Category: Gospels

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Friday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time

AUGUSTINE:

In all our trials, each one must take care not to be overcome or to come down from a spiritual height to a carnal life. He who had progressed should not look back by turning toward the past or failing to reach out to the future. This is true of every trial. How much greater care must be prescribed in a trial such as that foretold for the city as “Such as has not been from the beginning, neither will be”? How much more this is true for that final tribulation which is to come on the world, that is, the church spread through the whole world? read more

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Thursday of the Thirty-Second Week in Ordinary Time

St Therese of the Child Jesus: “The Doctor of doctors teaches us without the sound of words. I have never heard him speak, and yet I know he is within my soul. Every moment he is guiding and inspiring me, and, just at the moment I need them, ‘lights’ till then unseen are granted me. Most often it is not at prayer that they come but while I go about my daily duties”

A Christian does not grow as a Christian if their faith is gradually replaced by a new kind of worldliness.  There is a temptation – under the guise of liturgy, or spirituality, or evangelization – to return to the world from which we were saved.  We can see this clearly in the question of the Pharisees about the coming of the Kingdom of God.  The Pharisees are not preparing themselves to leave this world and go to God, but rather to harness divine authority and ensconce themselves in positions of worldly power and influence.  They would like a kingdom of God because God is invisible and therefore absent.  If God is absent from His own kingdom, that means the Pharisees could be in charge since God isn’t going to make a bunch of “important temporal decisions” anyway.  The distance between the terms is almost negligible: “ruling in God’s place,” “ruling in place of God,” “there is no God,” and “I am a god.” read more

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Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

In today’s Gospel we see why Jesus talks about it being difficult for a rich person to be saved.  We are frequently focused on the amount of things, of goods, or of money.  Jesus wants us to understand that so long as we focus on the way our lives and actions appear we cannot grasp our true trajectory.  Where we are headed depends on the disposition of our heart, our intentions, what we choose to value.  Even the one who is exteriorly poor may end up anxious and worried about tomorrow if they are not poor in spirit.  Generosity with the goods of this world must be responsible and unselfish – and that can only come from a heart that trusts in God more than in wealth.  The problem with material goods is how we come to cling to them, rely on them, and get our sense of security from them. read more