A Thought for Living Column
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A THOUGHT FOR LIVING COLUMN BY FATHER PAUL KEENAN Credited with Righteousness June 6, 2008 The second reading for the Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time is from the Letter of Paul to the Romans. It speaks about the faith of Abraham. There were many reasons why Abraham might have doubted God’s promise. Abraham and Sarah were old, well past the age of leading a people and of having children. Yet Abraham kept faith. As Paul says, “He did not doubt God’s promise in unbelief; rather, he was strengthened by faith and gave glory to God and was fully convinced that what he had promised he was also able to do.” But Paul has a surprise for us. He notes that Abraham’s faith was “credited to him as righteousness,” but he does not leave it there. We, too, he says, are credited with righteousness. The words written about Abraham are not just for him, they are for us as well who, as St. Paul says, will believe in Jesus Christ. This means that because of our faith in Christ, we receive a wonderful gift. Like Abraham, there are times when we see the reasons for doubting what God has promised us. His promises may seem too good to be true. We may feel at times that he has let us down. But if, like Abraham, we hold firm in our faith, we are credited with righteousness. We bask in the grace of God. Solid Ground May 30, 2008 The readings for the Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time speak of the importance of taking the Word of God to heart. In the First Reading, Moses tells the people to take the words he has received from the Lord and take them so to heart that they might be like a sign or, as we would say today, a logo, that they would wear as though it were an article of clothing. In the Gospel, Jesus says that his Word is like the solid foundation of a house. Building our lives on his Word is like building a house on a solid foundation. Building our lives on anything else is like building a house upon sand. In a conversation this week about a certain aspect of Church teaching someone (in a very respectful way) asked me whether a lot of the matter of these teachings was not just a little too abstract for people to understand and so as to have any real meaning. My response was that, yes, a lot of Church teaching is abstract, but that it is important for us to try to show how those abstractions have real meaning in our everyday lives. And they do. For example, what seems to be an abstract philosophical discussion of how the human soul gets to experience eternal life when it is created in time by God at the moment of conception, ends up being a wonderful statement of appreciation for the marvelous gift of getting to have a supernatural knowledge of God and intimate relationship with him. Ideas have consequences and what often appear to be academic and relatively unimportant concepts really make a tremendous difference in the way we are called to live our lives. The point of this week's readings is that the Word of God is bedrock. With it as our foundation, we have the right anchoring we need to guide our lives in the right way. Corpus Christi May 23, 2008 On the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, often referred to as Corpus Christi, the readings remind us of the spiritual nourishment that can be found in Christ alone. In the Gospel, he describes himself as the Bread of Life, and when we receive him – Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity – in the Eucharist, we receive spiritual nourishment of the highest order. We are taking Christ Himself into our souls. In the First Reading, Moses recalls the goodness of God to his people during their time in the desert. We remember how, in the desert, the people grumbled because they did not have any food. God sent them manna to nourish and comfort them. Instead of being grateful, they grumbled and complained about the quality of the food. We can often be like those people in the desert. We pray, asking help from God for the difficulties in which we find ourselves. God sends us help, but it comes in a form we do not like or do not recognize as help. We grumble and complain. At the heart of our celebration of the presence of God in our midst, especially in the Eucharist, is the importance of gratitude. When Jesus goes to multiply the loaves and the fishes to feed the multitudes, he first gives thanks for them. Others have been complaining that they don’t have enough money for feed the crowds. Still others have scoffed at the paltriness of the loaves and the fishes – how can these feed so many? Instead, Jesus gives thanks and the rest is history. Trinity Sunday May 16, 2008 At first glance, the peruser of the readings for Trinity Sunday might wonder whether there has been some mistake. Only one of the readings, the Second Reading from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, even mentions the trinity, and that in the form of a traditional blessing. The First Reading is a dialogue between God and Moses in which Moses and God on Mount Sinai, in which God pronounces his name, “Lord” and Moses invites him to accompany the people. It is when we look at the Gospel, however, that we see the profound meaning of the Trinity. In Gospel times, of course, there was no formal understanding of the Trinity, but looking back, we see that the seeds of the triune God are there. In this passage, John does not portray Jesus as speaking of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit per se. But a close look at the passage reveals the work of the Trinity nonetheless. God (the Father) sent his Son into the world. There is a third part to this formulation, and that is that the reason God sent his Son into the world was not to condemn the world but to save it. Therein lies the work of the Holy Spirit – completing the work of the Father and the Son by saving the world, not condemning it. Theologians have told us that the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son, and here St. John is telling us that this love is extended into the world to which the Son was sent, specifically so that we who believe might not perish but might have eternal life. The Father loved the world. He sent his Son into that world. The Holy Spirit – the love with which the Father loved the Son and the world – is that love made present to us so that we might share it as well. The magnificent message here is that God loved us and continues to love us through the Holy Spirit. As John says elsewhere, it is not that we loved God first, but that he loved us first. The result of that love is that we might not perish but might have eternal life. The story of the Trinity in other words, is a magnificent story of love, a story too big for us to comprehend but not to big for us to experience. And on Trinity Sunday, we recall that marvelous blessing, we thank God for it, and we renew our experience of being loved so wonderfully by God. Pentecost May 8, 2008 Today is Pentecost Sunday, a feast which is also known as The Birthday of the Church. This is because on that day, the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles in the form of a huge gust of wind and tongues of fire and emboldened them to proclaim the message of Jesus Christ to the entire world. Or, as John expresses it in today's Gospel, Jesus came to them and breathed the Holy Spirit upon them. Prior to this experience, the disciples were locked in a room, afraid to come out, uncertain as to what to do next. They had been thrilled and relieved to have Jesus return to them after his death and resurrection. Now he had ascended back to heaven and was gone from their sight. They were confused and afraid and they knew that there were those who would attempt to harm them or even take their lives because they had followed Jesus. Once they receive the Holy Spirit, the apostles are completely different people, or at least they seem so. Whereas before they often misunderstood the message of Jesus or had misgivings about it, now they understand in and proclaim it confidently. Whereas before they were afraid, now they stand up to those would defeat them. When we read of the apostles in the gospels and when we read of them again in the Acts of the Apostles, it is as though we were reading about entirely different people. The Holy Spirit has transformed them. Pentecost is also a Jewish feast, occurring fifty days after the celebration of the Passover. and was a feast of the harvest. Moses commanded his people, “Thou shalt number unto thee seven weeks from that day, wherein thou didst put the sickle to the corn. 10 And thou shalt celebrate the festival of weeks to the Lord thy God, a voluntary oblation of thy hand, which thou shalt offer according to the blessing of the Lord thy God.” (Deuteronomy 16:10.) It is also referred to in Christian circles as “Whitsunday,” a reference to the white vestments worn by the priest on that day.