Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

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Father Joshua Whitfield

Contributor

Last Sunday’s Gospel reading and this Sunday’s Gospel reading are really one reading. You should read them together. The teaching Jesus offers is layered and rich and radical. He is trying to liberate his disciples, liberate us. You would do well to dive deep here to hear what Jesus has to say. Chances are it will make you uncomfortable. Chances are it will be good for you, especially eternally.

Jesus has been preaching against what causes fear, about what we should really fear instead. We shouldn’t fear what can kill the body, for instance, but instead fear him who can cast the soul into hell (Lk 12:5). We shouldn’t worry about things like inheritance, money, food or possessions, for “your Father knows that you need them” (Lk 12:30).

Jesus is not telling his disciples to shun possessions or money or food completely; he is not saying that each Christian should become a beggar like St. Francis. Rather, he is talking about the proper perspective believers should have and how such perspective should order their lives. That is, unlike the birds of the air or the lilies of the field, human beings have an eternal destiny to account for and prepare for.

What Jesus is trying to do is to get his listeners to focus on one treasure rather than another. That is, he is saying that when we fail to account for eternity, for the kingdom of God, our fear will too likely cause us to store up treasures for ourselves to hedge against the future. Which is plainly foolish, Jesus says; for once you’re dead, he asks, “the things you have prepared, whose will they be” (Lk 12:20-21)?

Instead, Jesus tells his disciples to focus on “a treasure in the heavens that does not fail” (Lk 12:33). And you do that, Jesus says, by selling your possessions and giving alms (Lk 12:32).

Here Jesus is simply underlining good rabbinic wisdom, wisdom almost completely forgotten today. It is the wisdom found in Proverbs 10:2 and 11:4, the idea that wealth “does not profit in the day of wrath” but that only “almsgiving delivers from death.” The notion of a treasury in heaven is thoroughly Jewish; Jesus didn’t pull it out of thin air. “Store up almsgiving in your treasury, and it will rescue you from all affliction” (Sir 29:12).

This, simply and radically, is what Jesus teaches, but with an emphasis and urgency befitting the advent of the Messiah: “it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” he says (Lk 12:32). These words have the same punch to them as those he spoke at Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry, that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Lk 4:21).

What Jesus is saying is that his disciples are to enact the ethics of the kingdom now, to sell possessions now and to give alms now. “I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous mammon,” Jesus will later say, “so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal habitations” (Lk 16:9).

This is not something to put off, Jesus clearly teaches, for that’s the warning of the parable of the rich fool (Lk 12:20). Disciples are meant to begin heaven now not simply by believing in Jesus but also by living as he taught us to live as sharers with one another and as friends with the poor.

Now we may understand better the strange ethics found in Acts, why the first Christians “had all things in common,” selling their possessions and distributing goods “as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45). Now we know why Luke said of that community, “There was not any one needy among them” (Acts 4:34).

These first Christians were simply being faithful to Jesus’ rabbinic teaching made real and contemporary by his continued Messianic presence in the community, the same Messianic presence we believe is present in the church today. The kingdom has been given in Christ today too, so what are we waiting for? Why aren’t we sharing our possessions now?

Which is the question, I said at the beginning, would make you uncomfortable. But I also said it may just save you, eternally at least. And please know how serious the question is: Why aren’t you sharing your possessions now?

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking this is not a question immediately connected to your salvation. Please don’t think you can get into heaven while ignoring this question, passing it off with excuse after excuse.

The whole wisdom of the Scripture, the clear teaching of Jesus, can’t be set aside. The matter is urgent. As St. Basil the Great preached once, “Think reasonably about that which is and that which shall come, and what you might lose through shameful profit.”

Really, I can’t say anything more chilling or truer than that. Just that maybe it harrows the soul to think of so many Christians who ignore such teaching, so weighed down by their possessions, unaware how eternally weighed down they really are.

Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas.

Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Go and Glorify

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Father Phillip W. DeVous

Contributor

For many years now I have thought the main reason people drift away from the practice of the faith is due to the total fragmentation of our attention and our capacity to pay attention to God. Attention is a sacred act for the simple reason that we become that to which we pay attention.

Because of our frayed and fractured attention spans, we have become less capable of paying attention to anything important, especially God. At a fundamental level, faith may be understood, at a minimum, as the attention we pay to the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ.

How do we recover that attention which is so essential to the life of faith; that in some sense IS the life of the faith? Let us turn our mind’s attention to our Blessed Lord: “Jesus was praying…”

We must take the time to pray. Prayer, which as the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil understood it, is “laboring to give our attention to God.” When I have struggled in prayer over the years, I have always found comfort in Weil’s understanding of prayer. My very labor to pay attention to the living God was itself prayer.

It is essential to note that prayer, deep prayer, is hard and we, like the disciples, turn to the Lord and pray for the gift of prayer, asking, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And the Lord answers that prayer.

“Father.” Jesus reveals to us that God is not some cold, distant first cause or prime mover, but the source of my existence and life. He is Father to each of us and all of creation. Though our heavenly Father is certainly almighty, he revealed by Christ to be in familial relation of generativity and intimacy to us.

“Hallowed be your name.” When we enter in the labor of praying, we recognize the one to whom we direct our attention is like no other. To call upon the Father is to do more than enter some kind of random chat. When we are praying, we enter a communion with the all-holy God and in so doing, His holiness becomes transformative to us. His holiness hallows us, that is, makes us holy, for prayer is one of the means by which our Father shares the divine life with us.

“Your kingdom come.”  In the person of Jesus Christ, the Kingdom of God is at hand! The Kingdom of God is made present and personal in Jesus Christ. In prayer we come to see that a whole new manner of being, and relationship of God has come to us as we receive Jesus Christ in prayer, which is the most fundamental act of faith.

“Give us this day our daily bread.” We pray for our daily bread — the things we need to sustain life. This, however, goes beyond the earthly and material life, for what we really need to sustain us is the “bread of life” wherein we feed on the very life of God. Thus, the “true bread come down from heaven” that sustains us in the divine life of God is the Most Holy Eucharist. Every Holy Mass that is celebrated is the Father’s direct and personal answer to this prayer.

“Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.” This single line embodies the absolute primacy of divine mercy in our lives. Having received the divine mercy of Jesus in His paschal mystery, we are enjoined to liberally extend forgiveness to others. If we pay close attention to this petition, we get the sense that we are not forgiven of our sins if we do not forgive others. Therefore, essential to our Eucharistic Communion with the Lord is active sense of mercy sought, mercy received, and mercy extended-from God, to us, and from us to others.

“Do not subject us to the final test.” The Christian life is a life of spiritual warfare against the forces of the world, the flesh and the devil. We must turn to the Lord and ask him to deliver us from evil and give us the grace of final perseverance in our communion and friendship with Him as we navigate life’s trials and sufferings. It is precisely this grace for which we pray when we say, “that through the powerful working of your grace (that) these most sacred mysteries may sanctify our present way of life and lead us to eternal gladness.”

Father Phillip W. DeVous is the pastor of St. Charles Parish, Flemingsburg and St. Rose of Lima Parish, Mayslick, Ky.

Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Go and Glorify

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Father Joshua Whitfield

Contributor

The readings for the fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time — Cycle C — are: Deuteronomy 30:10–14, Colossians 1:15–20 and Luke 10:25–37.

“In the face of so much pain and suffering, our only course is to imitate the Good Samaritan,” Pope Francis wrote just a few years back. These words, found in “Fratelli Tutti,” remain true and urgent as ever. They are moral words I’ll never forget.

He was talking about how in our connected world, a world of global communication and commerce — our world of purchasable splendor and the supply chains that support them, often labor exploitation too; also our online world of information and misinformation, love and hate — we mustn’t lose sight of the humanity comprising our connectedness nor the moral responsibility we must own for one another both locally and globally, in person and even on social media.

We must not, Pope Francis said, elegantly shift our gaze from the poor and the exploited, crushed underneath either inhuman economic systems or nature-denying ideologies, simply because if we honestly accounted for the marginalized or, for example, the unborn, it would disturb us, disturb our pretty world, showing us that we are not as moral as we like to think we are.

No, Pope Francis said, we must see these brothers and sisters, all of them — Todos! We must not turn our gaze away from such people even if seeing them makes us uncomfortable or calls into question our conventional morality or is bad for profits.

That’s what I think Pope Francis meant by saying our only moral option is to imitate the Good Samaritan. He was, of course, simply iterating New Testament truth, the truth that faith without works is dead and that a person who claims to love God while hating neighbor is a liar (Jas 2:17; 1 Jn 4:20).

The point is we can boast all we want about our achievements and our knowledge, our success or our theology, but if none of it compels us to care for others, it’s basically a lie, rubbish, no good at all. We must see others, even those we may not want to see, if we are to see God; that’s the point.

Which is the first lesson of the parable of the Good Samaritan found in Luke’s Gospel. The lawyer’s correct theology did not by itself matter. The challenge was whether he wanted to live out the orthodox theology he proudly professed. “You have answered right; do this, and you will live,” Jesus said to him (Lk 10:28). These are some of the most challenging words Jesus ever said to anyone, words not simply of truth but words also of action.

But again, the demand is that we followers of Jesus are the kind of people who can see. We must be able to see the suffering, the poor, the vulnerable, our fellow human beings. But not just see, we must also see with compassion.

For the story is clear: the priest and the Levite did in fact see the man on the side of road, beaten and half dead, it’s just they saw him without compassion. They saw him and “passed by on the other side.” The Samaritan, on the other hand, “came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion” (Lk 10:32-33). Then the Good Samaritan served him, caring for him at his own expense; his seeing, his compassion and his charity materially benefitted a man who was to him a stranger, whom he made his neighbor by the practice of tangible charity.

Which I guess is the point, that this sort of real love and real mercy should shine like the sun on everyone, like God’s love and mercy does — shining through believers who dare to love beyond boundaries and beyond fear. Or at least that’s the idea.

Which is the unsettling question. In your life as a Christian is love simply an idea? As a Catholic, are you merely sentimental? Is there no morality, no ethics, attending your belief or your devotion? Do you not serve others or care for the poor at all? Are you proud of your Catholic belief, your grasp of theology, but never, say, volunteer? Have you never thought about either the positive or negative effects of your participation in the economy? Have you never wondered who makes all those affordable things you buy, never wondered about their wellbeing?

You understand what I’m getting at? There are plenty of people suffering on the many sides of the many roads of today’s world, but do we see them? And further, do we care? If we are Catholics, we must care. That’s why Pope Francis insisted we imitate the Good Samaritan. He was saying nothing different than what Jesus said to that lawyer. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus said to him. Those words are meant for us too. But will we listen?

Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas, Texas. His column has been provided by OSV News.