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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay HughesRelated Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

Great crowds turned out to hear Jesus preach, teach, and heal. From the start, however, he encountered opposition. He might have dealt with this opposition by becoming a grim faced prophet of impending doom. Instead he told a story to show that despite opposition, despite the seeming futility of so much of his work, there was every reason for confidence — and joy. We know the story as the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. It is been transformed in the telling, however, from a story about seed to one about different kinds of soil.Fr. John Jay Hughes explains this, and much more, in the second talk in his series, A Journey Through the Parables. There you will find also a discussion of the sensitive subject of change in the Church. Can the Church change? Should it change? What did the great 19th century English convert, John Henry Newman, at the end of his long life a cardinal, say about this topic of change?The opposition and suffering which Jesus experienced caused him to warn his followers that they too would encounter suffering: “You will suffer in the world. But take courage! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Elsewhere in John’s gospel, however, Jesus speaks about God loving the world: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). Fr. Hughes deals with this seeming contradiction, which can be found elsewhere in the gospels, by showing that the word “world” is being used in two different senses.Finally, you have heard, surely, about Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross. Do you know what the Seven Last Words of the Church are? In the second of Fr. Hughes’ talks on the parables, you will find out.

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CLICK FOR FREE CATALOG OF AUDIO COURSES

Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

THE LESSONS OF THE MAGI
Epiphany. Matthew 2:1-12.
AIM: To present the story of the Magi as a paradigm of the Christian life.

Who were these “magi” who were guided to the infant Jesus by a star? Where did they come from? Where did they go? We do not know. To make sense of the story, we must pay attention to its symbolism. Read in that way, we find that the story has five stages. The magi, whom we also call the wise men, saw; they searched; they found; they worshiped; and they returned home. Let’s take each stage of their journey in turn.

They saw.
A farmer kept a flock of tame geese which freely roamed the farmyard, always looking down for food. One day the farmer saw that the geese were nervous and restless. They were looking up. In the sky he saw the reason. It was autumn. Wild geese were flying south. The farmer’s geese flapped their wings and made a lot of noise. But they did not fly away.

Many people are like that. Something unusual happens to raise their minds from life’s routine. They become aware of greater possibilities, a higher call. But they fail to respond. The opportunity passes. The old routine resumes. The wise men were different. They were not content with looking up.

They searched.
Doing so required courage. How their friends must have mocked them. “Following a star? What on earth for? Have you taken leave of your senses?” To set out in the face of ridicule, on what seemed like a fool’s errand, took courage. Sooner or later, it always takes courage to be a follower of Jesus Christ. His standards cannot always be made reasonable, or even intelligible, to unbelievers. At times the follower of Jesus Christ must have courage to swim against the stream: to say No when everyone else is saying Yes; or Yes when all others are saying No; to appear to reasonable, prudent people reckless, even crazy. The wise men had such courage. They set out on their seemingly mad search, and persevered in it until –

They found.
For this they are rightly called “wise men.” To the clever people who mocked them they seemed mad. In reality they possessed, along with courage, the truest wisdom there is: the spiritual insight to recognize the unique call of God, and to follow it regardless of the cost. As their search neared its end, our gospel reading tell us, “They were overjoyed at seeing the star.” They had reason for joy. They were successful. They were vindicated. It was they who had been proved wise; their critics were the fools. From the wise men’s point of view the search had been all theirs. In reality it was God who was seeking them. That was crucial: for the wise men, but also for us – as we see in a child’s story.

This little one came home in tears. When the child’s mother had dried the tears, she heard the reason for them. “We played side-and-seek. I hid. No one looked for me.” When you are only three, that can be crushing. “No one looked for me.”

Someone is looking for you – right now. God is looking for you. He is drawing you to himself, as he drew the wise men by the star. If only you will look up, and be bold, you will find him. And then, like the wise men, you too will be overjoyed. To know that, even now, God is looking for you, drawing you to himself, is already cause for joy. The wise men’s joy is not the end of the story, however. When they finally arrived at the end of their journey –

They worshiped.
Their worship was not merely reciting prayers by memory or from a book. They offered the best they had. The person who has never learned to worship like that is poor indeed. How sad when the Mass, for many Catholics, is merely the boring fulfilment of a legal obligation. No wonder such people habitually come late and hurry away early, complaining that they ‘get nothing out of it.’ If that is your problem, do what the wise men did. Offer God the best you have: something precious, costly. Then you will discover, even if only for a few fleeting minutes, the indescribable joy of self-forgetfulness, the joy of true worship.
After the wise men had worshiped –

They returned home.
They go back to the people who had mocked them when they set out. But they return home changed. They have been touched by their experience, touched by God. They have a message for those who thought themselves wise, but turned out to be foolish.

We return home from church each week, from our encounter with Jesus here in the Eucharist. We too have been touched by God. We too have a message for others. It is this. God is not far off. In all our sorrows, in all our temptations, sufferings, difficulties, and joys, God is with us. God is close to us always – even when we stray far from him. We imagine that we must storm heaven with our prayers to get God’s attention. And all the time it is God who gives us the ability to pray. It is God who is searching for us, leading us onward, drawing us to himself. That is the message. That is the gospel – the good news.

And when we grasp this good news, the story with its five stages begins again: the seeing, the searching, the finding, the worshiping, the return home. This is the story of the Christian life: the royal road by which untold millions have walked, the road God wants you to walk – and me – for the remaining fifty-one weeks of 2008, and for as many more weeks and years as our journey may last. Until it ends in Him; and journeying and searching and struggle are over, because we are home: where there will be no more weariness, no more discouragement, no more sickness or suffering, no more death. Where God himself will wipe away all tears from our eyes. Where we shall see Him face to face.

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Welcome to Get Smart about Investing. Over the last 20 years, mutual funds have become very popular. Half of all households in the United States own at least one mutual fund. But despite their widespread use, very few individuals actually understand what a mutual fund really is or the benefits they provide. Basically, a mutual fund is a financial company that takes your money and my money, puts it all together, and hires a team of professional money managers to make the investment decisions. So this is great. Instead of you or I trying to make all of the difficult decisions like what investments to buy, how much to invest, or when to sell, the mutual fund company does that for us. That’s called professional management, which is one of the biggest benefits offered by mutual funds. By using a mutual fund, you’re shifting investing responsibility from yourself to the mutual fund company and taking a less active role in the investment process.

If I ask you to invest money in stocks and bonds tomorrow and you’re like most people, you probably wouldn’t know where to start. Using a mutual fund helps an investor to address the challenges of diversifying a portfolio. Now if you were going to invest $300 or $400 this month, relatively speaking, it’s a small dollar amount and you’re somewhat limited as far as what you could do with it. Sure you could buy a few shares of Coca-Cola stock, or a CD or savings bond at your local bank, but that’s about it. The challenge is if you put all of your money into Coca-Cola stock, your whole fate and fortune is dependent on how this one company does; and we all know about the stories of Enron and WorldCom. The average mutual fund on the other hand, invests in 40 or 50 different investments, all in one fund. That means your money gets spread across many different areas, which gives you exposure to investments that you couldn’t have purchased otherwise and could help increase your returns. It also means that if some of the investments in the mutual fund don’t perform as well, there are other investments to balance things out, which could lower your risk. This is called diversification.We had talked about the importance of it earlier in the program, but again, diversification is just a fancy word for spreading your money in a lot of different areas so that you participate in areas that are doing well and limit yourself in those that aren’t doing as well. Basically, your diversification determines the amount of risk you’re taking and your overall performance. In order to be properly diversified using individual stocks, you would usually have to buy 10 or 20 stocks in each of the different areas. That alone is unrealistic for most individuals. But with a mutual fund, you could simply buy one mutual fund in each area and achieve complete diversification with a lot less effort. So the big advantages of using mutual funds are professional money management and diversification.
I’m Greg McGraime and Now You Know!

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