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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

Christmas Mass during the day.Heb. 1:1-6; Jn 1:1-18.

AIM: To explain the Incarnation and its significance for us.

It’s a strange gospel for Christmas, isn’t it? Where, we ask, are the shepherds, the manger, Mary and Joseph? Where is their child? Instead of these familiar Christmas figures we have heard about abstractions: light and darkness, the Word becoming flesh.Let’s start with another word: “incarnation.” It means “taking on flesh, embodiment.” This church building is the incarnation of an idea in the mind of the architect who designed it. It is the incarnation or embodiment too of the sacrifices that made its construction possible. Children are the incarnation of their parents’ love. And Jesus is the incarnation of God.We cannot see God. Jesus shows us what God is like. That is why this Christmas gospel calls Jesus God’s Word. A word is used to communicate. Jesus is God’s word because he is God’s communication to us: not a lifeless, abstract statement, but God’s living and breathing utterance and self-disclosure.When we listen to Jesus, we hear God speaking to us. When we look at Jesus, we see what God is like.

What do we see when we look at Jesus? We see that he preferred simple, ordinary people. He came to the world in a provincial village where nothing interesting or important ever happened. Jesus moved not among wealthy or sophisticated people, or among scholars and intellectuals, but among ordinary people. They were the ones who welcomed him most warmly. The rich and powerful and learned had difficulties with Jesus. Many were hostile to him. That was true then. It remains true today.Jesus was of the earth, earthy. In his youth he worked with his hands in the carpenter’s shop. His teaching was full of references to simple things: the birds of the air, the wind and the raging waves, the lilies of the field, the vine, the lost sheep, the woman searching for her one lost coin, leavening dough with yeast, the thief breaking in at night. Those were images that everyone could understand.

Jesus taught also in parables: stories so simple that they capture the interest of children; yet so profound that learned scholars are still studying them today.In preferring simple people and simple things, Jesus was showing us what God is like. He who is God’s utterance and word, God’s personal communication to us, is saying through all the circumstances of his life that God loves humble people. God is especially close to those who feel that they are not in control of their lives; that they are the victims of circumstances; that their lives are a tangle of loose ends and broken resolutions.In his earthiness Jesus shows us God’s love for this world and everything in it. Often we think of God and religion as concerned only with some higher, spiritual realm. That is wrong! God loves the earth and the things of earth. He must love them, because he made them. And God does not make anything that is not lovable. As John, the writer of today’s gospel, tells us in a later chapter: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16).It is because God gave us his Son at Christmas that we give gifts to one another.

The greatest gift we can give cannot be bought in any store. You cannot order it from an 800-number or over the Internet. You cannot wrap it. You cannot send it through the mail, by UPS or Federal Express. It is the gift God gave us at Christmas: the gift of himself. Even as a baby Jesus is God’s personal word and communication to us. In the words of our second reading, he is “the refulgence [that means the shining forth] of [God’s] glory, the very imprint of his being.”Look at Mary’s child: helpless, vulnerable, and weak, as all babies are. He is God’s way of saying: ‘This is how much the Lord God, creator of heaven and earth, loves you; enough to be become tiny, insignificant, vulnerable.’ Jesus, the personal utterance and word of God, is God’s gift to you. He wants you to share this gift with others. You do so when, like God himself, you give yourself to others: when, like Jesus, you too love the company of ordinary people; when, like him, you remain close to the earth and the things of earth.In a few moments we shall be offered our greatest and most important Christmas gift: the body and blood of our Lord, of Jesus who is God’s personal word to each one of us. The consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist are Christ’s body and blood: all his power, all his goodness, all his love. He offers all this to us:— not as a reward for services rendered;— not because we are good enough (for none of us is);— but because he is so good that he wants to share his power, his goodness, and his love with us.Jesus gives us this greatest of all gifts under one strict condition: that what we here receive, we generously share with others.

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Welcome to Get Smart about Investing. How are individual stock investments taxed? There are two ways you can make money with stocks. The first is from stocks that pay a dividend. Not all stocks pay dividends, but if yours does, you are required to pay tax on the dividend each year, whether you reinvest any of it or not. Dividends are taxed at fairly low rates, typically a maximum of 15 percent. For example, McDonald’s pays a $1 per share dividend each year. If you held 200 shares of McDonald’s, regardless of what the stock price is doing, each year you would receive a $200 dividend that you will have to pay taxes on. At the 15 percent rate that would be a $30 tax payment due on your $200 of dividend income.

The second way to make money from stocks is from capital appreciation. Stock prices are changing all the time, but you only realize a capital gain or loss when you actually sell the stock. With a capital gain or loss, there are really only three things you need to look at: How much did you invest, in other words, what was your purchase price or cost basis as it’s known; how much did you receive from the sale; and how long did you hold the investment for. If you bought an investment and sold it in one year or less, you would have a short-term capital gain. Short-term capital gains are taxed at your highest ordinary income tax rate. If you bought an investment and sold it after one year, any gain would be considered a long-term capital gain. Long-term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate, a maximum of 15 percent for most people. This is the government’s way of saying that it doesn’t want the average person to frequently day trade or buy and sell; therefore, it will give you a tax incentive to hold onto investments longer.

Let’s look at an example. If you invested $10,000 in Starbucks stock and sold it for $20,000, you would have a $10,000 gain to pay taxes on. If you held the stock for three months and then sold it, it would be a short-term capital gain, which would be taxed at your highest tax rate. If you had the same investment and held onto it for three years before selling it, the gain would be a long-term capital gain taxed at the lower rate, probably 15 percent. Investors in the 25 percent tax bracket would have to pay $2,500 in taxes if they had short-term gains and $1,500 in taxes if their gains were long term. That’s a big difference as far as what amount of the gain you get to keep, which is why the tax considerations of your investment is so important. Also keep in mind that if you simply hold onto a stock for several years, you delay having to pay taxes on your gains, since they are only taxed when you actually sell. This is yet another reason why long-term investing is more successful than short-term strategies.

What if you had a loss? Of course you never want to have a loss, but if you do, you can take advantage of it from a tax standpoint; you can use losses to offset taxes on gains. For example, if you had $10,000 of capital gains and $4,000 of capital losses, you could offset them by only paying taxes on the $6,000 difference rather than the full $10,000 of gains you actually had. If most your investments have been losses or don’t have any gains, you can deduct up to $3,000 of losses in a given year and carry over the additional amount into future years.

I’m Greg McGraime and Now You Know!

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CHRISTMAS - MASS AT DAWN. By Fr. John Jay Hughes

WHAT THE SHEPHERDS FOUND.
Titus 3:4-7; Lk 2:15-20.
AIM: To instil a sense of wonder and joy at the incarnation.

The world’s great religions, someone has said, are all about the same thing: our search for God. To this general statement there is an important exception. Christianity, and its parent, Judaism, are concerned not with our search for God, but with God’s search for us. At Christmas we celebrate God’s search, and his coming to us, in a special way. The readings at this Mass give us answers to three important questions about God’s coming. They tell us how God comes, when he comes, and why.

How does God come?
He comes in very ordinary and humble circumstances, to very ordinary and humble people. There was nothing dramatic about the birth of Mary’s child at Bethlehem. Few people took any notice — only a few outsiders, and three crackpot eccentrics.

Shepherds were outsiders in the ancient world. Without fixed abode, like gypsies today, they were mistrusted by respectable people. Since they frequently grazed their flocks on other people’s land, shepherds were considered too dishonest to be witnesses in court. Because their irregular lives made it impossible for them to observe the strict Sabbath and dietary laws, observant Jews held them in disdain.

The so-called Wise Men, whose visit we commemorate at Epiphany, were eccentrics: astrologers of some kind from God knows where, who set off on a madcap journey, following a star. We call them wise. To their contemporaries they were screwballs who were not playing with a full deck.

Nor was the scene which these visitors found at Bethlehem as attractive as we make it appear in our Christmas cribs. If Jesus were born today, it would probably be in a cardboard shack with a roof of corrugated iron in Africa, or somewhere in Latin America, without electricity or water: smelly, drafty, and cold.

How does God come? He comes in ordinary and humble surroundings, to people who live on the margin of society. That is how God came on the first Christmas. It is how he comes today.

When does God come?
He comes when we least expect him — when people have given up expecting him altogether. Matthew and Luke emphasize Jesus’ descent from the great King David, and Jesus’ birth “in David’s city” (Mt 1:17; Lk 1:27, 2: 4 & 11). They wanted to show that Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, whose birth “of the house of David” the prophets had long foretold.

Almost six centuries before Jesus’ birth, however, David’s royal house had come to an end. The revival of his long extinct dynasty after so great an interval was, humanly speaking, impossible. Moreover, the imperial census, which brought Joseph and Mary to David’s city, Bethlehem, was a humiliating reminder to their people that the nation over which David had once ruled as king was now governed by a foreign emperor across the sea. Rome, not Jerusalem, was the center of the world into which Jesus was born. At the very moment in which that world was set in motion by an imperial decree from its center, God was acting in an unimportant village on the edge of the empire in an obscure event from which we continue, twenty centuries later, to number our years.

Unthinkable? Impossible? Precisely! That is how God normally acts. He comes to us when we are least expecting him; when we have ceased expecting him at all. He comes in ways that stagger the imagination and demolish our conception of the possible. The creator of the universe comes as a tiny baby, born of a virgin.

Why does he do it? Why does God come at all?
To these questions our second reading gives us the answer: “When the kindness and generous love of God our savior appeared, [he saved us] not because of any righteous deeds we had done but because of his mercy.”

God’s coming is not a reward for services rendered. He chose to come to us at the first Christmas for the same reason he comes to us today: not because we are good enough, but because he is so good, and so loving, that he wants to share his love with us, his unworthy, erring, and sinful children.

This explains too why he chose outsiders and eccentrics as the first witnesses of his coming. Before him we are all outsiders, all eccentrics. Before God we are all marginal, as the shepherds were, and the wise men. It is His love, and His alone, which draws us in from the darkness and cold of the margin to the light and warmth of the center.

It is because God gave us his love at the first Christmas that we give gifts to one another at this season. The love God gave us then, and continues to give us today, is neither distant, nor abstract. God’s love is a person who is very close to us. His name is Jesus Christ.

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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

What is a parable? What is the difference between a parable and an allegory? And why did Jesus choose parables as his favorite form of teaching? These are some of the questions discussed by Fr. John Jay Hughes in his increasingly popular series, A Journey Through the Parables

Jesus himself seems to say at one point that the purpose of his parables was to impart to his inner circle secret knowledge, not available to others. “To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God: but to those who are without, everything is obscure, in order that they (as it is written) may ‘see and yet not see, may hear and not understand, unless they turn and God will forgive them.’” (Mark 4:12) These words have long presented Bible commentators and readers alike with a difficulty. Fr. Hughes discusses this difficulty in his opening talk.

That talk also summarizes a homily by Pope Benedict XVI on the topic, “God never fails.” Yet God does fail, the Pope said. He failed in Adam, who was not content with being God’s friend; he wanted to be a god himself. This divine failure was only the first of countless others. In Fr. Hughes’s introductory talk you will learn how the Pope deals with this difficulty.

“I invite you,” Fr. Hughes concludes his opening talk, “to join me on a journey through Jesus’ parables. It can be life-changing. In considering the parables we shall find that the greatest thing about these timeless stories is what they reveal about the Story-teller. He is the one portrayed in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, seated on a heavenly throne saying: ‘See, I make all things new.’ He wants to make your life new. The only thing that can prevent his doing so is your own deliberate and final No.”

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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

“NO ROOM IN THE INN.”
Christmas Midnight. Lk. 2:1-14.
AIM: To help the hearers make room for Jesus Christ.

We have less hard information about Jesus’ birth than most people suppose. We don’t even know the date: December 25th was not selected until the fourth century. Nor do we know exactly where Mary gave birth to her child, save that it was not in what then passed for an inn at Bethlehem.

The innkeeper was a busy man in those days. The roads were full of travelers, because of the Roman-imposed census, which required people to return to their native town to be placed on the tax rolls. There was much to do at the inn, and money to be made. According to the age-old law of supply and demand, guests were doubled up, and prices raised. When Mary and Joseph appeared at his door, the innkeeper saw at once that these humble travelers were not the kind of guests he was looking for. He might have said, “You can’t afford it.” Instead he told them, a bit more tactfully, “No room” — and slammed the door. The innkeeper never knew it. But with those two words, “No room,” he had missed out on the greatest opportunity life would ever offer him.

It would be unfair to portray the Bethlehem innkeeper as a bad person. His words to Mary and Joseph, “No room,” would be repeated often in the next three decades. For the world to which Jesus came had in truth no room for him, though it was his world. As we shall hear tomorrow, in our third Christmas gospel: “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him” (Jn. 1:11).

The ancient world into which Jesus was born had in Rome a temple called the Pantheon, with room for a hundred gods. But for the Son of the one true God there was no room in Rome’s Pantheon. Nor was there room for him in his own country — until people finally found room for him: on a hill called Calvary.

Has the situation changed in two thousand years? Would there be room for Jesus Christ if he were to come to the world today? to St. Louis? A person would have to be bold indeed to be confident of an affirmative answer to that question. Down through the centuries, and still today, the innkeeper’s words resound: “No room, no room.” And doors are slammed at his approach.

Why is there no room for Jesus Christ? Because people are afraid — afraid that if they give him room, he will take too much room; that little by little this man will take over their lives, changing their interests, their priorities, their plans, until they are no longer recognizable.

Is this fear justified? It is. If we admit Jesus Christ, he will indeed change our lives, and us. He will take all the room there is. No wonder that people are afraid. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” we read in the letter to the Hebrews (10:31).

There is, however, something even more fearful. It is this: to try to shut out this guest. For unlike other travelers, Jesus will not go away. He will continue to knock on our door, no matter how often we tell him, “No room.” The hand with which he knocks bears the print of the nails which pierced him in the place where, finally, people did find room for him. His persistence, like his patience and his love, are more than super-human. They are divine. He is the personification of the love that will never let us go.

Today, in this hour, Jesus Christ is asking for room in your life. He asks one thing, and one thing alone: that you open the door. Some verses of an old hymn, little known to Catholics, say it best.

O Jesus, you are standing, outside the fast-closed door,
In lowly patience waiting, to pass the threshold o’er.
Shame on us, Christian people, his name and sign who bear,
Shame, thrice shame upon us, to keep him standing there.

O Jesus, you are knocking, and lo, that hand is scarred,
And thorns your brow encircle, and tears your face have marred.
O love that passes knowledge, so patiently to wait.
O sin that has no equal, so fast to bar the gate!

O Jesus, you are pleading, in accents meek and low,
“I died for you, my children, and will you treat me so?”
O Lord, with shame and sorrow, we open now the door;
Dear Savior enter, enter, and leave us nevermore.

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Welcome to Get Smart about Investing. Understanding the different types of IRAs can be difficult. In general, there are two types of IRAs: traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs. Each provide different tax benefits. With a traditional IRA, you get a tax deduction today for the money you contribute. Similar to company retirement accounts, the money is invested and grows, but you do not pay taxes each year. The only time you will pay taxes on the money is when you take it out, usually when you retire. Of course the government doesn’t want you getting too many tax benefits, so it is possible that if you have a company retirement account through your employer and your income is above certain levels, the immediate tax deduction would not be available. You could still make a contribution and get the tax-deferred growth, but not the bigger up-front deduction. Check with your financial company or tax professional to see if these limits would apply for your situation.

A Roth IRA works a little differently. With a Roth IRA, you contribute money but get no tax deduction today, though the money that grows each year is also tax-deferred. The big difference with a Roth is that when you take money out at retirement age, all of the money and gains come out tax-free. If you invested $4,000 into a Roth IRA and the money grew to $20,000, you would not have to pay any tax on the $20,000. Keep in mind that if your income is above certain thresholds, you may not be eligible to contribute money to a Roth IRA. That’s another aspect to look into. So again, the big difference between the two types of IRAs is, with a traditional IRA, you get a tax deduction today and pay all of the taxes on the money later. With a Roth IRA, you get no tax deduction today, but all of the money and growth comes out tax-free later.

I’m Greg McGraime and Now You Know!

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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

EMMANUEL — GOD WITH US
Advent 4A - Mt. 1:18-24.
AIM: To help the hearers recognize God’s presence in their lives today.

A Sunday school teacher told a class of young children the Christmas story of the shepherds and the Wise Men. At the end she asked them: “Who do you think was the first to know about the birth of Jesus?”

A girl’s hand shot up: “Mary,” she answered.

Well, sure. How could anyone miss that? That’s just the kind of thing, however, that we adults often do miss. We’re looking for more complicated answers. Lacking the simplicity of young children, we associate God with things that are dramatic and spectacular, like the choir of angels appearing to the shepherds, and the star which guided the Wise Men to Bethlehem. It’s easy for us to miss God’s presence and action in something as ordinary as pregnancy and birth.

That explains why so many of Jesus’ own people failed to recognize him as their long awaiting Messiah. The popular expectation was that the Messiah would come dramatically, and unexpectedly. Jesus’ people had a saying: “Three things come wholly unexpected: the Messiah, a godsend, and a scorpion.” No one expected God’s anointed servant to come as a normal nursing baby born to a young girl in a small village. People expected him to drop unexpected from the sky, full-grown in his royal regalia and power. What more fitting landing place for the Messiah than the Temple mount in the holy city of Jerusalem, venerated by Jesus’ people as the earthly dwelling place of God? This helps us understand why one way the devil tempted Jesus during his forty days’ fast in the wilderness was by suggesting that he jump down from a pinnacle of the Temple.

How could people raised on such expectations reconcile them with this man Jesus who been born and raised in their midst? “We know where this man is from,” they say in John’s gospel. “But when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.” (Jn 7:27) Matthew reports a similar reaction to Jesus. When Jesus returned to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and taught in the synagogue there, the people asked: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? … Where did he get all this? They found him altogether too much for them.” (Mt 13:55f)

It is easy to criticize the Jesus’ contemporaries for failing to recognize him. But are we really more clear sighted than they were? When God first came to us in human form he did so not dramatically on the clouds of heaven, but through the nine months’ pregnancy of a simple country girl, and through thirty years of the normal human process of growth, infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. That tells us something — or at least it should. It tells us that God comes to us today as he did then: in ways we would never expect. More — God comes to us, and is with us, when we think he’s not there at all.

In the days after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York one of the television networks showed a group of people in New Jersey who had lost loved ones talking about that terrible day. “Where was God?” one man complained. “God wasn’t there.” Many people said the same. The complaint is understandable. But it is wrong. It assumes that God is there to protect us from pain and suffering, or at least from disaster and tragedy. Often God does protect us. But not always. Our Christian and Catholic faith promises us something different. It gives us the promise, and the assurance, not that God will always protect us, but that God is with us in pain and suffering, and especially amid disaster and tragedy.

“Where was God on September eleventh?” people ask. God was there in the countless acts of heroism, large and small, which were so widely reported in the days and weeks after the attack, and which still remain reason for gratitude, admiration, and wonder.

God comes to us in more ordinary ways too — not only when tragedy strikes. He comes to us, again and again, in the normal events of everyday life, in people we know and love — but also in those we dislike and find difficult, sometimes impossible.

God came to me a half century ago through a child’s voice in the confessional saying: “I stamp my foot at my mother and say No.” That hit me hard. That little one is so sorry for that small sin, I thought. My own sins are far worse – and I’m not that sorry. I believe that the Lord sent that child into my confessional to teach me a lesson. The child is probably a grandparent now. But I’ve never forgotten what that little one taught me.

The Lord came to me more recently, and spoke to me, in words of a woman, a daily communicant, who said to me after many years of married life: “Father, when you walk up to the altar on your wedding day, you don’t see the Stations of the Cross.” Preaching recently to a group of men preparing for ordination as permanent deacons, and to their wives, I quoted those words. As I did so I could see heads nodding all over the chapel.

An African proverb says: “Listen, and you will hear the footsteps of the ants.” God’s coming to us is often as insignificant as the footsteps of ants. God is coming to each one of us, right now. He is knocking on the door of our hearts. He leaves it to us whether we shall open the door. How often we have refused to do so, trying to keep God at a distance because we fear the demands he will make on us. Yet God continues to come to us, and to knock. He never breaks in. He waits for us to open the door. As long as life on this earth lasts, God will never take No as our final answer.

Refusing to open the door means shutting out of our lives the One who alone can give our lives meaning; who offers us the strength to surmount suffering; the One who alone can give us fulfillment, happiness, and peace. Keeping the door of our hearts shut to God means missing out on the greatest chance we shall ever be offered; failing to appear for our personal rendezvous with destiny.

Opening the door to God, letting him into our lives, means embarking on life’s greatest adventure. This is the most worthwhile thing we can do with our lives — at bottom the only thing worth doing. When we open the door to God, when we say our Yes to him, we place ourselves on the side of the simple Jewish girl whom we encounter in today’s gospel. When she opened the door to God and said her Yes to him, she was able to speak words that would be the height of arrogant conceit were it not for one thing: they were true:

“All generations shall call me blessed.” (Lk 1:48)

Fr. John Jay Hughes

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