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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

“THEY ALL ATE AND WERE SATISFIED.”
18A. Is. 55:1-3; Mt. 14:13-21.
AIM: To show that our deepest longings are satisfied only by Jesus Christ.

We Americans live in one of the richest societies on earth. More people in this land have access to more of the good things of life than, perhaps, any other people anywhere. Even those whom we reckon to be living beneath the poverty level would still be considered well off by millions of truly impoverished people in today’s Third World. Few countries anywhere would not be happy to exchange their economic difficulties with ours.

Amid this material abundance for so many, however, are people truly satisfied? A glance at the morning’s headlines or at the daily TV news provides plenty of evidence that many are not. Why? Because it is never enough to satisfy people’s physical hunger if their spiritual hunger remains unfed.

“Why spend your money for what is not bread; your wages for what fails to satisfy?” God asks in our first reading from the prophet Isaiah. Isn’t that what many of the glossy ads on TV and in the magazines are urging us to do? Promising happiness if only we’ll buy their product or service? Let’s be fair: much advertising is useful. If I’m looking for a pair of lightweight trousers for the brutal heat of a St. Louis summer, and I see an ad telling me about a sale on men’s clothing, I’ll hurry in to get what I need. The ad has served me well.

Too often, however, advertising is designed to kindle our desire for things we never knew we needed till we saw the ad. We find that after we have parted with our money, an inner emptiness remains. How can we get rid of that? How can we satisfy the deepest hunger of all: our spiritual hunger? In our first reading Isaiah gives us God’s answer to that haunting question: “Heed me, and you shall eat well. … Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life.”

Jesus knew that deep inner hunger which only God can satisfy. At the beginning of today’s gospel reading he has just received the terrible news that his cousin, John the Baptist, has been executed in Herod’s prison. Jesus knows that he must get away from the crowds, to be alone with his heavenly Father. He withdraws in a boat “to a deserted place by himself.”

But the people will not leave Jesus alone. Discovering his destination, they get there ahead of him. Upon disembarking, Jesus sees a “vast crowd.” What has brought them there? Some, surely, are attracted by Jesus’ wonderfully simple yet vivid way of speaking. Others may hope to witness his healing power, or to experience it themselves. Beyond such fully understandable reasons, however, there is another: somehow the very ordinary people in that vast crowd sense in this man, Jesus, someone who has the answer to life’s greatest problems; a man who comes from another world — from God.

Jesus’ heart goes out to these people. He realizes, Matthew tells us in a previous passage, that they are “like sheep without a shepherd, harassed and helpless” (Mt. 9:36, NEB). By the time Jesus has healed many sick people in the crowd, it is evening. His disciples want to send the people away to the neighboring villages to get provisions. With what must have been at least the trace of a smile, Jesus challenges them to provide food. His disciples are aghast. “Five loaves and two fish are all we have here,” they respond.

Why didn’t Jesus use his miraculous powers to provide food on his own? He wanted to teach his disciples a lesson. In telling them, “give them some food yourselves,” Jesus wanted the disciples to learn to trust not in their own resources, but in his power. What the disciples have to give is pitifully inadequate. When those meager resources are entrusted to Jesus, however, they are transformed beyond imagining. When every person in the vast crowd has eaten to the full, each of the Twelve is still able to fill his basket with leftovers. This detail too teaches a lesson: when Jesus gives, he gives not just abundantly, but superabundantly.

This story, recounted six times over in the four gospels, shows us who Jesus Christ is, and what he does for us. Jesus is the story’s central figure, the giver of God’s gifts in abundance. To distribute his bounty, he relies on his friends. What they have to give is totally inadequate. They are entirely dependant on Jesus. The story continues today — in every Mass. We who are called to distribute the Lord’s gifts to his people wear special clothes: not the uniform of masters, but the livery of servants, whose task it is to pass round the dishes and to see that everyone is fed: from the Lord’s two tables, of the word and of the sacrament.

This gathering of the Lord’s people — like every Mass anywhere — is the continuation of what Jesus did in the upper room at the Last Supper the night before he died. It is also the continuation of that lakeside meal when a vast throng was fed by Jesus from pitifully inadequate resources. Here, and here alone, is the satisfaction of our deepest hunger. Here the beautiful words of our first reading are fulfilled:

“All you who are thirsty, come to the water!
You who have no money, come, receive grain, and eat;
come without paying and without cost, drink wine and milk!”

Here we, the joyful people of God, repeat with a full heart the words of our responsorial psalm:
“The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.”

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Welcome to Get Smart about Investing. Asset allocation was step one: Make sure you maintain a balance between aggressive and conservative investments. Diversification is step two: Make sure that within each of these areas, you’re exposed to many different assets so no area can dictate your entire investment return. Again, participate in areas that are doing well and limit yourself in areas that are not. Step number three is portfolio rebalancing.  Rebalancing is simply adjusting your investments to get back to the plan that you were following.

Over time, all of your investments will vary in performance and some investments will do better than others. What if you started the year with 80 percent of your money invested in stocks and 20 percent invested conservatively because you were following an 80/20 plan? If the stock market did very well over the next few years, it’s very possible that 95 percent of your portfolio’s value would be invested in stocks and just 5 percent of it in bonds, because the stocks grew faster than the bonds. Your portfolio is now overly exposed to stocks, with 95 percent of it invested in the stock market. The right plan for you to follow should have been an 80/20 plan. Rebalancing your portfolio would involve selling a small portion of your stocks and buying bonds to get back to the plan you were following.

By not rebalancing, you would actually be taking on too much risk. You’d be in a plan that’s more aggressive than the one you’re supposed to be in. The same concept would apply to each of the subcategories of different investment types we’re looking at. If the healthcare industry does really well, you’ll probably end up overinvesting in healthcare and would need to move into other areas so you’re not overexposed to any one risk. If small companies were performing poorly, perhaps too much of your stock portfolio would end up in large companies; and thus your diversification would be reduced; again, increasing your risk.
Why is rebalancing so important? The answer is it forces you to do three things that most investors don’t do:
1. Follow and stick to a consistent investment plan each year, tailored to your particular situation.
2. Keep emotions out of investments. Following a plan helps you make investment decisions based not on your emotions, but on a logical framework consistent with what your portfolio needs.
3. Rebalance investments. This forces you to buy investments that have gone down in value and sell investments that are going up. It’s the opposite of how most people think about investing. Think about it. If an investment did great, no one would want to sell it. Very few investors will ever take money off the table when they’re doing well. Look at the late 90’s as an example. Investors were receiving 50 to 100 percent returns and it was not enough for them.
If you were rebalancing your portfolio, you would have shifted some money from technology stocks to bonds and more conservative areas before the market conditions changed. On the other hand, no one wants to buy an investment when the market is doing terribly, although that’s the best time to invest. 2002 and 2003 would have been the best time to buy stocks, but very few people did. By rebalancing, you’re forcing yourself to make investment decisions that very few people can make on their own. Creating a successful plan is all about removing your emotions and gut feelings from the investment situation.

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

A PURE CHURCH?
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A - Wis. 12:13, 16-19; Mt. 13:24-30.
AIM: To show the hearers that the Church is a Church of sinners, not a gathering of the righteous.

A number of you are gardeners. Why on earth, you are probably wondering, does the man in this story tell his workers not to pull up the weeds in his field? The story, like a number of passages in holy Scripture, makes us shake our heads and wonder how we can make sense of it all. Jesus tells us this story to show us that God’s ways are radically different from ours. The story is also Jesus’ answer to his self-righteous critics who complained: “This man receives sinners, and eats with them” (Lk 15:2). Why?

The suggestion of the farmer’s slaves that they should pull up the weeds in his field was entirely reasonable. The farmer rejects the suggestion nonetheless. There will be a time for separating the weeds from the wheat, he says. But that is later, at the harvest. Until then, he orders, “let them grow together.”

‘That is how I am acting,’ Jesus is saying. ‘That is how God acts — like this farmer.’ Jesus knew there were many people in the crowds which flocked to hear him who did not accept his message. Challenged by his critics to send such people away, however, Jesus refused. The time for separation and judgment, he said, was not yet. That would come later.

The prophets of Jesus’ people, right up to and including John the Baptist, believed that when God sent his promised Messiah, the first thing this anointed servant of the Lord would do would be to judge people. Yet when Jesus came he did not judge. He ate with sinners. He prevented the stoning of the woman taken in adultery. He proclaimed God’s love for all – given freely and lavishly, whether people deserved God’s love (like the good Samaritan aiding the wounded man by the wayside), or whether they did not deserve it (like the younger brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son who came home, after wasting his entire inheritance, not with true sorrow for his sin, but simply to put food on his table and a roof over his head). Jesus healed people, without investigating first whether they repented of their sins or not.

Jesus spoke of judgment too, of course. But he made it clear that this would come later. And it would be based on how people responded to God’s freely given love. And in the great parable of judgment, the story of the sheep and the goats, Jesus said that the measure of our response to God’s love would be how much, or how little, we had done for people in need.

Jesus’ message – proclaiming God’s love first, and judgment later – and the story in today’s gospel of the wheat and the weeds which explains this message, are important for all those who are scandalized because his Church contains so many hypocrites: people who come to Mass on Sunday, but whose lives the rest of the week are inconsistent with the words they hear and speak in Church. There is no use trying to say it isn’t so. It is. The Church does contain hypocrites. It always has. It always will. And it would be dishonest to pretend that they all laypeople.

Jesus never promised that every baptized Catholic would be part of his heavenly kingdom, any more than he promised the crowds who flocked round him in Palestine that they would all be part of his kingdom. On the contrary, Jesus knows that his Church will always contain many who, because their hearts are far from God, are not part of his kingdom.

Separating true believers from hypocrites, however, is for God not for us. “If you pull up the weeds, you might uproot the wheat with them,” Jesus warns. Every attempt to create a “pure” Church of true believers has ended in failure. Only God can purify his Church; for only God can see people’s hearts If God chooses to delay his work of final judgment and purification, it is for the reason given in our first reading: God’s “mastery over all things” makes him “lenient to all.” God can afford to be generous and merciful because he is all powerful.

The story tells us of God’s patience. It warns us not to be less patient than God. Which one of us would not like to have a Church in which there were no hypocrites? In which everyone from First Communion children to the Pope always practiced what they preached? That would be beautiful, wouldn’t it? But creating such a pure Church is God’s work, not ours. And the time for God’s final purification is not yet.

Note that I said “final purification.” Purification of the Church through repentance and forgiveness of us, its members, goes on all the time, and must go on. The Second Vatican Council said that the Church is “always in need of being purified” (LG 8, end). The painful crisis which burst upon the Church in our country six years ago through the misconduct of some priests and bishops is part of this ongoing purification.

The time for final purification, however, is not yet. That “not yet” contains a warning, and a burden, but also encouragement. The warning is contained in the farmer’s order at harvest time: “First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles for burning.” God delays his judgment because he is patient, to give us every chance to decide for him while there is still time. One day, however, there will be no more chances. Judgment will begin. That is the warning. The burden is having to live in a Church of sinners, where many are hypocritical and insincere. The story’s encouragement is its message that the Lord’s Church has room for everyone.

I’d like to leave you with a question, for your own reflection: If the Church were really as pure as we would all like it to be, can we be confident that there would be room in it for ordinary, weak sinners like us?

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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

SURPRISED BY JOY
17th Sunday in Ordinar Time, Year A.  Matthew 13:44-52.
AIM:    To show the joy of Christian discipleship.

In the middle years of the last century there was no more widely read or more convincing spokesman for Christian belief than C.S. Lewis.  A professor of English literature at both Oxford and Cambridge who died in 1963, his books still sell briskly today.  In his only autobiographical work Lewis tells how he moved from the formal Protestantism of his childhood in Northern Ireland to abandon all religious belief in his teens.  Only in his thirties did he come back to believe, first, in God, and then to accept Jesus Christ as God’s Son.  He called the book Surprised by Joy – a tribute to the wife, Joy Gresham, whom Lewis, a confirmed bachelor most of his life, married in 1956 when he was fifty-eight.  The film, Shadowlands, tells the story of their marriage.

Both of the men in today’s gospel were “surprised by joy.”  In this the man discovering buried treasure, and the merchant finding “a pearl of great price,” were alike.  In other respects, however, the two men were quite different.

The first man is a day laborer plowing his employer’s field.  As he walks back and forth over the familiar ground, the plow catches on what he at first takes for a rock.  Investigation shows it to be a pottery jar filled with gold and silver coins.  Before the days of banks, the best way to guard such a treasure was to bury it.  Who had buried it, or when, he cannot know.  He realizes, however, that this unexpected find can change his life, giving him the first financial security he has ever known.

He realizes also, however, that he has a problem.  The law of the day said that buried treasure belonged to the person on whose property it was found.  Rather than carrying off the treasure at once, and risk having the owner of the field challenge his right to possess it, the man carefully buries the jar again and finishes his day’s work.  Later he scrapes together his meager savings and makes his employer an offer for the field.  He is careful to appear casual about it, so as not to arouse suspicion.  When his offer is accepted, the man is overjoyed.  The purchase has cost everything he has.  The treasure which is now his, however, is worth far more.

The merchant is different.  He is not poor but well off.  And he is looking for treasure.  He probably started collecting semi-precious stones as a youngster.  In time what began as a hobby became his livelihood.  Years of buying and selling have sharpened his eye, and refined his taste.  He smiles now when he thinks of the worthless baubles that used to please him years ago.  One day, walking through the bazaar, he sees a pearl so large, and so flawless, that it takes his breath away.  He know he must have it.  It will mean the sacrifice of all he owns.  But no matter.  When you have found perfection, no price is too high to pay.

“God’s kingdom is like that,” Jesus is saying.  Neither of these two men think for a minute of the sacrifice they are making.  Both think only of the joy of their new possession.  Both know that the great treasure they have discovered is worth many times over what they are paying to possess it.

Must we pay a price to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ?  Of course.  Sometimes that price is high.  But when we think only of the cost of discipleship, we make our religion grim and forbidding.  In these two little parables Jesus is emphasizing not the cost, but the infinitely greater reward.  From the great chorus of Christian disciples who, like the men in these two stories, have been “surprised by joy,” let me quote two voices.

The first is the late fourth century north African convert, later a bishop, St. Augustine.  All through his twenties the intellectually brilliant Augustine wanted to be a Christian.  But he thought the price was too high.  He was unable to give up his freedom to live his life as he pleased.  After God granted him the grace of conversion, Augustine wrote that what he had sacrificed for Jesus Christ was nothing compared to the treasure he had gained.

“How sweet did it become to me all at once to be without those trifles!” Augustine writes in his Confessions.  “What I previously feared to lose, it was now a joy to be without.  For you cast them away from me, you true and highest sweetness.  You cast them out and instead entered in, you true and highest sweetness.  You cast them out and instead entered in yourself, sweeter than all pleasure.” (Confessions ix.1)

Then there is Fr. Alfred Delp, a German Jesuit who gave his life for Jesus Christ in 1945, under the tyranny of Adolf Hitler.  In a farewell letter, written with manacled hands in his prison cell on death row but full of peace and joy, Fr.Delp wrote of his great discovery, and changed perspective.

“I know now that I have been as stupid and foolish as a child.  How much strength and depth I have sacrificed in my life!  How much fruitfulness I might have had in my work, how much blessing I might have given to others!  Only the person who believes, who trusts, who loves, sees truly what human life is really all about.  Only he can truly see God.”

Let me conclude by recalling an event most of us can stilll remember: the tragic death of the British Princess Diana on the last day of August 1997.  For days television showed the public grief of crowds in London.  Grief also fueled their protest that there was no flag at half mast over Buckingham Palace.  Courtiers explained that the only flag permitted there was the Royal Standard, which is flown only when the sovereign is in residence.  Since the Queen was in Scotland, the flagpole remained bare.  Within days, however, tradition yielded to sentiment.  For the first time ever, the Union Jack flew over Buckingham Palace, and at half mast.

We followers of Jesus Christ have a royal standard.  On a field of red, the color of the Savior’s blood, is emblazoned in letters of gold the single word: “Joy.”  It flies – or should fly – above the Christian heart, to show that the King is resident within.

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Welcome to Get Smart about Investing. After you make the decision to invest in the stock market with a portion of your portfolio and have an idea of how much money you want to place in large caps, small caps and international stocks, the next decision to make is whether it’s better to use individual stocks or stock mutual funds. This choice comes down to understanding the pros and cons of each method well enough to make the right decision. We’ll talk more about stock mutual funds later on. But first ask yourself how active a role you want to play in managing the stock portion of your portfolio.

Individual stocks tend to be a lot more work than using stock mutual funds. Look at all the factors you need to be concerned with: How much should you invest in technology versus healthcare? How much should you invest in each stock? When should you sell a stock? How should you keep track of all the different stocks? What overall strategy are you following? I often run into clients who invested in individual stocks and ended up with a portfolio that was too complicated to keep up with; not to mention the headaches these clients got when tax time rolled around. They had bad stocks that remained in their portfolio for years and good stocks they didn’t even know about. Individual stocks are great, but there can be a lot more upfront and ongoing work involved.

Most of the people I talk with who want to invest in the stock market usually have two or three ideas for individual stocks that they’re interested in, or came across a stock recommendation in the newspaper or on TV. In many of the cases, a better way for them to get started would have been to use a combination of both individual stocks and mutual funds. For example, if you were investing $20,000 in the large-cap portion of your portfolio, perhaps you could invest $12,000 in an S&P 500 index mutual fund and $8000 in individual stocks. Or you could put $4000 in each. This way, if your stocks are doing better than the S&P 500 index, you become one of the few people to outperform the market. But if those stocks aren’t doing do as well, at least a bulk of your money is well-diversified, allowing you to participate in the overall growth of the market over time.
How much money do you have to invest or is already invested in stocks? Do you have enough money to buy 10 to 20 different stocks from each of the asset classes: large caps, small caps and international? Getting good diversification with smaller dollar amounts is harder and more time consuming when you’re investing in individual stocks, and much easier to do with stock mutual funds. This is especially true for the small cap and international portions of your portfolio because most people are less familiar with these types of companies. For example, you would probably have an easier time understanding Coca Cola’s business model compared to a bank in India. Generally, investors who plan to use individual stocks should have at least $50,000 to $100,000 for their portfolios.  Again, if you don’t have that much money to invest, use mutual funds for the bulk of your investment, then complement it with a few individual stocks.

Let’s say you had $60,000 to invest and wanted to put it in individual stocks. After some planning, you decided that you would allocate $30,000 to large caps and $15,000 to small caps and international stocks. Instead of investing all of the money in individual stocks, you can use mutual funds for the small cap and international portions of your portfolio, and individual stocks for the large-cap portion. That would enable you to focus your time on the area you’re more familiar with and use the expertise of mutual fund managers in these other areas.

How well have the stocks you’ve chosen performed in the past? Maybe you have the time and money to spend on enjoying the process of selecting individual stocks; but have you done it well? Can you tell me how your investments performed over the last year? Most people can’t. It’s challenging for anyone to separate the good stocks from the bad, year after year; not to mention someone who doesn’t do it on a full-time basis. For the average person, it’s difficult to implement a disciplined investment strategy for individual stocks. If it sounds like I’m trying to dissuade you from investing in individual stocks, it’s because I am. For most people I believe the convenience, professional management and diversification of a stock mutual fund outweighs its drawbacks and costs.

Most people I speak with say their financial lives are already too busy. They want to make good financial decisions but don’t want too active a role in managing their investments. The bulk of their portfolios should be in mutual funds, with occasional stock purchases, if they’re interested and have time for it. It makes sense to follow an investment plan that’s aligned with your interests and priorities.

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

THE SUPER-ABUNDANT HARVEST
15the Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year. Is. 55:10-11; Mt. 13:1-9.
AIM: To instill hope by showing that God’s power overcomes weakness, failure, and defeat.

Was Jesus’ life a success story? Hardly. True, he attracted large crowds. But few in the throngs which hung on his words really understood him. Even his closest friends didn’t really get it. At the Last Supper with their Master they were still arguing about “who should be greatest” (Lk 22:24). During his public ministry Jesus encountered mounting criticism and hostility, and at the end rejection and a cruel and unjust death.

Jesus responds to the rising tide of opposition which he saw all around him with the story he tells in today’s gospel. It is a story of contrasts: on the one hand the waste and failure of most of the farmer’s hard work; and on the other hand the abundant harvest despite this failure.

Farmers in Jesus’ day first scattered seed on unplowed ground, and then turned the seed into the soil by plowing over it. Some of the seed sown by this farmer lands on the hard footpath made by people who walk across his field. Before the farmer can turn the seed under with his plow, the birds have picked the path clean. The seed is wasted. Some of the seed falls on soil so shallow and rocky that even after plowing there is not enough depth of soil for proper root development. That seed too is wasted. Part of the seed falls among thorns which, even after being turned under by the plow, grow up again and crowd out the seed. Waste once again.

Up to this point in the story all the seed, and all the farmer’s hard work, have been wasted. This corresponds to Jesus’ own experience: initial popular excitement at his teaching and miracles; but already clear signs of the hostility and rejection which will lead to his condemnation and death. Jesus’ efforts, like the farmer’s, seem to lead only to waste and failure.

Now comes something we weren’t expecting. Some of the seed lands on rich soil and produces an abundant harvest: “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” A modern commentator explains: “A 20-to-1 ratio would have been considered an extraordinary harvest. Jesus’ strikingly large figures are intended to underscore the prodigious quality of God’s glorious kingdom still to come” [New Jerome Biblical Commentary No. 42:25]. Despite all the waste and failure, Jesus is saying, an abundant harvest is certain — indeed a super-abundant harvest.

Faced with mounting evidence of rejection and failure, Jesus could have become a grim preacher of impending doom. Instead he is relaxed, confident of ultimate success. Jesus’ optimism is not superficial, however. He does not proclaim a bright, cheery message of positive thinking, or possibility thinking; with the smiling assurance that everything will turn out all right if only we hang in there and keep the right attitude. By telling a story in which most of the farmer’s hard work is wasted, Jesus shows us that much will not turn out all right. We must expect setbacks, even defeats.

Jesus’ message of confident faith in the midst of discouragement, reverses, setbacks, and defeats, is exactly what we need today. How much of the Church’s work is wasted. Think of all the time and treasure we invest in our Catholic schools. We’re proud of our schools — and we should be. If we ask however, how many of their graduates are still practicing their faith ten years after graduation, we begin to doubt: is our investment in our schools really worthwhile? Or is the bottom line, once again, waste, failure, and defeat?

And what about our personal failures? We have made so many good resolutions. Some we have kept. Many we have not. When we come to confession, it’s the same tired old list of sins. We ask ourselves: “Will I ever make any real progress?” Too often we suspect that the answer to that question is No. Must we simply acknowledge defeat, and hang our heads in shame?

Jesus does not deny the power of evil. How could he when it brought him to the cross? Jesus does not deny the reality of failure — whether it is his own seeming failure, his Church’s failures, or our own personal failures. Despite failure and defeat, however, Jesus tells us to be confident, to have hope, to hold our heads high.

‘Have patience and courage,’ he is telling us. ‘Do your work. Keep on. Sow the seed. Leave the rest to God. The harvest is certain. When it comes, it will be so much greater than you can possibly imagine that you will be amazed.’ The super-abundant harvest which Jesus promises depends in the last analysis not on us, but on God. Jesus himself is the one who sows the seed in the often hard, stony, and thorn-choked soil of human hearts, our own hearts included.

Jesus is also the word of God of which Isaiah speaks in our first reading. Jesus is God’s personal communication to us, as my words are a communication to you. In that first reading God says: “My word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.” The final triumph of Jesus, who is God’s word, his personal communication to us, is absolutely certain. No less certain too is the super-abundant harvest which Jesus promises in his story of the farmer sowing seed.

How do we know all this? We know it from the two central symbols of our faith. At the center of our religion is a cross, the symbol of a wasted life, and ultimate defeat. Behind the cross, however, is the empty tomb, God’s guarantee that his Son spoke the truth when he said: “Some seed fell on rich soil, and produced fruit, a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold. Whoever has ears ought to hear.”

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