Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 22:1-14

There was a little church in the poor part of town whose members didn't have much but very loving. A new family moved into the neighborhood and it was apparent that they had threadbare patched up clothing, so the pastor asked the congregation to have a clothing drive to help out the family. And they did. With smiles and well wishes, they presented the almost new clothing to the family, with the invitation that they would be welcome at the little church. The father of the family assured the membership that they would be there. The next Sunday came and went, and the Sunday after that. Finally the pastor went to the father and said, “you certainly don't have to come to our church, but I thought you were going to when we talked.” The father replied, “Well, we were, but when we got all cleaned up and dressed in those clothes, we decided we'd be more comfortable with the Episcopalians.”

This is the third parable Jesus addresses to the chief priests and elders. Two weeks ago it was the two sons; last week it was the tenants of the vineyard who refuse to give the owner what is rightfully his; and then we come to this week. And again, it's easy to read this as still another place where Jesus says, “You Jews had your chance! I'm going to hand over the kingdom to the gentiles!”

But before we jump to that, a little background. The king is planning a wedding feast for his son. Only the best people are invited. The king has told all the A-list upper class high society people that the feast will take place on a particular day, and they should hold the date. And the date comes, and he sends out his servants to invite the guests. So far, so good. Everyone listening to Jesus knew about those kind of parties. Probably none of them had ever been invited to one, though. And they had all heard this comparison before – there is more than one description of God's kingdom as a wedding banquet, or at least a banquet, in the Hebrew scriptures. And while it helped to be Jewish to be invited, it was no guarantee; you had to also be a righteous person.

Then Jesus starts to expand a bit. People are turning the king down! And for stupid reasons. The social event of the century, and you have to check out your farm? You can't take the day off? And of course even more shocking is the fact that the king's invitation is met with violence and even murder. Now we could pause here and say, if the king is God, what next? It doesn't sound like God when the king marshals his army and wipes out the city and its inhabitants; it doesn't sound like our God, at least. But put that aside for a minute; Jesus does not imply that the king is God. And the next thing is almost as shocking. The king throws open the banquet to everyone his servants can round up, and finally the banquet hall is full. It doesn't appear that it matters whether you are upper class or lower class, even good or bad – you are invited.

And then those who were listening heard the most shocking statement of all. A man is thrown out, bound hand and foot, because he isn't wearing a wedding garment. They knew that the people who had come to the banquet would have been given a simple white tunic to wear over their clothing – the wedding garment.

Now if you were invited to a wedding today you might have been given a card with your name and assigned seat on it. Lets say you showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, tossed the card on the floor and went up and sat at the head table. You might get thrown out also, and that's kind of what the man in the parable was like.

So what do we make of all this? How does it apply to us? And really, it has nothing to do with the Jews and the Gentiles. Matthew wrote at a time where this division was just beginning, and some communities of Christians still considered themselves to be Jews.

I think it's like this. Jesus is still answering the question, what is the kingdom of heaven like? And he starts with a familiar image – its like a wedding feast; and only the right people are invited, people who had the right status, the right friends, the right amount of money. And it really helped to be a relative of the king.

But Jesus goes on to say that actually, everyone is welcome, good or bad. Everyone is invited to the banquet. So Jesus is saying that there are no preconditions to the invitation; you don't have to pray a certain way or live like a Pharisee, or have Abraham as your ancestor. And you can reject the invitation. If you ignore it, that's up to you. If you actively oppose the kingdom, there will be consequences.

But if you do accept the invitation, you will have to change your life, you will have to, as Saint Paul tells us, “put on Christ”. Every time we baptize someone in our church, he or she puts on a white garment to symbolize this exact thing. The man who was thrown out accepted the invitation but refused to change, refused to be led by the Spirit of Christ.

If we put on Christ, that means that we make a conscious effort to put God first in our lives. Jesus was a man of prayer, and the reason he prayed was to learn what God wanted of him, not to ask God for favors. And his prayers were often prayers of thanksgiving, because he had seen the Father at work in the world. And that should be our goal – to learn what God has in mind for us and to be grateful for what we've been given.

But if we put on Christ that means we make a conscious effort to notice the people who God puts in our path – to notice that they, like us, are beloved of the Father and that Jesus died for them. It's our task to see their need and try to do something about it – and everyone needs something if only a sign of connection and solidarity, like a smile or compliment or a serious inquiry such as “How are you?” And if they haven't heard the invitation to the wedding banquet, we may be the messengers that have been sent out by the king.

Twenty seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 21:33-43

One of my facebook friends is a minister in another Christian denomination. Every now and then I'll see a post about how awful it is that there are people who oppose same sex marriage, or bigots who oppose gender assignment surgery for children who don't feel comfortable with their biologic sex,

or people who feel that we should have no barriers to immigration or citizenship. Needless to say, my friend is pro-abortion, pro-gun confiscation, anti-police – you name the left wing cause of the day, my friend embraces it. My facebook friend is very passionate and vocal about these positions. And my friend claims all of these positions are based on gospel values. My friend is a tenant in the vineyard.

When I read one of Jesus' parables, I try to look for the challenge that is there. This is one of those where it's hard at first to see the challenge. It's hard to read this parable and not think that Jesus is talking about the Jews, who rejected him, and us Christians, who have inherited the privilege of working in the vineyard, because we haven't rejected him.

The Church does us a favor here, though, in having us listen to the Old Testament reading and the Psalm, both about vineyards. In Isaiah, the prophet is reflecting on the history of the people of Israel, who have been so carefully protected and built up by God, and who continue to rebel. Now God has had enough. He is going to quit taking care of the vineyard and let it go to ruin.

In the psalm, the writer is reflecting on what seems to be God's withdrawing his protection from his people. This is one of those psalms of lamentation, which ends with the prayer that God will restore his watchful care.

The people who were listening to Jesus probably knew these two writings by heart; they heard them read every year in the synagogue, and if you were a Jewish man, you made an effort to study scripture and understand it. The people listening were quite conscious that they had become the neglected vineyard, the vineyard in ruins. They were subject to the Romans, they were ruled by a tyrant – and if you lived in Jerusalem, you could always see some poor soul hanging from a cross. The people listening to Jesus longed for the God who had abandoned them to return.

Jesus tells a vineyard parable but this time with a twist. The vineyard owner has put his property in the hands of tenant farmers. These tenants would work the vineyard and then divide the crop according to the formula that had been agreed upon; usually they would get one third and the landlord would get two thirds. Not a way to get rich, but certainly you could raise a family and have a little left over. If you made your share into wine, you could probably make even more money.

But these tenant farmers decide to take the whole crop, and very foolishly, it seems, beat and kill the messengers of the owner, and ultimately kill his Son.

But if you think about it, the real fool here is the owner. Who in his right mind would send a second delegation when the first had been treated in that way? And who would then send his Son into that situation, thinking, “They will respect my Son.” Probably you and I wouldn't.

Now in the gospel it says Jesus addressed this parable to the chief priests and the elders. But when he asks the question, “What will the landowner do to those tenants when he comes?” who is answering the question? Jesus preached to crowds; he didn't pull the chief priests and elders into a room where only they could hear. In fact, I suspect there weren't any chief priests or elders in the crowd. Jesus probably addressed the parable to them, but they were not the ones who answered his question. The crowd did. And when he replies, “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you” he is still rhetorically addressing the Chief Priests and the elders. It is their failure he is pointing to, not that of the people who are following him, who, after all, are mostly Jews from the lower classes – farmers, fishermen, tradespeople – even tax collectors and prostitutes.

I think this is important, because then the condemnation becomes a lesson for us as well. The leaders of the people had been given ample time to lead the people into the kingdom of Heaven, but had failed over and over again. From what we know, the priestly caste was pretty corrupt, in contrast to the Pharisees, who were misguided, but very sincere. The priests tended to be Sadducees, who rejected the idea of resurrection and were favored by Herod. They were simply preying on the people and playing at religion.

As we will learn further in the Gospels, Jesus explicitly promises his apostles that they will be the ones who will rule over the people who are in the kingdom of heaven. But the coming of Jesus is something the apostles themselves come to realize is tied up in a new kind of priesthood – a priesthood of the whole people. It's no longer the job of the leadership to cultivate the vineyard; it is the job of, as St Peter says, “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession...”

God did not take the vineyard away from the Jews and give it to Christians. God took the vineyard away from the chief priests and the elders, and put it into our hands. And not just our hands, the hands of everyone who wants to do God's will upon the earth. The real message is that no human being can blame someone else for the destruction of the vineyard, for the failure of the vineyard to yield fruit. The parable is telling us that human beings are meant to bring about God's kingdom; we all are tenants, and if we decide we should be the owners and that is our mindset, then we too have killed the son and deserve the punishment the landowner will mete out.

The parable tells us that the landowner, Our Father, has a great deal of patience, patience beyond what any human being would have. But even God's patience runs out. So the question we should ask ourselves this week is, “What will we have to show the vineyard owner when he comes to collect his share? How are we building up the kingdom of heaven?” ,

Twenty sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 21:28 – 32

There was a rich man who became very ill and his doctor told him that he might not survive. “Doctor,” he said, “there is so much I want to do with my life. If you save me I'll donate a million dollars to this hospital.” After a while he recovered. Weeks went by. One day the doctor ran across the rich man and reminded him of his promise. The rich man laughed and said, “I must have really been sick to say something like that!”

In one translation of this gospel reading, Jesus asks, “Which of these honored his father?” To the surprise of missionaries to certain African villages, about half the people sided with the brother who said “yes” but did not do the work. And we know from studying the times when Jesus walked the roads of Palestine, the people there would probably feel the same way. Because people would imagine these scenes taking place in the pubic square – everyone would hear the dialogue between the father and the son, and for a son to publicly refuse a request from his father was dishonorable and insulting to the father. To these people the son who, though he had no intention of doing the work, answered his father with respect for his authority, was the one who honored his father.

And that's probably why modern translations have Jesus asking, “Which of these did the will of the father?” And of course we all agree with the pharisees that it was the first son. And Jesus goes on to compare the first son to the tax collectors and sinners, who were changing their lives in response to the preaching of John the Baptist, as opposed to the Pharisees and Scribes, who were diligently carrying out the letter of the law but forgetting that according to the prophets, God desired mercy, not sacrifice.

But I wonder what Jesus really said 2000 years ago in the Aramaic language he spoke? Because all we have are english translations of an ancient document written in Greek about 80 years after Jesus had ascended in to heaven. And the author of Matthew may not have even understood Hebrew, let alone Aramaic. Many of Jesus other parables make you stop and think. The translation we just heard doesn't seem to do that. Maybe Jesus was a little ambiguous when he asked the question; maybe he wanted everyone who heard him to ask, “which son am I?”

And we are probably both sons. I know I am. There have been many times in my life when I said I would do something but didn't, or made a promise that I didn't keep. There have been times when I've said something I didn't mean, because I didn't want to start a fight or get in a long argument. I remember a time when I was at a party and someone I knew approached me, having had a bit more to drink than he should have. He began insisting in a loud voice that radiation therapy was poison, that it did more harm than good, that doctors who used it were charlatans. I made a few statements in defense of radiation therapy, but he just got louder and angrier, so I ended up agreeing with him and suggesting he should go tell the doctor over there who actually was a radiation therapist.

And of course I'm the first son as well. Like you, I've had moments when I really didn't want to do something, it didn't matter who was asking; it was easier to just say no. But then after prayer, after second thought, I go ahead and do it. If you are a deacon or a doctor or a husband or wife or in fact anyone, you will have many moments in life when you will initially resist doing something you should do, but then end up doing it. An interesting difference between the two sons is that the first son did not have to struggle with himself to act as he did – he just lied. The second son, on the other hand, had to change his mind, had to repent, which is always a struggle.

But both sons have something in common; they say one thing and do another. It's secondary whether one does the will of his father and the other honors his father. When Jesus compares the tax collectors and sinners to the first son, he notes approvingly that these individuals have changed their lives in response to John's preaching, but what he doesn't point out is that those who have changed their lives in doing so have said yes to the father they want to serve. And when he compares the Scribes and Pharisees to the second son, he does not say they will not get into the kingdom of heaven, but that they were lagging behind those others and they should now change their minds and begin carrying out what they already knew and taught.

I think a final lesson can be learned from this parable, and Jesus lived his life demonstrating it. That is, authenticity should be a virtue we strive for. Whenever we say one thing and do another, even if we are like the second son, it speaks to division within us, and that is always something that holds us back. Jesus showed us a truly authentic life and that was part of his appeal to the crowds who followed him. His words and actions were always in alignment. He was the one who said, “My food and drink is to do the will of my Father”. And he was the one who told his disciples that the Son of Man had to go to Jerusalem to be tortured and killed and rise again, and he did that.

I've been the first son and I've been the second. And rather than beat myself up because I have shown myself to be inauthentic those times, I look at them now as opportunities for self examination, so that I can live a more authentic life, where my words and my actions are aligned, where I walk my talk, where I say what I mean. And it is a wonderful feeling to have moments when there is no division in my spirit, where, for a brief moment at least, I am in the kingdom of heaven.

Twenty Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 20:1 – 16

Many years ago I used to take two grandchildren on my Saturday errands. They were pretty young, about five and three. I would of course try to bribe them into being good by promising a treat. Once I let them pick out penny candy. After we got back to the car the three year old began crying; it turned out that she had grabbed two fistfuls of the candy and could not hold any more, and was very bothered by the fact that her brother might get some.

A lot of sermons on this gospel passage leave you to think that Jesus is telling us not to be jealous. That's a good message. But there is a lot more here than that. Before this passage is another which I'm sure you remember. It is about the rich young man who chose not to follow Jesus because he had many possessions. Jesus comments that it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Then Peter asks, “We have given up everything to follow you; what then will there be for us?” And Jesus promises that they will receive a hundred times what they have given up, and eternal life besides.

And that is when Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a man, a land owner...” The parable we hear today.

So Jesus is expanding on what he has just told Peter, about the reward for giving up everything and following him.

So we need to see this parable like Jesus' audience did. First of all, landowners, especially rich ones, were suspect. Part of the Mosaic law was that every fifty years land which had changed hands would be returned to it's original owner. The Jewish people, needless to say, stopped doing that fairly early on. People who were rich, and rich meant land, were considered to have done something dishonest to acquire their land. One thing they often did was try to pay their workers less than the usual daily wage. But this landowner agrees to the usual wage. The usual wage was enough to keep your family fed and have a little extra; it was sufficient, it was all you needed. So those first workers went away happy.

Then at the end of the day, seeing that those hired last are getting the usual daily wage as well, the first workers think they deserve more, but they don't get it. And that's the point Jesus is making to Peter. He is saying, you will be rewarded, Peter, you will receive all you can handle. But when you asked that question, your premise was wrong. In the kingdom of heaven, everyone will receive all they can handle. There is no finite pile of stuff to fight over, to be jealous about. God has no limits and wants to give you everything you need. There is no such thing as more or less in the kingdom of heaven.

So a lot of us might sympathize with the workers who bore the heat of the day; we might sympathize with Peter After all we come to church, we try to live good lives, we pray, we treat others with human decency. And we know there are people out there who don't. And the natural inclination is that we should get more than they do. But hard as it is to understand, that's not the way it is in the kingdom of heaven.

So why is Jesus telling us this parable? Maybe it's a little disappointing to know that Saint Theresa and John Paul II and I and my uncle Louis who drank heavily and had been married three times and had been sent to jail twice but had a deathbed conversion and received the sacraments – all of us are going to receive from God all that we need to be perfectly happy for all eternity. But the kingdom of heaven is here, now. We don't have to wait till we die. And God gives his children, whether Catholic or Muslim or atheist, all that they need to live, and live comfortably. He gives them what they need to be happy in this life and in the next. And those of us who are trying to bring about the kingdom have to turn away from that idea that God's gifts are finite and some of us deserve more than others. Those of us who are trying to bring about the kingdom have to remember that God wants everything good for everyone, and we are God's instruments in this world.

A man died and went to heaven. He had lived a very holy life, dedicating himself to helping the poor and disadvantaged. He had worked tirelessly for justice. He lived a life of prayer. And when he stood before the judgement seat, he was assured that he would have a wonderful mansion, a porche, lots of great friends – anything he wanted, for all eternity, because God wanted him to be happy. And the next person in line was a man who had lived on the margins. He got to church Christmas and Easter; he threw a dollar bill into the collection plate. He grudgingly gave a few dollars to the Saint Vincent de Paul society, but only when asked. And his temper tantrums made the lives of his wife and children miserable. And at the judgement seat, after weighing the good and the bad, he was told that he would begiven a wonderful mansion, a porche, lots of great friends, anything he wanted for all eternity, because God wanted him to be happy. And the first man's heart was filled with gratitude and he welcomed the second person with open arms.

Go and do likewise.

Twenty Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 18:21-35

There is a wonderful movie called “Rosanna” which is set in Italy. The hero runs a little bar and his wife seems to be sickly, and anticipates dying soon. Her one wish is to be buried next to the child they lost. However, the cemetary is rapidly filling up, and although there is land that could be used for a new cemetary, the owner was spurned by the woman before she married the barkeeper, and out of spite will not sell the land. Much of the movie has to do with the hero trying desperately to keep people from dying before his wife can be buried. In one particular scene, the hero has discovered a dead body, but propped him up in a chair to look like he is still alive. A mortal enemy discovers that the man is actually dead, and pulls out a pistol and says, “You think you can get away with me by dying? I'm coming after you!” And he shoots himself in the head, making the problem for our hero even worse.

This gospel passage shows us Jesus telling Peter that his followers are expected to forgive, seventy times seven times, which basically means “always”. To be a follower of Jesus, you have to forgive those who harm you. But the rest of the passage – what is it about? Jesus likens the Kingdom of heaven to the situation where a king is owed a huge debt, and is about to sell the debtor, his family and all his property to get what he is owed, but when the debtor begs him, saying he will pay the debt if he is given a little more time, the king forgives the whole debt. He does not say, Okay, you have more time, he forgives the debt. And then the debtor goes out and throttles a fellow servant who owes him a very small debt. The onlookers are offended and they tell the king, who takes the debtor and throws hands him over to the torturers until the whole debt is paid. And Jesus then threatens us with the statement that Our Father in heaven will do that to us if we do not forgive our brother in our hearts.

Three things catch my attention in this parable. The first is that the king forgives the whole debt. He had every right to his first option, which was to recover his money. He could have been more merciful and given terms of repayment to the man. But he forgave the whole debt. The second thing is that Jesus tells us Our Father in heaven will do this to us if we don't forgive. The third thing is that we have to forgive in our hearts.

A lot of people look at this passage and say that we are like that unjust servant, and the king in question is like God, and the second servant is like our neighbor, and that's certainly a legitimate way to look at the passage. But maybe if we plunge a little deeper.

The King forgives – and does so at the request of his servant. When the king forgives it is as though there is no debt, as though the servant had never borrowed anything. The pre-debt relationship is restored. And all because the servant asked. If the king is meant to represent God, then the king is also giving an example of Godly forgiveness – forgiveness in the heart, as it were. I think most of us can think of someone who offended us in the past, and maybe we forgave that person, and maybe we even are on fairly good terms again. But when we remember the offense, it sets off our adrenalin, we relive the offense, we can still feel how we felt then. I think that means we have not forgiven in our hearts. I think it means that at some level there is still a barrier between us.

When the servant refuses to extend the same kind of charity to his fellow servant, having him put into prison until he pays his debt, the wicked servant widens the gap between him and his fellow servant. His heart is hardened; his fellow servant becomes less of a human, more of a thing, in his eyes. And when this happens, the wicked servant also drives a wedge between himself and the king; in a way, the wicked servant has lost his status before the king as a fellow human being and as such pays the consequences.

Now although Jesus tells us that if we do not forgive in our hearts, our Father will do the same thing to us, it isn't that God is waiting for us to slip up, and then plans to punish us if we do. The real point is that as long as we have not forgiven others in our hearts, we really can't have that relationship with God which we seek. A heart full of resentment, bitterness, anger, is not a heart that can give itself entirely to God. And if we can't become one with God then we will be very sorry indeed.

Being a Christian takes work. Some of our fellow Christians say that all you need to do is acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior. Others say that if you avoid sin and frequent the sacraments, that's all you need. And you know, I suspect given the love God has for us, and given the fact that He gets what he wants, and that he wants every one of us to be with him in heaven, We'll probably wake up someday and know that we are going to heaven. But even in the next life, we can't come into his presence as long as there is anything holding us back. Maybe God will give us an infinite amount of time to forgive our brother in our heart, but it will certainly make things go a lot smoother if we learn to do this now. In fact some saints have said that forgiveness in the heart is literally the key to living in the Kingdom of heaven. Sometimes if we cannot forgive in our hearts, we actually need help. Being unable to forgive is one of the main reasons people see mental health professionals. So on this Sunday let us ask, is there anyone we need to forgive?

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Matthew 18:15-20

If you were a medical student you would probably have heard of this ethical problem. Imagine that you are in a supermarket and you notice that the person in front of you in the checkout line has an ugly black spot on his neck. You know enough to suspect this is a melanoma, but you aren't sure. The person is a total stranger. What should you do?

If you say, “I think you have a melanoma on your neck and you should get it checked out,” are you acting as a physician, and if you are, do you now have a doctor patient relationship with this person? Do you have to document that you made a potential diagnosis and recommendation? If you don't document, you could be in trouble. If you do, you are admitting that you practiced medicine. And if you are wrong about your diagnosis, you could end up being sued for causing mental anguish. On the other hand, if you say nothing there may be no legal consequences but what if the person goes on to die of something that might have been prevented? What would you do?

When you listen to the gospel today, Jesus is telling his apostles that there is no question in his mind as to what you do when you see that your brother is heading down the wrong path. You interfere. You first try to reason with him, one on one. If that works, wonderful. If not, then you get help. And if those you asked to help can't bring about a solution to the problem, you involve the whole community. And if that fails, Jesus is saying, kick him out, don't have anything more to do with him. Treat him like a tax collector or a gentile. Isn't that what he is saying?

But probably not. Because the whole thrust of Jesus' extended commandment is to do everything possible to bring the offender back into the community. He expects us to go out of our way to do this. And if nothing works, we are indeed to treat our brother as a tax collector or a gentile – just as Jesus did with Matthew, or Zaccheus; just as Jesus did with the Caananite woman or the Roman Centurion – never cutting the bond between us, always offering a loving response, even when it seems as though there isn't a chance for reconciliation.

When I was growing up in Montana we had a lot of Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, who lived in my home town. My grandfather was a Mormon, although he stopped going to church or participating in the faith when he married my Catholic grandmother. The Mormons have beliefs which we Catholics would find strange, and probably vice-versa. But they do have a strong sense of being a community. If you are a Mormon woman you and the other women in the parish get together every now and then to stock the church's basement with food and clothing. The purpose is to always be ready to help someone who has fallen on hard times. And if you are a Mormon man, you might be part of a delegation whose job it is to find out why someone didn't show up for the Sunday services. If the person is in trouble you arrange help; if the person is losing faith, you try to help them find it again. There aren't many Mormons around here, but when I was practicing medicine I cared for a patient who was active in the local church. He was being hospitalized because of complications of treatment, and every couple of days the delegation from the church would show up to ask him what he needed, how he was doing, and then they would pray over him. The Mormons take community seriously.

We Catholics, not so much. We can be at the same weekend Mass every week and sit in the same spot in the church. We can exchange the sign of peace with the lady behind us, year after year. And then one day we notice she isn't there anymore, and we don't know her name, and we briefly wonder what happened, and that's about it.

Joan and I recently took three grandsons on a trip to Colorado. Our grandchildren like to have us take them on trips, but they know one of the conditions is that they go to church with us – every day, if we can find a daily mass. But we went to one church for the Sunday mass and observed a wonderful custom. At the beginning of the Mass after reading the announcements the lector asked us to turn to someone we didn't know and ask them to pray during the mass for something we wanted from the Lord. If you and I are praying for the same thing, Isn't Jesus there with us? Doesn't Jesus guarantee an answer to our prayers? That's what he promises in today's gospel. This church, which had six weekend services, three priests and four deacons, and a full house for at least the Mass we went to, also had a sign as you left the church: It said, “You are now entering mission territory”.

Catholicism is not just about my relationship with God, about the wonderful sacraments we have, about the great intellectual tradition that has been handed down for two thousand years. It's not just about the schools and universities and hospitals and charities it runs. Jesus reminds us today that each soul is worth extending ourselves to the fullest; it is a very important part of our faith to look after each other, not just in a traditional sense of extending charity, but also in terms of keeping each other in the community.

There's a story about a man who stopped going to church. His pastor went to visit. They were sitting around a dying fire. The pastor asked why he wasn't going to church. He answered that he could worship God by himself, he didn't need the church. The minister said nothing, but moved the dying coals closer together until a flame shot up.

I think one of the big problems we have in our church is that we don't make a personal effort to bring our fellow Catholics back to the sacraments. If we did, think of what our parish would be like.

Twenty second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle A

Mathew 16:21-27

When I was much younger one of my doctor friends left his wife to take up with a younger woman. He told me that he felt bad about it, but as he explained to his wife, God wanted him to be happy, and he was much happier with his new girl friend than he had been with his wife. I guess a real question we could ask ourselves is, “Does God want us to be happy?” You might say, “not at the expense of the happiness of other people” or some other qualifier, but I think we all sort of believe that God is happy when we are happy.

But Today Jesus tells us that if we want to save our lives we have to lose them, if we want to follow him, we have to take up our cross; and even poor old Peter who said in effect, “God forbid that anything would happen to you that would make you unhappy,” was sharply rebuked and called Satan. Last week Jesus called him the rock upon which he would build his church. Today he calls him a stumbling block which is a better translation than the word “obstacle”.

I met a lady the other day who just had a major operation to deal with an abdominal cancer. She is not going to be cured; the disease is too far gone. With luck, she'll have a few months and they won't all be comfortable. And she said, understandably, “Why me?” She is in her early fifties, her children are off on their own, and she was looking forward to a few years of doing things she wanted to do, traveling a little, maybe going back to school. And she told me she prays, prays for a miracle, prays that this nightmare will just be a bad dream.

And none of us will escape, we will all have that day when the unthinkable happens, when we will face something devastating. And we will ask, “Why me? Doesn't God want me to be happy?”

Maybe today's gospel is God's answer to this question.

Some of you are aware of Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who is a prolific author of books about the spiritual life. I don't agree with everything he says, but he does make the interesting point that we human beings spend much of our lives defining ourselves. This not only involves who we think we are, but who we think we are not. As we get older that image becomes more fleshed out, and more firm; and when anything comes along that challenges the image we have of ourselves, we have to rebuild the image based on the new information, or we have to ignore the new information and cling to the image. Both take a lot of work, and that is what we mean by suffering. And one of the consquences of creating this image is that this is were we locate happiness as well. Happiness is when something seems to confirm what we believe about ourselves.

But if you are like me, and you are, you probably know by now that getting something you really want makes you happy for a very short time, and then you want something else. I have a basement full of power tools and a kitchen full of gadgets, most of which I once believed would add to my total amount of happiness.

Saint Augustine said, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God” He also recognized in his search for God that God was not to be found in external things, in the pleasures of the world, in the occupations of the mind – while he was searching without, he says, God was within,

Richard Rohr and probably Saint Augustine would agree that if we really want to find happiness, if we really want to avoid suffering, we have to recognize that the self which we try to make happy and try to keep from suffering is not real, it is only something we built up, and one of the tasks of growing is to recognize this and accept it. And when we do this, we begin to recognize that God, the God in whom I can finally rest, has been there all along.

Jesus tells his disciples that he has to go – he has to leave Galilee, where he has been treated like a rock star, where he has huge crowds following him and hanging on his every word. He has to go to Jerusalem. And he has to suffer. Because even Jesus, Son of God though he is, is human, and like all human beings, in order to meet God he has to undergo the pain that comes when he confronts the fact that the image he has of himself is not the real him. I don't think that's heresy, because the gospels tell us that Jesus was tempted, and temptation means nothing if you aren't attracted by that which is tempting you. I think that is why the harsh words to Peter – because that might have been a real temptation, and Jesus sees it as such. Jesus goes on to tell his disiciples that he has to be killed. And perhaps for most of us that will the point where we finally let go of that image of ourselves we have so carefully built up through the years of our lives. Certainly there is a kind of pain in elderly people who still see themselves as they used to be, but no one else does.

But Jesus has one last prediction – that he will rise again. And when Jesus rises again, he shows his oneness with God, which for you and I and Jesus requires letting go of ourselves and letting God raise us up.

So Jesus tells us today that if we spend our energies looking for happiness and avoiding pain, it won 't really work; we have to lose our lives in order to save them. And if we want to follow Jesus into resurrection, we have to carry our crosses through suffering and death.

So God does want us to be happy, but he wants real happiness for us, which can only come about when we have Him. And our hearts may be restless until they rest in God, but we know that God's heart is restless until he gets what he wants, which is to become one with you and I. Nothing else matters, because as Jesus tells us, what can anyone give in exchange for his soul?