Today’s Thoughts: I have always liked the story that we find in today’s Gospel (Mark 12: 28-34). I especially like the end when Jesus looks at the scribe and says, “You are not far from the Kingdom of God.” It is perhaps the only moment in the Gospels when Jesus and the scribes are on the same page. There is a mutual understanding, a mutual respect at this moment in the struggle between Jesus and the religious leaders of his time. It is a nice thing to see. Would that this kind of understand and respect would happen between leaders of all kinds during our time.
The respect and understanding centers around the two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbor and we might say there is a third, love of self, because Jesus says we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. As Jesus teaches and the scribe comes to understand, these are the two or three great commandments and everything else flows from them, which might explain why we find ourselves in the struggles that we are in today. If we just look around at our world, our culture, our society, our church the problems that we find relate to the way we live out or perhaps better said, don’t live out these commandments. Our struggles can be directly related to how we don’t value God and perhaps more importantly how we don’t value others or ourselves. We might even say that our struggles as a culture, society, church and a world can be traced to the lack of love that we have for ourselves. If we don’t love ourselves how can we love others, how can we love God? Love is not just wanting the best for ourselves, others and God. Love is a respect, a reverence for life, for who we are as individuals, as a culture, as a society, as a church, as a world. Love is finding the good in ourselves, others and God. Love is seeing God in others and in ourselves. Love is seeing, acknowledging, and accepting the differences in ourselves and others but most importantly still being able to find God. Our challenge today and every day is to put into practice these three great commandments. Our challenge is to wake up each day in love with God, our neighbor and ourselves! Have a great Thursday everyone!
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Today’s Thoughts: In today's Gospel reading, Mark considers the problem of life after death and its implications. Jesus takes the side of the Pharisees, believing in resurrection from the dead, as opposed to the view of the Sadducees. This is one of the reasons why Jesus frustrated the Pharisees so much: although he seemed to be one of them according to this criterion, he refused to interpret Scripture as literally as they did or to put as much importance on a strict and literal interpretation of the Law. He goes beyond (not against) what many Old Testament texts seem to assume concerning life after death.
The wider question which Jesus is addressing here is how we are to interpret Scripture. A literal interpretation is easy for us to understand and so to follow, at least insofar as our having confidence in doing the right thing is concerned. Anyone who is willing to come to grips with Scripture, soon recognizes that this approach has its problems. The interpretation of the Scriptures is best left to the scholars, what is important for us is how we as individuals read Scripture and draw sustenance from God through it. What I am referring to here is prayer. If we are to have a living friendship with God, we need to be in conversation with him. Scripture, as the Word of God, plays an important role here but cannot be taken literally or assumed to have only one "message" in a given passage. Scripture is rather a place where we listen to what God says through a particular passage. The Spirit will lead us to pay attention to one aspect of that reading, to a word or expression, or will inspire us with a new understanding of ourselves and who we are. What is most important here for us is first that we pray, regularly, with or without using the Scripture, and then that we reflect on what we are doing and what we experience in prayer. And then go on to live in the strength of that Word. Mark’s Gospel today ends with the great affirmation that God is the God of the living and we encounter this living God first and foremost through prayer. God is not waiting for us to survive life, God is actively nudging us through prayer and in other ways so that we give life to his kingdom every day. Have a great Wednesday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: In our Gospel today, Jesus finds himself once again challenged, harassed, or questioned by the religious leadership. The Pharisees and Herodians seem to be at least civil this time, yet they are still trying to entrap Jesus. Their tactic this time is to ask about paying taxes.
In recent years there has been a lot of talk about religious freedom, about the government infringing on the rights of churches, religions. Perhaps our Gospel story today can be cast in the light of religious freedom after all Rome was asking for tax money so that they could continue their conquering ways. Just think of all the barbaric acts that these taxes would be paying for. Just think of the Roman occupation that these taxes would be helping to fund. It would seem only right for Jesus to say that withholding the Roman tax would be the right thing to do. However, Jesus simply says, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.” In other words, culture and society are not always going to line up with our faith values yet we are still part of culture and society. We will need to give what they require but we will also need to live out our faith, our relationship with God. At times these two relationships are in tension even conflict and we are called to make a choice. The choice is not always easy and often has consequences. The challenge is that we live in the world, but we are friends of God. Have a great Tuesday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: I think we have all had one of those moments when listening to a reading from Scripture we think, “O my God that is directed at me!” There is something in the message, the story that hits home that makes us pause and think about our faith, our relationship with God, our life.
I get the sense that today’s Gospel story (Mark 12: 1-12) was one of those moments for the religious leadership of Jesus’ day. Jesus’ story was directed right at them and they knew it. However rather than taking it to heart, rather than giving it some thought, rather than discerning how to change their lives they chose to consider ways of getting rid of Jesus. The uncomfortableness of the truth did not set them free it just made them blinder to the presence of God in their life. There is a quote that I have always liked and you might have seen it on my Facebook page or in one of my tweets. The quote goes something like this, “Someone described a biblical prophet as one who comforted the disturbed and disturbed the comfortable.” That was certainly true of Jesus especially in our story today. Yet our reaction to today’s Gospel might be to sit back and relax think that Jesus is speaking to leadership and not to us and that would be a mistake. Jesus’ words should also make us uncomfortable today. How often has God sent people into our lives with a message, with the presence of God and we have rejected them. Thinking they don’t fit in, thinking they don’t have the truth, thinking they don’t belong? The point is that we never know when God will come a calling, sending a servant, a son, to collect the fruits of our labor. Will we recognize that it is God and embrace his presence or will we reject the visitor because we think we know best? Have a great Monday everyone Today’s Thoughts: There are many ways to look at the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ which we celebrate today. The most obvious is the gift of the Eucharist, the institution of which we encounter in the account we hear in today Gospel. We encounter that special moment just before Jesus Passion and Death when he gathered his disciples together and gave them the central focus for the rest of their lives. The Eucharist is our most cherished gift, it is the center of our lives as people of faith, as Church. The Eucharist offers us, like it offered the first disciples, the physical and spiritual nourishment needed to live this life of faith. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist that we receive demands our lives, it demands that we bring Christ’s real presence to the world.
Another way of looking at this feast comes from another Gospel story. Fr. James Martin, S.J. writes, “God can do a lot with what we think is a little.” Just think of what Jesus did along the Sea of Galilee when he multiplied the loaves and fishes. His disciples wanted to give up. They said all they had were five loaves and a few fish. As we have learned God makes possible the impossible while doing a lot with little; or as Teresa Whalen Lux put it, “God often takes something small and insignificant and turns it into the extraordinary.” When you think about the Last Supper and the story of the Multiplication of the Loaves you think of Jesus taking simple ordinary things and doing extraordinary things with them. Along the Sea of Galilee, he fed many and at the table of the Eucharist each Sunday, each day, Jesus feds many. Day in and day out Jesus takes something small, insignificant and ordinary, bread and wine, and does the extraordinary. I have often in my preaching reflected on receiving the Eucharist as a moment when God, when Jesus says to us, I demand your life! I have given you mine so now go and give it to the world. Our celebration of the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ today reminds us of just how blessed we are, of just what God can do and of our challenge each day to live, to trust in God and bring the real presence of God to the world! Have a great Sunday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: Eugene Peterson in his book Subversive Spirituality writes, “Imagination is the capacity to make connections between the visible and the invisible, between heaven and earth, between present and past, between present and future. For Christians, whose largest investment is in the invisible, the imagination is indispensable, for it is only by means of the imagination that we can see reality whole, in context.”
After reading today’s Gospel (Mark 11:27-33), a question might be, do the chief priests, scribes and the elders, the religious leadership of Jesus’ time, lack imagination? It seems each time we meet them they just don’t seem to be able to make a connection between visible the invisible, between heaven and earth, between the present and the past, between the present and the future. Perhaps an even more important question is – do we lack imagination in living out our faith? Have a great Saturday everyone! Today’s Thoughts: Today’s Gospel begins with Jesus entering the Temple area, but it was late, so Jesus went to Bethany for the night only to return to the Temple area the next day to drive out the buyers and sellers. Before Jesus took it upon himself to clear the Temple of business he first paused to look around. What did he see? Did he see beauty, as well as distortion?
Often, we act before thinking; we jump in with both feet before we really know what we are landing on. We act as though we know what the real circumstances are. Our actions at time are based on our memory or worse yet, based on how we might prefer to perceive reality. Pausing and looking again can be difficult. It might cause us to change our understanding. Pausing might even cause us to ask for help even from God so that we can see things correctly! In the Gospel today, Jesus asks us to pause but also to persevere in prayer and forgiveness. In fact, it is our willingness to forgive that helps our prayers find their way to God. Jesus pauses today in the Gospel to put into perspective just what the Temple was all about. As Jesus says, “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all people!” Have a blessed Friday everyone! |
Fr. Paul R. Fagan, C.P. "Preacher on the Run"Just a few thoughts to help you on your journey through life...let me know from time to time what you think... Archives
April 2024
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