Homilies & Thoughts

I like it when this reading comes up, because it’s an unusual moment for the Lord. This scholar comes up to him and says, “Lord, don’t you realize that you’re insulting me too?” And Jesus says, “Yes, I do realize that. And in fact, I have more insults for you.”

But what Jesus says to him is intriguing: “You scholars of the law impose burdens that are hard to carry, but you don’t lift a finger to help.”

In English, we have this term WASP: a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. And whatever else it means, one of its connotations is this kind of merger of religion and culture.

When you hear the term, you picture someone who dresses a certain way, has a particular set of manners, and whose life looks like a particular American ideal. It’s the kind of person for whom using the wrong fork for your salad is probably an equal sin to breaking the commandments. Everything gets merged together.

This Gospel always gets to me at a deep level because I am a messy person. I do not typically have a room that is well swept and put in order. But everyone, even messy people, likes a clean room.

When everything is cleaned up and nicely ordered, and you step into it for the first time, it feels wonderful. It feels freeing. But then you have to keep it that way. And that is where I always fail.

I think it’s easy to struggle with this Gospel. At the surface level, the message we hear is that if we are persistent in prayer, we will get whatever we ask for, no matter what it is. But we know from experience that this simply isn’t true. There are things we could have prayed for for decades and still never received.

So to understand what the Lord is saying, we have to look deeper and see these situations for what they really are.

It’s a striking coincidence that on the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, we hear Saint Luke’s version of the Our Father. And it really is a coincidence: today’s Gospel comes from the weekday readings rather than the proper readings for the feast. Yet the Our Father is a foundational prayer in the rosary.

I think it’s good to understand how the rosary developed, because that very history instructs us in the spiritual life.

Martha has a problem, and she goes to the Lord. We can read her words as a prayer. She brings him what she wants and asks him to act. That is how we pray. But the Lord’s answer to her request is no.

And notice that he does more than deny her request. Martha is complaining that her sister Mary is not helping her. She wants the Lord to tell Mary to change. Instead, he tells Martha that she is the one who needs to change.

We might hear today’s Gospel and think that this is an absurd situation. The landowner has prepared a vineyard. He has planted it, protected it, and provided what is needed for it to bear fruit. He entrusts it to tenants. And instead of honoring the one who has given them this opportunity, they turn against him. They reject his servants, and ultimately they reject his son. How could anyone receive so much and respond in that way?

“Do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”

I think the Lord is telling his disciples not to remain focused on the supernatural powers he has given them or on the things they can do. Rather, they should keep their minds focused on heaven. We hear a similar message elsewhere in the New Testament, where we are instructed to keep our minds on the things above.

The innocence of children is something we all recognize, at least to some extent. Yet it’s hard to pin down exactly what it means. If you’ve been around children, there are times when they are truly wonderful, when there’s something inspiring about their innocence. There are also times when they are less inspiring to us, right? But there is something there, even if it’s hard to grasp.

I think part of it is that their lives are not complicated in their own minds. They see things simply. Something is what it is, and they act on it. They trust in a way that we struggle to trust. Our experiences in life, even with people we think are trustworthy, can make us wonder, “Well, maybe not.” That’s part of life. And so we have to intentionally cultivate that childlike mind in ourselves and in our approach to life.

Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Jerome. He is probably best known for translating the Scriptures into Latin, and for that famous saying: “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”

But if you spend much time reading the Fathers of the Church, including Jerome’s own writings, something else stands out: he had a really bad temper. He seems to have struggled with it throughout his life. It comes through in his writings, and other Fathers of the Church mention it as well.

The death penalty is certainly a controversial subject. And with any controversial subject, we have a tendency to talk past one another. We speak different languages. We have different priorities.

Those who support the death penalty speak about safety, the community, justice, and making things right for victims. Those who oppose it speak about mercy, rehabilitation, and the protection of life, often with the conviction that we have advanced beyond this kind of punishment.

We like to make the Gospel safe and comfortable. We like to keep its demands at a distance, so that it has plenty to say about other people and very little to say about us.

And that is easy to do today. We hear Jesus confronting the chief priests and elders, and we treat it as somebody else’s argument from two thousand years ago. He exposes their refusal to repent, even when tax collectors and prostitutes do. And we feel comfortable, because we have already decided that we are on the side of the underdogs. We are the good guys in this story.