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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-43.

AIM: To help the hearers see how much God has given us, and hence how much he espects from us.
Jesus had a way of seizing people’s attention at once. He spoke about things that vitally interested people. Today he might speak about the Iraq war, affirmative action, the death penalty, abortion, feminism, illegal immigration — all subjects about which most people have strong opinions.

A matter about which people in Jesus’ day felt strongly was the amount of land in Palestine owned by foreigners. Jesus’ fellow Jews resented the windfall profits reaped by wealthy tycoons in far-off Rome from some of the most fertile property in the country, while those to whom the land rightly belonged often had difficulty eking out a bare existence. The story we have just heard about tenant farmers who mistreated the agents of an absentee landowner may have been based on an actual case familiar to Jesus’ hearers.

Three details in the story would immediately have seized the attention of anyone familiar with the Hebrew scriptures: the hedge around the vineyard, the wine press, the watchtower. All three details are mentioned in Isaiah’s tale of his friend’s vineyard which we heard in our first reading. Jesus’s hearers were familiar with that passage from Isaiah. They knew that the vineyard in that passage was a parable of God’s loving care for his people, and of their ungrateful response. Isaiah is quite specific about this. He represents God as saying: “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I had not done? Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes?”

Isaiah used the parable to expose the ingratitude of God’s people for all the care he had lavished on them, and to warn them that a day of reckoning was coming. The warning came from God himself: “Now, I will let you know what I mean to do with my vineyard …
I will make it a ruin.”

In retelling the familiar story, Jesus makes it clear that Isaiah’s day of reckoning is now at hand. The religious leaders of his people are about to reject him. Up to now they have held back because of Jesus’ popularity with the crowds. Now, however, the small ruling clique is becoming bolder. Jesus gives them a final, solemn warning: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”

Is that all long ago and far away? Don’t you believe it! Jesus’ warning is as up-to-date as the morning headlines. It contains lessons for us today: for our country, for us American Catholics, for each of us personally.

First, the warning for our country. Few nations have been so blessed by God as ours. We are rich in natural resources, and rich in the diversity of races, nations, and tongues which have come to these shores seeking a new and better life. For more than two centuries two protecting oceans enabled us to develop a largely unpeopled continent. For most of our country’s history we were able to work out our national destiny little troubled by struggles elsewhere. Even today the United States, despite all our problems, remains the richest and most powerful country on earth — since the fall of communism in 1989 the world’s only superpower. Jesus’ parable warns us that all this wealth and power will be taken from us, and given to others, if we are not willing to share with those less fortunate than ourselves the abundance God has given us.
The parable is also a warning to us American Catholics. The position of influence we enjoy in the Church, because of our numbers and financial resources, will be taken away from us and given to Catholics in Third World countries, if our Catholicism is complacent, conventional, and lukewarm — while theirs is dynamic, daring, enthusiastic.

In 1974, thirty-four years ago now, a Capuchin Franciscan priest from Switzerland, Fr. Walbert Bühlmann, wrote a book which the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner called “the Catholic book of the year.” It was called The Coming of the Third Church. Bühlmann’s “Third Church” was the church of the Third World: Latin America, Africa, parts of Asia. By the end of the twentieth century, Bühlmann said, most of the world’s Catholics would live in the southern hemisphere. The older churches of Europe and North America would no longer rank first. Bühlmann’s prophecy has proved correct. The next Pope could well come from Latin America, from Africa, or from Asia.

For each of us personally Jesus’ parable is a warning that merely conventional, formal religion is not enough. And our religion is conventional if all it means, at bottom, is fulfilling a list of “minimum obligations”: dropping in at Sunday Mass to get our card punched, avoidance of serious sin, but not much beyond that: little generosity, little love or consideration for others, because we’re too busy looking after Number One. How much would a marriage be worth in which the spouses were merely concerned to fulfil their “minimum obligations” to one another? Think about it!

In the great family of God which we call the Catholic Church God lavishes on us treasures beyond counting: all his truth, all his goodness, power, and love (the theologians call it “grace”). He looks for our answering love in return. The treasures God bestows on us are meant to be used, not put away for safe-keeping. They are to be shared, not hoarded. If we fail to pass on to others what God so generously give to us, we shall lose God’s gifts. We can’t keep them, unless we give them away. That is what Jesus’ warning words mean: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”

Someone has said: It doesn’t take much of a person to be a Catholic Christian. But it does take all of him — or her — that there is!

* * *

America Magazine for Oct. 6th has published this review of my new book:

All He Ever Wanted

By Robert P. Imbelli | OCTOBER 6, 2008

No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace
By John Jay Hughes Tate Publishing. 344p $19.99 (paperback)

In his most affective and affecting epistle, St. Paul wrote to the Philippians: “I give thanks to my God for all my memories of you” (Phil 1:3). Paul’s eucharistic remembering came repeatedly to mind while reading the Rev. John Jay Hughes’s lovely and moving autobiography, No Ordinary Fool. Calling to mind and narrating the events of his life—the sorrow of his mother’s death when he was but six years old, the emotional and spiritual closeness to his Anglican priest father, his own ordination to the priesthood as an Episcopalian and subsequent reception into the full communion of the Catholic Church, his painful alienation from his beloved father, his fruitful scholarly and pastoral ministry—all this and more Hughes celebrates as a testimony to grace.

As a precocious and sensitive child, the loss of his mother at so early an age had and continues to have an indelible impact. He says simply: “From this blow I have never recovered. I belong today to the walking wounded.”

Yet, from this unfathomable sorrow there came a conviction of grace. Let me allow Hughes to recount the decisive occurrence in his own voice:

I can no longer recall the exact day when I discovered God in the

darkness. I can fix it, however, before the age of nine. One day I

realized the parting was not forever. With blinding certainty it came

home to me that I would see my mother again, when God called me

home. From that day to this the unseen spiritual world—the world

of God, of the angels, of the saints, and of our beloved dead — has

been real to me…. Decades later I realized that this insight was the

beginning of my priestly vocation.

Hughes spent six happy years as a priest in the Anglican Communion, mostly in parish ministry. Four aspects of that priestly service continue to characterize his approach to priestly ministry to this day. They have relevance not only for priests, but for all those seeking to respond generously to the Lord’s call.

First, early in his ministry he made a commitment to tithe whatever income he received. To his surprise he found the practice of tithing not a burden, but a source of blessing. He writes: “Since it is based on faith (trusting that our needs will be taken care of if we give away the first portion of our income), it deepens faith. It enables us to use money sacramentally, by making something material a vehicle of the spiritual—gratitude.”

Second, Hughes soon became convinced of the need for a sustained prayer life as the soil of fruitful ministry and, indeed, of all growth in Christ. Moreover, this discipline must be practiced in season and out of season, whatever feelings of consolation or desolation accompany one’s prayer. As he writes wisely: “Neglect of this fundamental truth is the root cause of much of the Church’s present difficulties.”

Third, from teenage years the practice of confession has been crucial to his spiritual life. Indeed, one of the sorrows he experienced in becoming Roman Catholic before the Second Vatican Council was that he did not hear pronounced the consoling words of absolution, which he had heard and rejoiced in as an Episcopalian. Instead, Catholics before the council were instructed to pray the Act of Contrition while the priest mumbled absolution in Latin. The irony, of course, is that the linguistic intelligibility of the sacrament has also witnessed a decline in its celebration—though there are welcome signs of a rediscovery of this great grace.

Finally, a practice that Hughes learned from his Anglican mentors and which he has followed faithfully is never to preach on Sunday without a written text before him. The obvious advantage is that one thereby disciplines oneself to a clear beginning, middle and ending to structuring the interconnections among them. Those who have read Father Hughes’s published homilies know the care and the imagination they exhibit. He tells us that in homilies he shuns “moralism.” He explains that even when preaching the moral law, he presents it “not as the standard we must meet before God would love and bless us, but rather as the description of our grateful response to the blessings and love bestowed upon us by our loving heavenly Father as a free gift.”

Father Hughes writes with passion and conviction, spicing his recollections with telling incidents and wry humor, often enough directing his wit at his own false steps and follies. But it is the author’s Jacob-like wrestling with the call to Catholicism that provides the distinctive drama of the narrative.

In his early 20s he began to wonder whether the Anglican tradition had not in fact splintered itself from the Catholic Church, a questioning that his high-church father dismissed as “Roman fever.” Resolved for a time, the questions re-emerged forcefully after his ordination as an Episcopal priest. The stumbling block was his suspicion of exaggerated papal claims. But as he studied and consulted about them, he found them less an obstacle than he had feared.

The decision, in 1960, to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church was motivated by no emotional appeal or aesthetic attraction to the preconciliar church, but solely by his persuasion of the truth of its claim. In his view this entailed no repudiation of his past nor of the abundant graces he had received. As he wrote his father at the time, “It was not so much that I had come to find Anglicanism wrong, as incomplete.” But all efforts at explanation were spurned; the elder Hughes barred his son from the family home; and, though correspondence continued between them, they never saw each other again.

Hughes’s subsequent studies in Innsbruck (where he attended the lectures of Karl Rahner, S.J.) and in Münster (where he heard and greatly appreciated Joseph Ratzinger) were followed by his conditional ordination as a Catholic priest. His account of his many years of priestly ministry in the postconciliar church as teacher, theologian and pastor will elicit respect, gratitude and frequent moments of recognition as readers recall their own experiences and enter (as I did) into silent, yet spirited conversation with the author.

One will find much to relish and to learn from in this marvelous testimony to grace. Eucharistic remembering provides the cantus firmus that inspires and sustains Hughes’s honest and joyful witness. His book evokes, in an almost sacramental way, what St. Paul saw to be the fruit of grace: “an overflow of thanksgiving to the glory of God.”

Rev. Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, teaches systematic theology at Boston College.

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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables

26^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Matthew. 21:28-32.

AIM: To show that our only claim on God is our acknowledgment of sin and our prayer for forgiveness.

On the day after Christmas 1958 Angelo Roncalli, who had become Pope John XXIII not quite two months before, visited Rome=s central prison. A murderer asked the Pope: ACan there be forgiveness for me?@ The Holy Father responded by enfolding the man in his arms. No words were necessary. The embrace said it all.

AYou can=t come to me,@ Pope John told the prisoners. ASo I have come to you.@ He went on to tell them that he had some personal experience of jails: his brother had once been arrested for poaching. In the account of the visit which appeared in the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano the next day this remark was censored. The editor feared that readers would be scandalized to learn that a Pope=s brother had been in trouble with the law.

Pope John=s experience with the Church Establishment, represented in this instance by the editor of the Vatican newspaper, was not unlike that of Jesus Christ. ATax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you,@ Jesus says to the religious leaders of his people at the end of this story about the man with two sons. He was addressing Athe chief priests and elders of the people@.

Jesus= association with people of bad moral character (represented here by Atax collectors and prostitutes@) scandalized his pious critics. His acceptance of such people did not mean approval of their sinful lives, any more than Pope John=s embrace of the murderer implied approval of violent crime. By welcoming notorious sinners Jesus was appealing to the spark of goodness that was still in them as God=s children. He knew that kindness and love can break through the hardened human heart far more effectively than moral denunciation.

Today=s parable of the two sons was Jesus= way of bringing home the contrast between the religious leaders, who rejected him, and the outcasts of society, who heard him gladly. To Jesus= hearers, living in a patriarchal society, the father in the story was a figure of unquestioned authority. His sons owed him obedience not merely because they lived in his house. Obedience was also a sacred duty enjoined by the fourth commandment: AHonor your father and your mother.@

The first son=s response to the father=s request for help on the family farm was an in-your-face refusal of his duty which would have deeply shocked Jesus= hearers. ABut afterwards [he] changed his mind and went,@ Jesus tells us. The second son responds courteously and at once: AYes, sir!@ ABut [he] did not go,@ Jesus says.

Immediately Jesus confronts his critics with a question. AWhich of the two did what his father=s will?@ Jesus= critics give the only possible answer: AThe first.@ They are convicted out of their own mouths. AAmen, I say to you,@ Jesus tells them, Atax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you. When John came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him; but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not later change your minds and believe him.@

The second son in the story, who told his father he was on the way to work and then failed to go, is like Jesus= upright critics. Proud to be members of God=s chosen people, they were confident that faithful performance of their religious duties gave them a claim on God which he was bound in justice to honor. They had forgotten that we never have a claim on God. God has a claim on us, and it is an absolute claim. AWhen you have done all you have been commanded to do,@ Jesus says on another occasion [and which of us has?], Asay, >We are useless servants. We have done no more than our duty=@ (Luke 17:10).

The first son in the story, who told his father there was no way he was going to work for him any longer, and later regretted his insolence and went to work after all, is like the depraved outcasts who heard Jesus gladly. Their lives proclaimed rebellion against God. But the welcome they gave Jesus showed there was still goodness in them. Jesus appeals to this goodness by his compassionate love. Perhaps, like the first son, they will yet feel regret and turn from the darkness of their wasted lives to the sunshine of God=s forgiveness and love. This hope is the basis for Jesus= stern warning to his hard-hearted and self-righteous critics: ATax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you.@

For us the story contains a warning C but also encouragement. Faithful performance of our religious duties is in itself no guarantee of salvation. Such obedience is profitable only if it brings us closer to others and makes us more loving people C and if it brings us closer to God. And the closer we come to God, the more clearly we shall recognize our remaining sinfulness and unworthiness of all the love he showers on us. Jesus gives the same warning in the sermon on the mount: ANone of those who cry out, >Lord, Lord,= will enter the kingdom of God but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven@ (Matthew 7:21).

Who are those who cry, ALord, Lord@? Certainly not the declared enemies of Jesus Christ. No, we are the people who cry, ALord, Lord.@ Day by day, and Sunday by Sunday, we utter the Lord=s name: in petitions, intercession, thanksgiving, praise, and penitence. That is right and good. The parable warns us, however, that if our piety does not bear fruit in our lives, we are still far from God. The warning is not for outsiders, for others. It is for us, the declared followers of Jesus Christ.

If the story=s second son is a warning to us, however, the first son is an encouragement. As followers of Jesus Christ we have been taught that readiness to respond to God=s= call is a virtue, slowness or refusal a sin. We have been told not to complain, and to avoid the rebellious attitude which produces and nurtures complaints. Few of us, however, avoid these things completely. Often we are slow to respond to God=s call, coming to us through the teaching of the Church, through the inner voice of conscience, through the needs of a sister or brother whom we encounter along life=s way, or in the legitimate commands or requests of those in authority. Sometimes we refuse such calls altogether.

All that is, in the last analysis, of little account, Jesus is telling us. What counts is not what we say, feel, or intend. The only thing that counts is what we do. Negative feelings, resentment of God=s demands or of the demands of others, are not important if, despite such feelings, we are still trying to do what we know is right. Indeed, being generous with God and others when this is difficult, in spite of the sullen resentment within, is of greater value than obeying God=s call in times of spiritual fervor and zeal.

God sees the difficulties with which we must contend. When we stumble and fall, and think we can rise no more because we=ve been down so often before, we need to ask God to do for us what we can no longer do ourselves. When we approach God in that way, we do have a claim on him: the claim of a sinner seeking God=s mercy.

Let me conclude with the verses of an evangelical hymn. If you have ever watched a Billy Graham revival on television, you have heard it sung softly by the massed choirs as people come forward to give their lives to Jesus Christ. It goes like this:

Just as I am, without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me

And that thou bid=st me come to thee, O Lamb of God, I come.

Just I am, though tossed about, with many a conflict, many a doubt

Fightings and fears within, without, O Lamb of God, I come.

Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind; sight, riches, healing of the mind,

Yes, all I need, in thee to find, O Lamb of God, I come.

Just as I am: thou wilt receive; wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;

Because thy promise I believe; O Lamb of God, I come.

Just as I am, thy love unknown, has broken every barrier down;

Now to be thine, yes, thine alone, O Lamb of God, I come.

Just as I am, of thy great love, the breadth, length, depth, and height to prove,

Here for a season, then above: O Lamb of God, I come.

* * *

John L. Allen, Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter, syndicated columnist, TV commentator on things Catholic, and author of 3 books about Pope Benedict XVI, writes about my book, No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace:

“Catholic literature abounds in conversion stories, and many of these ‘Home to Rome‘ tales have a sort of apologetic edge. No Ordinary Fool, however, transcends that genre. While no one could miss Fr. John Jay Hughes’ deep love for Catholicism, this is far more than an argument for Roman verities. It is a piercing, wise memoir, written by a priest who has prayed and thought deeply about matters of both head and heart. Hughes is admired across ideological fault lines because he cuts to the core of things, to the restless need of the human heart for a love that lasts. Anyone who wishes to take that journey would do well to have Hughes as a guide.”

Amazon has temporarily sold out and lists the book as “currently unavailable.” Until they restock, it can be ordered directly from the publisher, Tate Publishing and Enterprises.

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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

Related Audio Course: A Journey Through the Parables 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Matthew  20: 1-16a.

AIM: To help the hearers trust not in their own merits, but in God’s mercy

It seems terribly unfair, doesn’t it? Even a child can see that is isn’t right to pay people who have worked all day in the blazing sun no more than those who have worked only an hour. Many years ago I spoke about this parable to some fine Sisters in St. Louis with whom I lived for seventeen years. When I had finished reading the story, I could see an elderly German Sister in the front row frowning.

“They all get the same,” she said. She was pretty burned up about it.

We should be burned up about it. If we’re not, we haven’t been listening: or the story is so familiar that it no longer disturbs us. To understand the story we have to realize that it is not about social justice. It is about God’s generosity. If Jesus were telling the story today, it might go something like this.

A rancher in one of the “salad factories” of California’s San Fernando valley is eager to harvest his crop before a threatened change in the weather. So at dawn he’s off to the hiring hall at the edge of town. The men he finds there are able-bodied and eager to work. They also know their rights. They bargain with the rancher about the conditions of work, and about their wages. When they strike a deal, they feel good about it. The work will be hard, but they know they will be well paid.

At intervals during the day, the foreman tells the rancher that more workers will be needed if they want to get in the whole harvest in time. So the rancher makes repeated trips to town to hire additional help. Each time the workers he encounters are less promising. The men he finds lounging around in mid-afternoon are the dregs of the local labor market: drifters, panhandlers, winos. While those hired at dawn have been working in the hot sun, these men have spent another day idle, reflecting glumly on the hopelessness of their lot. There is no bargaining with men like that. As much out of pity as for any real help this sorry lot can offer, the rancher tells them:

“Get into the truck, fellows. There’s work for you out at my place.”

At quitting time, those hired last are first in the pay line. These are the men whom life has passed over. They have learned through bitter experience that every man’s hand is against them. They wish now that something had been said about wages before they got into the rancher’s truck a couple of hours earlier.

The first man in line receives his pay envelope. He rips it open — and can’t believe his eyes. It contains a whole day’s pay! He stands there dazed, tears of joy welling up in his eyes. He expected to be swindled. Instead, he has been treated generously — far more generously, he knows, than he deserves.

Meanwhile, news of what the first men in line are receiving is being passed back to those in the rear. These are the men who have worked hard all day. They calculate how much they will receive at the same hourly rate. Imagine their indignation when they receive exactly what they had bargained for in the early morning. They protest angrily to the rancher.

“It’s my money, isn’t it?” he answers them. “If I want to be generous to someone else, what’s that to you?”

We are left with the injustice. The story begins to make sense only when we ask: who was happy? who was disappointed? and why? Those who were happy were the men hired last and paid first. They had not bargained. They had nothing to bargain with. They were little better than beggars. It was these beggars, however, who went away happy, while the bargainers were unhappy.

Why? Not because they had struck a bad bargain. No, at the beginning of the day they knew it was a good bargain. Nor were they unhappy because the bargain was not kept. On the contrary, it was kept to the letter. At the end of the day, however, they thought of something that had never occurred to them when they were hired. They thought they deserved more.

The men who went away happy did not appeal to what they deserved. They knew they deserved very little. The only thing they could appeal to was the rancher’s generosity. That is the key to a right relationship with God, Jesus says. Appeal to God’s generosity and you will be flooded with joy. Appeal to what you deserve, and God will give it to you. God is always just. He never short-changes us. When we discover, however, how little we actually deserve, we’ll probably be disappointed.

We know the story as the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. A better title would be the parable of the Bargainers and the Beggars. The story is important for us. It flies in the face of everything we’ve been taught. Society says we should not be beggars. We should work for what we get, not depend on handouts. In everyday life that is fine. With God, however, different standards apply. He loves to give handouts! To receive them, however, we need to stand before him empty-handed, appealing (if we must appeal at all) not to God’s justice but to his mercy. More, we must forget about keeping track of what we think we “deserve” and stop worrying that others whom we consider “less deserving” (or not deserving at all!) share the Lord’s overflowing bounty with us.

The full-time workers in this story resemble the elder son in the story of the Prodigal Son, angry at the undeserved welcome extended to his shiftless younger brother. Like those who had worked all day in the vineyard, the elder brother thought he had been short-changed. He was mistaken. “Everything I have is yours,” his father told him (Luke 15:31). What more could he have received than that? The elder brother in that story needed to stop keeping score and join in welcoming the family member who, despite his folly and sin, was still his brother.

Are you a score-keeper, always reckoning what’s coming to you? Are you, with God, a bargainer — or are you a beggar? If you want to experience God’s justice, be a bargainer. He is a God of justice. He’ll never short-change you. When you discover, however, how little you deserve on any strict accounting, you’ll probably be disappointed, perhaps even shocked.

So perhaps you’d rather experience God’s generosity. If so, then you must learn to be, before God, a beggar. Then you will be bowled over with the Lord’s generosity. You will know Mary’s joy at the news that she was to be the mother of God’s Son: “The hungry he has given every good thing, while the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1:53).

Ask the Lord who bestows his gifts not according to our deserving but according to his boundless generosity to give you that hunger which longs to be fed; that emptiness which yearns to be filled. Stand beneath his cross and say, in the words of the old evangelical hymn: Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to your cross I cling.

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Blog Author: Fr. John Jay Hughes

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“GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD … “
Exaltation of the Cross. John 3:13-17.
AIM: To proclaim God’s unconditioned love, and appeal for a response.

At the center of every Catholic Church in the world is a cross. The cross hangs around the necks of hundreds of thousands of people in our world who give no other outward sign of being religious. Teachers of young children report that when they offer the youngsters a selection of holy cards and ask them to choose one, time and again children choose the picture of Jesus on the cross.

Why is the cross so important, and so central? Why is it hanging, right now, around the necks of countless fighting men and women in the Middle East? Why, after two thousand years, has the cross lost none of its fascination and power? The best answer is also the simplest: because the cross is a picture of how much God loves us. “There is no greater love than this,” Jesus tells us, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

“God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” we heard in the gospel. It was the most God had to give. That is why the cross is at the center of every Catholic Church in the world. That is why the cross is also at the center of the Church’s preaching. Many people associate the words “preaching” and “sermon” with a list of Do’s and Don’ts: all the things we must first do or avoid before God will love us and bless us. Yet the gospel is supposed to be good news. Is it good news to be told that God won’t love us until we have kept enough of God’s rules to show that we are worthy of his love? That doesn’t sound like very good news to me. It sounds like horribly bad news.

The gospel is the good news that God loves us just as we are, right now. How much does God love us? Let me tell you. Some of you will remember the little Chinese girl, Doris, who entered our pre-school last year just few weeks past her third birthday. She calls me Grandpa Jay. On most days I would go to meet Doris when she was dismissed from school. Together we would stand at the front door, waiting for Doris’s mother. How excited Doris when she spotted her mother. She would run across the school yard as fast as her little legs could take her, to her mother’s waiting arms. It was heart-stopping. Beautiful as that was, however, it doesn’t begin to compare with God’s love for us.

So how much does God love us? An e-mail I received some time ago put it like this. “If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If He had a wallet, your photo would be in it. He sends you flowers every spring. He sends you a sunrise every morning.” He never lets you out of his sight. Do you know why? Maybe you’re thinking it’s because he wants to catch you breaking one of his rules. Many people think that. They’re wrong – dead wrong. God never lets you out of his sight because he loves you so much that he can’t take his eyes off you. Face it, friend — he’s crazy about you! God doesn’t promise days without pain, laughter without sorrow, sun without rain; but he does promise strength for the day, comfort for the tears, and light for the way.

Here is another story. Marie is eighty-seven years old and a widow. She has lived for several years in a nursing home. It is hard to grow old, to have to give up your own place and to be dependent on others. Marie has never been able to adjust. She is crabby and disagreeable much of the time. She complains over trifles. She criticizes those who look after her, often for little or no reason. Her loved ones have reproached her for her bitterness, and tried to talk her out of it. They’ve failed.

One day Marie received a letter from her grandson at college. He told her how much the whole family loved her, how she was an inspiration to them. He said how much he admired her. Shortly after she received the letter a priest visited her. He found her clutching the letter, in tears.

“I want you to read that, Father,” Marie said. When he had, she told him she wanted to go to confession. She did so and received the Lord’s forgiveness: that love that will never let us go, which heals us and makes us well again.

Afterwards Marie was transformed. For the first time anyone could remember she was kind to the nurses. Instead of criticizing them, she thanked them for all they did for her. What had changed her was simply a letter which said: “Grandma, we love you.” It is love that breaks through. And the cross is a picture of God’s love for us.

“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,” we heard in the gospel, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

The One who hangs on the cross, to show us God’s love, says elsewhere in this gospel according to John: “I am the light of the world” (8:12). And in today’s gospel he tells us that our eternal destiny is being determined, even now, by how we react to his light: “Everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”

Are you walking in the light of Jesus’ love? Or do you fear his light because of what it might reveal in the dark corners of your life which, like all of us, you try to keep hidden? We all have those dark corners. Now, in this hour, Jesus Christ is inviting you to put away fear. Come into the bright sunshine of his love. Once you do, the fire of Christ’s love will burn out in you everything that is opposed to his light. Then the reason for your fear will be gone. Then you will have no need to hide. You will be home. You will be safe: safe for this life, but also for eternity.

“Whoever believes in [Jesus Christ] will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their words were evil.”

The eternal destiny of each one of us is being determined by our response to the light, and love, of Jesus Christ. He is waiting for your response, right now.

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“I FORGAVE YOUR ENTIRE DEBT”
24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Mt. 18:21-35.
AIM: To show that God’s gifts, in particular forgiveness, can be retained only if we share them with others.

Abbot Jerome Kodell of New Subiaco Abbey in western Arkansas, describes an ugly scene at the funeral of a widow. Two of her adult children refused to attend because their siblings were also present. What a terrible picture of family bitterness and unhappiness. The cause? Inability to forgive past wrongs and injuries, even at the grave of the common mother.

“Lord, if my brother sins against me,” Peter Jesus asks in our gospel reading, “how often must I forgive? As many as seven times?” Peter assumes that the duty of forgiveness has limits.

“I say to you,” Jesus replies at once, “not seven times; but seventy times seven times.” Jesus was saying that for his followers the duty of forgiveness is unlimited. There is never a time when the Christian disciple can say: ‘I have forgiven enough. Now is the time not for mercy but for justice.’ Peter asked about the quantity of forgiveness. As so often, Jesus does not answer the question. Instead he tells a story about the quality of forgiveness, and the reason for it. We’ve heard the story countless times. For Jesus’ hearers it was new. Let’s see if we can put ourselves in their place.

The story’s opening is ominous. A king, for Jesus’ hearers, was a man with the power of life and death over his subjects. The people with whom he intends to settle accounts are important officials responsible for collecting the king’s taxes. “One was brought before him,” the story says. The use of the passive suggests that official is hauled before the ruler by the royal guards.

The amount of the man’s debt would have caused Jesus’ hearers to gasp in disbelief. The “huge amount” in our translation conceals the figure given by Matthew: “ten thousand talents.” A talent was the largest sum of money then in use — something like a million dollars today. The king they knew best, Herod the Great, is estimated to have had a total annual income of only nine hundred talents. To have incurred a debt more than ten times that already huge amount meant that the official has been embezzling on an enormous scale.

A debt of that magnitude is unpayable — as the story says: “He had no way of paying it.” The king’s command, that not only the official but his wife and children as well, should be sold into slavery, shows that this was a tyrannical Gentile monarch. According to Jewish law only a robber unable to restore what he had stolen could be enslaved. Other family members were immune from such punishment.

Up to this point of the story the sympathy of Jesus’ hearers would have been with the corrupt official. Though his embezzlement of such a huge sum was dishonest, the king’s cruelty was worse. The man’s plea, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full,” — reinforced by his body language: falling down before the king in homage — bears no relation to reality and is merely an expression of the official’s desperation. Once a sum of money so vast was gone, a lifetime would have been insufficient to repay it.

Now comes a surprise: “Moved with compassion, the master let the servant go and forgave him the loan.” A king who was prepared to enslave an entire family for the debt of one member is not the kind of man from whom one would expect mercy, let alone mercy on this scale. So it is nonetheless. The carefully crafted story will have further surprises still.

No sooner delivered from his desperate plight, the official, formerly passive (“brought in”), becomes active: “He found one of his fellow servants who owed him a much smaller amount.” Again Matthew states the amount “a hundred denarii.” A denarius was a day’s wage — the amount promised by the vineyard owner in another parable to those hired early in the day (cf. Mt 20:2). The contrast with the debt owed by the first official, and now forgiven, and that owed the latter by his colleague is immense.

The second official’s reaction to the demand that he pay his debt mirrors that of the first. Body language (kneeling) and plea (“Be patient with me, and I will pay you back”) are identical. The sole difference is that the second official’s debt could easily be paid, given reasonable time. How shocking for those hearing the story for the first time to learn of the first official’s harsh response. Seizing his colleague by the throat and throttling him, he insists that the man be imprisoned until the debt is paid. The first official has completely forfeited the sympathy he enjoyed at the story’s outset.

In the story’s conclusion the colleagues of the two debtors do what Jesus’ hearers wish they might do in the same situation. They report the injustice to the king. Summoning the first official again, the king reminds him of the unmerited mercy he has received and, in an act of grim irony, grants the man what, in his original desperation, he had requested: time. Now, however, the time will be spent not in repayment but in prison, under torture.
It is a story of contrasts. The contrast between the king’s mercy and his servant’s cruelty is obvious. Less clear is the contrast between mercy and justice. The story moves back and forth between the two. The king’s original summons and the command that the corrupt official, with his whole family, be sold into slavery are an insistence on justice at any price. The official reacts to his sentence on the same level. Instead of appealing for mercy, he pleads, however unrealistically, that if he is given time justice will be done: “Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.”

The hearers of the story are surprised when the king, portrayed up to this point as cruel, abandons his insistence on justice and shows mercy, granting his corrupt official not what he had asked (time to pay the debt) but more than he had asked (forgiveness of the debt). Justice required that, in return, this official grant his colleague’s plea for time to pay the relatively small amount which he owed. The corrupt official’s refusal of this plea violates both justice and mercy — the more so since the plea, in this case, was reasonable and realistic. This double failure brings on him swift and terrible retribution.

Behind the king in the story stands God. The corrupt official’s hopeless plight parallels our own. From birth we owe God everything. He has given us the gift of life, using our parents as his instruments. He has also given us the unique set of gifts and talents with which each of us is endowed. Only a life of perfect obedience to God could discharge this debt. By disobedience, however, we have incurred further debts. Like the first official in the story, our situation is hopeless. Our debt to God is unpayable. Out of compassion, God sent his Son to pay on our behalf a debt we could never discharge ourselves. God has done for us, in short, what the king did for his corrupt official. As Paul writes: “He pardoned all our sins. He canceled the bond that stood against us with all its claims, snatching it up and nailing it to the cross” (Col. 2:13f).

This free gift of forgiveness is not a reward for anything we do. It is simply an expression of God’s overflowing love for us as his children — sinful yet still his own, created in his image. This forgiveness is given to us, like all God’s gifts, under one strict condition: that what we have freely received, we freely share with others. The story’s lesson is simple: if we are not forgiving toward others, as God is already forgiving toward us, we risk discovering one day that the forgiveness God has extended to us has been canceled. Jesus is telling us, in short, that our treatment of others, here and now — and especially of those who have wronged us — is already determining where, how, and with whom we shall spend eternity.

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“OWE NOTHING TO ANYONE, EXCEPT TO LOVE ONE ANOTHER.”

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A. Rom. 13:8-10
AIM: To help the hearers by giving an example of love in action.

“Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another,” we heard in our second reading. Is that realistic? Can we love on command? Certainly not, if the kind of love Paul is talking about is a matter of our feelings only. Feelings come and go. The love Paul is talking about, however, is something different. He is talking about an attitude; more specifically, about behavior. Here is an example. The man who sent it to me is today a successful architect. Here is his story, in his own words:

“Thirty years ago, I was driving a cab for a living. When I arrived at 2:30 a.m., the building was dark except for a single light in a ground floor window. Under these circumstances, many drivers would just honk once or twice, wait a minute, then drive away. But, I had seen too many impoverished people who depended on taxis as their only means of transportation. Unless a situation smelled of danger, I always went to the door. This passenger might be someone who needs my assistance, I reasoned to myself.

“So I walked to the door and knocked. ‘Just a minute’, answered a frail,elderly voice. I could hear something being dragged across the floor. After a long pause, the door opened. A small woman in her 80’s stood before me. She was wearing a print dress and a pillbox hat with a veil pinned on it, like somebody out of a 1940s movie. By her side was a small nylon suitcase. The apartment looked as if no one had lived in it for years. All the furniture was covered with sheets. There were no clocks on the walls, no knickknacks or utensils on the counters. In the corner was a cardboard box filled with photos and glassware.

“‘Would you carry my bag out to the car?’ she said. I took the suitcase tothe cab, then returned to assist the woman. She took my arm and we walked slowly toward the curb. She kept thanking me for my kindness.

“‘It’s nothing’, I told her. ‘I just try to treat my passengers the way I would want my mother treated’.
“‘Oh, you’re such a good boy’, she said.
“When we got in the cab, she gave me an address, then asked, ‘Could you drive through downtown?’
“‘It’s not the shortest way,’ I answered quickly.
“‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I’m in no hurry. I’m on my way to a hospice’.
I looked in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were glistening.
“‘I don’t have any family left,’ she continued. ‘The doctor says I don’t havevery long.’ I quietly reached over and shut off the meter. ‘What route would you like me to take?’ I asked.

“For the next two hours, we drove through the city. She showed me the building where she had once worked as an elevator operator. We drove through the neighborhood where she and her husband had lived when they were newlyweds. She had me pull up in front of a furniture warehouse that had once been a ballroom where she had gone dancing as a girl. Sometimes she’d ask me to slow in front of a particular building or corner and would sit staring into the darkness, saying nothing. As the first hint of sun was creasing the horizon, she suddenly said, ‘I’m tired. Let’s go now.’

“We drove in silence to the address she had given me. It was a low building,like a small convalescent home, with a driveway that passed under a portico. Two orderlies came out to the cab as soon as we pulled up. They were solicitous and intent, watching her every move. They must have been expecting her. I opened the trunk and took the small suitcase to the door. The woman was already seated in a wheelchair.

“‘How much do I owe you?’ she asked, reaching into her purse.
“‘Nothing,’ I said.
“‘You have to make a living,’ she answered.
“‘There are other passengers,’ I responded. Almost without thinking, I bentand gave her a hug. She held onto me tightly.
“‘You gave an old woman a little moment of joy,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
“I squeezed her hand, then walked into the dim morning light. Behind me, adoor shut. It was the sound of the closing of a life.

“I didn’t pick up any more passengers that shift. I drove aimlessly, lost in thought. For the rest of that day, I could hardly talk. What if that woman had gotten an angry driver, or one who was impatient to end his shift? What if I had refused to take the run, or had honked once, then driven away?

“On a quick review, I don’t think that I have done anything more important in my life. We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware — beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.”

The man who sent me that story offers this final comment. “People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said. But they will always remember how you made them feel.”

His story, which I have given you entirely in his own words, is a beautiful example of what Paul is talking about when he writes in our second reading: “Owe nothing to anyone except to love another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments are [all] summed up in this saying, namely, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.”

That kind of love is not inborn. It must be given to us. We are here to receive that love, from the One who is love himself. His name is Jesus Christ.

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“DO NOT CONFORM YOURSELVES TO THIS AGE.”
22nd Sunday in Ordinary time, Year A. Jer. 20:7-9; Rom. 12:1-2; Matt. 16:21-27.
AIM: To help the hearers see and live with the eyes of faith.

“Do not conform yourselves to this age,” Paul tells us in our second reading. What does he mean? You can see what he means in the morning newspaper, and on the evening television. He is telling us not to live by the standards of the world around us.

Today’s world is very different from Paul’s. Yet people have not really changed all that much. Now, as then, the smart person looks after Number One; tries to get ahead by the deft use of thumbs and elbows; and reacts to rebuffs and injuries with the chip-on-the-shoulder slogan: “Don’t get mad, get even.” With his words, “Do not conform yourselves to this age,” Paul is telling us that if we are serious about wanting to be friends and followers of Jesus Christ, we must follow different standards.

There is not one of us here today who has not felt the downward pull of the world’s egotism and self-centeredness. Jesus felt that downward pull himself. At the beginning of his public ministry he was tempted to purchase popular success by various short-cuts and sensational tricks. “Turn stones into bread,” the Tempter told him. “Throw yourself down from the Temple – God will look after you.” (cf. Mt. 4:1-11; Lk 4:1-13). In today’s gospel Jesus is tempted again. He is starting on the final stage of his journey. It will take him up to Jerusalem, to death. Once again, as at the beginning, he feels the downward pull of this world’s standards, trying to turn him aside from the right way.

Jesus is hurt that the temptation comes this time from the friend who has just confessed that Jesus is God’s anointed servant and Son, the long-awaited Messiah. In response to this declaration of faith, the Lord has just given his friend Simon the new name “Peter the Rock,” as we heard in last week’s gospel. With this name Jesus bestowed on Peter the position of leadership in the Church that was yet to be. And now here is Peter, of all people, trying to turn Jesus aside from his Father’s will and call by responding to Jesus’ prediction of his passion and death: “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.”
Peter was speaking (to use Paul’s terminology from our second reading) from a mind still conformed to this age. We see how keenly Jesus felt the downward pull of temptation in Peter’s words by the harshness of Jesus’ response: “Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Thinking as God does means, Paul says in the second reading, being “transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.” That transformation begins here in the liturgy, which is the gathering of God’s people for public prayer. Here we do what Paul tells us to do in the second reading. We “offer our bodies” (Paul’s word for our selves: all that we are and have, sin excluded) “as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, [our] spiritual worship.”

The renewal of our minds starts at the table of the word, as we listen to the call, not of the world’s standards, but of God’s. The world drags us down. God pulls us up. In our first reading we hear the upward pull of Jeremiah’s words. He protests that God has “duped” him into being a spokesman for the Lord. The role of prophet has cost Jeremiah scorn and repudiation by his own people. Yet deep in his heart, Jeremiah knows that he can do no other. He must speak for God.

We feel the upward pull of Jesus’ words in the gospel: “Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” If ever a man had the right to speak those words, it is Jesus Christ. They tell us what, deep in our hearts, we already know. The only way to preserve all that we hold most dear, even life itself, it to yield everything to Jesus Christ.

Uplifted by God’s holy word, we offer at the table of his sacrament the living sacrifice of our spiritual worship. In so doing we receive back far more than we offer: the very body and blood of our divine Master, who died that we might live. He, Jesus, is the one who transforms us by the renewal of our minds. He is the one who sends us forth from these twin tables of his word and sacrament into the rough and tumble of life, enlightened and empowered by his Holy Spirit so that we can do what Paul tells us to do in the second reading: to “discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect”; and what Jesus tells us to do in the gospel: to lose our lives in service of Him who always gives back to us so much more than we can ever give to Him.

Do we really believe that? Aren’t we often afraid of losing our lives for Jesus Christ? Our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, addressed this fear at the end of his homily at the Mass for the inauguration of his pastoral ministry on April 24th 2005. The Pope addressed his words especially to young people. Here is what he said:

“Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that he might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life.”

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