3rd Sunday in Lent, Cycle C - March 23, 2025

 3^rd Sunday of Lent- C

March 23, 2025       11am  

Our Lady of Grace Parish, Parkton

 

Greater Sinners? 

 

Approximately 1.2 million people in our country have died from Covid.

 

Would we say that they died from this because they were greater sinners – greater than us? I think we would not and should not say this.

 

Or, how about the people who died in the collapse of that condo building near Miami several years ago.   

 

Would we say that they died because they were greater sinners – greater than others? Again, I think we would not and should not say this. 

 

Jesus’ Answer 

 

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses two similar examples.

 

He refers to some people who were put to death by the cruel tyrant Herod. And then he refers to some people who were killed when a building collapsed and fell on them.

 

And Jesus asks: do you think that these people were greater sinners than others? And he answers his own question: “By no means! [Absolutely not!]

 

Jesus’ point is that we are not to look at others and try to gauge their degree of sinfulness. Instead, we are to look at ourselves.

 

The Season of Lent is intended to get us to do just that. Jesus wants us to be aware of our shortcomings, our wrongdoings, our sinfulness, our need for growth or fuller conversion.

   

Threefold Conversion 

 

One of our Catholic theologians, Father Ronald Rolheiser, has commented on this gospel passage. 

 

Father Rolheiser is a religious order priest, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate, and is on the faculty of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio. He recognizes that all of us who are here have an initial commitment to God or Jesus.

 

But Father Rolheiser also sees three movements for our coming to a fuller conversion or faith commitment. 

 

First, we need to move from being bystander to participant. 

 

So, instead of just lamenting the darkness in our world, we point out persons or situations of light. Instead of just seeing the need of some people for clothing and food, we give what we can afford to help them. 

 

Instead of just talking about prayer, we actually pray. So, we need to move from being bystander to participant.

 

And second, we need to move from judging to repenting.

 

We can judge ourselves as better and others as less in subtle ways. For example, we might think or even say, “I am less rigid and more understanding than she is.”

 

Or “He is much more impatient with the children than I am.” So, we need to move from judging to repenting and that means that we focus on our own sinfulness.

 

And third, we need to move from thinking that we are unloved to knowing that we are loved.

 

This means that we move away from an image of God as conditioning his love on our earning it. Instead, we really accept the fundamental statement of the Scripture that “God is love” and Jesus’ words “I call you my friends.”

 

This will lead us away from just obeying commandments because we are afraid of God and move us toward responding as fully as possible to the gospel as our part of this wonderful relationship. So, we need to move from thinking we are unloved to knowing that we are loved by God. 

 

Conclusion  

 

Okay! A fuller commitment to the Lord – that’s what this gospel and Lent are about.

 

Moving from being bystander to participant, from judging to repenting, from thinking ourselves unloved to knowing we are loved. And that last movement really explains the last part of today’s gospel.

 

In this particular parable, Jesus is not the owner but the manager of the orchard. The owner was only interested in what the fig tree could produce.

 

The manager was interested in the tree itself. He cared for the tree and believed that his care for it would end up with good results.

 

That’s how Jesus or God relates with us: patient, caring, forgiving, loving. That’s the God to whom we respond in this Lenten season.

 

  

 

2nd Sunday in Lent, Cycle C - March 16, 2025

 2^nd Sunday of Lent- C

March 16, 2025       5pm 

Our Lady of Grace Parish, Parkton

 

Rothschild Mansion

 

There is a story that back in the 1800s, some tourists were passing by the famous mansion of the Rothschild family in London.

 

These tourists noted that on one end of the mansion, the cornices and exterior wall were unfinished. They wondered why this was so since the Rothschilds were such a wealthy family.

 

Lord Rothschild explained that he was an orthodox Jew. According to Orthodox tradition, the house of every Jew was to have some part left unfinished.  

 

Why? To bear witness that the occupant of the house is like Abraham, in a sense unfinished, a person on a journey with no lasting home on this earth.    

 

Life as Circle

 

Today’s first reading and gospel lead us to this same understanding.

 

The message is that we are all on a journey. About fifteen years ago, I read a book entitled The Gifts of the Jews by Thomas Cahill.

 

Cahill states that up until the time of Abraham, about thirty-five hundred years ago, ancient peoples viewed life as a circle. They believed that what had happened in the past would happen again in a continuous circle.

 

They also believed that everything was determined by heavenly powers. It was not so much our free will, but heavenly powers that determined what would continually happen.

 

And so, our task was to meditate on the ceaseless, circular flow of life. We were to do this until we came to peace with it.  

 

Now, as I said, that was the ancient view of life. But one of the gifts of the Jews, as Thomas Cahill says, is that Abraham changed this way of thinking.

 

Life as Journey

 

The background to today’s first reading is that Abraham had listened to God’s call and set out to an unknown land.

 

He set out on a journey, and ever since then the way to look at human life is as a journey. This change of outlook now means that there is much more to life than the past simply repeating itself and this being determined by some heavenly power.

 

Now there is the possibility of a different future, and we are responsible for creating it. The Old Testament also reveals that this journey is not just from one country to another, as it was for Abraham and Moses.

 

It is not just an outer journey, a journey outside of me. Instead, it is primarily an inner journey, a journey to our inner self where we can find God.

 

It is a journey of becoming more and more like God. And in the long run, it is a journey back to God. 

 

A Journey with No Tents

 

This understanding carries right over into Christianity.

 

The gospels consistently show Jesus on a journey to Jerusalem. They also call us to see our lives as a journey and they add an important caution.

 

The caution is that we have to resist the temptation to pitch our tents, to stay put. In today’s gospel, Jesus will not let Peter pitch tents up on the mountain because he knows that there is still a lot of journey ahead.

 

Today, like Peter, we might be tempted to pitch our tents. We might be doing this when we say things like: “This is the way I’ve always done it.”

 

Or, “This is the way I learned it and have always understood it.” Statements like these might be saying that we are closing ourselves off to looking at things differently or doing things differently.  

 

For example, we can pitch our tents when it comes to our understanding of ourselves. Maybe we just turn off any comment that calls us to examine our attitudes or outlooks. 

 

We can also pitch our tents when it comes to our faith. Maybe we resist understanding God as loving us and in turn feel loved by God, and instead we still look upon God as primarily a judge or punisher and in turn feel afraid of God. 

 

The point is that like Peter in the gospel, we need to resist the temptation of pitching our tents. This is what the Season of Lent calls us to do – to stay on the journey of life, to keep growing personally and spiritually.

Ash Wednesday, Cycle C - March 5, 2025

 Ash Wednesday – C 

March 5, 2025         8:30am

Our Lady of Grace Parish, Parkton

 

“…Searching for the Soul”

 

A Jewish rabbi named Naomi Levy has written a book called Einstein and the Rabbi: Searching for the Soul. 

 

In one part of this book, Rabbi Levy shares an insight that may be helpful for us as we begin Lent. It is about looking back on our lives, either to the far past or the near past.    

 

Rabbi Levy says that we may experience the nagging feeling that we have messed up part of our life. Or that we have been missed part of our life and been asleep at the wheel. 

 

Rabbi Levy says that when we take the time to look back on our lives, we may find ourselves regretting two types of sins. And here is where her insight is especially pertinent for us today.   

 

Things Done and Things Not Done

 

First, there are the sins we committed, the things we actually did. I lied or I was impatient or I looked at unwholesome Internet sites.

 

I cheated on my work time with my employer, or I treated an employee unfairly. These are things we have done and wish we had not done. 

 

Then Rabbi Levy says that the second type of sins may be tougher to deal with. These are the things we haven’t done.  

 

There is the apology we never made or the forgiveness we didn’t offer, and the person is now deceased. There are the thoughtful words we never spoke and the helpful things we never did and could have done. 

 

So, we look back and we see that we have messed up some things and missed other things in our lives. We feel regret and the question is: is there something we can still do to repair what we have done or not done? 

 

Lent

 

Well, I suggest that the nagging voice that we may hear about all of this is God’s Spirit within us.

 

It is God calling us to the Lenten desert, moving us to repair our lives. It is God wanting is to confront the things we have done and now regret and the things we haven’t done that have left us feeling incomplete.  

 

So, let’s make this Lent a time to go into the desert of our hearts. Let’s put ourselves in the quiet of God’s presence.

 

Let’s try to find a way to resolve the things in our lives we have done badly and the things we have not done and wish we had done. Let’s allow our practices of prayer or fasting or charity lead us into this desert and through that to a springtime, which is the meaning of the word Lent, a springtime of fuller life with myself and with God.     

 

 

8th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle C - March 2, 2025

 8^th Sunday of Ordinary Time – C 

March 2, 2025         8:30am

Our Lady of Grace Parish, Parkton 

 

Splinters 

 

So, a parent confronts his or her teenage son about not studying for a test or skipping a homework assignment.

 

A manager calls a young sales rep into his office for messing up the order of one of the company’s oldest and best customers.

 

A friend works up the nerve to tell her friend that what she did hurt and embarrassed her.

 

A neighbor expresses his discomfort to the man who lives next door about some negative ethnic stereotyping. 

 

No one likes these encounters. But the parent, the manager, the friend, and the neighbor remain calm.

 

They are firm and focused, but they are also calm and compassionate. They call their son, their employee, their friend, their neighbor to be aware of their actions.

 

They help them to become aware of what they have done as a way to do better or be better. What could be an ugly and divisive confrontation becomes something positive.   

 

Wooden Beams 

 

Why? 

 

How can these encounters turn out positively? I think there is only one way this happens. 

 

Because Mom and Dad remember what it was like to be young themselves. Because the manager remembers messing up more than one order when he was starting out.

 

Because the hurt friend remembers times when she unwittingly hurt someone who was close to her. Because the neighbor remembers that he was also brought up with some negative ethnic stereotypes. 

 

To use Jesus’ image today, these persons had worked to remove the wooden beams from their own eyes first. Only then are they able to help others to pull the splinters out of their eyes. 

 

Jesus’ Lesson 

 

So, in today’s gospel, Jesus is not saying that we should ignore the faults of others.

 

He is not saying that we should quietly accept the bad behavior of others because we’re no better than they are. He is saying that challenging the hurtful behavior of another begins with the humility of seeing the wooden beams in our own eyes first.

 

It begins with understanding how those wooden beams distort our own vision and behavior. To put it another way, we will not effectively deal with another person’s brokenness until we admit our own brokenness.

 

We cannot heal another person until we have known our own need for healing. This is what Jesus means when he cautions us to deal with the wooden beam in our own eye first before we try to take out the splinter in the eye of another.