Fr. Thom's Homilies

Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time October 28, 2018           I remember a woman from one of the nursing homes in my first assignment.   Her name was Barb and she was blind.   I always knew when to start Mass at the nursing home where she lived because she had one of those watches that on the hour would say, “The time is 11:00 o’clock.”   That was my cue.   At the end of every Mass at I would always go around and greet as many of the residents as I could.   Every time I came around to Barb she would take firm hold of my hand and say to me, “Father, pray for me that if it is God’s will I would see again, but most importantly that I would get to heaven.”   And I would always tell her, “Barb, you’ve got your priorities straight.   I think you see better than most.”   I couldn’t help but think of Barb as I looked at the Gospel for this Sunday in which Jesus encounters Bartimaeus.   There’s a ...

          I don’t know if you noticed in keeping up with readings from week to week, but there is something missing between last week’s Gospel and this week’s Gospel.   In fact, there are three whole verses between the ending of last week’s passage and the beginning of the passage we just heard.   Now, that may not seem like much and we might not feel like we have missed a whole lot, but those three verses are very important for us if we are to understand the passage for today.   Last week, of course, we heard about the rich man, who went away sad, because, though he had kept all the commandments from his youth, there was still something he lacked, and that was to let go of his possessions.   Then, this week we find James and John are “jockeying for position” Jesus’ glorious kingdom.   But in the three verses between these two episodes, Jesus predicts His passion, death, and resurrection for the third and final...

          The Gospel for this Sunday contains, as always, a challenging message for us.   And it is not just for those who have wealth, as we might initially think, but really a message for us all.   And though it may at first seem difficult, I think if we would hear this message out, we would find it to be very liberating.           A man approaches Jesus and, like so many people, he is looking for answers – perhaps an easy answer.   More specifically, he wants to know what he has to do in order to “inherit eternal life.”   He has kept the commandments from his youth, he says, but there is still something more he feels he must do.   “Jesus, looking at him, loved him , and said to him, ‘You are lacking in one thing.   Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’”   He loved him .   How intere...

           In the Gospel today there seems to be a reversal of what we usually see in these regular sparring matches between Jesus and the Pharisees.  Usually , it’s the Pharisees who are taking the “hard line” about some teaching of the law or another, whether it is about ritual purity (complaining that the disciples of Jesus do not meticulously wash their hands as they do) or about the Sabbath (criticizing Jesus for curing on the Sabbath), or other things along these lines.  And then it is Jesus who contextualizes and approaches these laws with a little more nuance and pastoral prudence, explaining, for example, that interior purity is more important than mere external observation of the law, or reminding us that the Sabbath was made for us and not the other way around.  So, we’re used to the Pharisees being the hardline “rules guys” and Jesus being the guy who – in so many words and ways – says “Lighten up already” or at least “Get yo...