In today's Gospel reading, Jesus is put to the test -- again.
The pharisee asks:
“Teacher,* which commandment in the law is the greatest?”
Jesus' answer is taken from the Torah.
He said to him,* “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
This is a citation from Deuteronomy, and is a well known Jewish prayer.
Jesus continues:
The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
This is a citation from Leviticus.
Leviticus is the first book of the laws of God, (not the first book of the Torah) while Deuteronomy is second law. In this we can see the saying fulfilled, the last shall be first, and the first last.
Since Monday, my daughter and her two daughters visited with me. We had a very nice visit.
We blew bubbles, went to the zoo, sang songs, read books and ate. Some of my family who lives nearby, came to visit too.
It was a good week.
FOX News has an opinion article of some goings on in Houston, TX, which is reported also in the Houston Chronicle.
Deacon Greg comments on it saying near the end:
But I’m left to wonder just what the city of Houston intends to do with those sermons it has subpoenaed, and what sort of evidence it believes they contain. “Look! He’s preaching Christ crucified! Outrageous!”
Yeah. So?
Maybe government authorities feel those sermons—which, one way or another, inevitably point to the cross—are supporting activity that is somehow criminal; maybe they fear they are stirring up political opposition to something the preachers feel is immoral or unjust. If that’s the case, well, Houston, we have a problem. The last time I checked, speech in America is still free. So is religion.
Any effort to thwart or inhibit that is tiptoeing perilously close to tyranny.
The Deacon must be unaware that a Catholic priest was arrested and charged with violating the Hate Speech law in Canada a few years ago, because he read aloud from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
As I said in a post last month:
Without "the design established by the Creator," there are no human rights.
At Townhall, Mona Charen has a column in counterpoint to Ted Olsen's pro gay marriage crap.
Charen:
Families began disintegrating and failing to form long before gay marriage became a cause celebre. But the movement for same-sex marriage pushes our culture in exactly the wrong direction because it forwards a damaging conception of marriage. Marriage, Olson says, "is about being with the person you love."
Not so. Marriage is about the welfare of children. The state confers benefits on opposite-sex couples because they conceive and raise children, and it believes that strong families are the foundation of strong polities. Libertarian claims that the state should remain aloof from family matters overlook the fact that when couples divorce or part ways, the state becomes involved in property division and custody, so it's unrealistic to keep the state out.
The problem with endorsing same-sex marriage is that it conveys to heterosexuals that mothers and fathers don't really matter.
I refer you to my post on Marriage as a gift of self, in imitation of the self giving of Jesus on the Cross.
Giving oneself completely, means all of oneself, always; your fruitfulness, your complementarity. Marriage isn't just unitive, it is at the same time procreative.
The deepest meaning of love is to give yourself freely for another; your whole self, not just some part, not just for some convenient period of time, but for the whole of your life, until death do you part. Since it is a free gift of self, marriage cannot be coerced, as it has been done routinely in many cultures throughout history. It was the coming of Christianity which brought that practice to an end in our culture.
Marriage is fruitful because the defining act of Marriage is sexual intercourse between the husband and wife. The husband and wife have complementary sexual organs. This complementarity is essential for the propagation of the species, and is essential for the culture to be passed along to the future. Marriage provides the stable building block on which culture and civilization stand, because the children who are the fruit of the sexual intercourse, are raised by their parents to be good solid members of their society.
Don't the states declare NULL marriages that are not consummated by sexual intercourse between the husband and wife?
I highly recommend reading Familiaris Consortio, and Deus Caritas Est.
Russell Shaw at Our Sunday Visitor has an article about the death of Fr Benedict Groeschel, CFR. EWTN broadcast the Mass of Christian Burial for him the other day.
There were two cardinals, a dozen Bishops, more then a hundred priests, uncounted members of religious congregations, and innumerable laity at the Mass in Newark New Jersey.
I have read several of his books, and corresponded with him a couple of times more than 15 years ago. He sent me a picture of himself with Mother Theresa which I have on my dresser.
Eternal Rest grant unto him O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
Fr John Zuhlsdorf has a blog with a wonderful video of
Cardinal Burke discussing some aspects of the Synod of Bishops.
He especially addresses the topics that are making headlines in the secular press, and occasionally in the Catholic Press.
The video is produced and aired by EWTN and runs about 1/2 hour long.
Cardinal Burke points to and cites many worthwhile encyclicals.
I encourage you to watch it, and read the pertinent encyclicals.
______________________________________________________
Update:
Edward Peters comments extensively on the video of Cardinal Burke which you can view at the link to Fr John Zuhlsdorf above.
A section from the reading of the Gospel today:
“And I tell you, ask and you will receive;
seek and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened to you.
For everyone who asks, receives;
and the one who seeks, finds;
and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
What father among you would hand his son a snake
when he asks for a fish?
Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?
If you then, who are wicked,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”
I am reminded of a passage from the first letter of St Peter:
Cast all your worries upon him because he cares for you.e
Dads work hard to make the bread
Feed the kids and give them beds
Beads of sweat drop from their brow
Forging steel or steering plow
Moms with their own flesh feed life
Build a home and shield from strife
Sickness fever any day
Mothers wipe the tears away
Mary Mother Virgin wife
Through her flesh came fullest life
Saying yes the gift complete
Mary's lap was Wisdom's seat
Jesus gives the gift of self
Pouring out his life and health
Scorned and scourged and nailed to tree
He gives his all for you, for me
At Real Clear Religion, Fr Robert Barron, writes about one of the five proofs of God's existence that Aquinas includes in his Summa.
Thomas Aquinas famously laid out five arguments for the existence of God, but he characterized one of them as "the first and more manifest way." This is the proof from motion, which can be presented simply and schematically as follows. Things move. Since nothing moves itself, everything that is moved must be moved by another. If that which causes the motion is itself being moved, then it must be moved by another. This process cannot go on to infinity. Therefore, there must exist a first unmoved mover, which all people call God.
As the song from "The Sound of Music" says: nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.
It is a good read and elaborates on what it means to "move" (this is not merely a change in coordinates, like a physicist might assume).
It's also a good refresher for those who remember this proof.
In the Gospel Reading for today, 5 Oct 2014, the Twenty Seventh Sunday in Ordinary time, Jesus tells a parable about some tenant farmers and their land owner.
The tenants are supposed to steward the land and provide a potion of the fruits of the land to the landowner.
Those ungrateful tenants beat and kill his messengers on two occasions at least, and when he sends his son to them, they kill him as well.
Jesus asks what the landowner will do to those evil tenants. They respond “He will put those wretched men to a wretched death and lease his vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the proper times.”
Jesus then quotes Psalm 118 to them: The stone rejected by the builders...
Was "the stone rejected by the builders" the refusal of the tenants to deliver the fruit of the land to the landowner? Jesus says give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.
Is this the echo we should hear? Or is it the judgement of his listeners "He will put those wretched men to a wretched death" that is the rejection of the stone?
This question arises because of how this parable is fulfilled in the Passion. Jesus, the heir, is taken outside the city and killed brutally. What is the response of Jesus? What is the response of Our Father? Who among us is without sin? Who among us is not redeemed by the passion, death and resurrection of Christ? Are we not all those wretched tenants?
What is God's reaction or response to us? How dissimilar it is to the one predicted by Jesus' listeners.
They were so wrong they rejected the cornerstone of the the Temple, the place with which all other features are aligned. As Paul wrote "if God is for us who shall condemn?"
Jesus, the living bread come down from Heaven, is the Mercy of God. He is the cornerstone of the Temple (the Church), and of our lives. He says in John's Gospel "God so loved the world that he gave* his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life."
The stone rejected is Jesus, the Word of God. The stone rejected is Jesus, the mercy of God. The stone rejected is Jesus, who brings to fruition in us the work already begun.
In the end we must not reject the stone, but offer to Our Father, who holds our lives in his hands, who called us to life, in whom we live and move and have our being, the fruit of our lives, our labors, our loves. We must give to God what is God's.
For when he is revealed in his glory he will separate all the people of every nation as a shepherd separates the sheep and the goats. There are only two groups and essentially only one choice -- the blessing and the curse -- life and prosperity or death and doom.
Eternal life is to know the only true God and Jesus Christ who is the way the truth and the life. To choose Jesus is to choose life. To choose Jesus is to choose Mercy, and receiving mercy we become filled with mercy.
What we have received as a gift, let us freely give.
Note: citations are in
this color. Links are in
light blue. My words are in white.
Over at National Review Online, Rich Lowry has a post about a recent skirmish between Sean Davis of the Federalist and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Lowry summarizes:
The problem is the belief of his (Tyson's) fans — encouraged by him — that science has all the answers; that anyone who believes in physics must adhere to a progressive secularism; that anyone not on board is guilty of rank anti-intellectualism.
Properly understood, science is a tool, an incredibly powerful one, but still just a tool. G. K. Chesterton wrote long ago, “Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
The Bush-quote controversy reminds us that the self-styled champions of science are, like anyone else, prone to sloppiness, pomposity, and error. Just don’t tell the adherents of the Tyson cult. It’s not polite to scandalize the faithful.
One important thing to remember is that scientists are like everybody else. They can be egocentric, self aggrandizing, petty, and vindictive as well as "prone to sloppiness, pomposity, and error."
In other words they are sinners like the rest of us, in desperate need of the mercy of God.
The words from the book of Job, in the readings from Mass today come to mind:
Then Job answered the LORD and said:
Behold, I am of little account; what can I answer you?
I put my hand over my mouth.
Though I have spoken once, I will not do so again;
though twice, I will do so no more.
Some humility in the presence of God is a good thing.
