2025 Mar 30 SUN: FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
Jos 5: 9a. 10-12/ Ps 34: 2-3. 4-5. 6-7 (9a) / 2 Cor 5: 17-21/ Lk 15: 1-3. 11-32

Well, we are coming close to the celebration of Holy Week and the Easter Triduum. And I ask you especially to keep Holy Thursday in mind. We'll have the Mass of the Lord's Supper here Thursday, April 17th at 7 p.m. And you know that there is an element of Holy Thursday which is very, very dear to the heart of Pope Francis. And obviously he is not going to be doing this himself this year. But we need to do it, all the while praying for his good health and his recovery. It's the washing of feet. And you know that Pope Francis has gone to various places in Rome on Holy Thursday to perform the foot washing. And very often he goes to prisons when he washes the feet of men and women alike. And many of the people are not Catholic or Christian. But he has gone and he has performed this singular demonstration of service as a prelude to his ultimate service of offering himself on the altar of the cross. So please keep the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord's Supper in mind. And think of the fact that our God does go to people who think they are abandoned or who think they have lost any chance of being united with God. I believe that makes for a very powerful prayer.

So today we have heard a very well-known story told by Jesus. And I consider it his second most annoying parable. I think the most annoying is the one about the workers in the vineyard who get surprised at the end of the day by the way in which the owner of the vineyard pays them for their day's work. Jesus meant for these parables to be annoying, to be provocative. And we find ourselves in this parable saying, "What would we do if we were in this situation? What if I were the younger son? What if I were the older son? What if I were the father?" These parables are intended to work on us. And as we are reminded here today, Jesus directed this parable to the scribes and Pharisees: people who had hardened their hearts against Jesus, who thought that they had no need to listen to him. 

I've been thinking about the connection between this parable and the first reading from the book of Joshua. And it is a somewhat obscure reading and it does require a certain amount of explanation. Joshua was Moses' aide. And when Moses died, Joshua took over as the leader of the people, and at long last they emerged from their 40 years in the wilderness. They emerged into the land which God had promised to them. And I think the connection between Joshua and the parable is that it has to do with the expression we have, "coming into one's own." And we use that expression to mean that after much preparation and much anticipation, the person finally comes into his or her vocation and is able at last to use the abilities God gave to them.

I believe that this parable is about a man who had a strange idea of what it meant to come into his own. He said, "Give me the share of the estate even though you're not dead yet." And then he took all that wealth and yeah, his life was a never-ending party.
Well, of course, never-ending parties come to an end. But this is what is going on. He has a very maladaptive idea of what life is about. And he discovers what it really is as his father welcomes him back. 

We also have from St. Paul a discussion of the uniqueness of Jesus. And of course we will be celebrating his uniqueness as our Savior, particularly in the Easter Triduum. St. Paul says, "God made him who did not know sin to be sin," which may be a rather puzzling statement to us. We can actually develop it by saying he became a sin offering, and in fact he became THE sin offering. It was he who bore our sins and all the effects of the sin of this world in order to liberate us.

And so we have something pointing us directly toward Easter. And we open our hearts in thanksgiving to this personal gift of the Son of God who became one of us and has loved us sufficiently so that we too can come home.

2025 Mar 23 SUN: THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT
Ex 3: 1-8a. 13-15/ Ps 103: 1-2. 3-4. 6-7. 8. 11 (8a)/ 1 Cor 10: 1-6. 10-12/ Lk 13: 1-9

It is good to learn that Pope Francis has been released from the hospital. He was going to do -- so this would have been almost four hours ago, a noon praying of the Angelus that is a Sunday noon day custom, there in Rome. And following that he was going back to his home in the Casa Santa Marta. And the doctors say that he will need at least two months of recuperation. It's remarkable that the doctors also said he's been a very good patient. Well, I hope so. [Laughter] But, you know, we're talking about repentance today, and from what I can tell, Pope Francis has this deep, deep urge to be active. And when you have that attitude, it is a hard thing to acknowledge your limits. And you've probably heard this more than once from me that word "limits" is a very big word in my own spirituality. Because I remember that I am God's creature. I am necessarily limited. I am not the one God who is unlimited. So we continue to pray for Pope Francis, and we are grateful that he will remain with us. And we look forward to everything which comes from the next years of his papacy.

These readings seem to be about time. We have this second reading in which St. Paul is making connections between the Exodus of the Israelites and our own Christian sacramental life, particularly baptism and Eucharist. He is comparing baptism to the escape through the parted Red Sea and connecting the Holy Eucharist with the manna from heaven. 

So this is a profound encounter between God and Moses. When it comes to fast and slow, Moses saw this bush that was aflame, and he was assuming that the flame would very quickly consume the bush, but that did not happen. God told Moses of his concern for the people, and that he would deliver them from their slavery. When we think about the events of the Exodus, the tenth plague upon the Egyptians was the death of the firstborn, and this happened in one night. And the Israelites had to leave in great haste. On the other hand, once they escaped, they wandered in the desert for 40 years. 

So we find various expectations about how long something is going to take. And we have to acknowledge that as we move from our slavery to sin, it seems to us to be a long process, particularly, I believe, because we know that we have to change certain habits of ours, and the habits have been long in the making, and undoing them takes a long time as well.

But as we turn to the Gospel, we understand that repentance, in the sense of being a turning toward God, that turning cannot be delayed on our part because the gift of forgiveness, the gift of mercy, is such a precious gift that we must not presume upon it, even though we know we drag our feet in many ways.

And Jesus is saying, don't conclude just from your observation that something terrible happened to someone, that this was God's judgment upon them.

In fact, he directs us to this parable, the fig tree which is not bearing fruit. And the owner of the orchard wants to do away with this tree, but the gardener says, "Give it another year. We'll give it some special attention." Well, this is our time to give ourselves special attention. We know we must quickly orient ourselves toward our God. God does give us time for this cultivation, for this fertilizing.

As we sang in the psalm, "The Lord is kind and merciful." We welcome the time which God gives us, and we want to recognize that this moment is a most acceptable time for the turning of our hearts.

2025 Mar 16 SUN: SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT
Gn 15: 5-12. 17-18/ Ps 27: 1. 7-8. 8-9. 13-14/ Phil 3: 17 -- 4: 1 or 3: 20 -- 4: 1/ Lk 9: 28b-36

My brother had a friend when we were growing up, and my brother passed along to me some of the things that he heard from this friend about their family. 

So apparently it was kind of a ritual with them: that they would start on a vacation getting into the car and driving and their dad was driving. He would at some predictable point exclaim, "Isn't this great, kids?" 

The kids did not know what was so great. I'm sure that the dad was enjoying the fact that he was not at work and he was looking forward to some time where he could just be present. And really I think that's what he was expressing. Just being present to the moment. But his kids thought it was funny. 

St. Paul says to us today, "Our citizenship is in heaven." And we in fact can be aware of heaven in our midst. The more that we are just present to a moment of relaxation and rest and contemplation, we can be filled with wonder as Peter, James and John were so filled at the time of Jesus' Transfiguration. Luke says that Jesus was preparing for his "exodus" which he would accomplish in Jerusalem. Exodus, of course, refers us to the freeing of the people of Israel from their slavery in Egypt. And Jesus' death and resurrection are properly referred to as the exodus: deliverance from the evils of this world. 

So we are likewise called to a sense of wonder. Before he was Abraham, he was Abram, and the Lord said to him, "Look up into the night sky. Try counting the stars. Can you do that?" Well, you can be filled with wonder because as numerous as the stars are, will your descendants be. And this was a cause for wonder.

On the part of Abram who was unsure whether he would ever have a child by his wife Sarah, he was furthermore filled with wonder. When he saw this eerie thing taking place, the Lord had told him to cut some animals in two. And a representation of the Lord, a fire pot and a torch, passed between the halves.

This was the establishment of the covenant, the bond between God and his people. And it was saying on the part of the Lord, "If I go back on my covenant, may I be as these animals that have been split apart." So there was cause for wonder in the life of Abram, later to be called Abraham.

And we in this Lenten time can cultivate our own sense of wonder. We can look at God's creation. There are things in God's creation that call us to a sense of wonder. We think of the people in our life and the fact that we share love with these people.

Yes, it is great. Our preparation for the Easter mystery is one which includes the favor given to Peter, James and John so that they might not completely lose heart at the time that Jesus was crucified. We saw them weaken, particularly Peter, but they did not completely lose heart. And they had had the opportunity to gaze upon the evidence of Jesus' resurrection.

So we are called through the Word of God today to be present to the wonders which surround us and realize the degree to which we have been loved by the God who has made us and brought us together. And he has made an unbreakable covenant of life and love with us.

2025 Mar 9 SUN: FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT
Dt 26: 4-10/ Ps 91: 1-2. 10-11. 12-13. 14-15/ Rom 10: 8-13/ Lk 4: 1-13

Our Scriptures begin today with an account from Deuteronomy of some of the history of God's chosen people. It refers to slavery and liberation. We move on to St. Paul, and he is telling us that the gifts of salvation and liberation, which come from our God, are not exclusive. He says that everyone, whether Jew or Greek, calling upon the name of the Lord Jesus, will enter into salvation and a great sense of peace in the presence of God. And we see through the Gospel that Jesus has embraced our difficulties to the ultimate degree because he has been subject to temptation. Now as we mentioned at the beginning [of Mass], we might say, well of course he resisted temptation because Jesus is God. Well, we have to understand that Jesus really did embrace our human nature, and as Paul says in Philippians chapter 2, he emptied himself. He did not cling to his identity as the Son of God. He entered into our miseries.

We can recognize something here in the temptations which Jesus is experiencing. You and I are all proud of our identity, and someone could come along and question that identity and say, "If you are so great, do X, Y, or Z. Show who you are." And you and I would tend to take the bait. We'd say, "Yeah, I'll show you." And that's the sort of temptation that Jesus experienced. We have no idea how the consciousness of Jesus as God and human worked itself out. That is perhaps one of the deepest issues of theology. We don't know, but we see that there is a resistance to claiming that glorified identity, and staying with the lowly human identity. And this is a call to ourselves to refrain from glorifying ourselves, instead saying, "I know I am human. I am not God. I am not self-sufficient. I rely upon my God and on the people around me who love me." These are practical thoughts which must occupy us during this season of preparation for celebrating the Easter mystery.

2025 Mar 2 SUN: EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Sir 27: 4-7/ Ps 92: 2-3. 13-14. 15-16/ 1 Cor 15: 54-58/ Lk 6: 39-45

Have you ever heard this expression: "Just sayin'"? I hear that and this is how I translate it. "I'm going to pass along some information to you and it may be distasteful to you, but I am distancing myself from it. Please don't hit me." That's how I feel about that statement.

And it certainly goes against the idea which we hear very clearly from the book of Sirach and from the gospel today, that every one of us is responsible for the words we say.

There's another example. In the online world, there is a lot of reposting that goes on, reposting done by people who don't even know for sure if the original post is true. So we have to consider how we take responsibility for what we say. And as Jesus tells us, it comes from what is stored in our heart. And he gives us another image of a good tree bearing good fruit. We have to ask ourselves, "What is my participation in my social situations doing? Is it building up or not?" 

And of course, I'm sure that Jesus was having fun with these images that he gives us, especially the one about seeing the splinter in someone else's eye when your own vision is impaired. You say, "Let's take the splinter out of your eye" when all the time you have a 2x4 in your own eye. That's pretty obvious. It certainly means that before [we] seek to criticize, it is necessary for us to examine ourselves and recognize that there is much to be corrected in our own personality. Therefore, we can have that experience and, "Okay, yeah, that's out of my eye. I'm seeing a little more clearly. And maybe I am in a position to correct." But then again, we come around and we realize that every one of us has faults, and we might do people a lot of good if we are patient with them. That often is much, much better. 

We think about these things as we conclude St. Paul's reflections on the gift of resurrection. He reflects on the mystery of Jesus and says, "Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" And he's pointing us to Jesus who won the victory for us, and we can never forget that the victory was won because he truly died. He died with us and for us. He chose to undergo what you and I have no choice about, and he has lifted us up.