Today we celebrate Christ the King, and it is the end of the Church year so we will be moving on from Matthew to Mark, so I want to tie a bow on this, really just tying everything together that we have been talking about.
So we are getting to the end of the parables in Matthew’s Gospel, and this one has always been one of my favorites, but I’ve found a new appreciation for it in looking for that twist. Before we get there, we often think of talents as skills or abilities, God given usually, but in the time of Jesus, a Talent was a value of money. A silver Talent would have been worth 20 years worth of wages, so in today’s terms, worth about a million dollars. So the Master gives 5 million dollars, 2 million, and 1 million and goes away.
At the end of the Church year we focus on “the Last Things.” These readings are actually funeral readings. Well not so much the first one but definitely the second two, I’ve used both at funerals recently, in fact the reading from Paul’s 1st letter to the Thessalonians was read at my funeral (today/yesterday). (In my green funeral book they are numbered E12 and G3.)
Today’s readings are about spiritual leadership. They are directed at the priests, no doubt, but I believe there are some good lessons in here for everyone. First, in our Gospel, you’ll notice that Jesus recognizes legitimate authority. He says, “The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses. Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example.” The “Chair of Moses” is the chair of power so to speak, it is the legitimate leader’s seat. In the Catholic Church, there are several levels, the first being the Pope’s chair in Rome for the whole Church, second being the bishop’s chair in the Cathedral for the local area Church, and the third being the Pastor’s chair in the individual church.
In today’s gospel the Pharisees ask Jesus a complicated question. It is complicated because they have made it complicated over the years. If you think about it, the first and only law was: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” But they couldn’t even get that single law right.
Today’s gospel reading centers around a coin, a single denarius, which had the image of “the Caesar” on it. Some of these coins still exist in the world, and much like our coins today, the profile picture of the person also had an inscription which read “Caesar Augustus Tiberius, son of the Divine Augustus.”
We just heard the parable of the Royal Wedding Feast, and I hope you can see here that as with Jesus's other parables, this is one of those stories that is rooted in common experiences that even today people will be familiar with - like being invited to a wedding and to the reception.
These readings remind me of a conversation I was having with a woman recently about something that she was doing. She asked me if something she was doing was wrong in the eyes of God and I confirmed that it was, and her response was, “well, if it is so wrong, why hasn’t God just killed me for it?”
One of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever had was detasseling. In central Iowa this is a very common job for high schoolers, basically we would get up early, and pretty much at sunrise we were out in the field, walking rows of corn, pulling the tassels, the very top piece of the corn, we would pull that out of the female stalks of corn so that the male ears would pollinate the corn, basically making the hybrids for the seed corn.
A central theme in today’s readings is perseverance in our prayer and our worship. The first reading might have been unthinkable to the faithful Israelites at the time it was written, it said, “The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, ministering to him, loving the name of the LORD, and becoming his servants—all who keep the sabbath free from profanation and hold to my covenant,”
In our first reading we have one of the characters and situations I was referring to last weekend, Elijah in the presence of God, the prophet hid his face so he did not see God, so in the Transfiguration which we celebrated last weekend, Elijah finally got to see God face to face.
The Transfiguration reveals the relationship between the “humanity” and the “divinity” of Jesus. One of the reasons it’s such an important feast is because it is the one time in the Gospels that Jesus’ divine nature - which is normally hidden under His human nature - His divine appearance is made visible to Peter, James and John.
This weekend is the last of our three weeks of parables describing the Kingdom of Heaven, and as before we will continue looking at the twists found in these parables. The twists or the unexpected aspects can help us understand what Jesus is trying to tell us about the Kingdom.
As promised we have more parables this week, three more focused on the Kingdom of Heaven, and as I said last week, by looking for the twist, or the unexpected part of the parable, we can come to better understand the point that Jesus is trying to make.
Today’s Gospel is the first of a series of Parables that we will hear over the next few weeks. Parables are more than just analogies or comparison stories, they are more like riddles, they contain some sort of twist or surprise in them. As we heard today, parables are often hard to understand, but usually if you can spot the twist then you can understand the meaning of the parable.
Again this weekend we have another reading that is typically used for funerals. The Gospel from Matthew we just heard is often used because of this line in the middle, “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Mt 11:28) Many people work so hard throughout their lives so the family members planning the funeral interpret this passage to mean, “come now, you hard worker, and finally take your rest in Heaven.”
It’s an exciting weekend here at Nativity, a lot going on. First, July 2nd is Nativity’s 100 year anniversary of being a parish. The first Mass wasn’t held until December 23rd, 1923, but the parish was created or incorporated by the Archbishop on this date, with the cornerstone being dedicated on July 4th, so we are one hundred, pretty cool. We will be doing some great stuff to celebrate our 100th, stay tuned for that. One thing I’m hoping for is to get the Bishop here to celebrate an anniversary Mass…
After my mom died, I had this immediate weird thought that seemed strange even to myself, my thought was this: “I want to be better.” My mom’s death made me want to be better, to live a better life, and it wasn’t like I was living a bad life or anything, I just knew I could improve in some ways.
This weekend we celebrate Father’s Day, and it’s hard for me not to think of my own Father. I am blessed with a great Father - a loving, faith-filled, Holy Spirit guided Father - who has really helped me become the man that I am today - the priest that I am today.
Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The Trinity is a core teaching of our faith, in fact, that is how we define a Christian in general is if they believe in the Trinity or not. At the same time, the Trinity is a very difficult concept to preach about, most preachers really struggle this weekend with what to say, how to define it, how to talk about God as three in one, it is such a mystery.