TWENTY NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR


MONDAY OF THE TWENTY-NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR (Luke 12: 13-21)
Greed takes on many forms and the Lord reminds us to beware of each and everyone of them. One form of greed is the one with which we usually associate it. A person always seeking more and more. The person who looks at life and asks the question: what can I get out of it?... the person who is constantly living to make more and to have more.
Another type of greed....one who is always fighting for his or her rights. Today's gospel is a good example of this. The man who asked Jesus to intercede apparently had a right to the inheritance. Jesus takes this as an opportunity to speak of greed...as much as to tell us that demanding what is owed one may be a type of greed. He is telling us that at times we have to surrender even what is due us in justice or we stand the danger of having our judgment clouded and our hearts closed.
Another type of greed is what I call the greed of "wanting". Someone once told me that greed is not measured so much by what a person has as by what a person wants. These "wants " take on all the different shades that our personalities have. They can be merely physical wants, they may be emotional or they may even be spiritual. In all cases what distinguishes greed from others is that we forget the spiritual side of our existence. The real sin in greed is that it causes a blindness.
We become blind to God, to others and even to ourselves. The possessions, the things we want capture our hearts and we become incapable of seeing beyond the boundaries of our own little world.
Blindness in scripture is the same as having no faith. Our Lord's command to beware of greed is a warning that faith can be covered over and even suffocated by material possessions and the desire for them. He warns us many times about the desire that we all have for riches of one sort or another and how dangerous it is if we really want to live in His kingdom.

TUESDAY OF THE TWENTY-NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR (Luke 12:35-38)
Quite obviously the master, in today's Gospel, is the Lord and we are the servants. As I read this Gospel the question which kept coming to mind was: what does the Lord want? or more precisely: how does He want me to wait? Waiting seems to imply that we lack something and are waiting for it to happen. It seems to me that by very definition to wait means there is an incompleteness. A hope not yet attained, a dream still in the future, a pain not over.
So much of our time is spent waiting...we have to wait on line to buy food, to see the doctor, to get on an airplane. We wait for the big day when we shall see an old friend again, we wait for the baby to be born, and there comes a time in life when we wait for death....
Is it wasted time? Do we look at it as just a necessary evil before we get what we want? Our Lord gives us an important lesson about waiting.
It is a time of activity(make sure there is oil) it is a time of responsibility(cinctures)it is a time a joyful anticipation, not just sitting. Waiting is not simply to keep an eye on the future (when will the line end) but to enjoy the moments before. Strange and marvelous things happen as we wait.

WEDNESDAY OF THE TWENTY- NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR (Luke 12:39-48) Common sense and the living of the Gospel. All Jesus is doing is giving a brief lesson in common sense. The good servant because he sits back and thinks acts in accord with the reality of the situation (the master shall return)the bad servant does not reflect, reacts to the present and consequently acts not in accord with reality.
This "common sense" however must be faith motivated. We as human beings are too prone to make mistakes. The bad servant would, as he was acting, probably say that he was acting according to common sense. The master was late so why not make the best of it. The good servant, on the other hand, trusted in the master's returning. When we act according to common sense the trust in the Lord must be the foundation. His word should be the light before us .
Christian "common sense" goes beyond the purely pragmatic. The pragmatic "common sense" does not take into consideration the master's return. That is, it does not take into consideration the place of God. Christian, on the other hand, will always take the totality of the situation into mind, that means bringing God into the equation of life. This faith filled common sense leads to great things. Anyone reading the Gospel for today would see Our Lord's message quite clearly. The Gospel is just simple God inspired common sense.

THURSDAY OF THE TWENTY-NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR (Luke 12:49-53)
The Gospel rings with a sense of immediacy... " how I wish" " what anguish I feel till it is over"....there is a sense that the Lord wants things to happen right now. Then He speaks of peace...at first these words seem so harsh...can you imagine going into a room a saying: I have come to start an argument. That is bad enough but to say it shortly after having proclaimed peace would make it even worse. This is what Jesus did. How do we resolve the paradox?
Is Christ the King of Peace? Yes. His mission is to establish peace. The peace he wants to establish, however, is the unity between God and creation. He wants to and is working in the world to, bring about the order which should exist between God and creation and between all the different parts of creation. To do this He must face up to a peace which is really not peace. Complacency, comfort with the way things are...a spiritual sleepiness which dulls the conscience. We all like to be comfortable within ourselves...the unfortunate thing is that many times this comfort is not based on good values but on any value which would do away with an internal conflict. This is the peace which Our Lord has come to disrupt.
In a real sense to be really comfortable and at peace within ourselves we have to go through the sometimes painful process of letting the sword of the word of God penetrate our hearts. It will cause some discomfort because no one likes to surrender that which gives them peace...that is until something better has been offered . One of the problems of today is that in so many cases people have attained this comfort, this peace, and have closed themselves off to the peace which only the Lord can give.

FRIDAY OF THE TWENTY-NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR (Luke 12:54-59)
The presence of the Holy Spirit in the world. It seems to me that in many cases our thinking stops short of where we are supposed to be going. Perhaps, in today's Gospel Our Lord is simply inviting us to ask all the questions we are supposed to. St. Thomas More said: always ask one more question. We have to ask: how is the Spirit moving in the world today? In all the world situations which are against the Gospel; war, genocide, abortion , greed....does this mean that the Spirit is not present there. One of the most difficult things for me to do is to look at a situation where man's inhumanity to man is apparent and say that in some way the Spirit of God is working there. Sometimes , as a matter of fact most of the time, I do not know the answer. I do not know the "how" but I do know that God ignores nothing and that in some way all things will be brought together to fulfill His plan.

SATURDAY OF THE TWENTY-NINTH WEEK OF THE YEAR(Luke 13:1-9)
Commitment tempered by compassion is the message for today. Our Lord is not wishy-washy, nor does he expect His disciples to be wishy-washy. He certainly does not His disciples to be blown about by every wind that comes into the world. He expects them to know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil, and to make judgments accordingly. He wants them to be convinced. At the same time He realizes that this commitment exists in a vessel of clay. They will make mistakes. Sometimes the vision will become cloudy. They may loose their way. It is at this time that the compassion of the Lord shine forth. He understands weakness.
Compassion demands that follower of the Lord begins again. Compassion is healing, it heals the weight of humanity. Being healed it encourages us to grow, and never to become complacent.