully, by those obsessed with empire – to effectively deter and prevent rebellion. For Jesus and his followers there was no time to waste and so the message is stated simply and starkly: To reject the revelation of God, as a whole or in part, is to embrace death. There’s no threat here; Jesus is simply stating a fact, and in fact his words echo those of Moses, spoken centuries earlier: “I set before you life and death” (Deuteronomy 30:19). God’s ways are the ways of life.

But first, a necessary digression, made so by John’s use of “the Jews” and by the sad fact that again and again the fourth gospel has been pressed into service by antisemites in general and especially by those who would vilify “the Jews” as supposed “Christ-killers”, even though the Catholic Church has authoritatively rejected this particular abomination at least twice: In the 16^th century with the Council of Trent and again in the 20^th at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. John’s gospel, composed in the latter years of the first century, reflects a growing division between those who followed Christ and the Jewish mainstream. It was largely a division among Jews. The earliest followers of Jesus were Jews; Jesus himself was a faithful Jew from first to last. And here John’s “the Jews” did not mean Israel as a whole but rather groups of Jewish leaders, most notably the Pharisees. They’re the ones – though not to a man, for even the Pharisees were not univocal in opposing Jesus – who saw Jesus as a threat to the status quo and a problem to be dealt with decisively.

OK? Back to it: God is self-giving love. God’s way – the way of life, as in “I set before you life” – is the way of self-giving love. To live in harmony with the fundamental realities of the universe is to love as God loves – albeit imperfectly, given our limitations and given that we inhabit a fallen realm in which we see “through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Right action for the Christian is to behave so as to reveal, affirm and cooperate with the reality of self-giving love. And the thing about reality is that, being real, it prevails, regardless of anyone’s cosmology. Things are the way they are. That’s not a reason to despair but a reason to rejoice, for this is God’s world and God is love.

You can posit another reality if you like. Say, I don’t know, the Lord of the Flies? Spoiler alert: Whatever things look like at the start it’s not going to end well; but at least you won’t be the only one heading toward calamity. As Jesus put it in Matthew 7:13, “for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it”. In that vein, the other day I came across a piece by Nathan Schneider in the Jesuit publication America. The title made me sit up straight: “The U.S. Government is at War with the Catholic Church”. Unnuanced as titles go, but not hyperbole; not by a longshot.

With the possible exception of the Vatican city-state (population 882), it’s a given that the world’s governments do not align themselves with Catholic teaching. They’re not trying to do so. Most people don’t see this as a problem. It becomes a problem when Catholic teaching articulates moral and ethical norms that apply generally. Which is one of the aims of Catholic teaching, and indeed Catholics say that moral norms exist objectively and even that they – to express it poetically – are written in the book of nature, meaning that they are discoverable and comprehensible by anyone who might care to look for them. Morality is part of the fabric of the universe.

Please note I am not suggesting that the Church’s leaders and moral theologians always get it right when it comes to articulating moral norms. Simply put, the Church is, um, imperfect. With a couple of notable exceptions, everyone who has ever been or is now associated with Catholic Christianity has been and is – brace yourself – sinful. We’ve gotten things wrong even when we were trying very hard to get things right. Through a glass, darkly….

Back to Dr. Schneider, who teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s not the first to note that Catholic teaching and American public policy are not one and the same or even congruent. What caught me was the breadth of his assertion that the lack of congruence is so fundamental and all-encompassing as to amount to America’s having declared war on Holy Mother Church.

For many Americans the perceived disconnect between law and Catholic teaching is limited to the usual short list of hot-button topics. It’s a list we could all recite. For some the list includes but a single topic; so much so that after the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade (the 1973 decision that recognized a constitutionally-protected – though limited – right to abortion) in 2022 a fair number of American Catholics rejoiced to think the nation had at last aligned itself with the Church. It had not, and not even with respect to topic at hand. Certainly not with respect to the body of teaching that has to do with building just and equitable human societies and with living in harmony with creation as a whole.

The disconnect is not a right-or-left thing. To be sure, it’s worse – much worse and more glaringly evident – under the current reign-of-chaos in Washington, but it’s pervasive and long-standing. The current state of things may indeed be nightmarish; at the same time it’s pretty much where we’ve been heading for a very long time, across administrations and legislative sessions. Had we been paying attention we could have and perhaps should have seen it coming – as indeed some have. Just saying.

It’s the war in the Middle East, which is just the most recent episode in what looks like an endless war. It’s also ICE’s ruthless march from sea to sea. It’s our treatment of immigrants and refugees – at once exploited and made to feel unwelcome – in general. It’s our undeclared hot war on the poor, which is not in any sense a war on poverty itself but the demonization of its victims. It’s the rapaciousness of winner-take-all capitalism. It’s the ethic of power, empire and dominion. It’s the cutting away of an already-tattered safety net. It’s the calculated brutality with which we treat non-human creatures. It’s those in positions of authority who assure us that mercy and empathy have no place in American life or suborn blasphemy by associating the holy name of Jesus with “overwhelming violence of action”. You might say we have failed to grasp the meaning and purpose of human societies from the get-go. And it’s turning our backs to the unfolding cataclysm of climate change, even when the canary in the coal mine has keeled over. As Dr. Schneider sums it, “[T]his country should shame us before our Lamb”.

In today’s gospel passage Jesus characterizes his identity and mission with imagery that the learned and scholarly Pharisees would have readily understood: This is God’s world; divinity is revealed in the person of Christ, fully God and fully human; transcendent holiness is become not just part of the human story but the essence of the human story. This is reality in all its implications, with self-giving love as the core, foundation and center.

Though many Catholics know little about it, Catholic social teaching is not an add-on; it is neither anomalous nor optional; certainly it is not the fever dream of the unnamed bogy-people derided by some as “liberals”. Much of it has come to us via this or that supreme pontiff. It’s articulated in the speeches and writings of Pope Leo and his four most immediate predecessors, including a good bit of material having to do with wealth and economics that would surprise the dickens out of most American Catholics. In sum, Catholic Social Teaching (it merits the capital letters) is substantive, which is to say it is grounded in reality. It has been distilled, imperfectly but inspiringly, into a set of principles – four, five seven or ten, depending – that include the core concepts of dignity, solidarity, the common good, the preferential option for the poor, the way of nonviolence, and what we might as well call integral ecology. It doesn’t matter which principle you start with; you’ll meet the others along the way, because they are of a piece.

We ignore them at our peril. They’re as real as gravity, and as uncompromising. Insist that gravity is fake news or somebody else’s problem? Fine. Next question: Is your life insurance paid up? That’s how real this stuff is: “You will die in your sins.” Again, not a threat; no more so than warning someone at the edge of a precipice that the first step will be a doozy.

A body of teaching expressed as principles. Where to begin? I don’t know that it matters all that much, so long as we start somewhere. What’s called for – what God calls us to – is to start and to strive. Which is not to say that we have to get every bit of it right, right from the start, for Catholic Social Teaching is shot through with mercy, as are all the things of God. After all, and as Pope Francis was fond of reminding us, the very nature of God is mercy. We’re asked to strive; to work at it; to engage with others and to build connections. And even to find joy in doing so, in the way that old-fashioned barn-raisings were joyful occasions. We make friends along the way; we discover meaning and purpose in the everyday; we see a better world on the horizon. We strive, together and together with Christ and the saints, in the direction of health and holiness.

Numbers 21:4-9

From Mount Hor the Israelites set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.”

Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.”

So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

John 8:21-30

Jesus said to the people, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.”

Then the Jews said, “Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means by saying, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’?”

Jesus said to them, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world. I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I am he.”

They said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “Why do I speak to you at all? I have much to say about you and much to condemn; but the one who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.”

They did not understand that he was speaking to them about the Father. So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me. And the one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what is pleasing to him.”

As Jesus was saying these things, many believed in him.

1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7 10-13 + Ephesians 5:8-14 + John 9:1-41

My beloved cousin Scott is a Lutheran pastor in Oregon. Like pastors everywhere he keeps shelves and shelves of books. One in particular depicts a laughing Jesus on the cover. The title escapes me – something like Jesus Was Hilarious! One long-ago Saturday, desperate for distraction, I actually took the book down from the shelf and spent about 10 minutes with it. As almost anyone could have told me, the title proved to be… let’s just call it a stretch.

I’ve no doubt that Jesus had a sense of humor. It’s just that the gospels weren’t composed with comedy in mind. Today’s story of the Man Born Blind (not sure what to call him after his encounter with Jesus; perhaps the Man Formerly Known as the Man Born Blind?) is about as good as it gets for gospel humor, at least in my estimation. Jesus himself wasn’t going for laughs. The humor in the story comes from – or at least is at the expense of – the Pharisees, who don’t seem to mind looking ridiculous so long as they can build their case against Jesus. It’s worth reading the dialogue out loud; that’s when it really comes to life.

The passage has been described as a masterpiece of Johannine storytelling, and so it is. Among other things, it’s a tale of contrasting movements. The Pharisees move further into darkness; the Man Born Blind moves from darkness to light. No surprise regarding the Pharisees. They were on alert from the start. We meet them as they’re challenging John the Baptist’s credentials, before Jesus has even appeared on stage (1:24). They move from being on alert to suspicion to feeling threatened to deciding that Jesus must be removed from the picture. Their motivations? A mixture, but in general they’re concerned with maintaining the status quo, which includes not just the admittedly precarious balance of power in the Roman province of Palestine but their own status among the Jewish people. And so we see the Pharisees move tragically and willfully into blindness.

Then as now, those with power and influence have outsized effects on society at large. And so Judas – not a Pharisee himself but acting to further the Pharisees’ scheme – leaves the Last Supper to betray Jesus, at which point, fatefully, “it was night” (John 13:30). The absence of light, complete.

The contrasting movement in the story is with the Man Born Blind. He’s the unwitting star of the story. As the Pharisees move from light to darkness he moves – precipitated by his encounter with Christ – from darkness to light; from not seeing to seeing with crystial clarity. The text bears this out, beautifully: At first he refers to Jesus as “the man called Jesus” (9:11). In A few verses later he describes Jesus to the Pharisees as a “prophet” (9:17). He hits his stride when the Pharisees haul him back in for another round of questioning and he comes back with this: “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes” (9:30) Why so amazing? The Pharisees billed themselves as the ones who saw and understood. They were supposed to see clearly so as to reliably guide others – which brings to mind Jesus’ assessment of the Pharisees in Matthew 15:14 as “blind guides” who lead others “into a pit”. Towards the end of today’s gospel passage, the Man Born Blind is again before Jesus. He says, “Lord, I believe” (9:38). He has moved from the absence of light to physiological vision to complete understanding.

The US is making war again. I’d call it “at war” but it’s mostly a push-button war from missile-launching sites across the Persian Gulf. Appropriately the attack has been given a moniker worthy of a video game: “Operation Epic Fury”. It was celebrated and glorified in a video that was posted on the White House’s official X page on March 6 – on another calendar entirely, Friday of the 2^nd week of Lent and World Prayer Day. The video was called Justice the American Way. It’s something that a group of miscreant adolescent boys might have dreamt up, being a mashup of actual footage from Iran with scenes from action movies. Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago described it, succinctly and with prophetic precision, as “sickening”.

Justice the American Way was posted 6 days after the United States targeted and destroyed the Shajareh Tayyebeha girls’ elementary school in Iran, killing 180 or so people, most of them girls aged 7 to 12. We’re told the attack – on this particular target – was an accident. Interesting concept, which brings to mind a kid’s telling his mother, “But Mom it was a accident!” Noteworthy that the world’s best-funded and most technologically sophisticated military force accidentally took out an elementary school with a “triple tap” strike – “triple tap” being middle-school speak for striking a target with three missiles in succession so as to ensure lethality. In the case of the Shajareh Tayyebeha elementary school the second or third strike destroyed a prayer space within the building where girls who had survived the first of three lethal “taps” were huddled, waiting for their parents to pick them up.

The Iranian regime that the United States “decapitated” – though it quickly found a new head – was brutal and murderous. Was the attack then justified? The risk in asking questions like that is that we can so easily get stuck in our thinking: We imagine that we must decide whether armed conflict is ever justified before we can assess the rightness or wrongness of this or that armed conflict. Which isn’t necessarily the case. We don’t have to solve everything to address one thing. And there are degrees of right and wrong, which is why there are things like the Geneva Convention and Just War Theory. As the Second Vatican Council decreed in Gaudium et Spes, “the mere fact that war has unhappily begun [does not] mean that all is fair between the warring parties” (Gaudium et Spes, 79).

With respect to the widening conflict in the Middle East it only gets more bizarre and more appalling. American officials – all of them people who should know better – have used the language of religion to characterize Operation Epic Fury. Some of them have gone so far as to suggest that the American president was “anointed by Jesus” to launch the attack as part of a divine plan.

You did not hear it here first: God’s plan has nothing to do with armed conflict or indeed with violence. What Jesus would say about all of this seems clear from even a cursory reading of the gospels. And Pope Leo has been increasingly direct in condemning the attack and its horrific consequences. The other day he dismissed as “absurd” the notion that “problems and differences can be resolved through war”, noting further that some have even dared “to invoke God’s name in these choices of death.” For their part, the American bishops have begun to criticize and condemn the administration’s actions not just regarding the war but more broadly with regard to human rights abuses on every front. And Americans of every description in cities from sea to sea are stepping up to protect their neighbors and demonstrate a way forward that is entirely consistent with the Gospel.

There is light even in darkness, but at present the larger story is one of increasing darkness. Not unlike the story of the Pharisees, who spiraled from suspicion to mistrust to thoughts of murder to arranging for the capture, torture and execution of the Christ. Which is how darkness works: At first we will not see; before long we cannot see, even as we are pulled further and further into chaos, down and down into the abyss.

But there is redemption, always and everywhere. The way from darkness to light has been marked out again and again, through the centuries. Consider this, from today’s reading from Ephesians: “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Darkness – the absence of light – yields to the light of God’s self-giving love. What’s required from you and me is movement, careful and deliberate, from darkness to light, confirmed and followed up by small but definitive choices that mark new ways of proceeding. It can be as simple – and as breathtaking as seeing for the first time – as finding and associating with people who are like the person you want to be and were called to be. There’s no shortage of them out there, even though they may not be immediately obvious amidst the noise and chaos.

Even the Pharisees – often characterized as a first-century version of the Galactic Empire’s stormtroopers – weren’t all bad. Some among them followed Jesus; some among them became part of the nascent Christian communities that formed after the Resurrection. And of course one Pharisee – called first Saul, then Paul – responded wholeheartedly to the presence and invitation of God.

It’s not too late, even when it seems like it’s too late. There is redemption. Every act of kindness matters. Every expression of mercy helps. Despite war and climate change and deliberate ignorance and willful intransigence; even with the horrific fact of this or that abomination, creation is spinning back to God. That’s why Lent makes so much sense and is at root so profoundly hopeful. This is God’s world and you are loved; all of you, whatever side you’re on or whatever you’ve done. And there’s not really anything you or anyone else can do about that. God is love and you are loved. Which means, among other things, that things do not have to be the way they are. Dear ones, take heart and be of good cheer.

1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13

The Lord said to Samuel, “Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse of Bethlehem, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.”

When the sons of Jesse came, Samuel looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the Lord’s

anointed is now before the Lord.” But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as the human sees; the human looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, “The Lord has not chosen any of these.” Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” And he said, “There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.” And Samuel said to Jesse, “Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here.” Jesse sent and brought David in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The Lord said, “Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.” Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.

Ephesians 5:8-14

Brothers and sisters: Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Live as children of light – for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.

Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it is said, “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”

John 9:1-41

As Jesus passed by he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him. We have to do the works of the one who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and smeared the clay on his eyes, and said to him, “Go wash in the Pool of Siloam” – which means Sent – . So he went and washed, and came back able to see. His neighbors and those who had seen him earlier as a beggar said, “Isn’t this the one who used to sit and beg?” Some said, “It is”, but others said, “No, he just looks like him.”

He said, “I am.” So they said to him, “How were your eyes opened?” He replied, “The man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes and told me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ So I went there and washed and was able to see.” And they said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I don’t know.”

They brought the one who was once blind to the Pharisees. Now Jesus had made clay and opened his eyes on a sabbath. So then the Pharisees also asked him how he was able to see. He said to them, “He put clay on my eyes, and I washed, and now I can see.” So some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, because he does not keep the sabbath.” But others said, “How can a sinful man do such signs?” And there was a division among them. So they said to the blind man again, “What do you have to say about him, since he opened your eyes?” He said, “He is a prophet.”

Now the Jews did not believe that he had been blind and gained his sight until they summoned the parents of the one who had gained his sight. They asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How does he now see?” His parents answered and said, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind. We do not know how he sees now, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him, he is of age; he can speak for himself.” His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone acknowledged him as the Christ, he would be expelled from the synagogue. For this reason his parents said, “He is of age; question him.”

So a second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give God the praise! We know that this man is a sinner.” He replied, “If he is a sinner, I do not know. One thing I do know is that I was blind and now I see.” So they said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered them, “I told you already and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to become his disciples, too?” They ridiculed him and said, “You are that man’s disciple; we are disciples of Moses! We know that God spoke to Moses, but we do not know where this one is from.” The man answered and said to them, “This is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if one is devout and does his will, he listens to him. It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.” They answered and said to him, “You were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” Then they threw him out.

When Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, he found him and said, Do you believe in the Son of Man?” He answered and said, “Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, the one speaking with you is he.” He said, “I do believe, Lord,” and he worshiped him. Then Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.”

Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not also blind, are we?” Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin; but now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains.

Isaiah 1.10, 16-20, 27-28, 31 + Matthew 23:1-12

It can be tempting to treat the Old Testament as if it were second-tier, having little to say to contemporary Christians. You’ll even hear people speak as if there were two deities in Scripture. There’s the angry, vengeful and punishing God of the Old Testament – the God of Flood and fire – and then there’s the merciful and loving God of the New Testament – you know, the God who sent Jesus. Except of course that they’re the same divine being. And, again of course, the books of the Old Testament were the scriptures that Jesus knew, loved and preached. I’d say the Old Testament worked pretty well for him.

I think it’s fair to say – at least outside the confines of a gathering of Scripture scholars – that the Old Testament tells the story of the growing relationship between God and Israel, using different voices and different kinds of literature. In broad terms, there’s nothing there that’s inconsistent with the Gospel. How could there be, especially when Christians believe that the Old Testament anticipates the coming of Christ?

A case in point is the final line of today’s first reading from Isaiah: “The strong shall become like tinder, and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them”. The prophet is considering a way of proceeding that’s as popular today as it was 2,500 years ago, aphoristically expressed as “might makes right”. It is the prevailing ethic in Washington and elsewhere: The strong make the rules and decide what is right or wrong. Not that anyone spends much time thinking about right and wrong per se; they’re treated instead as infinitely flexible and elastic categories. What’s really important is winning. Winners win; losers lose. Winners are strong; losers are weak. Who decides what winning looks like? The winners. These days it mostly looks like wealth, which buys power. In ancient Israel it looked like power, which brought wealth as sweet nectar draws hummingbirds.

This is, by the way, perfectly expressed in the Wisdom of Solomon as the “unsound” reasoning of the “ungodly”: “Let us oppress the righteous poor man; let us not spare the widow nor regard the gray hairs of the aged. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless”. (Wisdom 1:16-2:1; 2:10-11.) Which sentiment – “what is weak proves itself to be useless” – might well have fallen from the lips of the fellow who now sits behind the desk called the Resolute. Although there’s no reason to pick on him in particular. None of this is uniquely his; as a phenomenon, he is but a symptom.

The logic of “might makes right” is unsound and ungodly, to be sure. And boy is it in vogue. Even as it is sharply and in luminous terms countered by the wisdom of Isaiah 1:31: “The strong shall become like tinder, and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them.” Their vaunted strength is their undoing, both tinder and spark; the thing that burns and the thing that ignites it.

Those who make war seek victory through violence. They’ll tell you that they seek only peace, and indeed at times violence may seem to yield something that looks like peace. It’s not peace but rather a temporary cessation of hostilities as one side is defeated or disarmed; or perhaps a period of relative calm wrought by memories of war’s horrors.

Let’s go a little deeper. Does anyone imagine that the recent bloodbath in Gaza will yield something other than a legacy of violence reaching far into the future? Or that the current conflagration in Iran will result in her leaders’ setting aside their nuclear ambitions? Or will they work harder – and smarter – than ever to gain their own nuclear deterrent?

The root problem here – as it so often is – is a false belief, in this case the false belief encapsulated in the aphorism at issue: Might makes right. False because fundamentally untrue: Right and wrong are not the creatures of whimsy but exist and are real. The arrest, torture and murder of Jesus at the hands of Rome were wrong and not made less so by their being essential elements in the plan of redemption. Redemption doesn’t turn wrong into right but rather through the divine power – the shorthand for which is self-giving love – yields good from evil.

What did Jesus say about violence? There’s a joke told about the famously taciturn American president Calvin Coolidge – known as “silent Cal”. The story goes that when he returned from church one Sunday Mrs. Coolidge (we’re not told why she stayed home and posing that question – “Wait. Why didn’t Mrs. Coolidge go to church with her husband?” – would be to take arms against humor itself) asked him what the preacher had talked about. The president’s monosyllabic response: “Sin.” Mrs. Coolidge’s follow-up: “Well, what did he say about it?” To which Cal responded: “He was against it.” Which is a good way to summarize Jesus’ attitude toward violence: He was against it.

Yes, the world and life are complicated. Yes, it’s possible – in the way that it’s possible for the moon to be made of green cheese – that someone could posit a set of circumstances – a la, perhaps, one vein of thinking, itself now in vogue, regarding the life and work of Deitrich Bonhoeffer – in which violence might in fact be or at least seem to be the better way of proceeding. We don’t need to go there. Neither do we need a graduate seminar covering the history of nonviolent resistance to evil, at least not this morning. All we need to remember is that Jesus was unequivocally against the use of force.

What I love about the passage from Isaiah is the succinct and poetic way it expresses an essential truth: Evil is its own undoing. It is destructive and it destroys.

And so, briefly, to today’s gospel. About which I remember – I’d add that it was years ago but when you’re as old as I am anything that’s even remotely interesting happened years ago – the day when a tearful parishioner came up after Mass to tell me that his newly born-again son had returned from a camp meeting to announce that never again from that day forward would he refer to his dad as “father” or indeed “dad” because in fact and as the preacher had reminded all and sundry they had but “one Father – the one in heaven”. Which is, I’m pretty sure, not the outcome that Jesus intended, given that Jesus was generally against the breaking of hearts.

Today’s passage reveals the tension, as present in primordial Christianity as it is now, between the need for structure and order in Christian communities and the fact that within those communities we are of equal status. As I understand it, the first Christian communities were notably countercultural in that regard: People from all walks of life and from every level of social hierarchy, bonded in fellowship. What gets us into trouble is not so much this or that honorific used in polite conversation but rather what the honorific engenders – primarily in the one so addressed but as well within the fellowship.

Years ago – again with the years ago – I made the lethal mistake of telephoning the local Catholic Worker house about something and stupidly asking to speak with “the person in charge”. Clearly and profoundly nonplussed, the person who answered said, “Um, OK…” and put the phone down. And I waited… and would have waited for weeks had I not realized my mistake: You don’t ask the members of a radically non-hierarchical community to abandon their ways of proceeding and embrace hierarchy just so you can talk to the right person to help with the particular problem that gave rise to your call.

The tension between the need for structure and the fact of equality is tricky territory for all of us. As we’ve seen, the outcomes can be horrific. It doesn’t take much for the person on the receiving end of an honorific to proceed as if a form of address – Father, Eminence, Doctor – had cosmic effects at the level of being. And it doesn’t take much for those who traffic in honorifics to imagine that Father does indeed know best, even about things that Father knows nothing about and even when Father has run off the rails.

For now I’ll just say that I think that when you’re introduced to the mother superior of the local convent, it’s OK and even the polite thing to say “Nice to meet you, Reverend Mother”. Just remember what’s at stake. And let’s do our best to remember together that there is life and there is death and that evil is its own undoing.

Isaiah 1.10, 16-20, 27-28, 31

The vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, concerning Judah and Jerusalem. Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land; but if you refuse and rebel, you shall be devoured by the sword; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken. Zion shall be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness. But rebels and sinners shall be destroyed together, and those who forsake the Lord shall be consumed.

The strong shall become like tinder, and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them.

Matthew 23:1-12

Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ chair; therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practise what they teach. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long. They love to have the place of honour at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.

“But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students. And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father — the one in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Matthew 5:1-12 + Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13 + 1 Corinthians 1:26-31

Preachers sometimes gloss over the Beatitudes, treating them as little more than an attempt to say something sweet about the unfortunate, because after all and as your grandmother always said, “If you can’t say something nice about someone don’t say anything”. But the Beatitudes are much more than that.

The Beatitudes – the blessings – are in Luke and Matthew. In Matthew they begin the Sermon on the Mount; in Luke they begin the Sermon on the Plain. The material comes from Jesus himself, but Matthew and Luke handle it differently. Either way it’s core material; something of an introduction to the Gospel message as whole. Matthew has Jesus sit down to teach, as teachers did back in the day. And he puts Jesus on top of a mountain. Why? Matthew was writing from a Jewish perspective for Jewish followers of Christ. And so the mountain makes perfect sense. Where did Moses go to receive God’s word? To Mount Sinai. Here Jesus does not receive God’s word on top of the mountain. Instead, Jesus teaches from the mountain in the way that God taught from the mountain. God on the mountain; Jesus on the mountain. Which is to say that we dismiss or downplay this material at our peril.

News flash: Not once did Jesus tell his followers to be nice, or to go along to get along. Not once, not ever. This is not greeting-card spirituality: inoffensive, anodyne, non-threatening. Got that? If we don’t get that we’re going to miss the point and we, dear People of God, cannot afford to miss the point. Everywhere, but perhaps especially in the United States where, to paraphrase Joe Biden and others, the soul of a nation is at stake.

Jesus belonged to a culture that saw the world’s goods – tangible and intangible alike – as limited; limited and already distributed. Everything had been handed out; what you had was what you had. Most people were poor. There were merchants, but there was no middle class. Some few were wealthy. Most of them were associated with the palace or the Temple. They were wealthy because they were powerful. It’s different today, in that today wealth buys power. Back then power brought wealth. More or less the same difference, but with different starting points.

Sometimes you’ll hear someone of means say that they were “blessed” with wealth: “I’ve been blessed” or “God has been good to me”. You don’t hear that as often today as you did when I was coming up, perhaps because people today don’t feel much of a need to apologize for having more than their fair share of things, which shows how thoroughly winner-take-all capitalism has shaped our culture. In the ancient world the understanding was that if you ended up more than your fair share of the world’s goods you were a thief, pure and simple. Or, as St. Jerome would say in and about the fifth century, “Every rich person is a thief or the heir of a thief”. Where there was acquisition, wealth and profit there had been extortion, theft or fraud.

To be poor was to be helpless and powerless. You were at the mercy of the elements. A lovingly-tended crop could be lost in the blink of an eye. You could not protect yourself from scoundrels or kings. You couldn’t defend your reputation. You were unable to avoid being taken advantage of. You were surrounded by limits; fenced in.

Guess what: It’s not different today. It’s a sad and distressing review, but let’s review: To be poor is to struggle in a world of limits you had no part in setting and for the most part cannot overcome. You reside in the undesirable, unattractive, neglected or dangerous parts of town with billboards and fast food joints and plasma centres. You live in ugly, unsafe, and rat-infested housing, suitable for so-called “trailer trash”. You’re unable to afford a reliable vehicle in a world designed for private automobiles, meaning in most American cities that you must rely on unreliable, inefficient or sketchy public transportation. Getting to and from work – because most of the jobs are in the suburbs – takes hours instead of minutes and necessitates long waits in the heat, rain or snow. If you qualify for public assistance – and qualifying means jumping through endless hoops, over and over again, challenged at every step – you’re viewed with suspicion or disgust; seen as an undeserving leech or a parasite. Your children attend poorly-funded schools. They’re mocked and teased for their clothing, manners, or appearance. At the pharmacy you decide which of your prescription medications you can afford this week; you may skip the pharmacy altogether when the rent is due. You may skip health care altogether because you can’t afford the deductible or the copay that comes with your insurance, if you’re lucky enough to have health insurance through your employer. And then, on top of the unending stresses and humiliations of it all you’re blamed for your own plight. You’re dismissed as lazy, stupid, grasping, lacking in ambition, someone with nothing on the ball and nothing to offer. In sum, you’ve gotten what you deserve.

Sadly, there are more challenges ahead. As the effects of climate change gather steam, those with the means to do so will abandon the world’s coastal areas so as to protect themselves from rising sea levels and deadly storms. Those with the means to do so will abandon the Sunbelt and the tropics as large parts of our planet become all but uninhabitable. Those without the means to afford air conditioning will suffer and die from extreme heat.

Sometimes people who aren’t poor romanticize material poverty, as in “The poor people I’ve known seem so much happier than everyone else” or “Poor people are so generous” or “Poor people know what’s important in life; that’s why we need poor people”. Most of that is nonsense; some of it is well-intended. Some of it serves to convince those who aren’t poor that all is well, that things are as they should be and that they needn’t concern themselves with the problems of poverty and inequity.

While it’s true that those with less are more proportionally more generous than those with more, material poverty is not conducive to happiness. To the contrary, it is conducive to anxiety and chronic illness. The poor are sadder, sicker and shorter-lived than the wealthy. That they’re generous and hospitable means only that they’re generous and hospitable, not that they’re able to pay their bills and keep food on the table. To be sure, wealth does not bring happiness. Plenty of wealthy people make messes of their lives but wealth provides a cushion; when you fall you don’t fall as fast or as hard. As for those who remain convinced that poverty and happiness go together, go ahead and test that idea by embracing material poverty. Or if that prospect is too frightening, maybe read a book. For starters I’d suggest Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, first published in 2001.

Yes, the Beatitudes acknowledge a hard reality but they are about blessings, and not just one kind of blessing but two complementary kinds of blessing, then and now. One looks to the future and to the end times, when God’s dominion of love and justice will be fully revealed and suffering will end. Then the blessed will stand with God. Now, here and now, those who will stand with God in the world to come – the poor in spirit, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for justice – now they are the particular objects of God’s concern. Why? Because they are the forgotten, the exploited and the lowly. They are the poor, as in materially poor. Powerless and largely voiceless, they occupy the bottom rungs of society. Their hope resides in God. And God is for them; their advocate; their champion. God is on their side. Which is not to suggest that God does not love every person and indeed every creature. Consider the story of Lazarus and Dives. It’s the story of the wealthy and pampered man, known as Dives, oblivious to the suffering Lazarus, begging at the entrance to Dives’ luxurious compound. Both are beloved, Dives no less than Lazarus. But Lazarus is the particular object of God’s love and so is among the blessed.

People of God, here it comes: To be with God now is to be with and for those God is with and for now. It’s that simple. God’s dominion of love and justice has not yet been revealed in its fullness, but it is present here and now and especially in the person of Jesus Christ. Those who model themselves after Christ; those who choose God’s ways of proceeding are also blessed. They choose simplicity; they share what they have; they look to the Common Good; they reject the ways of aggression and revenge; they hunger and thirst for righteousness. This is God saying, “My ways are not your ways; but they ought to be.” In the Beatitudes God shows us the way forward. The blessed are those who help to bring God’s dominion of love and justice to fruition.

Nowhere do the Beatitudes, not in Matthew and not in Luke, suggest that what we know as material poverty, imposed from outside, is either desirable or indeed anything other than the result of sin.

Each of Matthew’s beatitudes follows from the first. Those who mourn are those who grieve the absence of righteousness in society even as they choose God’s way of proceeding. The meek are the powerless and those who reject the ways of aggression, dominion and vengeance. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness – and righteousness in Scripture is justice – are those denied it in this life and those who work to make the world more just and equitable.

So the Beatitudes are about sin and virtue, now and in the world to come. They are about those who have been sinned against and about those who reject the ways of sin. And just as a reminder, “sin” as Jesus understood it was about far more than sexual sin – something, by the way, that Jesus spent little time and energy addressing. Sin as Jesus preached about it was about the stuff of the Beatitudes: Injustice, material poverty, oppression, exclusion, aggression, exploitation, and the abuses of power and authority.

Sixty-two years ago in his resounding Letter From a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King wrote of his disappointment with the Christian churches of his day. Sixty-two years ago he wrote, “Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.” Why? Because as he saw it, “So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an arch-defender of the status quo.” And so in sermons and homilies alike the Beatitudes are set aside as empty platitudes, having nothing of consequence to say about anything, in the same way that preachers note our duty to “love one another” without pausing to give shape or substance to Christ’s words.

Happily, there are prophetic voices among us. Catholic and other Christian leaders have spoken out with clarity and power against the violent, oppressive and unlawful actions of masked federal agents across the United States. Courageous and insightful leaders have urged us to do what we can to protect and care for those who have been targeted by an ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation that is frankly racist and deeply sinful in its aims and methods.

Yes, deeply sinful. Sinful is the right word for it, because right and wrong are real things. Scripture is clear: The material poverty that is suffered by so many across the world is the result of sin and selfishness. The world’s goods belong to all and are for all, and now we know that all includes every created being. The Church has consistently taught that accumulating more than one’s fair share amounts to theft. Whether that teaching has been passed along from the Church’s pulpits is another matter, but the teaching stands.

All of which is to say that the Beatitudes come first because in them are brought forth the things that matter to God and to Christ who is God with us and so should matter to us. As such, they demand something more than lip service as we work together to make God’s dominion of love and justice a present reality. And you know what? It does not have to be this way. Things do not have to be as they are. The nation that so many of us love with such passion need not lose her soul. Maybe it is too late for some things: Those who have died have died and are no longer with us; the wounded have been wounded and hearts have been broken. But it’s not too late. Even though some of the effects of climate change can no longer be prevented; even though terrible things have happened in America and across the world, this is God’s world. This is God’s world and it will always be true that we can work together to make things better; we can share what we have; we can bind up, build up and encourage. We can be the blessed people who bless in turn.

Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13

Seek the Lord, all you humble of the land, who do his commands; seek righteousness, seek humility;
perhaps you may be hidden on the day of the Lord’s wrath.

For I will leave in the midst of you a people humble and lowly.
They shall seek refuge in the name of the Lord – the remnant of Israel;
they shall do no wrong and utter no lies, nor shall a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths.
Then they will pasture and lie down, and no one shall make them afraid.

1 Corinthians 1:26-31

Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.

God is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Matthew 5:1-12

When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the Prophets who were before you.”

1 Samuel 24:2-20 + Mark 3:13-19

“And he appointed twelve”. Why 12 apostles? Perhaps because there are 12 Tribes. Why 12 Tribes? Because the number 12 corresponds to the zodiac, which is another name for the ecliptic, which is the apparent path of the sun across the sky over the course of a year. About 500 years before the birth of Christ Babylonian astronomers divided the ecliptic – again, the apparent path of the sun across the sky over a year – into 12 equal parts, each having its own sign, each sign taken from one of the constellations visible in the night sky. Twelve signs; 12 months, each with 30 days. When the Hebrew people returned to Israel after 70 years of exile in Babylon, they brought with them Babylonian astronomy and Babylonian cosmology. That’s why the creation stories in Genesis share features with creation stories across the Fertile Crescent.

Scholars tell us that the word apostles and the phrase whom he also named apostles in chapter 3 of Mark’s gospel may have been added to Mark’s original text at a later date. In other words, not original to Mark. We think of apostles as specially-missioned members of Jesus’ team and “the Twelve” as a kind of Executive Board. And there’s the tradition that the Twelve took the Christian faith to other parts of the world, as with Thomas in India. And the tradition that each of the Twelve was martyred. Well and good, but the gospels don’t make nearly as much of the Twelve as any of that; certainly Mark does not. Scripture as a whole tells us almost nothing about most of them. Did the Twelve have special roles among the other disciples? There’s no evidence of that in the text, and indeed the Twelve don’t seem to constitute a core group. Peter, James, and John? Perhaps, but not as members of a group of twelve. Calling someone an apostle tells us only that they were sent; that’s what the Greek word apostle means. An apostle is one who is sent. So we’re talking about twelve who were sent.

The list of names of the twelve who were sent varies from gospel to gospel. The first four named in today’s gospel passage are always included: Peter, Andrew, James and John. Judas Iscariot is always included as well, and he’s always last on the list. As for the remaining seven, it depends.

Today’s gospel passage helps us understand the nature of discipleship. As are all disciples, the twelve are called to “be with” Jesus and to be sent. We think of “sent” as sent away or sent out, but that’s not it. Being with Jesus and being sent are two ways of talking about the same thing. To be with Jesus is to be in relationship with Jesus; to have bonds of intimacy and loyalty with the Son of God. That’s a given that we sometimes skip over. To be with Jesus also means to be on mission, even if you travel no further than your front yard. And to be on mission is to be sent; the word mission comes from the Latin word for send. When we say that Jesus was sent from God we’re not suggesting that Jesus was sent away from God – “Off you go! Stay warm and well-fed!” Sent in the sense we’re using it here is not about distance or separation; it’s about purpose. As Mark reminds us, being with Jesus on mission means proclaiming the Gospel or the Good News, healing, and confronting the powers of evil. Which is common to all disciples. In fact it is what you – if you think of yourself as a disciple – have been called to do and to be.

Wait? Called? Me? But I’m just a disciple…. This is where our two-tiered A-list-B-list understanding of discipleship can get things twisted around. Many of us – on occasion conveniently – see ourselves as B-list Christians: Disciples but not apostles. We’re students; adult learners; remedial Christians. We’re not the elite; we’re not members of the apostolic SWAT team; we haven’t been sent. In fact we can imagine that we’re here not because we were called or chosen but rather and simply because we choose to stick around. Not so; that’s altogether too easy and indeed there’s too much at stake for that. Consider John 15:16, which is part of the discourse that begins with Jesus’ washing the feet of the disciples. Jesus says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last”. Again, Jesus is speaking to the disciples. Which – guess what – includes you. And Jesus says these things on his last night, when the stakes are as high as could be, when getting the message across is now-or-never important.

As it is today. I feel safe in saying that what Thomas Paine – American humanitarian, visionary, patriot, and statesman – penned in 1776 applies no less today: “These are the times that try men’s souls”. Or, more inclusively, “These are the times that try the human soul”. Which is to say that these are the times that reveal who we are and what we are about, on so many fronts. “Try” as Paine used it doesn’t mean trying in the sense of burdensome, annoying or difficult. It’s try as in trial, as in put to the test, as in testing one’s mettle, as in gold tested in fire.

When a disciple says to the world, “I’m with Jesus” the world responds with a single word, “And…?” Sometimes the “And…?” is cynical and even world-weary, as if to say “I’ve seen the ‘I’m with Jesus’ people at work and I’m not interested.” Sometimes it’s driven by curiosity, as in “Help me understand what that means; what can I expect from you?” Saying “I’m with Jesus” demands that we represent, a lovely but rarely-used word that means that we act with integrity, which is to say in concert with our deepest convictions about who we are and how we are to be in the world.

This morning I’m struggling – yet again – with the news from south of the border in the United States. There’s been another killing in Minnesota. As with the first, it’s a heartbreak. And like the first, it’s appalling, especially given that neither should have happened. Both could have been avoided, had federal agents – as it appears – been better-qualified, better-trained and considerably less belligerent and aggressive. But of course they’ve been encouraged to act aggressively and with force, and in fact the killings were the predictable outcome of a federal campaign of terror unleashed on brown-skinned immigrants, their family members and friends.

There are things to be grateful for amid the heartbreak. Catholic religious sisters, priests, bishops and cardinals have spoken out eloquently and prophetically in recent days, as have their counterparts from Christian denominations across the spectrum. Good people from all across America are saying “No” to the administration’s objectives and tactics. Thousands and thousands of Minneapolis residents have braved sub-zero (that’s Fahrenheit, for my Canadian friends and confreres) temperatures to protest the presence and actions of federal agents in their city.

I love this quote from John Adams, taken from one of David Brooks’ recent columns in the New York Times (January 23, 2026): “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” Which is to say that checks and balances mean nothing absent the integrity of those in positions of power. We have witnessed and are witnessing the destructive chaos wrought by “passions unbridled by morality and religion”.

What to do and how to respond? That’s the question I pose to myself daily, for daily I must remind myself – remedial Christian that I am – that Christians are not called to stand on the sidelines. Doesn’t matter where we are on the planet or who we are. There never was a Christian SWAT team, appointed to do the hard work for us. There is, however, a team. It’s a worldwide team of disciples, called to be engaged in the great issues of the day, called to righteousness, honor and decency, called to be people of integrity whatever our status or place in the world, on stages large or small. Called to discern, every day, the ways in which we can be part of the work of healing, proclaiming the Good News, and confronting – standing up to, resisting without resorting to violence – the powers of evil. Beloved friends and disciples, loved beyond measure, let us be of good cheer; let us do what we can and where we can, with one another and with Jesus, who is God with us.

1 Samuel 24.2-20

Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to look for David and his men in the direction of the Rocks of the Wild Goats. He came to the sheepfolds beside the road, where there was a cave; and Saul went in to relieve himself. Now David and his men were sitting in the innermost parts of the cave. The men of David said to him, “Here is the day of which the Lord said to you, ‘I will give your enemy into your hand, and you shall do to him as it seems good to you.’”

Then David went and stealthily cut off a corner of Saul’s cloak. Afterward David was stricken to the heart because he had cut off a corner of Saul’s cloak. He said to his men, “The Lord forbid that I should do this thing to my lord, the Lord’s anointed, to raise my hand against him; for he is the Lord’s anointed.” So David scolded his men severely and did not permit them to attack Saul.

Then Saul got up and left the cave, and went on his way.

Afterwards David also rose up and went out of the cave and called after Saul, “My lord the king!” When Saul looked behind him, David bowed with his face to the ground, and did obeisance. David said to Saul, “Why do you listen to the words of those who say, ‘David seeks to do you harm’? This very day your eyes have seen how the Lord gave you into my hand in the cave; and some urged me to kill you, but I spared you. I said, ‘I will not raise my hand against my lord; for he is the Lord’s anointed.’

“See, my father, see the corner of your cloak in my hand; for by the fact that I cut off the corner of your cloak, and did not kill you, you may know for certain that there is no wrong or treason in my hands. I have not sinned against you, though you are hunting me to take my life. May the Lord judge between me and you! May the Lord avenge me on you; but my hand shall not be against you. As the ancient proverb says, ‘Out of the wicked comes forth wickedness’; but my hand shall not be against you. Against whom has the king of Israel come out? Whom do you pursue? A dead dog? A single flea? May the Lord therefore be judge, and give sentence between me and you. May he see to it, and plead my cause, and vindicate me against you.”

When David had finished speaking these words to Saul, Saul said, “Is this your voice, my son David?” Saul lifted up his voice and wept. He said to David, “You are more righteous than I; for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil. Today you have explained how you have dealt well with me, in that you did not kill me when the Lord put me into your hands. For who has ever found an enemy, and sent the enemy safely away? So may the Lord reward you with good for what you have done to me this day. Now I know that you shall surely be king, and that the kingdom of Israel shall be established in your hand.”

Mark 3:13-19

Jesus went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him. And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons.

So Jesus appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

Mark 1:29-39 + 1 Samuel 3:1-10 + Dunfee, SJ

The prophet Samuel lived around the year 1,000 BCE, before Israel had a king and before the Temple of Solomon had been built in Jerusalem. Today’s story from 1^st Samuel is set in Shiloh, which is about 30 kilometers north of Jerusalem. Back then there was a religious sanctuary in Shiloh called the Tabernacle; it contained the Ark of the Covenant, which itself contained the tablets on which were written the Ten Commandments – the symbol of the Law and of God’s covenant with Israel. One of the things the story teaches us is that an invitation from God is not a one-and-done thing. If you miss the message this time? God will try again.

Capernaum – Jesus’ hometown – was a village of about 1,500 souls on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. Archaeologists have discovered there what remains of the house of Simon Peter and his brother Andrew. The home was a typical family compound of the day. Extended families lived together. So we have Simon Peter and his family, including his mother-in-law, together with Andrew and his family.

That’s the setting for today’s story. Mark uses the story to make important points about discipleship, a favorite theme for Mark. It’s not surprising that today’s passage includes both a healing and an encounter with demons. Back in the day, sickness was understood to have something to do with evil spirits. So Jesus does two things: He restores people – including Simon Peter’s mother in law – to health and he dispatches demons.

Restoring someone to health meant restoring them to their place and role in their community. We’re told that Simon Peter’s mother-in-law is restored to service: “Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.” Hospitality was central to the cultures of the day, and women were the primary providers of hospitality.

Here’s Mark’s primary point: Discipleship is service. Which is something we may well miss or gloss over. We think of service as a burden; something you have to do but would rather not do; something you do until you become important enough that others serve you. Think of the “service industry”, characterized by low pay and lower status. In the great manor houses of England, servants bowed or curtseyed before their wealthy and powerful employers, who were acknowledged as their “betters”. Today, so-called “unskilled workers” take minimum-wage jobs in the service industry. They’re paid next-to-nothing; they do the jobs that others disdain; their labor is unappreciated and unacknowledged.

Which is not at all what Mark had in mind. To be sure, discipleship entails the rejection of social status, which we understand to mean identifying with those of lower status. But it’s more than that, and indeed humility can be nothing more than a performance, designed to gain attention and respect as a means of increasing one’s social status or even as a tactic. Think of Dickens’ rapacious Uriah Heep from the novel David Copperfield, bowing and scraping with false humility as he plots and schemes. How impressed we are when someone who has a choice chooses the humble and lowly!

Properly understood, discipleship sets aside the vocabulary of status altogether. Equality before God means equality, period. And Christian service has nothing to do with status. It is rather best understood to be about connection and community. Service is an expression of self-giving love. I serve not because you are better than me. I serve because we are connected; because I am with you and for you. I want the best for you; your well-being matters to me. It’s about self-giving love, which for the Christian is exemplified in the life and work of Jesus Christ, God with us.

The key to all of this is relationship. Which is more than an intellectual exercise. After all, Mark reminds us that even the demons know who Jesus is. They know that Jesus is the Son of God; they know that in Jesus is divinity. And lots of people back in the day knew Jesus as a worker of wonders; many had witnessed this or that healing. Which is not sufficient and not a mark of discipleship. And Scripture assures us that even false prophets are able to accomplish deeds of power. As Matthew puts it in chapter 7, verses 21-23, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you who behave lawlessly.’”

Discipleship is relationship, which is more even than acknowledging or believing in. Discipleship is relationship with God, with Jesus – God with us – and with the community of disciples, united in self-giving love. Mind and heart; body and soul; always and everywhere.

1 Samuel 3:1-10

At the temple in Shiloh, the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli. The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.

At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called, “Samuel! Samuel!” and he said, “Here I am!” and ran to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call; lie down again.” So Samuel went and lay down.

The Lord called again, “Samuel!” Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” But he said, “I did not call, my son; lie down again.” Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.

The Lord called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, “Here I am, for you called me.” Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, “Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went and lay down in his place.

Now the Lord came and stood there, calling as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”

As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Daniel to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord.

Mark 1:29-39

As soon as Jesus and the disciples left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to Jesus all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.”

Jesus answered, “Let us go on to the neighbouring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” And Jesus went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

One Advent years ago I taught – I use the term loosely – a short course in Matthew’s gospel to a group of parishioners. At the beginning of our second session I asked if anyone would be willing to get us started for the evening by reading a passage out loud. A hand shot up: “Sure, Father. Which one?” My response: “Matthew 1:1-17. Let’s all turn to it so we can follow along.” Everyone found the passage; our volunteer, suddenly less eager, looked at me with the face of a dog who’s figured out that a bath is in the offing: “Um, are you sure this is the right passage?”

The offending passage? Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. A long list of hard-to-pronounce names. I mean who names their child Amminadab anyway? A long, boring and useless list of names.

Except perhaps not as useless as it may seem. It may even, perish the thought, have something to teach us.

Matthew mentions 42 generations in three groups of 14, although the final group has but 13 generations unless Jesus counts as a generation. Some scholars suggest that a later copyist may have inadvertently omitted a name that would have yielded 14 generations in the final group. Fair enough: Trying to count the names in the list has made more than one person’s head swim and the copyist’s life has never been easy. Why did Matthew insist on three groups of 14 generations? Because 14 is the numerical value of the Hebrew letters that make up the name David and the Messiah of necessity would be “in the line of David.”

As was the custom in a patriarchal culture, only men counted in the official genealogy, and indeed Matthew’s list runs from Abraham to Joseph. Except that Jesus – who was and is rather the point of the whole thing – shared no DNA with Joseph nor indeed with any of the listed men. The only person mentioned with whom Jesus shared genetic material was his mother Mary. So the genealogy isn’t about shared genetic material; it’s about connections and relationships that matter. Which may seem less odd when we consider that today legally adopted children are entitled to inherit from their adoptive parents; the law does not question their status as “real” and “legitimate” children, despite the absence of shared DNA.

Matthew’s purpose in including his genealogy was to establish Jesus as the expected Messiah. That’s what he tells us in the first verse, after which he lays it out, generation by generation, from Abraham through David to Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom “was born Jesus who is called the Messiah”. Fine; done and done.

Except that there’s more. Because the list includes not just the male names we’d expect in a patriarchal culture – but four women in addition to Mary. This was not the norm. In the ancient world, genealogies were lists of men, even though back in the day everyone born of woman had just as many female ancestors as male ones. With a single notable exception: Jesus, who had one fewer (human) male ancestor than the rest of us.

These are the fab four: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Let’s begin with Bathsheba, who isn’t named but rather described as the wife of Uriah the Hittite. Not clear why Matthew didn’t name her, although referring to her as the wife of Uriah does serve to bring to the fore King David’s shame: While the honourable and conscientious Uriah was risking his life in battle for his king, the rather less honourable King David lusted after and pursued Bathsheba, taking her for his wife. She became pregnant. Seeking to cover his misdeeds, David sent Uriah to the front lines and arranged for him to be abandoned there, where he was killed. The child of the sinful union died; a second child was conceived and was born. That child became Solomon, the builder of the first Jerusalem Temple. You’ll find the story at 2 Samuel 11-12.

The story of Tamar is found in Genesis 38. Tamar, a Canaanite, was the wife of one of the sons of Judah – the eponymous founder of the tribe of Judah. Tamar’s first husband died; there were no children form the union. According to the custom of the day, Judah directed another of his sons to provide offspring for Tamar. He – Onan – was, um, unwilling to follow through. He also died, which left Tamar doubly widowed and in real peril. To secure her future and her place in the family, Tamar pretended to be a prostitute and so tricked Judah into impregnating her. She bore twin boys, one of whom – Perez – would become the ancestor of King David and therefore of Jesus.

Great stories, though not perhaps the best material for an after-school special. Which brings us to Rahab. Her story comes from the second chapter of the Book of Joshua. Moses has died; Joshua is tasked with taking the Israelites across the Jordan into Jericho. He sends two spies ahead of the column. The spies enter the home of Rahab, a prostitute – something they could have done without raising suspicions among the locals. Rahab has heard of the mighty deeds of the God of the Israelites and will not stand in the way. Back at the palace, the king of Jericho learns that spies have entered his realm and sends his own men to search for the Israelites. Rahab hides the spies and helps them escape. She promises to keep quiet; the Israelites promise that she and her kin will remain unscathed if she hangs a red cord in the window so the Israelites will know which house is hers.

And finally, Ruth. Her comparatively G-rated story is told in the first chapter of the Book of Ruth. The story begins with Naomi, an Israelite who with her husband and sons escaped famine in Israel by moving to Moab. One of Naomi’s sons married a Moabite woman named Ruth; Naomi was Ruth’s mother-in-law. Fast forward ten years: Naomi has lost her husband and her sons. The famine in Israel has ended and the bereft Naomi prepares to return to her home country; she plans to leave her widowed daughters-in-law in Moab in hopes they’ll find new husbands. One of the girls agrees to stay behind. Famously, Ruth is determined to accompany her mother-in-law. In some of the most beautiful language in all of Scripture she says to Naomi, “Wherever you go I will go, wherever you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people and your God, my God. Where you die I will die, and there be buried. May the Lord do thus to me, and more, if even death separates me from you!”

Why would Matthew bring these four remarkable women into his genealogy? They weren’t needed to establish the royal ancestry of Jesus. So why include them? Because there’s more at stake in the story of the Messiah’s birth. For one thing, there’s the irregularity of the thing. Back in the day, marriages were arranged; the union was the union of two families. Engagements could last more than a year, during which time the bride and groom were allowed to become acquainted – with rigorous supervision. At the end of the engagement the groom took the bride into his home, after which there’d be a party. Which is to say that for a bride to be with child before being taken into her husband’s home could only mean that she had been unfaithful. Which is why Matthew notes that Mary was found to be with child “through the Holy Spirit” and that Joseph had “had no relations” with her before the birth of Jesus. Even so there must have been talk, which is why Matthew goes on to tell us that Joseph planned at first – prior to his dream – to “divorce her quietly” in hopes of avoiding public scandal.

How better to deal with the irregularity surrounding the conception and birth of Jesus than to establish it as part of a larger pattern of historical irregularities among the Messiah’s ancestors? And so the stories of four women are included, each of whom is part of an irregular situation that somehow accords with God’s plan for humanity’s salvation. And the women themselves are irregular. They’re women and so unlikely candidates for an ancient genealogy. And three of the four – Tamar, Rahab and Ruth – are gentiles. For starters.

Bathsheba’s union with David was illicit; Rabab is a prostitute; Tamar pretends to be a prostitute. Irregular and not something to brag about when discussing one’s family history, but their moral rectitude isn’t the point. Rahab’s livelihood functions as little more than a plot device. She doesn’t have relations with the Israelites who come to her home; her status meant that men could show up on her doorstep without attracting attention. Tamar tricks her father-in-law into having relations with her so to better her chances for survival; understandable in a world in which a woman on her own was in real danger and one in which the roles open to women were severely limited. And, of course, Tamar’s scheme worked only because Judah saw nothing amiss in having relations with a woman who was not his wife.

Irregular, to be sure; at the same time resourceful, perceptive, loyal, and courageous. Matthew is at pains to show that the irregularity surrounding the birth of the Messiah was not accidental. In fact it was God’s way of proceeding. Which opens things up beyond even the birth of the Messiah, and gives us something to think about.

Mostly we remember the stories – and storied deeds – of “great” men. Four women who might otherwise have gone unnoticed are shown to be as essential to salvation history as the men who make the cut and are listed in the main body of the genealogy. Interesting that most of those men make the list because they fathered one or more children and not because they were virtuous, brave or faithful. The women make the list – as “irregulars” – precisely because they were resourceful, perceptive, faithful, and courageous.

The Christmas story isn’t the story of the great and famous. Not one of the principal characters in the story is wealthy or famous: Not Mary, not Joseph, not the shepherds, not the unknown and unnamed person who allowed a young woman and her husband-to-be to spend the night in their stable. The story is rather one of God at work in and through irregulars: Ordinary, unsung people, doing their best to be their best selves, working with whatever life has handed them. Does that include you? It does, if you’re like most of us. Can God work with you and through you? Is God at work in and through you? Are you part of the story? Matthew says so, and so do I.

In a few days we’ll wrap things up at the retreat house. Among other things, sixty years of offering the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius to individual retreatants with private spiritual direction will come to an end, at least in Guelph. It’s a punishing loss and a sadness that is hardly unique to Canada. Retreat houses all over North America are under pressure; many have already closed.

Loyola House is a remarkable place with a remarkable history. Others have related the history more effectively than this relative newcomer ever could. Instead I’ve chosen to address the situation of the closing more broadly; as it happens, a whole lot more broadly.

As with so many things these days, it’s about money. We needn’t go into the details. It’s a story of good intentions and best efforts. It’s at once nobody’s fault and everybody’s fault. The take-home is that places like this struggle to stay afloat in economies that have been rightly characterized as winner-take-all. Either you compete – there’s a key word and a keyword for you right there – and get ahead (which means you leave others behind) or you fall behind and disappear.

It’s not just retreat houses. It’s the drive to “privatize”, which means to remove something from the public realm and make it available only to those of means. It’s all kinds of things that make life easier and better and make us better human beings. A partial list: National parks, wilderness areas, city parks, street trees, livable and walkable neighborhoods, fast and reliable public transportation, museums, leisure time, the theatre, the arts, libraries, higher education, public education, the disappearing safety net, access to health care, public washrooms, child care, etcetera, etcetera. How is that we ended up with “normals” that ought to be anything but normal? How’d we get to a place where it requires two incomes – at a minimum – to own a house? Where you have to have a private automobile – and money for gas – to have a job or buy groceries? Where illness or old age or the loss of a job or the end of a relationship can mean that everything changes for the worse forever? Where loneliness and isolation have become the air we breathe? In depressing and frustrating sum, how is it that things that ought to be available to all have become tokens of success and the stuff of wealth and privilege?

Talk about this and you’re likely to be told, perhaps with a condescending smile and an implied pat on the head, that you “don’t understand how things work” or – and here’s the one that lands the hardest – that you’re being unrealistic. To which I admit a voice within me responds, “Unrealistic? All right, bubbeleh, it’s on!” Because that’s when I can pull one of my favorite quotations from my wallet. It’s what Satish Kumar had to say about realists back in 2008 (during an interview for the Guardian Limited):

Look at what realists have done for us. They have led us to war and climate change, poverty on an unimaginable scale, and wholesale ecological destruction. Half of humanity goes to bed hungry because of all the realistic leaders in the world. I tell people who call me “unrealistic” to show me what their realism has done.

Realist and realism used in this sense are campaign words: Words that the “successful” use to convince others that the way of proceeding that made them successful is what ought to be. It’s a con game and a confidence trick: “This is the way things are. You may not like it but you’d best resign yourself to it.” We’re asked to honor and salute economic and political systems that work for very few, if by working is meant the creation of a class of super-rich human beings. But these systems don’t really work, even for the wealthy. Someone may have the resources to circumnavigate the globe on a luxury windjammer cruise, perhaps to explore the world’s coral reefs – except that the world’s coral reefs are dying. That ski trip to Zermatt isn’t going to be nearly as much fun when the snow has disappeared. Wealth can temper the effects of climate change, but only up to a point. And isolating ourselves from the suffering of others, including the suffering of other creatures, comes with a moral and spiritual cost.

A society – and here I use society as a shorthand term that covers every variety and flavor of governance, politics or economics – that cannot feed, house or gainfully employ its citizens is failing. A society that cannot ensure a livable future for its citizens is failing. I’m not a naïve utopian; this isn’t a fever dream. Rather I’m drawing from the core of Catholic Social Teaching, which sets the Common Good as the goal for every human society. And what, you may ask, is the Common Good? Glad you asked: It is the set of social conditions that allows every member of society to achieve their fullest potential. I like to condense it in this way: Common Good = everybody thrives. It’s laid out in more detail in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1905-1912. And it’s neither new nor new-fangled; it’s at least as old as the first century, back when the various books of the New Testament were being composed.

It. Does. Not. Have. To. Be. This. Way. This isn’t what God wants. It isn’t what the average American – who is, regardless of their politics, a person of good will – wants. I’m not even sure it’s what the one-percenters want, at least in the long run. It does not have to be this way.

We can do this. The signs of the times point in a single direction. The time has come and is slipping away. There is too much at stake to wait and see. Which brings to mind Dr. King’s Letter From the Birmingham Jail, written in 1963: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”

How did I get from the impending loss of a beloved retreat house to Dr. King? Because it’s all connected and all of a piece. This is God’s world. You are beloved. There is a better way; the time is now for us to come together and move forward.

2 Maccabees 7:1,20-31 + Luke 19:11-28

The parable of the talents (or pounds) is problematic – not in itself but in the way it has been interpreted, which is a classic example of God’s word having been brought to heel and rendered harmless and even irrelevant.

Our first task with this parable is one of unlearning everything we’ve learned about it. I say that as a white middle-class American who grew up during the Cold War. As presented in the United States, the parable of the talents was part of a much larger program aimed at assuring us that God was all about the status quo. Things were as they should have been. Scripture and indeed Christianity had nothing to say about the social, economic and political structures of the day. Not that there would have been anything to say, mind you, because there was nothing wrong in or about America. These were the days in which you were either a cheerleader for what was referred to – in reverential tones – as the “American Way of Life” or you were a communist. We were the good guys; communists were the bad guys. It was that simple.

As we learned it back in the day, the parable of the talents presented Jesus as a booster for his local chamber of commerce. He might as well have been dressed up in a business suit. First-century Palestine was, we understood, pretty much like the United States, except they didn’t have electricity and they wore togas. Jesus wasn’t Jewish; he was Jesus. The accumulation of wealth and capital was laudable and in fact the goal. You worked hard; you got ahead. Which made the servants who made money for their master the story’s heroes; they were the ones who’d done what we were all supposed to do. The “wicked and lazy” servant who abandoned the scheme altogether? Useless; a loser and a chump; possibly a saboteur; certainly a bad influence.

The point of the story was that we were to take whatever “talents” God had given us and make something of ourselves as Christians. I recall never quite knowing how precisely I was supposed to make something of myself as a Christian; all I could figure was that I was supposed to get out there and bring souls to Christ. Because not unlike the Cold War, bringing souls to Christ was a numbers game. As in every scenario there were two teams: Our team and the other team. Once everybody had signed up for the right team – the Christian team – something wonderful would happen. Until then, we had our marching orders.

Those in the crowd – largely Mediterranean peasants – would have understood the parable quite differently. Theirs was a society in which goods were understood to be limited. We falsely believe that there is always more of everything. First-century Palestinians understood that there wasn’t more of anything and that everything had been distributed. Which meant that one person’s gain was another’s loss. Increasing your share meant only that you had taken what did not belong to you, which pegged you for a thief.

Luke places the parable at the end of a long narrative that equates discipleship with the sharing of possessions. And hard on the heels of the story of Zaccheus. Which, as Fr. Paul reminded us yesterday, is the story of a wealthy man who does the right thing with his possessions. Quite uncharacteristically he shares them with the poor, liberally and generously; quite uncharacteristically, he behaves honorably.

Lest his listeners imagine by this that the Kingdom of God had already come, Jesus immediately tells another story as a corrective: The parable of the talents. Honorable Zaccheus notwithstanding, the Kingdom of God has not yet arrived. Hence a story in which the wealthy behave as they had always behaved, stealing from those who had little and rewarding those who aided them in their nefarious scheming.

Who are the real heroes in the parable? Not the wealthy nobleman. He is sometimes presented as a stand-in for God or Christ. He is not: He describes himself as a “harsh man”. And honorable people do not go off to “get royal power for themselves”. The single hero in the story is the third servant. He has done the right thing by protecting his master’s money; he has done the honorable thing by refusing to cooperate with his master’s scheme. And is punished for doing so, which would not at all have been surprising to Jesus’s listeners. Neither would they have been surprised at the master’s concluding words: “‘I tell you, to all those who have, more will be given; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.”

In the midst of a story that was troubling I remember struggling in particular with those words. What could Jesus possibly have meant? We were told – by someone who ought to have known better – that Jesus was talking about faith: Those with faith would be given more; those without would lose even what they had. Which made little sense then and makes less sense now.

Noteworthy that Luke has Jesus tell this story as he prepares to enter Jerusalem, where he himself will be caught and persecuted by those without honor. But not before he lashes out at those who have turned even the Temple into a place of commerce and a “den of robbers”.

For decades this story left a bad taste in my mouth. The way I’d been told to understand it just didn’t make sense, although I wasn’t sure why. If only I’d known then what I know now, thanks to the Scripture scholars upon whom I have come to depend. Jesus does not ever bless the status quo. Not once does he tell his disciples to tolerate injustice or to look the other way. Rather he presents us with a vision of the Kingdom of God that makes perfect sense and is something to aspire to: A world of love and justice, grounded in the reality that God, self-giving love, is always and everywhere present; a world of universal thriving; a world to be worked toward, hand in hand with all people of good will.

Luke 19:11-28

As the crowd was listening, Jesus went on to tell a parable, because he was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately. So Jesus said, “A nobleman went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then return. He summoned ten of his slaves, and gave them ten pounds, and said to them, ‘Do business with these until I come back.’

“But the citizens of his country hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, ‘We do not want this man to rule over us.’

“When he returned, having received royal power, he ordered these slaves, to whom he had given the money, to be summoned so that he might find out what they had gained by trading.

“The first came forward and said, ‘Lord, your pound has made ten more pounds.’ The nobleman said to him, ‘Well done, good slave! Because you have been trustworthy in a very small thing, take charge of ten cities.’

“Then the second came, saying, ‘Lord, your pound has made five pounds.’ The nobleman said to him, ‘And you, rule over five cities.’

“Then the other came, saying, ‘Lord, here is your pound. I wrapped it up in a piece of cloth, for I was afraid of you, because you are a harsh man; you take what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.’ The nobleman said to him, ‘I will judge you by your own words, you wicked slave! You knew, did you, that I was a harsh man, taking what I did not deposit and reaping what I did not sow? Why then did you not put my money into the bank? Then when I returned, I could have collected it with interest.’

“The nobleman said to the bystanders, ‘Take the pound from him and give it to the one who has ten pounds.’ And they said to him, ‘Lord, he has ten pounds!’ The nobleman said ‘I tell you, to all those who have, more will be given; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. But as for these enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them — bring them here and slaughter them in my presence.’”

After Jesus had said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem.

Wisdom 2:23-3:9 + Luke 17:7-10

I did some of my studies in St. Louis, Missouri. Back in the day St. Louis was called “Little Rome.” Lots and lots of Catholics. The Italian Catholics lived in the part of St. Louis called “The Hill.” On the Hill the streets were lined with manicured lawns and modest brick bungalows. Every front yard boasted its own shrine to the Blessed Virgin. There was competition among neighbors for the best shrines, and so almost all of them had little shelters over Our Lady, to keep her from getting wet or snowy – you know, so she could be comfortable.

The Hill was where everyone in St. Louis went for good red-sauce Italian food. One restaurant after another, all serving pretty much the same thing: pasta made from scratch; red sauce made right there in the kitchen with ripe tomatoes and no oregano. A red and white checked tablecloth; a little vase with a fresh flower; a nice basket of Italian bread from the bakery down the block. Life was good on the Hill.

Back in the day there were lots of priests and seminarians in St. Louis. Lots of religious sisters too. Whether or not they lived and worked on the Hill, the priests and seminarians knew that if you showed up at one of the Italian places on the Hill in your clerical collar you’d get your meal for free: “Your money’s no good here, Father!” Scandalous? Sure, a little, especially if your parish was in another part of St. Louis. What scandal there was wasn’t in the graciousness of the restauranteurs; rather it was that Father had come to expect special treatment and had in fact come for a free meal.

Slavery was common in first-century Palestine. Even the less well-off had slaves. The desperately poor would sell themselves into slavery. The merely poor would farm out their children so they’d be fed at least; slaves or not, children were expected to pull their weight as soon as they were able to do so.

Slavery among the Israelites wasn’t chattel slavery as in the United States, in which the one enslaved was understood to be the personal property of the master and could expect to live the entirety of their life in heartless bondage. Hebrew slaves were more like indentured servants. To be sure, no one aspired to slavery and the slave’s life was not easy. Nonetheless, the existence of slavery in first-century Palestine was less a moral problem than it was a fact of life. Which is why Luke and Jesus are comfortable using slavery as a model for Christian service, whether as apostles or disciples.

Here Jesus is talking to the disciples, set apart from those described as “crowds.” Disciples have signed on the dotted line; they’re part of the movement and Jesus is dealing with them as such.

Jesus is laying out not a list of rules but a way of being, grounded in the nature of God. We’ve just heard him warn his followers about causing scandal – saying or doing something that would cause another to reconsider their own commitment to the movement. He’s just reminded them that faith – which in Scripture is defined in terms of relationship – is foundational. And he’s reminded them that repentance and forgiveness are not add-ons or options like heated seats in your car but in fact essential: Contained in the commandment to love God and love neighbor. Confused about that? Rules aren’t going to help you.

All of which is what Jesus is getting at in verse 10: “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” Now the word translated as “worthless” in this context means “owed nothing”, as in “We slaves are owed nothing”. Either way, the point is clear. If you expect to be rewarded for doing what is expected of you and indeed what defines you as a follower of Christ, you’re not seeing things clearly.

What might you be missing? That this is a way of life, centered upon God and the things of God. Which is to say that it’s grounded in reality. This is God’s world, and what is God but self-giving love? You don’t think of doing something for someone you love as an achievement or a favor. You’re not owed anything for it. Neither is it something to boast about. People who love each other do for one another. And for heaven’s sake, not giving scandal doesn’t make you a hero. As Jesus sees it, it’s part of what makes you a Christian, although he wouldn’t have used the word Christian. Righteousness and virtue are part and parcel of a way of being in the world, as are faith, repentance, and forgiveness. Akin to being a faithful spouse or partner or a loving parent: essential and constitutive, not performative. Of course we all stumble; sometimes we fall. Jesus knows that; hence the emphasis on repentance and forgiveness. But if your Christianity is performative – designed to impress, worn on your sleeve for all to see and marvel at; if it carries with it the expectation that your very status as a Christian has earned you a nice glass of chianti and bowl of pasta fazool – you’ve missed the point.

Wisdom 2:23-3:9

God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity, but through the devil’s envy death entered the world, and those who belong to his company experience it.

But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.

For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality. Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good, because God tested them and found them worthy of himself; like gold in the furnace he tried them, and like a sacrificial burnt offering he accepted them.

In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble. They will govern nations and rule over peoples, and the Lord will reign over them forever. Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones, and he watches over his elect.

Luke 17:7-10

Jesus said to the disciples, “Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’? Would you not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink’? Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded? So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’”

Romans 8:1-11 + Luke 13:1-9

Today we’re given a come-to-Jesus moment, brought to you by the originator of come-to-Jesus moments: Jesus.

The belief in ancient times was that disaster was punishment for sin or the karmic result of sinful behavior. You sinned; you were punished. Bad things happened to bad people. We still believe that today, sort of, even as we congratulate ourselves for being so much more sophisticated than our ancestors. Have you ever asked yourself, “What did I do to deserve that?” or more bluntly, “Why is my life so difficult?”

In fact, Pilate murdered Galileans even as they worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple not because they deserved it or were notorious sinners. He murdered them because Pilate was a vicious brute and a tyrant, so much so that he was recalled to Rome for his own come-to-Jesus moment with the emperor. That moment ended his blood-soaked career. And the tower of Siloam – which was part of the wall around Jerusalem – fell not because 18 particularly sinful people happened to be within range but because it had been poorly built. If bad things only happened to bad people the world would be a different place. Better? Maybe. Certainly different.

Jesus doesn’t directly counter his listeners. Instead he tells a story. In Luke’s hands the story becomes part of the larger story of Jesus on the way to Jerusalem, where he himself will have his own unfortunate encounter with Pontius Pilate and where he will be wrongfully condemned and crucified. It’s worth noting that death by crucifixion was designed – crafted, if you will – to be public, humiliating, prolonged, and exquisitely painful. It was political theater at its most brutal and punishing. And this for someone like us in all things but sin.

Jesus has another point to make, about urgency, which is central to his teaching. Because life is uncertain, because bad things happen to good and bad people alike, we have no time to waste. When he says, “but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did,” he is not suggesting that the universe is always ready to drop a grand piano on someone’s head as punishment for bad behavior. Perishing “just as they did” doesn’t mean at the hands of a tyrant or in a pile of rubble but perishing without having repented.

For Jesus the opportune time is always now. For us too the time to repent is now; the time to figure out who we want to be and how we are to be in the world is now. There is too much at stake; we don’t have time to wait and see how things settle out so we can ally ourselves with the winning side and anyway such an approach would be unbecoming at best. Jesus calls us now, today, to read and understand the signs of the times. Which we’re able to do. You don’t need a crystal ball to see where things are headed in the United States; the New York Times is sufficient. You don’t need tea leaves to see the effects of climate change; look out the window.

With the story of the fig tree Jesus, being Jesus, brings things around to God and to what God is really like. It’s a story of compassion, mercy and patience, in the face of urgency and against all reason. There are no signs that the tree will produce, despite years of careful tending by the gardener. In the world of fig trees, this one shows every sign of being worthless. And still the gardener pleads for – and we know will be granted – another year. Which is to say that in God’s world – which is this world – even when it’s too late, it’s not too late and it’s never too late to take a step in the right direction. In God’s world – which is this world – every step in the right direction makes things better and is worth taking.

Joel 1:13-15; 2:1-2 + Luke 11:15-26

We cannot remain neutral. Jesus said this 2,000 years ago, when the population of the entire world was no larger than 300 million, long before climate change, long before the industrial revolution, long before the invention even of gunpowder. Today, the stakes are higher because the potential for harm has increased geometrically. I don’t know that Jesus would phrase his point differently today, but he might well make it with more intensity. The earth is in peril; things seem to be running off the rails; and people and creatures all over the planet are suffering as never before.

Whether you believe in Satan as a cosmic being or as nothing more than a metaphor, evil is real. It’s always present. At various times and in various situations it becomes more visible. We think of Germany in the 1930s and 40s and appropriately so, as the evil made manifest in such a murderous regime stands out in sharp relief and is easy to identify. But extreme cases make bad law, and using extreme manifestations of evil as exemplars can lull us into imagining that such a thing “could never happen here” when in reality such things have happened here – and wherever “here” happens to be – and could happen again. And we forget that the kind of evil that makes the history books isn’t all or nothing but rather exists on a continuum. Which means that the way to utter depravity remains open – as Matthew 7:13 reminds us, “the road is easy that leads to destruction” – and it is indeed possible to get there from here. Which of course means that it’s also possible to move in a better direction.

As for the fellow with the horns and the pitchfork tail – Satan – it’s best to tread lightly. Books and films about the devil and his supposed minions invariably give him (and it’s noteworthy that we don’t worry so much about inclusive language when referring to Satan…) more power than he actually has. I’m not even sure that power is the best word for it. Satan isn’t powerful so much as he’s talented – not broadly, but with real depth. His talent? The lie. Which is why Satan is aptly called the Father of Lies. Lying is his best thing. Perhaps his only thing. Don’t get me wrong: He’s very good at it. He’s had millennia of practice, in every kind of situation and with every kind of person. His lies are crafted, finely honed, tailored with infinite style and finesse. As to you and me, they’re bespoke. They’re infinitely varied as to subject matter and topic. They’re beautiful when they need to be, subtle when they need to be, and bold and even inspiring when they need to be. Which is why they’re wonderfully easy to fall for, hook line and sinker, to horrific effect. And not one of us is immune.

Lies are attractive by design, and often the lie we fall for is the one that makes us feel better. Which is a handy point of entry into the world of emotional reasoning. Emotional reasoning is a kind of distorted thinking. We’ve all fallen into it. You engage in emotional reasoning when you treat your feelings as evidence. You feel guilty about something and so you decide you’ve done something wrong – or worse, that there’s something wrong with you. Or you feel powerless and so indulge in thoughts that help you feel powerful, such as fantasizing about taking revenge. Going with feelings rather than facts? That’s emotional reasoning. Going with the untruth that makes you feel better? That’s emotional reasoning.

Neutrality? Not an option. We can be lured into thinking that we can remain untouched by “minding our own business” or by looking the other way. Which is at once emotional reasoning and a stance that makes as much sense as hiding under the bed when the house in on fire. Sure it’s attractive: Stay out of politics; you’ll only come away soiled. Keep your own house clean and in order and you’ll be fine. Don’t get involved; wait and see how things turn out; keep your options open.

The truth is that you can’t opt out. Not choosing is the same as choosing. That’s what Jesus is getting at. In fact, neutrality itself is an illusion, for to remain silent in the face of evil is to side with evil. Remaining silent provides evil with tidy and newly swept quarters. And as Jesus is at pains to point out, it’s not enough to rid your metaphorical home of harmful ideas, distorted understandings or misbegotten ways of proceeding. Doing so is a good first step, but it’s not enough. If you leave it at that you’ve only put out the welcome mat for old ways of thinking and proceeding. They’ll move back in, happily, and they’ll bring with them their even less attractive out-of-town relations.

Although it’s true that silence is easily interpreted as support for the status quo, I don’t think that holding your nose and joining one or the other of the established camps is the answer. The American Civil Rights Movement, grounded in the concept of non-violent resistance to oppression, was neither Republican nor Democratic but instead religious and spiritual. For many Christians, it was a Christ-centered response to evil. And Christ-centered is where Christians ought to be. But the Civil Rights Movement included Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and non-believers: People of all descriptions working together – despite their differences – to make things better.

Satan may be a consummate liar, but he cannot compel us to accept the lies he offers. Which is why discernment is such a useful skill. Because there is a way forward to discern. A better future is possible, always. Sure, it’s a complex world. Sure, there are nuances we must attend to. None of this is easy, but there is a way forward, and we must choose, individually and together. Why? Because if we do not choose the right, the wrong will be chosen for us. And so we clean house and fill our newly cleaned homes with the stuff of truth and life: Kindness, generosity, mercy and compassion.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is one of those great big gospel stories that takes a lot of unpacking. You can’t do justice to it with a single – unusually lengthy – homily, so what I’ll do today is expand on some bullet points. So as to get you thinking. Which is what parables are for.

“And who is my neighbour?” That’s the question that elicits the parable. For a long time I thought the story was about two mean people who didn’t stop to help someone and a nice person who did. I was mistaken. Jesus didn’t tell stories about being “nice.” There was too much at stake. There is too much at stake.

The need for context. To get into the story we need context. Neither Jesus nor Luke provided us with context. They didn’t think they needed to. Who knew back then that people would be reading and listening to these stories 2,000 years later? Back then everybody knew the context. You didn’t have to explain the meaning and requirements of ritual purity. You didn’t have to tell people why it mattered that the people who did not stop were a priest and a Levite. You didn’t have to tell your listeners about Samaritans.

Ritual impurity. The lives and worldview of the people of Israel were structured and ordered according to the Law of Moses. Of particular importance in this framework was the idea of ritual purity. Ritual purity applied to times of day, places, situations and people. All of these could be pure or impure. Impure meant unfit, unworthy, soiled. We say that someone who has committed a mortal sin is not fit to receive communion without having first gone to confession. Which helps us understand ritual purity except that ritual impurity isn’t the same as moral impurity. There can be overlap; they’re not quite the same.

Contact with someone or something that was impure made you impure. Contact with unholiness made you unholy. Conversely, contact with holiness brought holiness. Think of the woman who touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was healed.

Among the twelve tribes of Israel, the tribe of Levi was special. Temple priests came from the tribe of Levi. Not every Levite was a priest; every priest was a Levite. Levites did not have their own territory but moved freely among the Israelites. They were privileged members of society; privileged and highly regarded.

The lives of Temple priests were regulated and codified by a system of do’s and don’ts. Priestly training was designed so that nothing much was left to chance. You didn’t have to think about what to do and what not to do. The system provided the answers you needed. The boundaries were clear, which made daily life easier to understand and navigate.

Among human beings, priests and Levites were considered to be naturally pure. At the other end of the purity scale were Samaritans. They were naturally impure and unholy; lumped together with people who ate pork. Contact with a Samaritan made you ritually impure.

Ritual impurity could almost always be remedied. The process depended on the nature and degree of the impurity. It could be relatively simple and easily performed or it could be complex and even expensive.

If all of this seems odd, note that we have our own notions of ritual purity and impurity. Remember “cooties?” Or condsider: Would you go into a store that sold the stuff of Satanic worship? Not that there are such places, but if there were and if you stumbled into one you might well feel that you needed to be purified. You might head right over to the parish to light a candle.

Contact with death – and with human blood – made you ritually impure. Priests and Levites were forbidden to have anything to do with dead bodies. There were exceptions: a priest could bury the members of his immediate family. Even so, the task made him ritually impure and he had to undergo a long and expensive process of ritual cleansing.

Travel. Back in the day, travel was risky. Most people walked. Some rode on pack animals. Some few were carried. Regardless, you kept your eyes peeled for robbers and brigands. You knew who was in front of you on the road and you knew who was behind. And this highway – which Jesus identifies in the parable as the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, popularly called “the Road of Blood” – was known to have been particularly dangerous.

And so to the story. So a priest and then a Levite encounter something out of the ordinary beside the road: A man, apparently unconscious, bloody and unclothed. Because he was unclothed he would have been hard to identify. Who is he? Where does he fit in the scheme of things? What has happened to him? How should this be handled?

The priest assumes that he has encountered a corpse. It’s not an unreasonable assumption. And stopping to investigate brings the risk of ritual impurity. And if the man has been attacked and killed, his attackers may be hiding nearby, waiting for their next victim. So the priest – again, not unreasonably – crosses to the other side of the road, as his training and state in life would dictate. And who knows? Maybe he planned to report the incident when he reached his destination.

For his part, the Levite would have known that there was a priest on the highway ahead of him. As he approached, the Levite would have seen that the priest had done nothing. Obviously – else why would there be still be a body by the side of the road? Safest option? Handle it the way the priest had handled it. And so the Levite too crosses to the other side of the road.

It’s easy for us to think of both as callous and uncaring. But in the culture of the day, maybe not. They were important people to whom ritual purity especially mattered. People would have assumed that they had important things to attend to. Their behavior was in keeping with the culture of the day. Who expects an archbishop to pick up litter as he walks along? Indeed, who expects an archbishop to walk? It’s too easy to assume that the parable is meant to contrast those who extend themselves with those who can’t be bothered; the compassionate versus the indifferent and self-involved. But there’s more going on than that. Remember, this isn’t a story about the importance of being nice.

The story as a whole is filled with nuance that is easy to miss from our vantage point. The scholar of the law stands – a sign of respect – and addresses Jesus as “teacher” – another sign of respect – and then begins to test him. What is this? It’s an ambush, disguised and dressed up in honeyed language, but an ambush nonetheless. Keen to this, Jesus responds to the scholar’s question with his own question: “What does the Law say?” The scholar would have known the right answer: Eternal life is gained by following the Law of Moses. But the scholar takes it a step further – remember, this is not a friendly inquiry but rather a test, designed to get Jesus into trouble. It seems the scholar has heard that Jesus has combined two concepts: love of God and love of neighbour. Which combination wasn’t unheard of back in the day – fringy, perhaps, but not unheard of. So he quotes back to Jesus the position that Jesus himself has espoused: The essence of the Law is love of God and love of neighbour. Then Jesus – in a genius move – turns the discussion to the issue of neighbour. Because at the time – and now – neighbours would have meant relatives and friends, those of your social class, your people.

In the parable, the Samaritan is the one who stops to investigate. The wording matters: The priest goes down the road; the Levite comes to the place and continues; the Samaritan stops and comes near to the man. Had they investigated, the priest and the Levite would have discovered that the man was not dead but rather grievously wounded. The priest – who would have been riding on an animal and may well have had a servant – could have put the injured man on the back of the animal and taken him to safety. The Levite could have at least rendered first aid. The Samaritan – the unclean outsider and the one of whom nothing good could be expected – does all of that and then some. He alone has a sense for what it means to be a neighbour. He, the outsider and the other, is the hero. That’s why pious Israelites may well have said of Jesus: “That one? I don’t like the stories he tells.”

The priest didn’t stop to investigate because his office was the most important thing. The culture to which he belonged gave him every reason not to stop and hardly any reasons to stop. The Levite didn’t stop to investigate because there was no reason to do something the priest hadn’t done. The Samaritan – the outcast and the enemy – did stop, for several reasons: He was an outsider and not part of the system. He did not belong; he was reviled. But his status as an outsider, pushed to the margins – although exquisitely painful – gave him a vantage point that insiders did not have. And so he saw, clearly. He saw the importance of connection; he knew the pain of being excluded and ignored. He saw the stricken traveler as his neighbour and himself as neighbour to the stricken man. And he chose to take the risk; he chose mercy. Which is what the story is about: Which of the three was a neighbour to the man by the side of the road?

Can you stand another story? The first Black American I remember seeing was an elevator operator in one of the big fancy department stores in Los Angeles. This was back in the day, just before the invention of the wheel. I was probably 4 or 5. There were still street cars downtown, which is where the department stores were. The store in question would have been Bullock’s or the Broadway. Maybe Barker Brothers. Anyway, the elevator operator was young and beautiful. She wore a black skirt and a black blouse with a lacy white collar. As we got on the elevator she smiled at me and promptly stole my young heart. It only helped that she had the Best Job in the World. You see, this was back before elevators were automatic. They were operated by elevator operators, who – among other things – had to make sure the car was level with the floor when the doors opened. I remember her doing so, using a little lever to jockey the car up and down. Utterly captivated, I must have smiled at her because she again smiled at me.

It’s a sweet memory, but there’s a problem. She’s the first Black American I recall seeing, but in fact there were Black Americans much closer to home than Los Angeles. There were Black Americans in Fullerton, the suburban Orange County town where I grew up. Many years later I learned that they lived on the other side of the tracks – literally – in a tidy little neighborhood called Maplewood. My parents knew that. It wasn’t a secret, but neither would there have been any reason to mention something that was just part of the cultural landscape. You wouldn’t have said that my parents were racists. They never referred to Black Americans in disparaging terms. On the rare occasions when they encountered Black Americans – always situations in which my parents, because they were white, would have had the upper hand – they were courteous. But they didn’t associate with Black Americans. We never visited or even drove through Maplewood, even though going through Maplewood would have been a more direct way to get to the public library downtown. I didn’t know Maplewood existed. And no white person would have seen any of that as odd or questionable. In fact my parents would have been ostracized had they gone out of their way to associate with Black Americans.

The elevator operator I fell in love with on that magical day so long ago had been born in the same country I’d been born in. She was a citizen, as I was. She was protected – on paper at least – by the same Constitution that protected me. As long as she kept to her place – a Black American elevator operator serving white shoppers – my parents would be warm and friendly with her. Had she shown up at our front door? Well, she wouldn’t have. She was not our neighbour; we were not her neighbours. She was the other.

The risk is great; the journey from civility to barbarism need not be long. Not even 100 years ago the National Socialist German Workers Party came to power in a European nation that had long enjoyed a reputation for order, civility and learning. The party was the dream child of a man possessed of no particular talents aside from a gift for public speaking who’d gone to prison in 1923 after a failed coup attempt called the Beer Hall Putsch. He had allowed himself to become bitter and resentful, and he used his eight months in prison to hone his resentment to a sharp and deadly edge. Under his leadership the party grew in numbers and strength by encouraging and capitalizing on the worst aspects of human nature: the lie presented and restated as the truth so frequently that it was accepted as truth; creating an “other” and then defining the “other” as the enemy of the people; scapegoating – blaming – this “other” for every failure, every problem, every downturn, every bump in the road. And then embracing, advocating and facilitating private and state-sponsored violence – relentless, ruthless and merciless – as the solution. And how recently did these things happen? With cataclysmic results, as recently as 77 years ago.

Sisters and brothers, we as Christians are called to recognize and resist these trends – this deadly poison – wherever we are. By rejecting outright the points of view and the methods that carve a broad highway to destruction and suffering on a massive scale; and by investigating, understanding and living the message of the Gospel. Which is love, self-giving love, pure, unadulterated, put into practice as mercy and expressed as seeing and being neighbour. There is no other. There is only us, neighbours among neighbours.

Baruch 1:15-22 + Luke 10:13-16

Last December I teamed up with Mary Jo McDonald to deliver a series of talks about Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ landmark document on integral ecology. Mary Jo is a friend of the retreat house. Some of you may know her. She has a PhD in theology and is a Lonergan scholar; which should tell you that she’s way smarter than I. Regardless, Mary Jo and I gave our talks in what’s now called the Norfolk Family of Parishes, more or less directly south of us, in the part of Canada that’s actually to the south of parts of the US. Yet another thing that’s confusing to Americans, who affectionately think of Canada as the Great White North. But then as an American I’ll just note that we Americans are easily confused. Our talks attracted nice audiences. Mostly women of a certain age; no surprise there, as increasingly those are the Catholics who come to things. They were engaged, receptive and appreciative; their questions and comments showed they’d been paying attention and that the issues we covered meant something to them. And, like Catholics in both Canada and the US, they’d heard next to nothing about Laudato Si’. Its ideas and arguments were completely new to them. Compelling, but new. In fact the most frequent comment was a version of “This stuff is amazing! I’ve never heard any of it before!”

There are lots of reasons for this. At the parish level, the Church in Canada and the US is increasingly overwhelmed. The models that seemed to work so well for decades are failing us. They depended on an abundance of priests and on a superabundance of religious sisters who worked like galley slaves for next to nothing. That world has faded into the mist. The “family of parishes” in which we gave our talks has two foreign-born priests serving four congregations; good men with neither the time nor the opportunity to do much of anything aside from attending to the very basics. In all, communities of faithful Catholics doing their best to function under a model that no longer serves and seems doomed to fail completely.

Which I mention because Pope Francis was at pains to show that with regard to ecology and the planet we inhabit, models that have been in place for the past two hundred and fifty years are both untenable and inconsistent with Christianity. We grew up with these models. They’re familiar. They’re all about ownership, power and dominion. We’ve taken their validity for granted. It’s time to leave them behind. In other words, it’s time for a conversion.

Today’s gospel passage gives us a frustrated Jesus, filled with a sense of urgency that his audience does not share: “For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes.” Tyre and Sidon were not part of Israel; the Israelites dismissed their inhabitants as pagans. Jesus is saying, “These people you dismiss as backward and faithless would hear and respond; why don’t you get it?” With respect to the environment, how is it that the rest of the world moves forward – albeit slowly – while the United States, increasingly the world’s problem child, refuses to acknowledge the obvious and instead takes giant steps backward? It’s embarrassing, dispiriting, and dangerous.

We must not lose hope. Two days ago Pope Leo convened a conference in Castel Gandolfo to mark the tenth anniversary of Laudato Si’. The conference, which ends today, is called “Raising Hope for Climate Justice.” A stunning title, right out of Catholic social teaching. And so the first American pope – itself something we were told “would never happen” – has renewed his predecessor’s urgent call for “true ecological conversion” from words to action.

Laudato Si’ is a treatise on integral ecology, which is about connection. We cannot isolate our deepening environmental crisis from the world’s economic, social, political and cultural problems. And because the problems facing us are connected, so are the solutions. They demand a comprehensive perspective that includes the voices of all and especially the vulnerable. Remediation must proceed from the premise that reality itself is built on connection.

Now take a breath with me and think of the Trinity. For many, a confusing and needlessly abstract concept, hardly useful at all. But it reflects and helps us grasp the essense of reality: Three divine persons; one divine nature. In other words, three divine persons, bound together in self-giving love. The Trinity tells us what God is like and in telling us what God is like tells us what creation is like: Connected, resting on a foundation of self-giving love. And from the Trinity comes? The entirety of creation, everything that is – because self-giving love is too big to be contained; it is creative; it issues forth in unrestrained and interconnected beauty and complexity. Our world is an ecosystem made up of ecosystems. Wheels within wheels; connected; interdependent; impossibly beautiful; the very stuff of God. And worth saving, even if saving it didn’t include saving humankind.

As Jesus reminds us throughout the gospels, get the core wrong and you get everything wrong. Get connection wrong and you get everything wrong. Which brings us back to hope. Yes, it’s late. Yes, the crisis deepens as we continue to waste time. But the reigning spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics has given us the go-ahead to think differently; to challenge ways of proceeding that only make things worse; to demand that our political, social and economic leaders the world over respond with intelligence, insight and alacrity. Yes, the Season of Creation officially ends tomorrow, but it returns every year, as does tomorrow’s Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. St. Francis of Assisi taught us to see that God is present, always and everywhere, to every aspect of creation and that the entirety of creation is beloved and sacred. Pope Francis affirmed and restated St. Francis’ teachings for our time in Laudato Si’. Pope Leo has joined his predecessor and has made Laudato Si’ a cornerstone teaching of his own papacy. There is a way forward, and because this is God’s world, every step in the right direction – no matter how seemingly small or tenuous – is at once convincing and redemptive.

Amos 6:1a, 4-7 + 1 Timothy 6:11-16 + Luke 16:19-31

Lazarus and Dives: The traditional name for today’s gospel story. Dives isn’t a given name; it’s simply the Latin word for “rich.” It tells us most everything we need to know about this man. “Wealthy” may well have represented everything the man needed to know about himself. By contrast, Lazarus is a given name. It’s derived from Eleazar, which means “God has helped.”

For Jesus and for the tradition into which he was born, wealth – defined as having more than your fair share of the world’s goods – was a problem. Not the end of the story, perhaps, but a problem nonetheless. “Problem” may not be the best word for it. I don’t know; it’s the best word I can think of. Would “sinful” be a better fit? Dives was absolutely sinful, but assessing sinfulness in real life is fraught. So calling wealth sinful just takes us further into the thicket. A “near occasion of sin”? Less fraught and a lot more fun to think about, but so many things can function as near occasions of sin – including the laptop computer on your desk and the bag of Double Stuf Oreos in your kitchen cupboard – that the term is not specific enough to be helpful. So I’ll stick with saying that back in the day, wealth was a problem; not the end of the story, but a problem.

And one of several intertwined problems for Dives. Jesus – laying it on thick before a hostile audience – notes that Dives dines sumptuously “every day.” Including the sabbath, when meals were kept simple to avoid working – and to avoid making others work. Dives eats this way every day, in a society in which food insecurity was a given because most people were poor. And when Dives goes out – not on foot but in the first-century version of a sweet ride – he dresses in his finest clothes, so as to be seen and noticed. Self-branding, 2,000 years before Facebook.

So wealthy, vain, and complacent. And oblivious. Lest we miss the point, we’re given a passage from Amos: “Alas for those who lie on beds of ivory, and lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, and calves from the stall; who sing idle songs to the sound of the harp…but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” In other words, the world around them is in flames and collapsing into rubble, and yet they take no heed, because their wealth insulates and protects them, both literally and figuratively. Others suffer and die while they are entertained; their wealth buys them safety, protection and comfort. Whatever is going on outside the walls of their gated communities is kept at bay.

By the way, “gated communities” is aptly descriptive here. They’re all the rage in the US, but they’re hardly a new phenomenon. In first-century Palestine the wealthy elite surrounded their dwellings and family compounds with walls. Cities and towns were divided by walls and gates that isolated the wealthy from the poor. Then as now, the built environment helped to maintain the status quo. It reminded people where they stood. Someone like Lazarus would have been reminded all day long that he neither belonged nor mattered. And at night he would have been taken up and deposited outside the city gates. Not aided, fed or comforted; taken out with the other trash.

Here’s a line that many of you will recognize: “‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ replied the Ghost. ‘I made it link by link and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?’” It’s from Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, spoken by the ghost of Jacob Marley, the former business partner of Ebenezer Scrooge. Jacob has returned to warn Mr. Scrooge that wealth – in both the having and getting of it – serves only to enslave; to blind; to isolate; to imprison.

Poverty enslaves, clearly. Lazarus is held captive by poverty; imprisoned by disease, hunger and suffering. Dives too is enslaved but less obviously, and indeed we associate wealth with the freedom to go wherever and do whatever you want. You’re free to fashion your own little carefree world at home; free to travel in a bubble of beauty and privilege, the world a charming stage-set. But Dives is indeed enslaved. He is unable to see the humanity of the fellow just outside his gate. He cannot appreciate that he and Lazarus are in fact connected. And he’s oblivious to the moral universe around him. Neither can he see the presence of God all around him; he’s not even looking for God. Like Jacob Marley, Dives has forged his own chains. To be sure, his fellow travelers in life have supported and encouraged him right along. We could say they provided the forge, anvil and hammer, but ultimately Dives himself took up the tools he was given.

Does it get worse? You bet. On a tear, Jesus holds nothing back. Dives passes away, and like all of us, he dies the way he lived. In death as in life, he speaks the only language he knows: “Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water….” Astonishing – he expects Lazarus to serve him, even now that the tables have turned. And when that proves impossible he asks Abraham – slyly referring to Abraham as “father” even though Dives doesn’t know what it means to be a son of Abraham – again to press Lazarus into service, this time as a messenger to warn the rest of the family. Wondrously ironic: Here is Dives, at last asking that Lazarus be brought into the family compound. Not for a meal, not for rest and respite, but to serve – and save – the family of Dives.

The story is about the behavior of one wealthy man. But it’s about more than that. It’s about a world that allows some to suffer as others prosper; a world that seems to thrive on inequity. Again, wealth was defined as having more than your fair share, which meant that you had what was not yours to have, which meant that you were a thief in a world where thieves were princes and kings.

In our time our dear Pope Francis went out of his way to articulate what has been part of the Church’s teaching for centuries: The world’s goods belong to all, equally. Which is a restating of the ancient idea that wealth and thievery are of a piece. The guiding principle is the Common Good, which in simple terms means, “everybody thrives.” The Common Good is the goal. How you get there is the stuff of economics and politics – means to an end. Some means are more effective than others. Regardless, the goal remains: That all may thrive. Now refined to include creation as a whole.

Today’s world is more complex by an order of magnitude than the world of the first century, when the population of the entire planet was around 200 million. “Complex” and “complicated” are handy words. They allow us to dismiss our problems as too big to solve and to throw up our hands in false overwhelm. But there is less complexity in the story of Lazarus and Dives than we might imagine. The tale need not have ended as it did. Dives could have taken another path. That’s the point. Another path. Perhaps beginning with baby steps, by directing one of his many servants to bring Lazarus inside and tend to his wounds. Done and done; not complicated at all.

What about our problems? Are they big? Yes. But big is not the same as complicated. Consider housing. Big problem; related to other big problems. Big, but not that complicated, and indeed no more complicated than building houses for people you care about. And in fact we build houses for people we care about all the time. The problem isn’t housing; it’s a matter of bringing others into our circle of concern. That’s the needed shift in thinking; if you will, the needed conversion. And climate change? Bigger still. Complicated? I’m not so sure. People who know things have assured us that the solutions to climate change are within reach. That’s not why climate change is a problem. It’s a problem because we have not yet developed the will to proceed. Rather like having someone like Lazarus outside your front gate; it’s a problem until you pick him up and bring him inside.

The story of Lazarus and Dives is a sad one, but it need not have ended sadly. Consider again Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843. Not unlike the story of Lazarus and Dives in some ways: A story of wealth, poverty and inequity, set not in first century Palestine but in England in the grips of the Industrial Revolution. Dickens gives us a miserly employer; wage slavery; and an impoverished family with an ailing child in danger of death. The difference is that A Christmas Carol does not end badly – after all, Dickens entitled his story A Christmas Carol and not A Christmas Funeral. There is a turning point: A conversion that makes all the difference. The result? “[A]nd to Tiny Tim, who did not die, [Ebenezer Scrooge] was a second father”. Some of the most heart-warming words ever written: “and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, [Ebenezer Scrooge] was a second father”. A conversion; an old man, come alive to his humanity. The distance from here to there condensed to a shimmering instant of conversion. Just in time. And nearly two hundred years later – and a good 2,000 years after the first telling of the sad story of Lazarus and Dives – it is not yet too late. We are indeed running out of time, but it’s not too late; not too late for the conversion that shortens the distance from here to there to a shimmering moment. In Christ, through repentance, there is a way forward.

I bring up Lonergan because today’s readings focus on the self-giving love of God as expressed – perfectly and with cosmic effect – in the self-giving love of Christ. “Self-giving” captures more than simply the Cross; it encompasses the entirety of what some call the Christ-event: Incarnation, birth, life, teachings, works, Passion, death, Resurrection, ascension. The meaning – and the implications – of the Christ event was a central theme of Lonergan’s work. It’s the mystery of redemption – which Lonergan called the Law of the Cross.

Put bluntly, we live in a time of troubles. I don’t have to tell you that. It’s rooted in human sinfulness, but it’s bigger than that. It looking like the wholesale degradation of human society and a massive downward spiral. It includes the deterioration of human relations, systematic and institutionalized injustice, and bias made into a way of proceeding. It yields escalating violence across the board. It’s happened before, and in fact it’s cyclical. It’s what Europe witnessed as fascism took hold in Germany and Italy in the years between the World Wars. It’s 300+ years of racism in the United States. It’s the Industrial Revolution and its effects on the earth, our Common Home. What do these cycles look like? They’re rooted in a set of unsupported assumptions about the world and our place in it. With respect to the case of the Industrial Revolution these assumptions and their related goals rest – uneasily – on a distorted idea of dominion, garnered from a misreading of Genesis 1:26. The assumptions vary, but there are some that apply across the board. The ends justify the means. Technological sophistication is linked to cultural and intellectual superiority. Europeans and especially lighter-skinned Europeans are inherently superior. They are God’s favorites.

The US is immersed in a moral crisis with political dimensions. It’s uniquely American in that it arises from the nation’s history. At the same time, it has features that are universal. Its features include the hardening of political, economic and social divisions to the point that those on the “other side” are seen as increasingly dangerous enemies. You’re right; they’re wrong. Communicating across the divide is perceived to be impossible; attempts to communicate are dismissed as wastes of time. What matters is not the common good but rather the accumulation and consolidation of political and economic power for your side. Holding public office is valued only as an means of gaining power so as to punish and overwhelm those on the other side. Resentment is a thing to be cultivated; revenge is encouraged and upheld as praiseworthy. Compassion and mercy are dismissed as weak or effeminate. Violence is the way forward. It liberates, cleanses and redeems.

Is there a better way? Of course: It’s the way of the Gospel. These recurring downward spirals are neither inevitable nor preordained. They can be reversed. How? With the redemptive power of self-giving love, expressed as mercy, forbearance and the rejection of violence. This is God’s way of proceeding, arising from the very nature of God. This is the means by which evil can be absorbed and transformed.

Which is where the Law of the Cross comes in. Evil can be indeed be absorbed and transformed; redemption is real and possible. But not without cost. If you stand in the way of evil, it will cost you.

This is the Gospel, lived and realized. Show the myth of redemptive violence to be the lie that it is. Do not cultivate resentment. Turn away from revenge. Do not return insult for insult. Reject chaos and the calamity that is the bitter fruit of chaos. In Lonergan’s words, the process is one of “transforming evil into good [and] absorbing the evil of the world by putting up with it, not perpetuating it as rigid justice would demand.” Wait. Putting up with with evil? Yes. As demonstrated by Christ on the Cross, putting up with evil “acts as a blotter, transforms the situation, and creates the situation in which good flourishes.”

The feast we observe today – the Exaltation of the Cross – is not about victory. Which is not to suggest that self-emptying on the Cross is about defeat, but rather that the language of victory and defeat is a category mistake. Winning and losing belong to the vocabulary of battle and aggression. We Christians are called to something different. We exalt the Cross as emblematic of a better way.

Where’s the rub in this? Here’s the rub: The transformation of evil was never meant to be a spectator sport. It is God at work in the world, to be sure. And if it was done for us, it was also given to us so that we might make it our work as well. Hence the invitation of Jesus: “Come, follow me” and “Go, and do likewise”. Rather than, “Watch this!”

Challenging? You bet. As they say, hella challenging. But not impossible. If it were impossible there’d be no point in it. It seems heroic because it stands out so sharply from the cultures of aggression and conquest that we have adopted as our common way of proceeding. It’s rarely seen, but it remains the better way and indeed the only way forward. Hear again the invitation: “Come, follow me.”

You, beloved child of God, are called to respond to Christ’s invitation. It’s an urgent call, which means that ignoring the invitation is the same as sending your regrets. But you’re not called to go it alone. Far from it. This is not a solo thing; neither is it parallel play. It’s a group activity. The more it’s practiced, the more widespread the transformation and the more evident its benefits become. You’ve seen it in the great souls we revere: Mary of Nazareth, the Mother of God; Mahatma Gandhi, a lifelong Hindu, inspired by the Gospel; Dr. Martin Luther King. Others, too, largely unknown. They’re out there. You probably won’t find them on Facebook or X or Insta. They’re the unsung heroes who’ve made Christ’s way of proceeding their way of proceeding. It is a great cloud of witnesses, doing the work of transformation. You’re invited.

Isaiah 32:14-18 + Philippians 4:5-7 + John 14:15-17

The other day a friend and I were talking about the things people pray for during Mass. We noted that lots of people pray for peace. My friend added, “Although we don’t even know what we’re praying for.” She was right. And being a thoughtful person as well as a Lutheran pastor, she soon came around to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer – another Lutheran pastor, and a theologian, and a martyr – called cheap grace. Grace is the presence of God; the gift of the Spirit; the way forward. It is gift and as such is given freely, but there is cost involved. Contradictory? Not really. God is not transactional. The cost – what Bonhoeffer called the cost of discipleship – comes from the context in which grace is given, which is relationship. God is self-giving love. Self-giving love is given freely. At the same time, love has meaning only in the context of relationship. Love abstracted from relationship is meaningless. And by their very nature relationships demand something of us. We attend to the other person’s well-being; we adjust our own needs and desires; we act in concert. We change – in ways that make us healthier, more humane and more alive, to be sure – but we change nonetheless. In a similar way a relationship with Christ demands something of us. Cheap grace is the idea that we can receive what God gives freely and remain unchanged.

It’s possible to pray for peace – or for anything else – in the way that a child might pray for a bicycle for his birthday, as a simple request: “Please, God, I want a red ten-speed.” Sometimes the child adds a blanket promise – “I promise to be good” – but those childish promises only show that the proposed exchange is essentially transactional. We’re no longer children, but even though our prayers are worded with greater sophistication they can amount to the same thing: “Lord, prevent us from fighting”; “pour water on this or that violent conflagration”. “Stop the violence in Gaza”; “stop the violence in the Ukraine”. “Stop the violence on the streets of Toronto”. “Lord, flip a heavenly switch and bring peace to the world”. Left unsaid in every case are these words: “…without our having to lift a finger.”

Surely we know better. We know that praying for peace means entering more deeply into our relationship with God. We know that praying for peace means advancing the cause of peace. It means working to renounce our own violent impulses. It means making it harder to act with violence when we are consumed by anger and lose ourselves. We know that peace-making is hard work, in part because it entails the remaking of society.

It’s that way too when we pray for the earth, our common home. It’s easy to pray for an end to the hundreds – yes, hundreds – of wildfires that rage across Canada. In fact it’s so easy that it can be nothing more than a demand for cheap grace: “Lord, fix it without my having to do anything but ask”. I’m asking God to suspend the law of cause and effect. I’m asking God for a miracle; the miracle that will mean we can continue to exploit Alberta’s oil sands without environmental harm; the miracle that breaks the link between fossil fuels and the death of the world’s coral reefs.

The hard and beautiful truth is this: Apart from the energy we receive from the sun, the earth is a closed system. Which means, necessarily, that everything is connected to everything else. And so no crisis is isolated from another crisis. As Pope Francis reminded us time and again, what we’ve come to call the climate crisis has multiple dimensions. Just as we cannot find peace without addressing the many causes of violence, so we cannot address the climate crisis without addressing our way of being in the world.

Discipleship is relationship; connection: Your relationship with God as expressed and articulated in your relationships with your fellow beings, human and non-human alike. When we say that everything is connected we affirm more than one essential truth: Every created thing is connected to every other created thing, and to God; Every problem is connected to every other problem.

Grace is there, freely given, from the One who is self-giving love. The context? Relationship. Grace is given in relationship and given for relationship. Our relationships change us, because we exist always and only in context. Relationships become unhealthy and fail when we refuse to change; so much so that to refuse to change is to refuse to love.

People who know things have been telling us that we are swiftly approaching the point of no return with respect to the climate crisis. Pope Francis added his voice to this rising chorus in 2023 in Laudate Deum, his follow-up to his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’. We’re closer than ever to the point of no return now that the world’s chief culprit – the United States – has turned its back on the rest of the world by working to undo the hard-won but still modest progress that’s occurred in recent decades. The United States ought to be leading the world in an all-out effort – something exceeding by orders of magnitude the effort to win the Second World War. Americans and Canadians should be pounding on the doors of our legislators and representatives, demanding immediate and sweeping change at the level of public policy. And yet Laudato Si’ – in many ways the signal and defining document of Francis’ papacy – has been largely ignored in the United States and Canada, both by the bishops and in parishes. And even some of those who say they take the problem seriously offer ideas that amount to tinkering with this or that, and always in ways that preserve the economic and political status quo. Really? The world is on fire and you’re handing out squirt guns?

Our problems are interrelated. Climate is related to wealth and poverty, to habitat destruction, to housing, to transportation, to food, hunger and malnutrition, to water and air pollution, to waste disposal, to agriculture and to animal welfare. Solving our climate crisis – to the extent that there is still time to think in terms of solutions as opposed to ameliorating the worst effects of a rapidly escalating calamity – will require a wholesale rethinking of human society. Which is the stuff of discipleship in any case. And the stuff of discipleship is the stuff of righteousness.

“The effect of righteousness will be peace.” Isaiah’s words, from today’s first reading. As used in Scripture, righteousness means justice, as in social and economic justice. That’s right: Social justice, the term that so many associate with loopy progressives, is Biblical. It is righteousness, and righteousness belongs to God. It’s encompassed in the phrase, “My ways are not your ways.”

Just as every problem is connected to every other problem, so every solution is connected to every other solution. How happy then that discipleship calls us to adopt ways of proceeding that are God’s ways of proceeding. That’s the good news. And there is always good news. There is always hope. The very process of addressing the climate crisis as disciples makes us better disciples; brings increased awareness and increased creativity; breaks down barriers; brings us closer together. Which can only make things better. Which is the way of righteousness.

Isaiah 66:18-21 + Hebrews 12:5-7 + Luke 13:22-30 + Dirk Dunfee, SJ

Here’s another happy little set of readings for a Sunday. Let’s see if we can make sense of them. I bet we can, and the very process of trying to making sense of them will do us good. After all, making sense of things is what human beings have been doing for thousands of years. Making sense of things; finding meaning.

Today’s readings get at a basic question: Why do bad things happen? Car won’t start; bicycle tire has mysteriously gone flat overnight. Which prompts a question: Why is this happening to me? To ask why something has happened is to look for meaning.

A person of faith might answer the question by assuming that they’ve done something wrong. I have offended God; I’m being punished. Or, in more fashionable language, I’m being disciplined. Another person – perhaps a person of faith, perhaps not – might chalk the present difficulty up to karma, the ancient principle of cause and effect. Not cause and effect like driving a nail into your bicycle tire, but cause and effect in the sense that evil engenders evil. We’ll come back to karma.

Some traditions encourage us to reframe. Zen Buddhists, for example, advise caution about labeling events as bad or good, suggesting that attaching judgments to everything is not helpful: “I like this; I don’t like that; I want this; I don’t want that.” Here’s an everyday example. We’re on the road in morning traffic, trying to make an appointment; as is so often the case, we have just enough time to make it if things go smoothly. So far so good. But there’s a red light ahead at the intersection where we need to turn left. Ooh, that’s bad. It turns green just before we get to it. That’s good. And then, down the road a bit, we see the flashing lights of an oncoming ambulance. And now we’re going to be late, despite our best efforts. Very bad; makes for a terrible morning. Except that my red light is someone else’s green light; someone who’s trying to get his daughter to her dance recital on time. And the ambulance that brings everything to a standstill and means I’ll be late for my appointment is rushing to come to the aid of someone in real distress. That’s reframing. It’s helpful. It engenders equanimity.

Let’s turn to the book of Hebrews. People who are in the know no longer call it the Letter of Paul to the Hebrews, for the simple reason that it isn’t a letter and wasn’t written by Paul. Neither was it written for the Hebrews, but we have to call it something. Regardless, it incorporates a traditional response to the question of why bad things happen. Why do they happen? Because God is a loving parent and loving parents discipline their children. To discipline is to teach. As God, the best parent of all, teaches. God disciplines the children of God – or, if you’re brave enough to use the word, God punishes the children of God. Call it discipline or punishment, it’s about teaching and learning. And in fact discipline and disciple come from the same root word that means instruction or knowledge. God disciplines; disciples learn. Your child breaks a rule; as a loving parent you discipline the child with a richly-deserved “time out”. Call it punishment if you will; you’re teaching the child that disobedience brings unpleasant consequences. The parent teaches; the child learns. And, sixty years on, may or may not be grateful.

People will insist that God punishes so as to teach; they say it’s right there in Scripture. It is there in Scripture, largely because the stories we encounter in Scripture were written well after the fact and structured so as to make a point. How did the Israelites know why they were being punished? Prophets told them; reliable prophets; not the false prophets who didn’t make it into the story. In your life and my life it’s trickier. I don’t know about you, but I don’t live with prophets. I live with Jesuits. And effective parenting demands clarity and consistency. For learning to occur, the child has to know what precisely they’ve done wrong. And the consequences have to fit the crime. “Put your Legos away; company’s coming.” The child starts in but is distracted and leaves Legos scattered across the floor. Time out? No TV for an evening? Sure. No more toys, forever? Of course not. That would be stupid, and cruel.

What if God indeed teaches but in ways that invite us to collaborate in our own learning? What if God – always a loving parent – treats adults as adults, capable of paying attention; capable of putting two and two together; able to find better ways of proceeding? And after all, isn’t that what it’s about? That’s why you’re here, right? To connect with God; to find a better way forward? In a word, discipleship.

And there’s more. It’s possible to come away from the Hebrew Scriptures with the idea that God never tolerates sin and disobedience. Vice is punished, then and there. Virtue is rewarded, then and there. But it’s more complicated than that, even in Scripture. Consider this passage from the 73^rd psalm. It would be worth putting on a bumper sticker except it would be too big for your bumper:

For I was envious of the arrogant;
I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

For they have no pain;
their bodies are sound and sleek.
They are not in trouble as others are;
they are not plagued like other people.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
violence covers them like a garment.
Their eyes swell out with fatness;
their hearts overflow with follies.

They scoff and speak with malice;
loftily they threaten oppression.
They set their mouths against heaven,
and their tongues range over the earth.

Yes, it’s God’s world. But life isn’t fair. People don’t pay attention. They’re deceived. They don’t use their heads. They have no interest in the common good. And they seem to get away with it. Complicated.

Which brings us to Jesus – for the Christian, precisely where we ought to be. I think Jesus lands on the side of something like karma. As a principle, karma comes to us from Hinduism and Buddhism. If borrowing a term from another tradition bothers you, find another word for it because even though aspects of it don’t quite fit, it makes sense. Karma is cause and effect; karma is consequences. Actions have consequences. Behavior matters. My behavior has ripple effects. Our behavior has very broad ripple effects. It’s the long view: Good behavior engenders good behavior and makes things better.

“Someone asked [Jesus], ‘Lord, will only a few be saved?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.’” The key word is strive. Strive to enter the narrow door. Will you be punished on the spot if you don’t strive to enter the narrow door? If you don’t attend to God’s vision? Probably not. As Jesus tells us elsewhere, God allows the weeds and wheat to grow together. Will things be worse in the long run if you fail to strive? Absolutely. Will that become clear in time? It will, if you’re paying attention, over time.

There’s a saying that Dr. Martin Luther King popularized. It comes from Theodore Parker, a 19^th century Unitarian pastor and abolitionist. You’ve heard it: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is God’s world. God is at work in the world. Everything is spinning back to God. But life isn’t fair. And we are given a great deal of agency. And behavior matters. And what seems expedient in the short run may make things worse in the long run. And so we strive to enter the narrow door, using all the tools at our disposal.

It matters. How you are in the world matters. How we are in the world matters. We can be part of the problem or part of the solution. And, as Jesus warns, there is a point of no return. More than one, actually. There is a point – swiftly approaching – at which the worst and most terrifying effects of climate change, for example, will be impossible to prevent. And even though God’s invitation to repentance and conversion is always there, the invitation becomes more difficult to see and accept as my character – formed by thousands upon thousands of decisions – becomes more hardened and concrete.

Americans – at least some of them – are learning the hard way that voting matters. It matters whether you vote; whom and what you vote for matters. Because if you’re careless or dismissive, a great deal of harm can occur. To the planet; to the creatures with whom we share the planet; to the unborn; to immigrants and refugees; to the vulnerable; to those for whom life is already hard; to all of us; to society itself.

Your daily decisions about what to eat, where and how to live, how to get around, how to earn a living – they all matter. They make a difference. They have consequences that you may not appreciate at the time you make them. Many of us get that, and we do the best we can in systems that may or may not point us in the best direction. Which means that public policy matters. Economics matter. Diplomacy matters. Because we’re connected to everyone and to everything.

Let’s turn, finally, to Isaiah. It hints at the world that Jesus points to, and it’s the stuff of hope and promise. It’s the destination, and it’s worth striving for. This part of Isaiah was written after those who had been exiled to Babylon had returned to Israel, courtesy of the Persian king Cyrus. Others – refugees, outsiders – had come with those who returned. To Jerusalem and to the Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians but since rebuilt. That line at the end that seems like a throwaway? “And I will also take some of them as priests and as Levites,” says the Lord. Worth paying attention to. It’s God’s vision, for the “some of them” are Gentiles. God is saying what many would have thought an impossibility: Gentiles will be brought into the priestly caste; Gentiles will serve in the rebuilt Temple. In other words, God’s inclusive vision will prevail. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Everyone, everywhere, every creature. All matter; all have a place in God’s dominion. God is with you; you are free to choose your way forward. And it matters.

Wednesday July 30, 2025 + LH + 17th Week in OT

Exodus 34:29-35 + Matthew 13:44-46 + St. Peter Chrysologus + 406-450 + Archbishop of Ravenna

Dirk Dunfee, SJ

For what seems like the umpteenth day in a row we’re back hearing about the kingdom of heaven. Makes you wonder whether Jesus had anything else to talk about. But again Jesus doesn’t tell us what the kingdom of heaven is. Rather he tells us how valuable it is and how compelling the thought of having it would be: So much so that you’d sell everything you owned just to be able to put together enough money to buy it. And Jesus didn’t envision holding something back just in case, as in “OK, I’ll do this, but I’m going to hold on to the cottage by the lake – just in case.” Perhaps because Jesus, being Jesus, is always trying to get us to render ourselves defenseless before God. And he’s confident that what he has to offer will be worth it.

The soundness of this singular proposal may hang on the nature of the kingdom of heaven. Here’s what I think: The kingdom of heaven is as if we believed the stuff we hear in church. The stuff that sounds so outlandish when you’re not in church; so much so that you don’t dare repeat it at the office. When you see your boss next week are you going to mention the kingdom of heaven? Are you going to ask her to help you understand how precisely the company’s mission fits into God’s realm of love and justice? Of course not. Who does that sort of thing? OK, Jesus, but then look where it got him.

What is the kingdom of heaven? Maybe a lot of things, all wrapped up in one thing. It’s all of us, agreeing to abandon the ethic of competition and one-upmanship. It’s all of us, dropping from our common vocabulary words like winning or losing, except perhaps in reference to the football pitch. It’s all of us, no longer reminding people of our latest honor or achievement – you know, by just casually slipping it into an otherwise perfectly innocent conversation. It’s the subverting of the ego – in me, the wounded and hypervigilant monster that approaches the world with teeth bared, always ready to change the topic: “But enough about you; let’s talk about me!” It’s listening to someone in a way that admits the possibility of changing our thinking about something – you know, listening with traction; listening that might actually go somewhere. It’s seeking the good – the well-being – of the other in our relationships – in all our relationships. It’s the Common Good, not as a Sunday morning ideal but as a real and universally held way of proceeding. It’s abandoning wealth even as we abandon poverty. It’s adopting an economic system that serves rather than enslaves.

It seems safe to say that getting from where we are to the kingdom of heaven is going to be one heck of a pull at the oars and until it all of a sudden catches on in a paradigm shift of cosmic proportions it’s going to be wildly unpopular. As unpopular as, say, the following modest proposal – which I haven’t yet run up anybody’s flagpole but only present here as an illustration of something that might be run up a flagpole somewhere. It has to do with land acknowledgements.* I hasten to note that I think land acknowledgements were a good idea; they’re good things, worth investing in as steps in the right direction. The downside of land acknowledgements is that people get upset – understandably and rightfully so – when they’re not accompanied by meaningful action. So… what if, when life presents you with an opportunity to make things better, you seize upon it. And in addition to acknowledging that the land on which you’ve been sitting for a hundred or so years was previously occupied by groups of people who’d been there for many hundreds of years, living their lives and as it were minding their own business – what if in addition to the rote acknowledgement the current occupants of what has become prime real estate were to consider giving all or part of it back to the people who were here first? What’s that you say? Outside the realm of the possible? OK, then what if you were to invite indigenous people to join with you in determining the land’s future? Thinking outside the box in a way that would be less than popular with the very people who remind us that the only way to get ahead is to think outside the box.

The kingdom of heaven is approximated by my favorite quotation from Scripture. It’s from Isaiah 55: “Your ways are not my ways.” Although I should add that it’s my favorite quotation only until I realize that the “your” in “your ways are not my ways” refers to yours truly.

Earlier on I said that the kingdom of heaven is a lot of things, all wrapped up in one thing. The one thing? The Incarnation, God in human form. In itself so preposterous a concept that only two possibilities exist: Either it’s an utterly untenable fabrication; yet another example of religious wishful thinking – or it’s true.

One problem with the kingdom of heaven, whatever it may be, is that for safety’s sake we’ve pretty well convinced ourselves that it’s unattainable, so much so that it would be silly to strive for it in any real sense. Maybe in the same way we’ve convinced ourselves that changing the Church for the better is unattainable and so we just wait for the day when everyone who’s standing in the way of changing things for the better gets out of the way. Just saying.

Is the kingdom of heaven a real possibility? I think so, because Jesus talked it up and he seems to have been a truth-teller; so much so that he got himself crucified.

How do we get there? How do we move in the right direction? I’m not sure, but I think it’s going to involve giving something up: Maybe selling what you have and giving the money to the poor? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly giving something up. Which for this American, uninured to sacrifice, is confessedly a sticking point, even if the something better is God’s dominion of love and justice. But then I think of others who’ve given up what they had in hopes of something better; others who’ve made themselves defenseless before God. I’m thinking of the heroes of the American Civil Rights Movement. Some of them religious; all of them Godly. Godly troublemakers. In the words of the great American statesman John Lewis, himself a hero of the Civil Rights Movement, makers of “good trouble,” which is trouble that stirs the waters as at the pool at Bethesda so as to make possible a miracle. I’m thinking of the young women and men who occupied the stools at whites-only lunch counters across the American south and allowed themselves to be desecrated and humiliated, for something better; for a step in the direction of the kingdom of heaven. Or the women and men who walked across the Edmund J. Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama – heading in the direction of the kingdom of heaven – and allowed themselves to be attacked, beaten and humiliated. For something better. Good trouble that awakened – perhaps just for a little while but long enough to change the course of history – the conscience of a nation. Not unlike selling everything you have to gain the kingdom of heaven. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: I’m just thinking out loud about the possibilities. I could use your help with that.

* Explanatory note for American or other readers unfamiliar with land acknowledgements: A land acknowledgment is a statement that recognizes the indigenous peoples associated with a tract of land, both historically and currently. They’re common in Canada, Australia and New Zealand and are becoming more common in the United States. In Canada, land acknowledgments are often posted near the entrances to buildings; they’re frequently read at the beginnings of public events. They’re expressions of awareness, reverence and respect, although they can be controversial if they’re seen as empty gestures unaccompanied by meaningful action.

It may further aid comprehension to mention that Loyola Retreat House will close in December of this year. The works that have taken place here for 100 years will cease. The acreage on which the retreat house sits will not be sold; plans for the future are still being worked out.

Ecclesiastes 1:2 – 2:21-23 + Colossians 3:1-5, 9-11 + Luke 12:13-21

Today’s readings are heavy enough without taking a closer look at our first reading from Ecclesiastes. It’s enough to send you running for a half-gallon of ice cream and a spoon. So let’s save the “all is vanity” for another day.

A father has died, leaving his property to his two sons. He may well have had daughters too, but women could not inherit in ancient Israel. Perhaps the father hoped that joint ownership would bring his boys closer together. It hasn’t. As was so often the case in ancient times, the brothers have become rivals. And in keeping with the custom in ancient Israel, one of the sons asks an authority figure – here, Jesus as rabbi – to act as arbitrator. Noteworthy that Jesus sidesteps the request even as he refuses to assume a role that would have been his to assume. Instead he uses the situation as a jumping-off place to address larger questions of wealth, poverty and economics.

From time to time I’ll be accused of preaching politics. I’ve learned to live with it, though it’s uncomfortable. The preachers I admire were regularly accused of preaching politics. Of course you don’t want to alienate your audience, but if you’re not raising hackles from time to time you’re not preaching the Gospel. And I’ve learned that it’s only politics when the person who accuses you of preaching politics disagrees with what’s being said. Finally, those who think Jesus never preached politics haven’t been paying attention. Which is true for all of us, really. The Gospel is life-giving, but it’s not nice in the sense of being inoffensive. A prime example is today’s passage from Luke. Jesus here is talking about wealth, economics and greed; he’s after the one-percenters of his day. Not because he sees them as enemies, although they will come to see themselves as his enemies. Far from it: He cares for them and he knows that they’re headed in the wrong direction; he also cares for those at the other end of the continuum; those who are wounded by the greed of others.

No one could accuse Jesus of being two-faced. He’s just come from a dinner party at the home of a Pharisee during which he raked the Pharisees over the coals. Which again is why Jesus received lots of dinner invitations but hardly any repeat invitations. He has continued his polemic; now he’s speaking in broader terms and challenging the status quo; and he’s doing it in terms that peasants would readily understand.

Americans and Canadians see the world’s goods as unlimited. We subscribe wholeheartedly to the belief that there is always more of everything. That’s why economic growth has been such an important marker of progress. Nobody wants to talk about steady-state economies. Economies either grow or they die. But the belief that there’s more of everything is a fiction. Except for sunlight, the earth is a closed system. And in fact we’re running out of things like fresh water; not because there’s less water than there was but because we’ve wasted or polluted so much of it. And fresh water is just another resource that was meant for all and for every creature but has been “privatized” – meaning that it is understood to belong to those with the means to acquire it.

When the first Europeans came to this continent, they saw before them an unlimited supply of resources – water, land, timber, minerals. Unlimited, and theirs for the taking. The US at least has continued to see the world in those terms: If you can acquire it by means fair or foul, it’s yours. If you can get it in the wagon or on the ship, it’s yours.

Back in the day, Mediterranean peasants saw things differently. Anything that had value was limited as to quantity. Moreover, everything had been distributed, fairly or not. Life was a zero sum game. Someone else’s gain was your loss; someone else’s wealth was your poverty. Most households used what they produced. Money was simply a means of exchange. If you sold something for a few coins you used them to buy something else you needed. You didn’t save money; there wasn’t enough to save and that wasn’t money’s purpose. Wealth was the result of greed; of taking what was not yours to take. As St. Jerome would put it some four hundred years later, “Every rich person is either a thief or the heir of a thief.” You’re not far off the mark if when you see the word “rich” in Scripture you replace it with “greedy.” The only honorable thing to do with a surplus? Share it with others; give it away.

So the rich man in the story is greedy and a thief. Worse still, he refuses to share his surplus; instead he tucks it away for his own needs. Greedy, a thief, selfish, individualistic and a fool. Think I’m going outside the bounds by using this language? By talking about wealth, poverty and economics from the pulpit? Sorry, but I’m not the one who brought it up. Jesus did, 2,000 years ago. And his words have been echoed – and variously ignored or dismissed – through the centuries.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the Common Good. Had things been working as they ought to have been working, you would have. It’s not a new concept. Far from it: It goes back to the ancient Greeks; it’s found in Scripture. In modern times it was articulated by Pope Leo XIII (the Leo before our own Leo XIV) in 1891 and again in 1965 at the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes, or the Church in the Modern World. The Common Good means that everyone thrives; everyone has the means to reach their full potential. It ought to be the foundation on which every economic system is built. It ought to guide every policy decision at every level. You can call your economics what you want: Capitalism, socialism, free market, whatever. According to Jesus, in the eyes of the Church, if it does not serve the common good it is sinful and foolish.

People wonder what politics has to do with God. Politics has everything to do with God. The thing is that all of this is connected: The nature of God, who God is for us, our relationships with one another, the way we are with respect to the rest of creation, the way we structure our lives. It all matters; it’s all tied together; all of it belongs to the moral universe. You can’t say this aspect of life matters; this other aspect doesn’t matter. The guy who slips something into his pocket at the supermarket isn’t the guy you want as your kid’s Sunday school teacher. It’s all of a piece.

Listen again to these words from Colossians: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Of course the author is dealing in metaphor; using symbolic language in the way that John used symbolic language: life, death, above, below, heaven, earth. “You have died.” In the eyes of the world, you have died because in turning to Christ you are rejecting the things that are commonly associated with success in life: Wealth (which means having more than your fair share), position, power, fame. In and through Christ you’ve had a glimpse of the world beyond the veil. You’ve seen clearly, even if just for a moment. And so you can place your life where it belongs, with the source of life, which is God.

We’re in trouble. Hate to have to point it out, but it’s true. So let’s tear ourselves away from our electronic devices and read the signs of the times: They spell out “TROUBLE” in big letters. There it is, written across the sky: TROUBLE. But there’s no need to panic. You’re not alone. God is with you. On retreat, certainly. But with you always and everywhere. God will not say goodbye when you leave here at the end of your retreat. God will go with you on the train or on the plane or in the care and God will be there when you get home. And there are all kinds of good-hearted people out there. Call on your friends; make new friends; make alliances across the spectrum. Set aside the rubbish that has kept you locked up in your own little world. Work up the courage to ask someone a question about something that matters. And then work up the courage to listen. Talk and listen: What you’ll discover is that we all long for pretty much the same things. We’re all looking for a better way. And there is a better way; regardless of your starting point there’s a better way. And we can figure it out together.