August 20/21, 2022 - 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Year C

The 20 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Year C

Peace be with you and greetings on this, our celebration of the 20 ^th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Well,,, today’s Gospel reading doesn’t come across real bright and cheery does it? What’s with all this talk about division, one against another, even within the same family? It all kind-a reminded me of a story my friend John once told me when he and his wife had gotten into an argument. Now mind you, John and Janis have now been married for over 50 years and are still deeply in love but like any long relationship, there were bumps in the road along the way. They had been in the car traveling all day and had spent the last hour or so in complete silence because of a disagreement. They were not saying a word to each other as they passed a farm with a pasture full of cows, goats, and pigs. At that point John attempted a little sarcastic humor when he should have just kept his mouth shut. He glanced at Janis and then motioned towards the pasture and asked, “relatives of yours?” Now Janis is not only an intelligent lady, but also quite wise. Instead of responding in anger at John’s stupid attempt at humor, she calmly turned towards him and said, “you’re right John,,, I believe they’re some of my in-laws.” OK, sorry folks. Now, I know that story isn’t very spiritual, but I couldn’t help it when I read the in-law against in-law part of today’s Gospel.

Seriously though, what is the spiritual message from today’s Gospel? It doesn’t sound like good news when Jesus says, “Do you think I have come to establish peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division” or, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing.” His words seem to be right out of the Old Testament, don’t they? Where is our merciful, gentle, and loving Jesus we’re so used to hearing? My friends, as hard as it is to accept sometimes, God didn’t change somewhere between Malachi and Matthew. Oh, just in case you didn’t know, Malachi is the last book of the OT and Matthew if the 1 ^st book in the NT. The God of the OT is the God of the NT, and we must never forget, Jesus himself is the second person of the Trinity. He is God.

Honestly, today’s reading challenges me with what I consider one of the great mysteries of my own personal Christian Faith; it’s not the incarnation, the virgin birth, or even the Blessed Trinity. From my humble perspective I have difficulty reconciling a God who is perfectly merciful with a God who is perfectly just. When someone tells me, they don’t like the God of the OT, I remind them, no one in the Bible talks more about Hell and damnation than Jesus Christ himself. Go read about the sheep and the goats in Mt 25 for example.

OK, so how do I reconcile a God who seems fierce and judgmental with a God who is loving and merciful? Doesn’t the Bible tell us God is love? Well, yes it does – but unfortunately, our perceptions of God’s love are obscured by the fallen world we live in. Thomas Aquinas wrote volumes about our perception of God viewed through humanities’ lens of sin in a fallen world and I’ve only got about 7 more minutes but let’s try. Aquinas said, “Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the recipient.” OK Thomas. So, what does that mean? Well let’s think of God’s love as the sun. On a bright blue sunny morning, the sun shines into our homes with radiant beauty. Now let’s add window shades to our simple little metaphor for God’s love. When the shades are wide open our home is full of light from the sun but as we start pulling those shades closed the sun’s light is diminished. The same sun is still shinning on the world outside, but we’ve chosen to dim its’ light by pulling the shades. Friends, this simple image is sort of what sin does to our perception of God’s love. It becomes distorted or diminished.

If you’re living in a relatively good spiritual state, God’s love will be perceived as kind, gentle, and merciful but if you’re spiritual life is off the rails, God will be perceived as fierce, threatening, and judgmental. You can see this story repeated over and over and over in the Bible. The great news is, however, the sun itself hasn’t changed. God’s love is still shinning as brightly as ever but our perception of that love is distorted, and, in most cases, we did it ourselves by closing the shades, through sin, or ego, or simply our every-day priorities like, pride, power, pleasure, and wealth.

Another key variable in Aquinas’ formula for perception of God is his definition of love itself. Thomas says, “love is willing the good of the other.” Now I’ve used Aquinas’s love definition often before but it’s critical to let it sink in. “Love is willing the good of the other.” When it comes to the Bible and our perception of God there is a flip side to this whole “love of God”, however. If love is willing the good of the other, then God’s love for us must – by necessity, generate God’s opposition to whatever works as evil within us. Hence, we have today’s Gospel. When Jesus says, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” He is telling us He wants to burn away anything opposed to God’s love for us. Anything that diminishes our perception of God’s love. He wants to burn up those shades we have pulled over the windows of our hearts distorting our awareness of God’s love! Jesus came to shake things up and that’s why this reading sounds a little scary and can cause confusion. The bottom line always really, really is, however, God is love!

Several weeks ago, I read a quote from Bishop Robert Barron summarizing why we sometimes tend to be divided, sadly even within our own Catholic Church. And also how we sometimes swerve off the path of God’s love. He said this; “The entire point of religion”, let me repeat, “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.” Friends, if you believe anything in the Bible says God doesn’t love you, you’re misinterpreting the Bible. And if anything in your own personal faith life is pulling you away from love of God and love of neighbor, open those shades to your heart and let the sunshine in.

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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.