12th Sunday in Ordinary Time June 23, 2024 (Season B)

12 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 23, 2024 (Season B)

Peace be with you on this, our celebration of the 12 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Well, the Church has certainly given us a lot to think about with our readings today. The Gospel reading from Mark is a story we should all be well familiar with. A stormy night on the Sea of Galilee, panicky disciples, a sleeping Jesus, then an awakened Jesus calming the Sea, and finally the question, “Do you not yet have faith?” Scholars have probably piled up enough paper writing about this story to sink that boat without a storm. I will talk about the Gospel story but initially I’d like to touch on the first reading from the Book of Job for a couple of minutes. The Bible story that frustrates so many.

You all know Job’s story, right? Basically, it’s kind of a, bad things happening to good people story. You see, Job was written at a time and to a culture that believed if a man was suffering it usually meant he had sinned. Yet here we have good old Job, a righteous man who is now suffering with all kinds of calamities in his life. So, today’s reading starts at the beginning of Chapter 38 with God finally speaking, “Then the Lord answered Job out of the storm.” Oh great! God is going to explain why Job, even though he is a wonderful guy, is suffering with so many miseries. NOT! This discourse from God goes from Chapter 38 all the way to Chapter 41 but, all it seems to do is add to the mystery. When God finally speaks, it is to pose questions of His own. God, in His divine wisdom, enters not to solve problems but to reframe them. “Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning and shown the dawn its place?” These four chapters from Job ultimately display the abyss of God’s love through creation.

Friends, I’m not sure how the ancient Jews felt about the Book of Job but now, the good news for us is not a promise to fix all our suffering on earth. We are not mere problems to be solved but people to be loved. The love of Christ is the good news, a love so profound that even death cannot pose a problem. As we contemplate the paradox of love, suffering, and forgiveness offered on the Cross of Jesus Christ, the Book of Job is finally understood. Jesus is the best man with the worst fortune. His suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension unites us with God the creator of everything. My sisters and brothers, G.K. Chesterton, an expert in the literary arts, aptly described the book of Job as a “riddle” because Job’s suffering seemed to make no sense. We now know; however, Jesus is the answer to the riddle.

So now in the Gospel reading Jesus, the one without sin, the perfect righteous man, gets into the boat and says, “Let us cross to the other side.” From a spiritual perspective that short phrase can have a lot of meaning because we know Jesus said it, and we know all about Jesus, right? As Catholic Christians we now know the whole Jesus story. We know he is fully human and yet fully divine. We know he is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, coeternal with the Father and the Holy Spirit. We know he reopened the gates of heaven for all of us by his own suffering, death, and resurrection. We know Jesus Christ is God and we know God is love.

So, in the Gospel, the Church and most scholars tell us Jesus and his disciples in the boat traveling across the Sea of Galilee can spiritually be seen two ways. First, the boat is the whole Church herself traveling with Jesus through space and time encountering all the storms and difficulties throughout history. Or second, we can view it as our own personal journeys through time with Jesus always there to calm the storms in our own lives. Today, I’d like to talk about the personal journey with Jesus.

Friends, I start each day with a little prayer by Thomas Merton. The prayer starts this way, “My Lord God, I cannot see the road ahead of me. I do not know for certain where it will end.” And the prayer ends with these words, “I will trust you always Lord, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death I will not fear, for you are ever with me. You will never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen.” Great words Father Merton but hard to follow.

The reading from Mark’s Gospel we heard today presents the spiritual dynamics of fear and trust. Making their way across the lake in their tiny boat, the disciples stand symbolically for all of us journeying through life within the confines of fear controlled by our own egos. The ego is fundamentally persuaded there is nothing beyond itself upon which it can rely. Unfortunately, this is a typical condition brought on by our own 21 ^st Century Western Culture. The modern attitude our culture teaches and encourages is, “I am completely in control of my own life.” Why and how does this happen? It’s simple, Jesus is asleep in the back of our boat. The sleeping Jesus stands here for the divine power that is literally asleep within all of us, indeed within the very confines of the ego. When in reality, Jesus symbolizes the divine energy that remains unaffected by the fear generated by the grasping ego.

This beautiful narrative from Mark’s Gospel seems to suggest that if we but awaken to the presence of Christ within us all, if we live in basic trust rather than fear, then we can withstand even the most frightening storms. Lord, I know your divine presence is within me. Help me to prevent my own ego from taking control.

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Paul T. Keil, 18-19 July 2026 16 th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Season A Peace be with you and welcome to our celebration of the Mass for the 16 th Sunday in Ordinary Time. OK, some of you may remember I’ve said before, in Matthew’s Gospel, Chapters 5, 6, and 7 comprise the whole Sermon on the Mount, but did you know Chapter 13, where we are today, is often called the Sermon of the Parables. In this single chapter Matthew strings together seven separate parables from Jesus. Today we just heard numbers two, three, and four. Last weekend we heard the first one with the Parable of the Sower and what happens to the seeds scattered in different places. Next weekend you’ll hear the final three parables from Chapter 13 so, be sure to come back. So, what is Jesus saying in these readings. Last week we heard the parable about seeds as an allegory for Jesus’s words falling on a path and being eaten by birds, falling on rocky ground and withering with no roots, falling into thorns and being choked by life’s anxieties, and falling on fertile soil to bear fruit. Today we have Jesus giving us another parable about planting seeds and again, just like last week, Jesus’ disciples ask him to explain the parable. And since He stops to explain both parables about planting, he just might be trying to emphasize something important here for his disciples, and for us. One thing is clear in these parables however, God’s Kingdom will always coexist in this physical world with forces opposing it, like the wheat and the weeds growing together. Now many religious people struggle with this condition. Some see it as predestination. A weed in the wheat field or a seed in the rocks must represent people predestined to go to hell. That’s what it literally says, right? Still others ask in frustration; this is God we’re talking about, why does God’s Kingdom have to struggle with opposing forces at all? Why doesn’t God just get rid of the evil? Well, our old friend, St Thomas Aquinas wrote quite a bit about good and evil coexisting in our fallen world. He said sometimes the two are so tightly interwoven that you couldn’t have certain types of good without certain types of evil. For example, he said simply, “there would be no virtue of the martyr without the cruelty of the tyrant.” Friends, God delights in our freedom, our intelligence, and our cooperation when we freely make the decision to accept God’s love. Without free will we cannot choose to love. Jesus’ explanation of the wheat and weed parable certainly helps when he says; “The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels” and in the next verse he says; “The Son of Man will send his angels.” There is a very important take-away here every single Christian should remember. Eternal judgment belongs to God alone, not to anyone else – period. This is a consistent message Jesus gives us in all four Gospels but unfortunately, there are those who sometimes forget this simple divine fact about humanity’s relationship with the unlimited creator of the universe. We may perceive an individual as being bad or even intrinsically evil but judgment for their immortal souls belongs exclusively to God. I always like an old adage that goes like this, “if I ever get to heaven, I may be surprised by who I see there, and they may be even more surprised to see me.” I’ll admit, over the years for a long time, as I’ve meditated on this parable about weeds and wheat or last week’s parable about seeds, especially the ones falling into thorns choked by worldly anxiety, there was something always bothering me. You see, if we’re not careful both parables can make life, heaven, and hell sound kind of random or worse yet, they can make God’s love sound like it is exclusively reserved for preselected people. I know now however, there is nothing further from the truth. If you’ve lived life for a while and think back to times when you were say maybe,,, struggling in school, or first dating, or trying to make ends meet while raising a family, or competing for promotions at work, or trying to buy that first house, you realize there may have been times when your life wasn’t very spiritually fruitful. In fact, I now realize there were times in my own past when thoughts of God, salvation, or prayer were nowhere in my daily routine. I even wonder; was there a period in my life when I was one of those weeds or a seed in the thorns? Thankfully, with reflection on the whole of Scripture, guidance from the Church, and maybe some help from the Holy Spirit I realize now these parables are not “either / or” propositions. God doesn’t intentionally create some people as weeds and some people as wheat nor does God throw souls into the wind to randomly fall in the thorns, or on stony ground, or in fertile soil. If you’re not careful, you can come to those conclusions, however. You can read the Bible too narrowly and pick out verses here and there that help support your personal image of what you want God to be. Those tend to be the same people who like to do God’s judgment work for him. Here’s the thing; some of us here today may have actually spent some time as those ugly weeds but at some point, with God’s help, we decided to change and now we’re wheat growing in that good old fertile soil. My sisters and brothers, sin must never be viewed as a permanent state. Like we heard from the Book of Wisdom today, “you gave your children good ground for hope that you would permit repentance for their sins.” This is the greatest gift of our Christian faith; God loves us all so much, even great sinners, God is always ready to forgive. So, here’s a challenge and homework for us all today. Most of us know people out there from all age groups, but especially some of our youth, who may be temporarily living life like the weeds in our parable today or maybe tangled in those thorns of life’s tribulations. First and foremost, we must be confident, sin is not a permanent state of life, second, we don’t judge, third, pray for them no matter how nasty they may seem. And finally, if we’re really, really brave, we offer them a hand to pull them up and out of the weeds, rocks, or thorns into God’s fertile soil.