Today’s first reading from the book of Revelation talks about Jesus in a very different way from what we are used to. When we think of Jesus, we think of a man, a teacher, someone who talks to us about God. When we use our faith to think about Jesus, we remember that He isn’t just a regular human being, we open the eyes of our heart to see him with spiritual vision: Jesus is God, He is divine, He is eternal. That isn’t something we know because it is obvious, it is something we know because we use our faith, because we believe. If we believe that Jesus is God, it makes everything He says and does very powerful for us, and it changes how important His words and actions are for us. You can think about how wonderful it is when you have a special family dinner together like at Thanksgiving. Jesus used to have special dinners together with His disciples. Imagine what it would be like to have a special guest at your family dinner, imagine what it would be like to have Jesus at dinner, what it would be like to have God at dinner with your family. Jesus came to show us that God is not far away from our normal lives: Jesus brings God into the everyday lives of the people He created and loves.
Wednesday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel is Luke’s slightly different account of the Parable of the Talents we heard on Sunday from St. Matthew. The differences between these two parables isn’t particularly important, though they are interesting. In Luke’s story, the amount given to each servant is much smaller than a talent. This reinforces the important spiritual teaching that we aren’t to worry about how much we have received, but that we are to invest what we’ve been given as wisely as we can. God has given us a great gift in Jesus: the grace to live a life liberated from the snares of sin and bound for resurrection. We are expected to use the Gospel we’ve been given to increase the fruitfulness of the Gospel around us.
Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
As we approach the end of the liturgical year, the readings bring our focus to the end that lies ahead: the end of our earthly lives, the end of the world and the final judgment of God. At first glance, today’s first reading is about how to be a good wife, but mixed in are various comparisons that seem archaic and need further explanation. First, it is crucial for us to remember that whenever the Scriptures – whenever God talks to us about husband and wife, He is talking to us about His relationship with with His people, with humanity. One of the most serious consequences of allowing our understanding of marriage to be destroyed by the decadence of the modern world, is that it destroys God’s message to us about His love and commitment towards us. In this first reading, God is telling us, through the image of a good wife, about who the Church is for Him. The Church is the bride of Christ, the good wife that He has been seeking since the dawn of creation when He tells us that, “a man leaves his mother and father and cleaves to his wife.”