Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“When Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist, He withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself…” (Matthew 14:13)

In commenting on this verse from today’s Gospel, Saint John Chrysostom writes:

“We see him on many occasions “departing.” We see this when John was imprisoned and killed and when the Jews heard that he was making more disciples. For it was his will to live his life in an ordinary rhythm of interaction and solitude. The time had not yet come for him to reveal his divine glory plainly. This is why Jesus told his disciples to “tell no one that he is the Christ.” His will was that this should be better known after his resurrection. During this time he was not very severe with those who were obstinate in their unbelief. Rather, he was prone to be indulgent with them.

On retiring, he departs not into a city but into a wilderness. He leaves in a boat so that no one would follow him. But note how the disciples of John had by now become more attached to Jesus. For it was they who told him of the event. They in fact had left everything and taken refuge in John. In their calamity Jesus makes provision for them, and in doing so he does them no small benevolence

But why did he not withdraw before they brought the news to him? Didn’t Jesus know the fact of John’s death even before they reported it to him? He did not want to make his identity known at this point. The divine economy did not require it. For it was not by his appearance only but by his actions that Jesus would have his identity confirmed. He knew the devil’s craft [NT Vol. IB, p. 7] and that he would leave nothing undone to destroy Christ’s revelation.

This is why Jesus withdrew. But the crowds do not withdraw from him. They try to follow him, as if riveted to him. Not even John’s tragic end diverted or frightened them. So great a thing is earnest desire, so great a thing is love, that it overcomes and dispels all dangers.”(The Gospel of Matthew,, Homily 49)

Collect

Draw near to Your servants, O Lord, and
answer their prayers with unceasing kindness,
that, for those who glory in You
as their Creator and Guide,
You may restore what You have created and
keep safe what You have restored.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
Who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

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Hope of life is the beginning and end of our faith

Saint Barnabas

Apostolic Father of the Church

An excerpt from Letter of Barnabas, (Chapter 19)

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Consider now the way of light; any man who is bent on reaching his appointed goal must be very careful in all he does. Now these are the directions that have been given to us for this journey: love your Creator; reverence your Maker; give glory to him who redeemed you when you were dead; be single-minded but rich in spiritual treasure; avoid those who travel down death’s highway; hate whatever is displeasing to God; detest all hypocritical pretense; do not abandon God’s commandments. Do not put on airs, but be modest whatever you do; claim no credit for yourself. Plot no evil against your neighbor, and do not give pride an entrance into your heart.

Love your neighbor more than your own life. Do not kill an unborn child through abortion, nor destroy it after birth. Do not refrain from chastising son or daughter, but bring them up from childhood in the fear of the Lord. Do not set your heart on what belongs to your neighbor and do not give in to greed. Do not associate with the arrogant but cultivate those who are humble and virtuous.

Accept as a blessing whatever comes your way in the knowledge that nothing ever happens without God’s concurrence. Avoid duplicity in thought or in word, for such deception is a deadly snare.

Share with your neighbor whatever you have, and do not say of anything, this is mine. If you both share an imperishable treasure, how much more must you share what is perishable. Do not be hasty in speech; the mouth is a deadly snare. For your soul’s good, make every effort to live chastely. Do not hold out your hand for what you can get, only to withdraw it when it comes to giving. Cherish as the apple of your eye anyone who speaks to you of the word of the Lord.

Night and day you will bear in mind the hour of judgment; every day you will seek out the company of God’s faithful, either by preaching the word, earnestly exhorting them, ever considering how you can save souls by your eloquence, or else by working with your hands to make reparation for your past sins.

Never hesitate to give, and when you do give, never grumble; then you will know the one who will repay you. Preserve the traditions you have received, adding nothing and taking nothing away. The evildoer will ever be hateful to you. Be fair in your judgments. Never stir dissension, but act as peacemaker and reconcile the quarrelsome. Confess your sins, and do not begin to pray with a guilty conscience.

Such then is the way of light.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

 

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Memorial of Saint Alphonsus Liguori, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

“You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. ... Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:13, 18.)

Origen of Alexandria (part 2 of Pope Benedict’s reflections on Origen) comments on this verse from the Gospel proclaimed at Mass today:

“Salt is useful for so many purposes in human life! What need is there to speak about this? Now is the proper time to say why Jesus’ disciples are compared with salt. Salt preserves meats from decaying into stench and worms. It makes them edible for a longer period. They would not last through time and be found useful without salt. So also Christ’s disciples, standing in the way of the stench that comes from the sins of idolatry and fornication, support and hold together this whole earthly realm.

But the “one dot” is not only the iota of the Greeks but also that which among the Hebrews is called the yod. And the “one iota” or “one dot” can symbolically be said to be Jesus, since the beginning of his name is written not only by Greeks with an iota but also by Hebrews with a yod. So Jesus will be the one dot, the Word of God in the law which does not pass from the law until all is accomplished. But the iota might also be (as he himself says) the Ten Commandments of the law, for everything else passes away, but these do not pass away. But neither does Jesus pass away; if he “falls to the ground”8 he does so willingly, in order to bear much fruit. Again, the “one iota” or “one dot” has mastery over things both in heaven and on earth.” (Fragment 91 and Fragment 99.)

Collect

O God,
Who constantly raise up
in Your Church new examples of virtue,
grant that we may follow
so closely in the footsteps
of the Bishop Saint Alphonsus
in his zeal for souls
as to attain the same rewards
that are his in heaven.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
Who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

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On the love of Christ

Saint Alphonsus Liguori

Bishop and Doctor of the Church

An excerpt from his work, Treatise on the Practice of Loving Jesus Christ

MEMORIAL: Saint Alphonsus Liguori

All holiness and perfection of soul lies in our love for Jesus Christ our God, who is our Redeemer and our supreme good. It is part of the love of God to acquire and to nurture all the virtues which make a man perfect.

Has not God in fact won for himself a claim on all our love? From all eternity he has loved us. And it is in this vein that he speaks to us: “O man, consider carefully that I first loved you. You had not yet appeared in the light of day, nor did the world yet exist, but already I loved you. From all eternity I have loved you.”

Since God knew that man is enticed by favors, he wished to bind him to his love by means of his gifts: “I want to catch men with the snares, those chains of love in which they allow themselves to be entrapped, so that they will love me.” And all the gifts which he bestowed on man were given to this end. He gave him a soul, made in his likeness, and endowed with memory, intellect and will; he gave him a body equipped with the senses; it was for him that he created heaven and earth and such an abundance of things. He made all these things out of love for man, so that all creation might serve man, and man in turn might love God out of gratitude for so many gifts.

But he did not wish to give us only beautiful creatures; the truth is that to win for himself our love, he went so far as to bestow upon us the fullness of himself. The eternal Father went so far as to give us his only Son. When he saw that we were all dead through sin and deprived of his grace, what did he do? Compelled, as the Apostle says, by the superabundance of his love for us, he sent his beloved Son to make reparation for us and to call us back to a sinless life.

By giving us his Son, whom he did not spare precisely so that he might spare us, he bestowed on us at once every good: grace, love and heaven; for all these goods are certainly inferior to the Son: He who did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for all of us: how could he fail to give us along with his Son all good things?

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

 

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Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Priest

“Or what king marching into battle would not first sit down and decide whether with ten thousand troops he can successfully oppose another king advancing upon him with twenty thousand troops?” (Luke 14:31.)

Saint Gregory of Nyssa (part 2 of the background of Saint Gregory of Nyssa is found here) offers the following insight on this verses from today’s Gospel:

“The Gospel somewhere says that a person who begins to build a tower but stops with the foundations and never completes it is ridiculous. What do we learn from this parable? We learn that we should work to bring every aspiration to a conclusion, completing the work of God by an elaborate building up of his commandments. One stone does not make a complete tower, nor does one commandment bring the perfection of the soul to its desired measure. It is necessary to both erect the foundation and, as the apostle says, “to lay upon it a foundation of gold and precious stones.”18 That is what the products of the commandments are called by the prophet when he says, “I have loved your commandment more than gold and much precious stone.” (On Virginity, 18.)

Collect

O God, Who raised up
Saint Ignatius of Loyola in Your Church
to further the greater glory of Your name,
grant that by his help we may imitate him
in fighting the good fight on earth
and merit to receive with him a crown in heaven.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

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Put inward experiences to the test to see if they come from God

Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Priest and Founder of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits)

An excerpt from the work, The Life of Saint Ignatius in His Own Words by Luis Gonzalez

Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Ignatius was passionately fond of reading worldly books of fiction and tales of knight-errantry. When he felt he was getting better, he asked for some of these books to pass the time. But no book of that sort could be found in the house; instead they gave him a life of Christ and a collection of the lives of saints written in Spanish.

By constantly reading these books he began to be attracted to what he found narrated there. Sometimes in the midst of his reading he would reflect on what he had read. Yet at other times he would dwell on many of the things which he had been accustomed to dwell on previously. But at this point our Lord came to his assistance, insuring that these thoughts were followed by others which arose from his current reading.

While reading the life of Christ our Lord or the lives of the saints, he would reflect and reason with himself: “What if I should do what Saint Francis or Saint Dominic did?” In this way he let his mind dwell on many thoughts; they lasted a while until other things took their place. Then those vain and worldly images would come into his mind and remain a long time. This sequence of thoughts persisted with him for a long time.

But there was a difference. When Ignatius reflected on worldly thoughts, he felt intense pleasure; but when he gave them up out of weariness, he felt dry and depressed. Yet when he thought of living the rigorous sort of life he knew the saints had lived, he not only experienced pleasure when he actually thought about it, but even after he dismissed these thoughts, he still experienced great joy. Yet he did not pay attention to this, nor did he appreciate it until one day, in a moment of insight, he began to marvel at the difference. Then he understood his experience: thoughts of one kind left him sad, the others full of joy. And this was the first time he applied a process of reasoning to his religious experience. Later on, when he began to formulate his spiritual exercises, he used this experience as an illustration to explain the doctrine he taught his disciples on the discernment of spirits.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

 

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Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

“So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and the reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do…” (Jeremiah 18:3-4.)

Saint Jerome offers the following insight on these verses from today’s First Reading:

“Whatever is discerned by the eyes arrives to the judgment and understanding of the soul through every other sense, through hearing, smelling, tasting and touching, but is retained even more so by the mind. Thus, the prophet was commanded to go to the potter’s house and there to hear the instructions of the Lord. “When,” he says, “I arose and went down to the potter’s house, he was making something on the wheel,” which the Seventy translated with the ambiguous and misleading word “stones,” for abanim and organum, both meaning “potter’s wheel,” are sometimes called stones, depending on the region and local dialect.

“When,” he continues, “I discerned that the vessel that he was making out of clay suddenly fell apart,” this occurred by the providential agency of God, that the artisan’s hand, unwittingly, would create a parable by its mistake. Then the potter who had destroyed his clay vessel on the turning wheel made of it something else, as seemed to him the thing to do. And immediately the Lord said to the prophet, “If this potter has such power that he can remake something out of the same clay that disintegrated, am I not able to do the same for you who seem to have perished?” Moreover, that he might signify thereby the freedom of the will, the Lord said that he would announce punishments and rewards to the nations and to this king or that king. It was not that these events that he had predicted were to happen, but rather that good may be brought out of evil if they repented, or evil brought out of good if, after their resolutions, they returned to sin.

Our point here is not that God was ignorant of what the nations and kings would do, but rather that he had endowed the human person with his own will, so that he would receive either a reward or a punishment on the basis of his own merit. Yet, what happens is not entirely dependent on a person, but also the grace that God has bestowed on all, for the freedom of the will must be restrained so that the grace of the Giver would excel in all things, according to the prophecy: “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor for nothing; unless the Lord keeps the city, do the guards watch over it in vain.” For “it is not of the one who wills or of the one who runs, but of the God who has mercy.” (Six Books on Jeremiah, 4.)

Collect

Stir up Your power, we pray,
O lord, and come,
that with you to protect us,
we may find rescue
from the pressing dangers of our sins,
and with You to set us free,
we may be found worthy of salvation.
Who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

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The Church is the bride of Christ

Saint Cyril of Jerusalem

Bishop and Father of the Church

An excerpt from his work, Catecheses, 18.

Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

The Catholic Church is the distinctive name of this holy Church which is the mother of us all. She is the bride of our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God (for Scripture says: Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her). She is the type and she bears the image of the Jerusalem above that is free and is the mother of us all, that Jerusalem which once was barren but now has many children.

The first assembly, that is, the assembly of Israel, was rejected, and now in the second, that is, in the Catholic Church, God has appointed first, apostles, second, prophets, third, teachers then workers of miracles, then healers, helpers, administrators and speakers in various tongues, as Paul says; and together with these is found every sort of virtue—wisdom and understanding, self-control and justice, mercy and kindness, and invincible patience in persecution. This Church in earlier days, when persecution and afflictions abounded, crowned her holy martyrs with the varied and many-flowered wreaths of endurance. But now when God has favored us with times of peace, she receives her due honor from kings and men of high station, and from every condition and race of mankind. And while the rulers of the different nations have limits to their sovereignty, the holy Catholic Church alone has a power without boundaries throughout the entire world. For Scripture says: God has made peace her border.

Instructed in this holy Catholic Church and bearing ourselves honorably, we shall gain the kingdom of heaven and inherit eternal life. For the sake of enjoying this at the Lord’s hands, we endure all things. The goal set before us is no trifling one; we are striving for eternal life. In the Creed, therefore, after professing our faith “in the resurrection of the body,” that is, of the dead, which I have already discussed, we are taught to believe “in life everlasting,” and for this as Christians we are struggling.

Now real and true life is none other than the Father, who is the fountain of life and who pours forth his heavenly gifts on all creatures through the Son in the Holy Spirit, and the good things of eternal life are faithfully promised to us men also, because of his love for us.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

 

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Memorial of Saint Martha

“When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him; but Mary sat at home.” (John 11:20.)

Origen of Alexandria (part 2 of Pope Benedict’s reflections on Origen) comments on this verse from the Gospel proclaimed at Mass today:

“Since Mary is a type of the contemplative life, Martha of the active, Lazarus of him who has fallen into sins after believing, naturally Mary and Martha mourn for Lazarus, and in mourning they need the comfort concerning their brother which the Jews wish to bring them. But before the fullness of time, words despair of being able to make the sister of the dead cease from weeping over him.

Martha seems more eager than Mary, since Martha first ran to Jesus, while Mary remained sitting in the house. Therefore Martha, who was somewhat inferior in this regard, ran to Jesus while Mary remains in the house to receive him as one who was able to bear his presence. And she would not have gone out from her house if she had not heard her sister say, “The teacher has arrived and is calling you.” And she did not simply get up but did so quickly, and falling at Jesus’ feet said what she said. The other sister had not fallen at his feet.” (Fragment 80.)

Collect

Almighty ever-living God,
whose Son was pleased to be welcomed
in Saint Martha’s home as a guest,
grant, we pray,
serving Christ faithfully
in our brothers and sisters,
we may merit to be received by you
in the halls of heaven.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son,
Who lives and reigns with You
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

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Blessed are they who deserved to receive Christ in their homes

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Bishop and Great Western Father of the Church

An excerpt from his Sermon 103

Memorial of Saint Martha

Our Lord’s words teach us that though we labor among the many distractions of this world, we should have but one goal. For we are but travellers on a journey without as yet a fixed abode; we are on our way, not yet in our native land; we are in a state of longing, not yet of enjoyment. But let us continue on our way, and continue without sloth or respite, so that we may ultimately arrive at our destination.

Martha and Mary were sisters, related not only by blood but also by religious aspirations. They stayed close to our Lord and both served him harmoniously when he was among them. Martha welcomed him as travellers are welcomed. But in her case, the maidservant received her Lord, the invalid her Savior, the creature her Creator, to serve him bodily food while she was to be fed by the Spirit. For the Lord willed to put on the form of a slave, and under this form to be fed by his own servants, out of condescension and not out of need. For this was indeed condescension, to present himself to be fed; since he was in the flesh he would indeed be hungry and thirsty.

Thus was the Lord received as a guest who came unto his own and his own received him not; but as many as received him, he gave them the power to become sons of God, adopting those who were servants and making them his brothers, ransoming the captives and making them his co-heirs. No one of you should say: “Blessed are they who have deserved to receive Christ into their homes!” Do not grieve or complain that you were born in a time when you can no longer see God in the flesh. He did not in fact take this privilege from you. As he says: Whatever you have done to the least of my brothers, you did to me.

But you, Martha, if I may say so, are blessed for your good service, and for your labors you seek the reward of peace. Now you are much occupied in nourishing the body, admittedly a holy one. But when you come to the heavenly homeland will you find a traveller to welcome, someone hungry to feed, or thirsty to whom you may give drink, someone ill whom you could visit, or quarrelling whom you could reconcile, or dead whom you could bury?

No, there will be none of these tasks there. What you will find there is what Mary chose. There we shall not feed others, we ourselves shall be fed. Thus what Mary chose in this life will be realized there in all its fullness; she was gathering fragments from that rich banquet, the Word of God. Do you wish to know what we will have there? The Lord himself tells us when he says of his servants, Amen, I say to you, he will make them recline and passing he will serve them.

Glory to the Father
and to the Son
and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and will be forever. Amen

 

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