24th Sunday in Ordinary Time - September 15, 2024 (Season B)

Paul T. Keil ,

24 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Year B

Peace be with you and greetings for our celebration of the Mass for the 24 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Wow, what great readings we just heard today. As I read them and meditated on them for a while, I wondered, would the congregation mind if I covered all three and talked today for 30 or 40 minutes? And then I thought, no Paul, better not. Even with your new artificial knee you cannot run as fast as you used to. You should all recognize however, all three of these are great readings. First, we heard a section from Isaiah’s wonderful suffering servant discourse, then a reading from the letter of James with a quote that has been causing debate among Christians ever since the Protestant Reformation, and finally a part of Mark’s Gospel where Jesus gives his Apostles the shocking criteria to be one of his disciples. How do I narrow this down? Well, maybe I got a little divine guidance.

Anyone here have a favorite number or numbers? Do you know what I mean, numbers you consider lucky or special for some particular reason? For example, when I flew helicopters in Vietnam my callsign was “Ghostrider 23” and after a year and 1,200 hours of combat flight time, I came back in one piece, so I’ve always considered 23 a lucky number ever since. Well, when it comes to the Bible however, for me, the number 8 is special. It all started with Romans 8 when I was in graduate school studying scripture at Seattle University. If you go to the last verse in Romans Chapter 8 you read this, “Nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I personally consider those the most hopeful words in the Bible. Then I discovered at the end of John 8 Jesus declares himself to be God more clearly than anywhere else when he says this, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM.” Now in my humble opinion that is a clear declaration of Jesus Christ’s coeternal Godship with the Father.

Now we come to Mark 8, which is where our Gospel reading came from today. My friends Jesus’s message about what he expects from his disciples is consistent in all four Gospels, but with my attention to the number 8 that’s the first place I look. And there again, when you go to Mark Chapter 8 then scroll near the end, look at verse 34 you read, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” By the way, if you have a Study Bible with footnotes, you can look at the bottom of the page and find Matthew’s, Luke’s, and John’s citations of the exact same message. So, if you turn to the end of chapters 8 in Romans, John, and Mark you first, get a message of great hope, second, a declaration of Jesus’s true identity as God, and third, a clear mission statement for Christian discipleship. Without a lot of difficult memorization, I can go toe-to-toe with some of those “Bible thumpers” who love to memorize tons of chapters and verses to explain my own basis in faith.

Really, you might ask? Right now, you might be saying I still don’t quite get it. My sisters and brothers, most of you have seen enough of life to know it is not all rainbows, sunshine, and bright flowers. Unfortunately, more and more people in our culture are finding is harder and harder to deal with that realization. Hence the epidemic of fentanyl or other drugs, deep depression, and an explosion in suicides, especially with our youth. Jesus is offering us all a solution. Deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow him. He is not telling you or me to go lead a miserable life. He is telling me paradoxically; I will see and feel God’s presence more clearly in my pain than at times when life is full of rainbows and sunshine.

If you understand the Bible story you know Jesus will undergo rejection from His own religious leaders and abandonment from the very people who first called him Messiah. He will undergo terrible thoughts that perhaps his life and mission were failures. Without seeing all of this, we cannot begin to understand who Jesus is. Friends Jesus Christ redeems us by taking on the very things in our lives that hurt us. Redemption is not escaping our pain; it is embracing it and overcoming it by God’s love and power. The Son of Man will be rejected, but the Son of Man will be with us until the end of the ages.

We are a fallen people living in a fallen world, and it doesn’t matter who you are, one thing we all have in common is, sadly; there will be pain in our lives. From a beautiful entertainer who fills the world’s largest stadiums, and whose wealth I can’t even comprehend, to an ordinary high school student sitting in classroom Monday morning, to a struggling mom or dad paying bills at the end of the month, we will all have pain in our lives. The miracle is this, we have redemption from a servant God who comes to be with us in the parts of our lives that seem the hardest. That is what, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me”- really means.

So, for homework today I would like to give you something to take home and reflect on for a while based on today’s Gospel reading from Mark 8. What does the suffering and humiliation of Jesus Christ teach me about God?

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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.