26TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Last Wednesday we came to a milestone it was 6 months since the lockdown and associated COVID19 measures began. It is hard to believe that it has been 6 months but it is. Over the last months we have had to change so many things in our daily lives and we have also said good bye to many of our much loved families and friends who have died as a result of this pandemic. It seems that with the recent government restrictions that this virus may well be with us for sometime to come. We pray for our continuing safety at this time as well as the safety of our families and friends along with the communities where we live.

In our Gospel reading for this weekend we hear the story of the two sons. The first son, who said no to his father but who went and did what his father wanted. And then the second  son, who says yes to the father but does not deliver . The first son “thought the better of it.” He was open to a change of heart.

The second son was set in his ways and closed to the change of heart that was necessary. The ability to change one’s mind is essential to all healthy relationships. A mind that is closed, whether from pride, stubbornness or stupidity, tends to destroy all relationships, e.g., when we refuse to admit a mistake, when we are unwilling to apologise and change our ways, when we persist in prejudice against a person or group, when we think we know it all when we don’t. Jesus surprises the people around him by responding favorably to the actions of the tax collectors and prostitutes who may have gotten it wrong at first but have since repented and come back.   Too many of us are down on ourselves for our past lives. Many of us can truthfully say, “I have made mistakes.” But we are here now. We are doing our best to follow the Lord. We try our best to receive the strength of Christ, the power of the Gospel, and integrate this into our daily lives. This Gospel passage points out something very important about faith and religion. Sometimes the terms faith and religion are taken to be the same. But they are not at all the same.

The difference between them be seen more clearly if we speak of religious practices rather than religion. There is a close relationship between religious practice and faith. Religious practices have to be based on and animated by faith.  The Lord calls us to a living faith whereby we enter into a living relationship with God. That involves something more than adherence to a system of ideas or obedience to a collection of rules or the practice of certain rites. It requires an authentic desire to follow Christ, whatever the costs to us material or otherwise.  Through this parable of “the second chance,” grace is given to enable us “to change our minds.” We can start anew. This parable is Good News indeed, for those who think it is too late to change, or can’t change. Jesus  who tells this parable to us today assures us we have his help to redirect our lives – to say “Yes” to the God who calls and enables us to change.

25TH SUNDAY OR ORDINARY TIME

Life goes on as we continue our journey with the covid19 restrictions and we pray  for the continuing safety of everyone out there. We also pray for all our youngsters who are receiving their first holy Communion during September and October.

In our Gospel reading this Sunday Matthew recounts the parable of the laborer’s in the vineyard who don’t see the generosity of their Master  because they are blinded by their own envy and selfishness.  Those who first heard this parable would have voiced their bewilderment. How could God not treat the hard, long-suffering workers in the vineyard better than those who had just arrived and didn’t seem to have done as much to gain their reward? The Day laborers in the vineyard objected to the amount of pay the owner gave them as the first was paid exactly the same as the last one denarius. This tense image rode against the popular view of the Kingdom as a peaceful plentiful feast for the faithful in paradise.

Jesus told this story to emphasize how the Kingdom differed from what people expected. What kind of God do we have? The parable tells us that our God is a generous and a just Father who doesn’t have any favourites, but continually invites us into the vineyard of faith and treats us  all equally.  God rewards us all “the same daily wage.” this is a pointer  towards the “eucharistic daily bread” God is constantly giving us to feed and strengthen us every day, as we strive to be God’s faithful people. In the pages of the gospels we meet many people who start out as losers but end up as winners. The parable of the  workers in the vineyard is the Lord’s call to all of us to share generously with all people  what we  have received and that means sharing our resources and our time. Sharing with those who are physically emotionally, spiritually or economically crippled. It means sharing with the prodigal sons and daughters, the outcasts, the overlooked, and the ones whom the powerful and respectable simply ignore or shun. The losers end up winners because Jesus makes a clear choice in their favour.

Why does he do so? Simply because Jesus knows and teaches that God’s ways are not our ways, that God does not work from the mathematics of a calculator but from the fullness of a full and loving heart the heart of the Father. All of us share equally in the task, whether called early in the morning or late in the day, we are called  to build up the kingdom of God in this  unjust and often times hard world. When we focus upon the needs of others, even if they encroach upon our rights, we give  ourselves for the Kingdom. Our work  becomes more honest and our leadership when we are called to lead will bring others to Christ for they see Christ working through us for everyone’s good. Ultimately, service means sacrifice. What are we willing to give up for the Kingdom of God as we proclaim the good news in word and deed during this time of COVID19 and the problems it brings to us.

24th SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

As we continue our journey of faith we also  journey along with  the continuing COVID pandemic. We continue our prayers for all those who are affected by the covid19. We Also pray for all those who were affected  in the 9/11 attacks in the USA 19 years ago it is hard to believe all those years have passed but they have. We continue our prayers for peace for the world and those who live in it, peace of mind heart and soul.

Our Gospel reading for this Sunday is all about forgiveness as a matter of fact all our readings are about forgiveness.. The parable of the unforgiving official is told in order to underline our need for forgiveness. When the king calls his court officials to audit the accounts, one shows a deficiency of ten thousand talents, a colossal sum of money. The sum is deliberately extravagant, perhaps running into millions of pounds in our own money, to heighten the contrast with the few pounds owed to the official.  

When the king orders the sale of the debtor and his family into slavery, the official pleads for time. The king feels sorry for him and decides to remit the whole of the vast debt.  The official, however, learns nothing from his experience, for he refuses to give a colleague time to pay a trifling debt; instead, he has him thrown into prison. When this heartless behaviour is reported to the king, the grant of full forgiveness is withdrawn and the unforgiving official is thrown to the torturers. What do we learn from this parable about showing mercy the saying goes that the mercy we show to others will also be the mercy that  will be shown to us in our turn. We often forget that God shows us mercy In the same way that the king showed mercy to  the official!  If we think we do not need the mercy of God we need to stop and think about it  for all of  us need gods mercy in one way or another. Have you ever found yourself in a situation where it was difficult to forgive someone who offended you all of us have been in that situation at some time in our lives.

Forgiveness can be very hard in many situations, and for this reason it takes a long time before we bring ourselves to forgive those who sin against us  especially when they might be  people we trusted a lot. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus seems to tell us that God’s forgiveness has necessary limits, but perhaps these are just the limits we set. The unforgiving slave brings judgment on himself by treating his own forgiveness as a license to bring judgment on others. He thus transforms a merciful king into a vengeful judge. The problem lies not with the king, or even by analogy with God, but with the world the slave insists on constructing for himself, under which terms his fate is now set. With whom, and to what systems, do we bind ourselves each day? Each day let us ask the Lord for forgiveness for all our sins Let us forgive all those who have sinned against us because that is what our father in heaven asks us to do. Remember our Father in heaven sent us Jesus his son to point the way and he encourages us to follow him.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

We are now at the end of the summer and the schools and many other things  in our locality are trying to get back into  the new way of doing things. There is a great deal of change  and It seems to me that time waits for no one and this is true enough when you stop and think that it is now 5 months since the youngsters were in school and so many things that we take for granted closed as a result of COVID19. But we are returning slowly to what is good and we know that we will have to journey along the road with the COVID19 virus going into the future whatever it brings. We bring ourselves and all we are doing and going through to god knowing that he is with us through it all.

In our Gospel passage for this Sunday St Matthew recounts Jesus’ instructions to the disciples about how they should deal with a brother who does something wrong. This same instruction applies to us and our dealings with other people in the here and now of today. This passage is very different from those of the two previous Sundays. They were dramatic stories, marked by deep emotions and with deep implications for the characters involved.

This is a little gem of a passage but with little drama, a very practical, common-sense teaching on that most common and most prosaic of community problems – conflict. It is a great wisdom teaching which continues to be valid for us in our own time. Management has become a science today, and Jesus’ teaching stands up well as a model of how to “manage” conflict in any situation.  It is the duty of the disciple we are told  to point out the error and even if our correction might not be well received. St Matthew wants to let the Christians in his community know how to deal with those who drift away from the teaching of Christ or blatantly contravene the commandments. And he chooses those words of Jesus which most stress the authority and the competence of the Christian community, the Church, to deal with these cases: Whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.  However, there are some safeguards built into this teaching on reproving those who go astray. Jesus says that first of all you must have it out with him alone. This might lead to a speedy solution and the person’s good name is preserved. Yet it seems  from the gospel reading that the only sanction is that the person be excluded from the community of the Church. That is surely the meaning of the words: treat him like a pagan or a tax collector treat him as an outsider. 

But in considering such matters we must be very careful; for getting all worked up about the behavior of someone else  can frequently be a sign of something else, something much closer to home.  Belonging to a community implies that we are involved in the life of its members. This is not a charter for the legion of the curious, but a procedure for a caring community to follow. It is a way of handling wrongdoing and hurt. Encountering the truth about another person and ourselves is daunting  because it makes us face up to the other person and ourselves and the weaknesses that are part of us and all we are. We should not be afraid to encounter the truth about ourselves and others as we deal with the world around us these day’s knowing that Jesus is making the journey with us .