30th Week in Ordinary Time (II)—Tuesday

Readings: Ephesians 5:21-33; Luke 13:18-21

“Wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.”
That statement from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians
is not a sentiment that goes down too well
with most people in our modern egalitarian society.
Many quite rightly recognize that such scriptures
have been used, at times, to persuade women 
to stay in abusive situations,
or to coerce obedience to those 
who will not honor their full sharing 
in the image of God. 
Such statements seem, 
at best, culturally out-of-step
and, at worst, downright harmful.

St. John Paul II, writing in 1988, 
noted that Paul’s statement
is “profoundly rooted in the customs 
and religious tradition of the times.”
No one in the late ancient world
would be at all surprised at the idea
that women ought to be subordinate to men;
this was nothing new.
But, St. John Paul notes, 
this statement is prefaced, 
by something that is truly innovative:
“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
Notice: this is not addressed just to wives,
but to husbands as well.
As Christians, husband and wife are both called 
to put the needs of the other ahead of their own,
and to do so to honor the example shown by Christ.
This is a call for all Christians
to serve each other out of love for Jesus;
this is the truly radical 
and counter-cultural message of the Gospel.
St. John Paul writes,
“This is a call which from that time onwards, 
does not cease to challenge succeeding generations; 
it is a call which people have to accept ever anew.”
To love and serve others rather than oneself
is as counter-cultural today as it was in the first century.
It is a way of living that rejects the worldview
that says you should look out for number one
and seek always to bend others to your will.

“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
This brief statement, these ten words, 
are like the mustard seed from which
the Kingdom of God can grow;
it is the yeast that can leaven
the loaf of our world.

“Be subordinate to one another 
out of reverence for Christ.”
If we plant these words in our marriages,
if we knead them into our friendships,
our workplaces,
our churches,
our politics,
then even now 
the reality of God’s reign
will begin to show itself
in our midst.
 

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Reading: Exodus 22:20-26; 1 Thessalonians 1:5c-10; Matthew 22:34-40

Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.
These, Jesus says, are the two great commandments.
It sounds pretty simple.
Of course, anyone who has tried to love
either God or neighbor, 
much less both,
quickly discovers that this 
is a fairly complicated affair.

How do we love God,
when God can seem so distant and mysterious,
so difficult to know?
Who is the neighbor that I am supposed to love?
Is it anybody and everybody?
Does it include my enemies?
Is it okay to love some more than others?
Does love mean accepting people as they are
or does it mean working to help them be better?
And how exactly do these two things—
love of God and love of neighbor—
relate to each other?
Can I do one without the other?
What if my love of God 
seems to come into conflict 
with my love of neighbor?
Which has priority?

We might continue to multiply questions,
but at some point the questions must end
and we have to get about the business of loving.
After all, love of God and neighbor is presented by Jesus
not as a helpful hint but as a command,
and our questions can become a kind of evasion.
There are many things we can come to understand
by stepping back and pondering them,
but we can only discover what love means 
by stepping in and actually doing it.
But how do we go about stepping in
to loving God and neighbor?

The best way to step in to loving God 
is by praying.
Because God is perfect, 
God needs nothing from us;
but, because God is good, 
God desires that we give him ourselves.
God wants us without needing us,
precisely so that we can flourish
and be united to God in eternity.
And the way we give ourselves to God
is by giving God our time, 
for time is the fabric
from which our lives are fashioned.
To step in to loving God,
offer God your time in prayer.
Offer it without worrying too much 
about whether you’re doing it right.
Just ask for what you want
and give thanks for what brings you joy;
God will let you know whether or not 
you’re wanting or enjoying the right thing.

My son the musician tells me 
that bad practice is infinitely better 
than no practice at all.
It’s the same with prayer:
flawed prayer,
distracted prayer,
misdirected prayer,
angry prayer,
bored prayer,
rote prayer—
it’s all better than no prayer.
For in our flawed prayer
God comes to help us,
and God’s Spirit prays within us
with sighs too deep for words.

What about loving our neighbor?
How we step in to loving our neighbor 
is as varied as the neighbors we love.
Our reading today from the book of Exodus
calls our attention to those neighbors 
most in need of our love,
but whom we might be inclined 
to step back from.
The foreigner living in our land,
the widow and orphan who have no protector,
the person in need who is subject to exploitation,
all those whom we can easily overlook.
We tend to think of the word “love”
as finding its natural home 
in our circle of family and friends.
But the law of love calls us 
to cast a wider net.
Indeed, the way to step in 
to loving our neighbor
often involves us stepping out
of our immediate circle.
And this means seeking justice 
for those most in need,
those most fragile and vulnerable,
those most unprotected and friendless,
no matter who they are.
As the philosopher Cornel West puts it,
“Justice is what love looks like in public.”
Concern for the needy stranger
in whom Christ himself is present
is the standard by which we will be judged.

Of course, the love we show our neighbor
through the pursuit of justice
can be as flawed and frustrating
as our attempts to love God through prayer.
I think we Catholics can feel this 
particularly during election season
as we confront what is, 
in light of the standard
set by the Church’s social teaching,
an array of less-than-perfect choices.
Even more frustrating is the fact
that the needs and the interests 
of those crying out for justice—
the widow and the orphan,
the alien and the poor neighbor—
might not seem always to align 
and the justice we can achieve
is only a rough approximation
of the justice God calls us to.
But just as flawed prayer 
is better than no prayer,
our stumbling pursuit of justice
is better than injustice.
We do what we can,
trusting that God’s Spirit 
will work in us and through us.

We cannot let the imperfection 
of our love of God and neighbor
become an excuse for stepping back
from the love that Christ commands.
The Spirit calls us to step in
and be not afraid.
Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind;
love your neighbor as yourself.
Trust in the Spirit to aid you in your weakness
and to bring to completion
the good work begun in you.
And may God have mercy on us all. 

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Isaiah 25:6-10a; Psalm 23; Philippians 4:12-14, 19-20; Matthew 22:1-10

You get the feeling that there must be
some sort of backstory.
A king sends messengers
to invite you to his son’s wedding
but you, for some reason, refuse.
The king sends more servants,
and this time you kill them.
The king then sends an army
that kills you and burns down your city.
What the heck is going on?
Why are all of these people
acting in such inexplicable ways?
I know that there can be
a lot of tensions around weddings,
but this is ridiculous.

Of course, we have no way
of knowing for sure
what the backstory might be:
perhaps long-standing hostilities
between the king and the invitees;
perhaps some cultural context
that is now lost to us.
But we don’t need to know the backstory
in order to get the main point of the parable:
God is inviting us to the banquet of life,
the wedding feast of the Lamb,
and if we refuse that invitation
we do so to our own detriment.
Jesus draws on the imagery
with which the prophet Isaiah speaks
of the fullness of life that God wishes for us:
“a feast of rich food and choice wines,
juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.”
Why would we refuse?
What would keep us from saying, “yes”?

But that is in fact what we do.
Like the people in the parable
we often respond to God invitation
with either indifference or even violence.
Throughout history, we human beings
have studiously ignored God’s invitation
to live the values of God’s kingdom:
the values of compassion and peace,
the values of concern for the weakest among us,
the values of generosity and self-sacrifice.
We human beings have even sought to eliminate
those whom God sends to remind us of this invitation,
not least Jesus himself, whom we hung on a cross.
I think today we can simply read the news
and see that we continue to shout each other down,
demonize those with whom we differ,
ignore those most in need,
and treat life as if it were a game
that you win by defeating those who differ
and grabbing all you can for yourself.
When God is offering us abundant life
why would we act in such inexplicable ways?
So we might ask, what is our backstory?

Our backstory is what Isaiah calls
“the veil that veils all peoples,
the web that is woven over all nations.”
Our backstory is the story of fear,
the story of mistrust and lack of faith,
the story that is told in Scripture
of our first ancestors
who were offered the abundant life of paradise,
if only they would trust in God to provide,
but who instead sought to become
their own gods, their own providers;
it is the story of faithless people
who preferred slavery and death
to reliance on God’s goodness;
it is the story of wars waged
in order to win for ourselves
what God wants to give us without cost.
This is our backstory;
this is who we are:
offered life, we chose death
rather than trust in God to provide.

But our backstory is not the whole story.
The good news of the Gospel
is that our past is not our destiny:
in Jesus God is writing for us a new story,
a story in which God will destroy death forever
and wipe away the tears from every face.
The parable of the wedding feast
should be read as a warning,
not a prediction.
Through God’s grace,
our story can be the story,
not of the old Adam,
the story of fear and faithlessness,
but the story of the new Adam,
the story of Jesus Christ,
who entrusted himself
fearlessly and faithfully
to the hands of his Father
and won victory over death.
The story of Jesus,
the story of God’s beloved
whom fear and death could not defeat,
can become our story.
And with this as our story
we can say with the psalmist,
“The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want….
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side.”
With this as our story we can say with Paul,
“I have learned the secret…
of living in abundance and of being in need.
I can do all things in him who strengthens me.”
We can become living signs of the abundant life
that God wants all people to share in;
we can be God’s invitation
to the wedding feast of the Lamb.

I am convinced that so much
of what plagues our world
grows out of fear and mistrust:
fear and mistrust of each other,
but even more fear and mistrust of God.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that the Lord will provide for all peoples
a rich feast, a banquet of abundance.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that only goodness and kindness follow us
all the days of our lives.
We treat one another as enemies
because we do not believe
that God will fully supply whatever we need,
in accord with his glorious riches in Christ Jesus.
But this does not have to be our story.
Let us pray today that God, through his Spirit,
will draw us into the story of Jesus,
the story of God’s reign,
so that we can hear and answer
his invitation to the banquet of life.
And may God have mercy on us all.