July 20, 2014:
Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Wisdom 12:13, 16-19: You taught your people, by these deeds, that those who are just must be kind; and you gave your children good ground for hope that you would permit repentance for their sins.
Psalm 86: Lord, you are good and forgiving.
Romans 8:26-27: The Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings.
Matthew 13:24-43: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a person took and sowed in a field. …”
July is the month of the Most Precious Blood
Scripture Notes from the Sourcebook:
THE FIRST READING: The words of today’s First Reading are actually addressed to God, and acknowledge both his providential care and his justice. Note the words that the author of Wisdom uses with reference to God’s justice: “Lenience” and “clemency” – as if to say, God bends over, goes the extra mile, for the sake of those he has created and enlivened with his Spirit (see Wisdom 11:24-12:1). We are to learn from God’s dealings with us how we are to act toward one another (see Wisdom 12:19).
RESPONSORIAL PSALM 86: The motif of God’s forgiveness voiced in Wisdom continues in today’s psalm. The third stanza echoes God’s self-revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai (see Exodus 34:4-6). Note also the universal orientation of the second stanza: the people of all nations are God’s creatures and beneficiaries of his kindness.
SECOND READING: Much of Romans 8 has to do with the presence and work of god’s Holy Spirit within us. Today’s reading focuses on the Spirit praying within us – especially when we do not know how or what to pray. The message is a profound one: God has planted his Spirit within us that this same Sprit might lead us to him.
THE GOSPEL: Once again, we hear a story about seeds and growth, and most importantly about the leniency of the householder in allowing both the good seed and the weeds to grow until the time of harvest. Is he lenient toward the weeds? Absolutely not. The concern rather is that the growth of the good seed not be harmed. The longer form of today’s Gospel includes an interpretation of the parable of the good seed and the wheat (verse 36-43) and two additional parables, the mustard seed and the yeast. What powerful effect the tiny mustard seed and yeast grain have – so it is with the Kingdom of Heaven. What powerful effect the seed of the Word, the parable, can have in our lives if we are receptive to its message.
PASTORAL REFLECTION: As adults, our choices require steady balance and knowledge so as to remain rooted as wheat and not strangled by the weeds in life. Our choices, our seeds in life, need to be fine-tuned with God’s guidance and our willingness. --2014 Sourcebook for Sundays, Seasons & Weekends
THREE PARABLES: Today’s three parables include the story of the weed and the wheat, the mustard seed, and the leavened yeast. The first parable in a nutshell is “It ain’t over till it’s over” (thank you, Yogi Berra). The second, that of the mustard seed, may be an image of the Church – starting with a small community and growing to immensity; and the parable of the leaven shows that even something small and quiet (leaven in the flour) works silently and strongly just like the word of God in people when their hearts are open. All of these parables tell us that God has things under control. – Elaine Rendler-McQueeney, from Today’s Liturgy magazine
THE FIELD IS THE WORLD: For ‘Kingdom of God’ you can say Presence of God. In this Sunday’s gospel reading Jesus is telling us what God is like, or how we are to think of God's presence. He could have used any images in heaven above or on earth below, but he picked these.
The Presence of God is like a seed in the ground, he said; or it is like yeast in a batch of dough. Seeds are small, many of them almost invisible, they are the beginnings of things, they are unimpressive to look at, and they are thrown into the ground as if they were being thrown away. Yeast becomes invisible in the lump of dough, it is never seen again. Seeds and yeast: these are realities that don’t draw attention to themselves; if you could credit them with virtues you would have to say they are as humble as dirt. (You could say similar things about another image that Jesus used: salt.) This, he said, is what the Kingdom (the Presence) of God is like; this is how God's presence makes itself felt in our life.
“The field is the world,” the text says. This phrase led to one of the biggest debates in the ancient Church. The Donatists were a rigorist sect in the 4th and 5th centuries, who claimed that the good seed in this parable referred to the members of the Church, and so by definition there could be no ‘tares’, no sinners, in it. According to them, the Church was composed entirely of good people, and the rest of the world was simply evil. This was a kind of Pharisaism come back to life. The one who engaged them definitively was St Augustine, who wrote several books against them. Not only the world, but the Church itself, he said, is a field in which there is good seed and bad. “How very many sheep there are outside it, and how very many wolves within!” And soon after, St Gregory the Great (c. 540-604) wrote, "In this present Church there cannot be bad without good, or good without bad. They are not good who refuse to endure the bad." The human race is not divided into children of light and children of darkness; nor is the Church. Every one of us has light and darkness in him or herself; the good grain and the tares grow together. The Church is not a club for the elite, it is a place in which sinners can grow and change by God's grace. That growth in grace may be agonisingly slow, like the growth of a grain hidden in the soil. But in that very slowness it imitates the patience of God.
There is no need to suppose that all the Donatists died out. There are some Christian sects that seem very exclusive (“Are you saved?”). By contrast with them, most mainline Christian Churches are consciously non-elitist; there is room in it for everyone, good and bad alike. It is a kind of hospital, or a convalescent home. St Augustine said it was the inn in which the man who fell among robbers was being taken care of.
Remember the tax-collector in Jesus’ story, who hardly dared to lift his head, but prayed, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). How unlike the other, the Pharisee, whose prayer was a recital of his own virtues. The tax-collector was no saint, and he knew it. But the seed of God’s presence was stirring in his heart; the yeast was invisible in his downcast appearance, but it was real. Jesus put him before us as the very model of how we should pray.
--- Donagh O’Shea for the Dominicans of Ireland, Today’s Good News
Never was leaf so green,
for you branched from the spirited
blast of the quest
of the saints.
When it came time
for your boughs to blossom
(I salute you!)
your scent was like balsam
distilled in the sun.
And your flower made all spices
fragrant
dry though they were:
they burst into verdure.
So the skies rained dew on the grass
and the whole earth exulted,
for her womb brought forth wheat,
for the birds of heaven
made their nests in it.
--by Hildegard of Bingen, 1098-1179
The wheat and weeds story shifts between moods of joy and malice. Each reference to the “good seed” is upbeat, but a threatening tone introduces “the enemy” and “the weeds.” … The owner is philosophical, his concern for the wheat obvious. He is neither naïve n or unaware. His forbearance has purpose; not to indulge the “weeds” but to safeguard the “wheat” that might be destroyed along with the weeds if action is taken too soon.
But there is also another motive. Jesus’ enemies criticized him for associating with sinners. Jesus counters that only God can separate good from the bad, and only at the end when true identities will be revealed – and when some in one camp surely will be revealed as belonging in the other! In telling the parable, contrast the master’s attitude toward the “weeds” that are to be bundled and burned, with his affection for the “wheat” that is to be gathered, lovingly, into his barn. … -- from Workbook for Lectors, 2014
WHEAT AND WEEDS, GOOD AND EVIL: Jesus used parables to challenge his audience to think. The images and symbols in the stories allowed for various interpretations, depending upon the audience and their circumstances. Interpreting symbolic stories in this way is called allegory.
To help relieve anxiety among his persecuted followers, Jesus told this parable as an allegory of good and evil. Obviously, Jesus recognized good and evil lived together. But, when Jesus made that co-existence part of God's Kingdom, he must have shocked his own followers. How could God allow such evil in the world? Shouldn't God act to save his people? Why did he delay?
Jesus countered those questions with an observation. God allowed evil in the world for the greater good. First, he delayed the terrible day of wrath so the good works of Christians could take root. When a believer experienced God's Kingdom, he or she produced "fruit:" an ethical lifestyle that fed the needy and inspired faith (and repentance) in others. The believer's lifestyle helped build up the Christian community and multiply effects of the good "fruit."
To make this notion clear, Jesus interpreted the parable in Matthew 13:36-43. The Son of Man (i.e., Jesus) sowed the wheat seeds; Satan sowed the weeds. At the Final Judgement, the angels (i.e., messengers) will gather the good and the bad into separate camps. The evil will be punished while the good will "shine like the sun" (13:43, also see Daniel 12:3).
Early Christians had a vested interest in this interpretation. After all, they believed the messengers of the Son of Man were, in fact, Christian missionaries who spread the Good News. As the missionaries evangelized, they "gathered" God's people into community life. In other words, the harvest had begun, in spite of evil in the world. As long as Christians evangelized through word and acts of charity, they could tolerate evil.
However, people, even Christians, did not perform works of charity with the best of intentions. Sometimes, an evil end perverted the best of "fruit." (Even the young weeds looked like fresh wheat; only maturity allowed workers to distinguish between the two.) [13:26] Here, Jesus implied a second reason God delayed the Final Judgement: to allow evil to produce the greater good. The greatest sign of this belief was the cross. Evil men crucified the Lord. Yet, without their evil, believers could not experience the limitless benefits of his resurrection. Indeed, God's revealed his Kingdom on the cross. …
Christianity can answer the question: why does evil exist in the world? The root of the answer lies in our free will. As God is free, so he chose to create us with freedom. Our freedom lies in a choice: to walk closer to the Lord, or to walk away from the Lord. The world functions as an arena for our choice.
To walk closer to the Lord involves the choice of love. We realize God loves us and we love him in return. In the choice of love, we extend our love to others. The world becomes the means to exercise love.
However, freely chosen love involves the risk of rejection. We can chose the self over all others. The world, then can become a means to reject others. We have seen this rejection many times over the past century in the suffering of the innocent. God does not infringe on our free will. Indeed, to allow us the opportunity to repent, God gives us the chance and the choice to harden our hearts. But, God even uses our rejection as the opportunity for greater good, as he did with the death and resurrection of Jesus.
If we ask "why is there evil in the world?" we must also ask "why is there good in the world?" … Evil may induce despair, but good inspires hope. Only hope based upon the choice of love can ultimately answer the scandal of evil in the world. …
God gives us a choice. Are we the wheat or the weed? What sort of fruit do we produce? If the answers to those questions are less than clear, never fear. God gives us the chance and the means to change and walk closer to him. But the chance requires action. Inaction is not an option.
-- Larry Broding, from http://www.word-sunday.com
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL:
Mickey: If there’s a God, then why is there so much evil in the world, just on a simplistic level? Why were there Nazis?
Mickey’s Mother: Tell him, Max!
Max (Mickey’s father): How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don’t even know how the can-opener works!
-- from the film, Hannah and Her Sisters
Reflection for July 20, 2014: Bill
Time is like a thief who steals the lives of the people you love when your back is turned. And even when you’ve been warned he’s around, you’re still somehow shocked when he snatches your people away. I’m thinking about Bill Chapdelaine, of course. I’ve been out of town and didn’t see the local paper, and so I didn’t learn about his death until today, when I came to work. Bill, or “Tiny,” Chapdelaine, with his deep luscious voice and his long rich laugh and his massive body that held such strength and gentleness. “Tiny,” we called him, just because he wasn’t: In soul and spirit, as well as body, Bill Chapdelaine was a wonderfully big, strong man.
“You Christians think you have everything figured out,” my nonbelieving friends and family sometimes say, adding, a bit sarcastically, “It must be so easy.” Well, no, it isn’t, not really. The truth is, I don’t know doodly-squat about Death (or anything else). It’s a mystery, we’re told, and that’s what a mystery is. I am helpless before the riddle of time and aging and birth and death. But I do know there’s only one sure way to get out of having to go to funerals, and that is to be the person in your world who dies first, before other folks get the chance to. Me, I’ve done my best to avoid that option. But Door Number Two isn’t that much better, because it requires outliving the people you love, maybe watching helplessly as they grow weaker and slip away inexorably from your hands. I have spent my adult life looking for Door Number Three. And I wouldn’t say I’ve found it for sure, but I think I know where the threshold lies. It’s here, right here, and I glimpse it each time I walk up to the altar to receive the Eucharist. Sometimes Door Number Three cracks open then and I am dazzled by the light that comes pouring through – the light of grace, the light of love – the light that says to us all: There is more to the story. Be not afraid.
Be not afraid. That’s what they sang at Bill’s funeral, which I missed. But I can hear the music in my head as I think about him now: “Be not afraid, I go before you always. Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.”
I’ve often written about the selfish, slapdash way I pray the Lord’s Prayer, saying “THY will be done” but secretly meaning, of course, “MY will be done.” I’ve learned to say “please” but I still have trouble with the concept. I am willing to do anything for God, unless of course it’s something I don’t want to do; then, we have a problem. But the older you get, the more often God asks you to do the kinds of things that you don’t want to do. I am thinking today about Joyce, and how often she’s had to do those kinds of things, and has done them with a grace and a strength that remain a marvel to all who know her. This is a woman who has spent her life taking care of other people, who has buried a son and now a husband, and who took of that husband for years as his health slowly, painfully failed – walking tenderly beside him for 59 years. And now, just now, being there to say “goodbye.”
I am in awe of the kind of love that can last for six decades. My generation tends to have short attention spans, emotionally more than mentally. Even though we know better, we still somehow think our lives should be bright and sunny and perfect and easy. Especially when it comes to love. But love is so much more than just the easy good times and the bright happy moments we sing about in our summer love songs. As one of Shakespeare’s sonnets puts it: Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s circlet come / Love alters not with its brief hours or weeks / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
I’ve never known a love like that, and so I’ve always looked at couples like Joyce and Bill with awe, even something like envy. They bore it out even to the edge of doom during these last few hard years – she with her strength and calm and endlessly loving care, he with his willingness to accept God’s will, whatever it was.
Whenever a tragedy happens, whenever someone I care about dies, I tend to take it out on God. It doesn’t matter that I know better. This is not about rational behavior; it’s about grief and guilt and yearning. There are times I want to grab the altar and shake it, crying out to the heavens at the top of my lungs, “My God, my God, what’s up with you? Why are you doing this to all these good people?”
Then I look up at the figure on the cross above the altar, and realize I don’t need to say a word. Because Jesus has already asked that question and every other question I might have; Jesus has already shaken, not just the altar, but the very foundations of this world. When he was dying on the cross he cried out, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” And I know they say he was quoting from a psalm – but I also think he meant every word that he said; I think that in that moment he was speaking for every human being who has ever lived, or will ever live. I believe he felt the grief of every single one of us – all the pain and regret and fear we have ever known, all the sorrow of all the inhabitants of this whole huge and heartbroken world. He felt everything at that one instant in the flesh and blood of his battered human body – and I think his great, more-than-human heart broke underneath its weight. And so he spoke for all of us, asking the question that burns in our bones on the sleepless, aching, hot-eyed nights: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me???” But he did more than ask that question. He answered it, once and for all, just three days later.
They tell us that the curtain of the temple was torn in two at the moment Jesus died. But an even greater curtain was also torn in two – and that is the one that hangs between life and death. And it was ripped entirely open, flung out utterly, endlessly wide, and light eternal came pouring through its dark and ragged tatters. How do I know this? Well, I can’t really know it, in the usual sense of that word; I can only believe it, from my hair down to the tips of my toes and the tingle at the end of my nerves; it’s not the kind of thing that a person can prove it or explain, scrawling it on a blackboard like an equation, Q.E.D. Because once or twice I’ve stood close to that curtain, and felt its edges moving in the breeze, and all at once the light of God has come pouring through the opening. And in that sudden light of grace, the tears on our muddy human faces begin to shine as bright as the most precious and beautiful pearls. I can’t prove any of this. But this is what I believe: I believe that one day we will all step through that mysterious curtain, and come at last into the loving presence of God.
My God, why have you forsaken me? God answers that question, not with a why, but with a who – with his Son and our brother, Jesus Christ.
Not that it’s always that easy to believe. One of my biblical heroes and brothers, the guy we call Doubting Thomas, swore he would never believe “Unless I put my finger into the nail-marks and my hand into his side.” And then, of course, Jesus appeared and gave him the opportunity: “Take your finger and examine my hands,” he said. “Put your hand into my side.”
And what did Thomas say, and do, in response? Exactly what you or I would have said and done – he fell to his knees, weeping and laughing and clutching and crying out wildly: “My Lord and my God!” Once he came face to face with Christ, there was nothing else he needed. And this is true of all of us. It’s just not it’s not as easy to get there as it looks. Because we only meet Christ through his wounds – and through our wounds as well; we meet each other as we make our way up the hard steep slope of Calvary Hill. And we all have to climb up that long hill, sooner or later. At least we know we don’t have to do it alone. “Be not afraid,” Jesus says. “I go before you always. Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.”
May Bill’s soul, and the souls of all the Faithful Departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen, and alleluia, in Jesus’ name.
– Diane Sylvain