Fullerton T

30th Sunday in Ordinary time

Well here we are at the 30^th Sunday of ordinary time as we are fast approaching the feast of Christ the King (34^th Sunday) and then we begin all over again with the Advent Season. As I write this Israel is about to invade Gaza. Thousands have died on both sides, and thousands more will die from violence, hunger, destroyed hospitals, missiles etc. We pray for peace in the Holy Land as well as Ukraine and we remember all the other places and people who need our prayers and the peace of God at this time wherever they are in the world.

The first reading from Exodus this Sunday speaks to us of immigrants. They call them “aliens in our midst.” The listing includes all other people who live on the margins of society. The first reading also warns against mistreating strangers, widows and orphans and talks about the proper conduct of loans and pledges. The warning comes from God’s lips. It’s not just a nice piece of social philosophy; it is the demand of living our faith. It means that true faith, as Jesus teaches it, is about being in loving relationship with God and other human beings. Often, we think of those who are poor as being less than human. We confirm those thoughts by avoiding contact, with them. Yet as sons and daughters of God we are directed to welcome those persons and seek to support them. Avoidance and alienation is contrary to that. Speaking badly about them is contrary to the dignity and worth that God uniquely creates in the people they are. The Pharisees in the Gospel Reading for this Sunday are all out to get Jesus because he had silenced the Sadducees.

In an attempt to do this they asked him this question Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?’ Jesus said, ‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. Many people say that as they grow older their relationship with God becomes much more central in their life. There is a sense in which we could say that it takes a lifetime of practice to love God with all our heart, soul and mind, to live the first commandment, putting God before all else.  To direct throughout our lives God has given us guidelines, the Ten Commandments. So many people in the modern world have decided to turn away from God and from spiritual things.  The passage is addressed to us as individuals in our various vocations it is also addressed to us as the Church of our time.  The Pharisees and the Sadducees represent the fragmentation which Jesus rejected. The demanding nature of the law of love is stressed in the final verse of the Gospel passage for this Sunday: “On these two commandments love of God and neighbour depends all the Law and the Prophets. Jesus left a crucial last testament to each of us: “Love one another as I have loved you.” Religious rituals are meant to be ways of reflecting on, savoring, remembering, celebrating and expressing that love. Sometimes they just end up as ‘empty’ rituals, when love has been replaced by fear, or when love is absent.

The Kingdom of God is not some far off place, but the moments when God’s life breaks into the human story. Those moments bring love, wisdom, grace, compassion, generosity, forgiveness and peace. Those practiced in the things of God recognise God’s presence most of all in loving relationships. In our “e-connected artificial intelligence” computerised  world existence, the words of Jesus in this Sundays  Gospel are especially challenging: to love with our whole heart and soul and mind requires us to “unplug” all our devices and distractions and be there  for one another, to engage one another as our loving God is engaged with us. love in action will change us and our surroundings. All we need to do is  to try and live like Jesus did. we should take one step at a time toward our creator and our fellow human beings and this will provide us with great reward.  And we should not worry where we are going, for God’s Spirit will lead the way along the road that leads to salvation and the destination we will arrive at is eternal life.

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This weekend we have Mission Sunday the day when we celebrate the missionary effort of the church in the world. In 1926, Pope Pius XI decided the Church needed a special day on which to pray for missionaries, and to renew her commitment to the missions. Today, World Mission Day is celebrated  in Ireland in October, as a sign of support and solidarity for missions and missionaries everywhere.  All of us will have heard of someone who has joined one of the missionary orders such as Columbans, Mill Hill Fathers, St. Patricks Fathers the Medical Missionaries of Mary there are many  other missionary religious orders who along with the Lay Missionary movements have gone out into the world to bring the message of the Gospel to the ends of the earth.  As we celebrate the churches missionary effort and the people involved in it we also remember the ongoing wars in the world especially in Ukraine and the Holy Land and the need to pray for peace in the world.

This Sundays  Gospel  passage is built around the saying in verse 21, “Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”. It is a “wisdom saying” and the passage invites us to enter into it with our feelings. Its truth should touch us so deeply that we are filled with humility as we realise that we do not live up to it  as individuals, as Church and as communities when we put Cesar before God.  Perhaps Jesus’ words that the coin which bears Caesar’s image belongs to Caesar means also that those things which bear the image of God belong to God including human beings and creation. This gospel is regularly cited among those both inside and outside the church. Many people want the church to stay inside the church building, praying and singing behind closed doors about “spiritual matters.” and that notion is quite wrong the Church needs to be in the world as a light in the darkness and a voice for those who have none.  We have to remember that the Church and we its people are called to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

We have the responsibility as people of faith in the places where we live to speak the truth with charity, clarity and conviction.  We have the responsibility to work and pray for peace especially when so much of the world is at war. We have responsibility towards the care of the planet, because God who created us  has made us stewards of his creation. God wants all of us  to  experience his saving presence in our lives. it is through God’s grace that we have received the Gospel Message of faith  and then we are sent by the Holy Spirit to be ambassadors of God. Will we accept the invitation to join in God’s mission by our prayers and support for those who are out there on the missions as well as  those who need our help closer to home on the mission fields that sadly many of  our countries  have  become.  Our annual celebration of Mission Sunday  gives us the opportunity to acknowledge all the missionary men and women who left everything behind in order to bring the light of faith to the far corners of the world.

When we think about the three parables we have heard over recent weeks we can say that the idea of giving back to God what belongs to God can be understood as giving back the love, generosity, justice and goodness we have received from God. Just as God did not lose anything by giving us these gifts, we don’t lose anything by making them real in our lives, so that others may also share in God’s life through us. We pray that the Lord will continue to inspire many people to join the missionary effort of the Church  so that the  love of God may be passed on to each generation in its turn as it has been passed on to all of us.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This weekend we pray  especially for peace in the Holy Land as we remember all those who lost their lives as a result of the terrorist  attack on Israel. This event has shown that  Hamas has no respect for the lives of the people Israeli, Palestine or anyone else. The attack was barbaric and there is no justification for the violence that it has brought to the people of the region. In the first reading this Sunday Isaiah presents a vision of hope for the People of God. There will be a banquet of immense proportions on the Lord’s Mountain. The spirit of the people will be redeemed and there will be salvation from reproach, from tears,  and the  terror of death. The message of the reading is good news especially these days when the news is so horrific especially coming from the Holy Land.

In the Gospel reading for this Sunday we hear about the king sending his servants out to call all those who were invited to come to his son’s wedding but none of the invited guests would come.So the king told his servants to go out and invite everyone on the road to come to the wedding feast.  Jesus tells the parable because his ways doing and saying things had been criticized by the “the chief priests and the elders of the people.”  They rejected him so now he turns to  everyone on the road and he welcomes the outcasts the poor, the sinners, and the outsiders. Matthew emphasizes, not only the importance of the meal, but the urgent need we have to respond to God the fathers  invitation to his feast.  In the parable those who did respond to the invitation,  did so with enthusiasm and joy. They knew a good thing when they heard it and grasped it immediately, filling the banquet hall just as the king had wanted for his son. Today all of us who say we are Christians are also invited to the wedding feast and this is a pointer towards our participation in the life of the Church where we are now as well as pointing to  eternal life in heaven. This weekend’s parable reminds us that God’s invitation is his gift to us, and it is freely given so that we can accept or ignore it.

We are invited to a feast of great joy and we need to make sure that others feel welcome to join us on our journey to the feast, especially those who don’t get invitations to feasts very often if at all. Those who gathered in from the highways and byways had no claim on the king who really is God our Father. We, too, have no claim on God, We do not merit God’s invitation on our own. It is a grace the father  lovingly offers to each and every one of us. Hopefully all of us will be able to accept the invitation to come to the feast and enjoy it when we get there instead of being like the invited guests who did not come to the wedding feast who were left behind.

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This week we began  the month of October and on Wednesday the Synod opened in Rome. There are many varied opinions on what this synod may do and what it might change but through all of this we need to pray and trust in God. This Sunday St. Paul tells us in the Second Reading that we should not worry and that we should pray to god for our needs and as a result of our prayer the peace of God will come to us and guard our hearts and our thoughts in Christ Jesus. This Sunday  we are back in the vineyard and the first reading and the Gospel are all about grapes and the wine that comes from them.  Our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah, speaks of God planting, caring for and protecting a vineyard. The vineyard is a symbol for the people of Israel and God’s loving care for them.

The people  the vineyard come to know God as the creator of all; the one who delivers them from slavery; their guide and protector in the desert during times of physical and spiritual testing. The gospel reading is also the story of the “tenants” and here again we are invited to be with them. We must however understand their frame of mind. In many cultures today “tenants” are poor people who are harshly treated by their landowners – and  Jesus would have been on their side. The tenants in the parable are very different. In the original context the tenants in the story represent “the chief priests and elders of the people”.  In the parable the “tenants” become angry when they are reminded that the vineyard has been leased to them and they must be accountable for what they have done or not done with it. Their anger grows ever more violent as the story develops, they want to own the vineyard rather than to work there and help the vines grow and produce grapes that aren’t sour but sweet.

Through the parable of the vineyard Jesus reprimands the “chief priests and elders of the people” gathered around him.  He focused on the unfaithful people who, by their sin and failure to listen to the prophets, had brought God’s anger down on them. Jesus’ reference to the killing of the King’s only Son was not lost on the Pharisees. They had already decided to kill Jesus who claimed to be the Son of God. Jesus’ words enraged them, and their hearts were further hardened against Him and it all ended up at the Cross of Calvary on Good Friday. As we know Calvary was not the end as we are talking about the parable in 2023 and we are called to take note. We normally like to think of ourselves as the new tenants of the vineyard who have taken over from the old tenants  the scribes and Pharisees  who failed to produce good fruit. That is true. But in taking over that inheritance we have also taken over the responsibility that goes hand in hand with it.

Harvest time is the time for us to reflect  on how much fruit we really are producing.  We should ask ourselves What part have I in the Lord’s vineyard. What part do I play in building God’s kingdom in the world? So today as we listen again to this parable we are called to go out to play our part in the lords vineyard. To be workers rather than the owners to nourish the vines of other people’s faith by our words and deeds so that as a result of our efforts they may produce much good sweet grapes that produce sweet wine.