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Christians

“The Sufficiency of My Merit is to Know That My Merit is not Sufficient” ~ St. Augustine

September 2, 2024 by Holy Name Monastery Leave a Comment

In this Gospel, Mark provides a significant amount of information about the Jewish observance of the laws ritual purity, perhaps to educate the Gentile Christians in his audience who would have had little or no experience with these laws. Well, we’re not among those uneducated, are we?

In today’s Gospel, Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for making ritual purity equal to and as binding as the Law of Moses.  He teaches that we are not defiled by the food that enters our bodies but the words that spew out our mouths.  Such defilement could also be the shrug of the shoulders and leaving the room with another’s question hanging in dead air.  Jesus unmasks a deeper question behind the one posed by the Pharisees: Where is holiness found?  What makes a “holy person”?  By itself it’s not eyes cast heavenward or cast to the ground or beating your chest like the Publican.  It’s not found in how we hold our hands to pray or kneeling for Communion or fasting until we faint.  Nor it is wearing a veil or a habit or a chapel veil.   Outward appearances don’t qualify one for sainthood.  Jesus makes it clear holiness comes from within.  It is evidenced in our deportment, our words, our attitudes, our interactions with each other and our care for God’s creation.  Examples are watering a plant, carefully relocating a lizard to the outdoors, moving chairs quietly, gently placing objects against what could be a noisy surface, or ensuring that doors don’t slam closed.  It’s kindness to our neighbor in the next room or down the hall; the sick, the newcomer, the guest, an annoying child.  The evangelist John was not the first, or the last, to say: “Actions speak louder than words.”  The words at the conclusion of today’s Gospel challenge us to guard against trying to merely look holy.

Jesus reminds us that we become holy when we allow God’s Spirit to transform us. Our actions and our words are a reflection of our “spiritual diet and digestive track”.  Our bodies reject tainted food in often dramatic and hurtful ways, through IBS and spastic colon.  In the same way, our consumption of bias, violence, snide remarks and crude language from the company we keep, our reading material or TV viewing is an abuse our spiritual digestive track cannot tolerate.  It is ejected onto others, into our environment by way of our own mouths.  But our spiritual diet can overcome those symptoms.  We can absorb positive, helpful attitudes in prayer, with daily, deliberate practice, lectio, and interactions with Christ-like persons.  We mature and radiate an expression of the conversion of our hearts.

It is worthy of our time and effort to perk up and listen to the Gospel message: “Hear me, all of you, and understand.  You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.”  It seems to me, Jesus’ underlying message to us, individually and communally, in this day and place, concerns teaching “human precepts” as “divine doctrine”.  It can be a great temptation for many to elevate personal wishes to the “right way” of doing things.  “I’m telling you: my way is the right way!” There is rarely only one right way in everyday matters.

The list of things that were once acceptable that today we shutter to see or hear about grows almost daily.  Airplane passengers used to able to view the plane’s cockpit from their seats, a cloth  towel hung near the kitchen sink to dry, or someone having one-sided conversations with a plug in their ear are a few examples.  Open dinner buffets were more popular and you didn’t get “pinged” to view 100 photos of my day in the park or of a tired toddler  up past his bedtime.  Even the “Queen of Manners” Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt have changed their minds about the “right way” to eat fried chicken.

Ponder in the week ahead Jesus’ reminder to the crowd.  Pray that it may not be said of us: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.”

~Reflection by Sister Roberta Bailey, OSB

 

 

Enjoy your holiday weekend …

  God keep you safe

 

Lord on this Labor Day,
we thank You for the blessing of work.
We ask for strength to complete each day.
We ask for rest when we are weary.
We ask Your guidance
for everyone seeking employment,
and we ask that
You be with those whose faces
we might never see
but who work tirelessly each day
for the good of us all.   Amen.

– from Our Sunday Visitor

 

 

First Reading:   Deuteronomy 4:1-2,6-8         Second Reading:  James 1:17-18,21b-22,27
Gospel:   Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23
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Filed Under: Blog, Front Page, Homily Tagged With: Christians, God, Jesus, Jewish, John, Labor Day, Mark, Pharisees

What is the Astuteness of the Christian?

January 24, 2017 by Holy Name Monastery Leave a Comment

3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Right to Life (January 23)  St. Paul (January 25)

First Reading   Isaiah 8:23-9:3          Second Reading  1 Corinthians 1:10-13,17
Gospel Reading  Matthew 4:12-23

In this Gospel the power of Jesus’ call is immediately evident – Peter, Andrew, James and John dropped everything to follow Jesus immediately.  Jesus doesn’t have to pitch the idea to these individuals nor does he need to persuade them.  Each has little reason to leave their current way of life.    Each seemingly has a steady job.  Most importantly they have familial ties to their vocations as family men and fishermen.  Now, in the new lifestyle they were inaugurating, their security would come from life in a mutually supporting community, where the needs of each one were taken care of.

Having begun to assemble his company of companions, Jesus turns to his ministry, as the Gospel describes it: teaching in the synagogues, proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and curing every disease and illness among the people.   He moved quickly and determinedly from one place to another … planting dreams, raising expectations, and opens doors of possibility.  His followers witnessed a dramatic alternative to the emptiness and despair that filled the lives of the people immersed in an atmosphere devoid off their trust and hope.

Whether man or a woman, when one joyfully responded to Jesus’ call to follow, and entered Jesus enterprise, their lives were dramatically changed.  They became agents of new possibility for all who came into contact with them – beacons of encouragement for the discouraged – inviting the stranger to faith in God and purpose in life.

The late Speaker of the House “Tip” O’Neill loved to relate a valuable lesson he’d learned early in his career. During his first political campaign, one of O’Neill’s neighbors told him: I am going to vote for you tomorrow, even though you didn’t ask me to! O’Neill was surprised and said: Why, Mrs. O’Brien, I have lived across from you for eighteen years, I cut your grass in the summer, I shoveled your walk in the winter; I didn’t think I had to ask for your vote! Mrs. O’Brien replied: Oh, Tommy, let me tell you something … people like to be asked!

A vital faith community will always be asking … inviting followers just as Jesus did.
It is never enough to simply welcome people when they happen to visit, we must also invite them to join us in our worship and ministries.  Without a direct “ask” a vocation may be stifled or a prayer-partner lost.  My mother spoke with great admiration for the Benedictine Sisters who were her teachers in elementary school.  I asked her once when she didn’t become a Sister – she replied “None of them asked me – so I figured I was not worthy.”  Of course, I would not be here telling you this story if she’d been asked and said YES.

Tomorrow (Monday, January 23) the church leads us in prayer for the sanctity of all life: for an end to abortion, euthanasia and the death penalty.  And more than that: to honor, respect and love all God’s people without reservation.  I invite you to listen to these words of Pope Francis (adapted slightly to be gender inclusion):

The Christian cannot allow her/himself the luxury to be an idiot, that’s clear. We don’t have the luxury to be fools because we have a very beautiful message of life and we’re not permitted to be fools.  For that reason, Jesus says, “Be astute, be careful.”  What is the astuteness of the Christian?  In knowing how to discern who is a wolf and who is a sheep. 

And when … a wolf disguises itself as a sheep, (the Christian) knows how they smell. “Look, you have the skin of a sheep but the smell of a wolf.” And this, this mandate that Jesus gives us is very important. It’s for something very great.  Jesus tells us something that attracts our attention, when someone asks him: “Well, why did you come into the world?” “Look, I come to bring life and for that life to be in abundance, and I am sending you so that you can advance that life, and so that it will be abundant.”

Jesus didn’t come to bring death (of the body), but rather, the death of hatred, the death of fighting, the death of slander, that is, killing with the tongue.  Jesus came to bring life and to bring the abundant life, and he sends us out, carrying that life, but he tells us: “Care for it!” Because there are people bringing us today the culture of death.  That is, life interests them insofar as it is useful, insofar as it has some kind of utility and if not, it doesn’t interest them.  And throughout the world, this weed has been planted, of the culture of death.

How beautiful is caring for life, allowing life to grow, to give life like Jesus, and to give it abundantly, not to permit that even one of these smallest ones be lost.  That is what Jesus asked of the Father: “that none of those whom You have given me be lost, that all of the life that You gave me to care for, might be cared for, that it might not be lost.”  And we care for life, because He cares for our life from the womb.

Caring for life from the beginning to the end. What a simple thing, what a beautiful thing.  Father, is that why there are so many wolves who want to eat us?  Is that why, tell me?  Who did Jesus kill? No one.  He did good things. And how did he end up?  If we go down the road of life ugly things can happen to us, but it doesn’t matter. It’s worth it.  He first opened the way.

So, go forth and don’t be discouraged.  Don’t be fools, remember, a Christian doesn’t have the luxury of being foolish, I’m going to repeat this: an idiot, a fool – you can’t give yourself that luxury.  You have to be clever, be astute!     Care for life. It’s worth it! “

~ Reflection by Sister Roberta Bailey, OSB, Prioress
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Filed Under: Blog, Homily Tagged With: astute, Christians, Faith, God, Gospel, Jesus, Pope Francis, Prayer

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