Hard questions, simple answer

 By Mallory Hoffman

Infant Christ as the Good Shepherd by Murillo.
(Wikimedia Commons)

 
"When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together,  and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.  “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”  He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’  This is the greatest and first commandment.  And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
(Matthew 22: 34-40)

Can you imagine how frustrated the Pharisees and the Sadducees must have been to hear Jesus answer their questions?  Each time they tried to make Him stumble by giving Him a question  they thought would trick Him, Jesus came back with an answer that made these learned men retreat from Him with their heads hung in shame.  They hoped to humiliate and silence Jesus, but each time, Jesus, silenced them. 


Continue reading at Mallory's blog His UnEnding Love.

Where do I stand this night?

By Melanie Jean Juneau

The Last Supper by Jaume Huguet (Wikimedia Commons).

It is Holy Thursday, the night we celebrate the Chrism Mass.Tonight, churches around the entire globe will wait in  prayerful vigil, with lights dimmed, all images covered with the congregation in respectful, sombre silence. The Church is remembering the end of Jesus’ public life as a teacher and healer and walking with Him as He begins His most important work, the work of salvation in His passion, death and resurrection.

Yet today’s Gospel takes us back to the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. He has just emerged from the desert, filled by the power of the Holy Spirit, astonishing crowds with His words. As He stands on the podium in the synagogue to read from the book of Isaiah, repeating the Old Testament reading which we have just heard minutes before, Jesus summarizes His entire ministry in a few short verses.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.

Continue reading at Melanie's blog Joy of Nine9.

Harsh words from Jesus

By Deacon Paul Rooney

 

Jesus has some harsh words in today's Gospel for those who do not tend to their spiritual journey.  One road on this spiritual journey speaks to me of love, and our invited response to the ethical demand of the gospel.  The other road speaks to me of hypocrisy.  Both roads reveal themselves eventually.

I can remember vividly the time when I was a paperboy for the Fremont Tribune many decades ago.Every late afternoon during the weekdays I would make my rounds delivering the Tribune.  Then on the first Saturday morning of the month, I would make the rounds collecting the monthly subscription price of 15¢. [How times change…the price today is $12.25 to have it delivered to your door by a paperboy!]

During the daily deliveries all month long, all I would see would be the outside of the homes: all very nicely painted, yards well-trimmed, and so on.  But once a month when I collected, they would invite me inside and I would see the absolute mess or chaos that the homes really looked like inside, away from the eyes of the world.  I suspect many of us can visualize that scene.  How many times have we received a surprise phone call from someone saying they would be arriving soon to visit - - so we hit the panic button and clean up the inside of the house (or at least that part that the Visitor will see)!

This is sort of what Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel (Luke 11:37-41). Jesus seems to get a little tough with his host, calling him and all the Pharisees fools!! That’s probably not something you would expect an invited person to call you, right in your own home. But that really was in keeping with the rabbinic tradition, which could also be harsh with some Pharisees.  In that culture, it meant that the Pharisees were being seen by Jesus as being arrogant, which in turn means the Pharisees were acting out of self-important pride in their own ability to follow the ritual rulebook.  And their man-made rulebook said that everyone had to wash their hands and forearms before eating.


Continue reading at Journey to Wisdom.

The dangers of being Catholic

By Rebecca Duncan
 

Calling of the Apostles by Ghirlandaio (photo credit: Wikimedia Commons).

Who were the Pharisees?  What were they really?  Why did Jesus condemn them so much?

They were men who thought they had found God.  They were men who had stopped seeking God and crying out for Him because they thought they already possessed Him.  They were men who were in the true Faith, who carried it out to the letter and who missed the point.  They were men who loved God's law but did not love God.  They were men who read about God every single day but could not see Him standing right in front of them. 

I've been thinking about what it was like before I was converted.  I was seeking God with all of my being.  My whole life was crying out the question, "Who are you?" 

Once I found the answer, I gradually became angry and bitter.  Some of that was rebelling against God's demands on my life.  But there was another dimension that I have only just come to realize.  It was that once I became sure that I knew who God was and that I was safely in His house, I stopped searching for Him.  I became a Pharisee. 

If I am not searching for God, I am most certainly searching for something else.  Whether it is success, entertainment or my own ideas about God and His life, as a human being I must always be seeking for something.  But, I will come to the end of those things.  God is the only one who I will never come to the end of.

Before I became Catholic, my life was filled with a kind of mysticism.  It was only because I was still seeking for God so strenuously.  That should be the perpetual state of this life.  That is how we enter into eternity now because eternity is always seeking and seeing more and more of God and never reaching the end of Him.

No matter where we are in this life we can never stop searching for God with all of our being.  Whether we know His name or not, whether we are praying perfectly or not, whether we are in a habit of sin we can't get out of or not, we must cry out for God like the tax collector who beat his breast and said, 'Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!'  

The saint is the one who starts searching for God and never stops.


Rebecca blogs at  Otaku Catholic.