15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 10, 2022 (Season C)

Paul T. Keil

15 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 10, 2022 (Season C)

Peace be with you on this, our Mass celebrating the 15 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time. My friends, for me, there are two great Biblical questions I try to repeat in my own heart several times every single day. Interestingly, neither question was originally posed by Jesus himself, or one of his disciples, or not even from one of the Biblical “good guys” at all. In fact, neither question probably had any spiritual intent when they were originally asked some 2000 years ago. The first question is near the end of Chapter 18 in John’s Gospel when Pontius Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” Now that’s one I ask myself about every time I pick up my smart phone or turn on the TV, but I think it’s critical, we must try to ask the question from a truly spiritual perspective in our modern secular society. We now live in a culture that is constantly trying to redefine truth every day. It’s reached a point where the concept of truth has become nothing more than an individual subjective opinion. Words like, right and wrong, good and bad, or even moral and evil aren’t popular in our modern vocabularies anymore because they tend to define – truth. Sadly, we now live in a world where it sometimes takes real courage to speak the truth.

The second Biblical question I always try to keep in my own heart every day is one we just heard in today’s Gospel reading. It came from our stories’ antagonist, a scholar of the law. He said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Now to fully appreciate Jesus’s answer we must step back 2000 years and try to hear this parable in context of the who, where, and when. In that world where a human Jesus walked, talked, and taught, the words “good”, and “Samaritan” would have never been used in the same sentence. We always must remind ourselves Jesus and his Apostles were all observant Jews. And almost everyone Jesus spoke to in the Gospels were observant Jews. A common misconception many Christians have today is, Jesus wanted to destroy Judaism. My sisters and brothers, nothing could be further from the truth. Jesus’s affirmation of the scholar’s answer about his own salvation was proof of that. “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Jesus Christ simply wanted to bring his Jewish brethren back to the original covenant of God’s love and fortunately for us today, his Jewish disciples successfully carried that same Gospel message out into the rest of the world. In fact, Biblical scholars tell us if we don’t hear Jesus’s parables in context of a 1 ^st Century Jew, we’ll miss the meaning. And that is what makes this specific parable a little scary for two reasons. First, the word “outcast” doesn’t come close to describe how 1 ^st Century Jews felt about Samaritans. Hatred might be a more appropriate word. Notice the scholar in this dialogue doesn’t even use the word Samaritan himself. So, Jesus uses a hated foreigner in his parable, but the second reason the story should make us all squirm is this, St. Augustine tells us we should see the Samaritan as Jesus Christ himself, and the half-dead man as Adam, the source and symbol of all fallen mankind. Is it any wonder, Saint Teresa of Calcutta called the most repulsive outcasts lying in the city’s gutters, Jesus in disguise?

The Church Fathers saw this story as Jesus curing a fallen world and the parable is full of other signs of Jesus’s healing. Jerusalem was God’s city on Mt Zion. Jericho is only 17 miles East but a decent of almost 3,200 feet in elevation and from the Book of Joshua, viewed as a disordered city, a place of sin. Consequently, the Fathers saw Jesus’s language, “he went down from Jerusalem to Jericho” as humanity’s descent into sin and the robbers stripping and beating as the result of sin robbing all of us sinners of human dignity. The Priest and Levite going down the same road represent religious leaders without love. Men who used rules without God’s love to glorify their own egos.

Scholars point to the pouring of oil and wine as Sacramental signs of Baptism, Confirmation, Ordination, Anointing the Sick, and even Eucharist itself. St. John Chrysostom used the image of the Inn in this parable as the Church. He said, “The Inn is the Church, which receives travelers who are tired with their journey through the world and oppressed with the load of their sins; where the wearied traveler discarding the burden of his sins is relieved, and after being refreshed is restored with wholesome food. And this is what is said here. For outside the Inn is everything that is conflicting, hurtful, and evil, while within the Inn is contained all rest and health.”

So, Jesus always was and still is trying to bring all of humanity into a loving covenantal relationship with God. The message of this parable is certainly pretty clear. Everyone, regardless of race, gender, faith, politics, or any other orientation,,, is my brother and if they need help, I’m supposed to give it. Wow, that’s so easy to say but I know, after I walk out of those Church doors today, it sure is hard to put into practice, isn’t it? It’s just so easy to judge and then allow my judgements to affect my actions. It’s so easy to become just like one of those ancient scholars of the law, or Pharisees, or Sadducees Jesus was always trying to teach the way of God’s love.

Well, a couple of years ago I read a mediation by Bishop Robert Barron that really hit me. He was directing it right at all of us who say we have faith but sometimes lose sight of God’s love. Here’s what he said. “The entire point of religion is to make us humble before God and to open us to the path of love. Everything else is more or less a footnote. Liturgy, prayer, the precepts of the Church, the commandments, sacraments, sacramentals—all of it—are finally meant to conform us to the way of love. When they instead turn us away from that path, they have been undermined.” So, in prayer, all I can say is, Lord Jesus, I’ll try my best to be open to your path of love and recognize you – in every person I meet. Amen.

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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.