Scripture readings for the Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Sirach 27:4-7
Psalm 92:2-3, 13-14, 15-16
1 Corinthians 15:54-58
Luke 6:39-45
Have we been paying attention? For the last couple weeks, the Sunday scriptures have given us a healthy dose of what is commonly called “The Sermon on the Plain” – Luke’s version of the more famous “Sermon on the Mount” found in Matthew. The lessons have been familiar – but strikingly direct.
What we hear is Jesus speaking directly to his disciples – the word “you” pops up a lot – while giving explicit instructions on how to live as his disciples. It’s not easy listening.
Jesus has advised to love your enemies, pray for your persecutors, give away your cloak. This Sunday’s excerpt adds to that a lesson against hypocrisy: “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own…You hypocrite!” And he concludes: “A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good.”
We get a sense of a summation here – a broad but incisive conclusion – and maybe the Church has given us these readings at this moment for a significant reason. The time we call “ordinary” is drawing to a close. Wednesday, we begin Lent. A journey of prayer, fasting and almsgiving is about to start.
You might consider these Gospel readings as lessons for the road.
Have we been paying attention?
What we’ve been hearing these last few weeks is something more than filler, biding the time between Christmas and Lent. These teachings are foundational – and among the most challenging for anyone who might claim the label “Christian.”
There have been lessons about mercy and compassion, about forgiveness and understanding. We’ve heard warnings about material success and living in physical comfort. And this Sunday, the disciples hear about the hazards of judging others. There’s been a lot to absorb, and much to leave listeners both inspired and convicted. A prevailing message is this simple but necessary reminder: being a disciple isn’t easy.
Be prepared to be challenged.
Be prepared to need to change.
That seems a very good theme to carry with us as we get ready to have our brows stained with ashes. These are ideas we should all carry with us in prayer as we begin the walk toward Calvary and, beyond that, to Easter.
The weeks ahead will be days for reflection, for sacrifice, for giving and for forgiving. Lent is a good time for taking stock – and taking a fearless inventory of our own shortcomings. Weeks before spring actually arrives, it’s an opportunity to begin some spiritual spring cleaning – to examine our consciences, measure our days, give up bad habits and sinful attachments and, ultimately, give more of ourselves to those in need.
If you’re looking for some robust spiritual reading for Lent, look no further than the Gospels we’ve encountered these past few weeks from Luke. “The Sermon on the Plain” can serve as a handy reminder of what we are called to do, and who we are called to follow – Jesus even advises us to work to “be perfect as the Father is perfect!”
In a few days, we will present ourselves to be marked, to declare to the world that we are fallen people in need of redemption, imperfect and sinful souls embarking on a project to be better, to do better, to live better, to love better – all in anticipation of the most important event in human history, Easter. We work to be prepared. We pray to be ready. We know we can never be worthy.
But we can try to get there.
As we turn the page on Ordinary Time and prepare to enter the extraordinary season that is Lent, Jesus has been giving us pointers for the days to come. Things to look for. Pitfalls to avoid. Attitudes to adjust.
Have we been paying attention?
Deacon Greg Kandra is an award-winning author and journalist, and creator of the blog “The Deacon’s Bench.”
Pope Francis reminds us ‘the Church is not an NGO but a love story’
By Elizabeth Scalia, OSV News
In the wake of recent headlines about the bruising cuts made to federal funding of various Catholic ministries, Pope Francis’s words from his 2013 apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” seem timely and worth pondering: “I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. … my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security.”
It is good to read the whole apostolic exhortation, but that paragraph reminds us that innovative religious women and men essentially created the notion of social services, both in the United States and elsewhere. They were doing massive good for the poor, the migrants, the oppressed, the sick, the orphaned and uneducated (and doing it long before governments ever thought to get involved). Among other things, religious like Mother Cabrini, Elizabeth Ann Seton and Katharine Drexel and their spiritual daughters and sons established food-security outlets, family support centers, home health care programs, migrant services, orphanages, hospitals and schools.
Almost all these ministries were funded by the dimes and dollars of faithful Catholics who may not have grasped finely nuanced theologies, but who recognized need and understood their purpose as Christians, which was (and is) to serve others as we would be served.
The pope’s warning about “structures which give us a false sense of security” may someday be called prophetic, particularly when it comes to Church dependence upon secular or bureaucratic structures. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the direction U.S. social services are headed, but that is not new – in fact, it has been true since at least 2011. Then, the USCCB’s Migration and Refugee Services was dealt a financial and ministerial blow when the Obama administration denied the bishop’s anti-human trafficking grant application because of Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion.
Of course our important aid programs must continue, but given how easy it is for government – any government, in any era – to withhold funding on a whim, perhaps we Catholics should rethink our too-deep dependence upon such support, which makes our work so vulnerable and (perhaps) keeps us from closely stewarding what monies we have beyond (at this point) paying off lawsuits. We rightly demand a preferential option for the poor, but does that mean we must make ourselves — and the poor – so reliant upon governments that without their funding our ministries dry up?
In an April 2013 homily, Pope Francis said something else worth remembering on this subject: “The Church is not an NGO. It’s a love story … But when organization takes first place, love falls down and the Church, poor thing, becomes an NGO. And this is not the way forward.”
He repeated the thought in the 2018 apostolic exhortation, “Gaudete et Exsultate,” where he warned against a Christianity that “becomes a sort of NGO, stripped of the luminous mysticism so evident in the lives of Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Vincent de Paul, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, and many others.”
Francis wants us – the Church that is the People of God – to go out from ourselves and bring forth ministries to others that are about not just the material but the spiritual and Christ-filled. The dearth of religious men and women who were able and willing to seek out the margins and serve the poorest, the neediest among us certainly means the laity must step up and become founders and servants; we will have to learn how to build greatness upon something more than the material, believing once again in the power of small mustard seeds over transient allocations.
The ongoing lesson of the crucifix is that sometimes disturbing things are permitted so that something great might be enabled to occur. Perhaps losing immense government funding is meant as a spiritual challenge for us to become once more that sacrificing, socially inventive and innovative Church of yore – that great “love story,” in the world but not of it – because we know full well that this world, and its powers, is not all there is.
