Daily Virtue Scripture Readings

“What I want is to leap out of this personality, and then sit apart from that leaping. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.” – Rumi

Fr. Ron Rolheiser writes, “In a day of instant and constant communication, cell phones and emails, I suspect that we all fit that description. Certainly, I do. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.” It seems that we’re almost always overstretched with too much to do. We come to the end of each day tired, yet conscious of what we’ve left undone. There’s always someone else we should have phoned, emailed, or attended to in some way. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases, crammed to the brim, and still unable to hold all we need to carry along. What’s wrong here? Whenever we feel that way, it’s a sure sign that we’ve lost the proper sense of time. Life is meant to be busy, but we’re also meant, at regular times, to have sabbatical, sabbath time, to rest and enjoy. Wayne Muller wrote a little book entitled, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives. I leave you with some of his wisdom:

– The Sabbath need not be a year or even a day. It can also be an afternoon, an hour, a walk, or a dinner. Sabbath is a time when we drink, if only for a few moments, from the fountain of rest and delight. It is a time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, and true.

– We are almost always running, trying to catch the things that will make us happy when, in fact, those very things are trying to catch us!

– God said: “Remember to rest.” This is not a lifestyle suggestion, but a commandment, as important as not stealing, not murdering, or not lying.

We need Sabbath. We’ve all lived too long where we can be reached.

Mary and Joseph’s faith traditions told them that the child was a gift from God. Listening to the wisdom of their history, Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the Temple. Sr. Thea Bowman writes that it’s fitting that we call to mind black history and present the legacy of black life to God on this Feast of the Presentation. Like Mary and Joseph, we are doing today what the wisdom of our cultural and faith traditions have told us to do, for we live at a time in human history when it is clear that we need to remember the heritage that lives on is us. It didn’t matter to Mary and Joseph that when they got to the Temple it was only a simple old man and a feeble old woman who recognized the presence of God in their child. They didn’t need the recognition of the high priest or the approval of the chief magistrate to know that Jesus was a gift from God. It seems to me that our ancestors had a “Mary and Joseph way of looking at things.” It didn’t matter to our ancestors that their children were born in the stable of a hostile society. They shared their belief in a God who could make a way out of no way. God has spoken to the world through us. He has made himself present to the world through us. So we gather in God’s house, just as Mary and Joseph did, to give praise with our thanksgiving. Knowing the wisdom of our ancestors who did with us what Mary and Joseph had done, we present our history and our lives before the altar and say thank you to God.

Jesus sends out the disciples to spread the Good News. He requires them to be free of any form of attachment if they are to preach the Gospel. A disciple who has the mission of bringing the Kingdom of God to souls through preaching should not rely on human resources but on God’s providence. Whatever he does need in order to live with dignity as a herald of the Gospel, he must obtain from those who benefit from his preaching, for the laborer deserves his upkeep. St Bede clarifies this teaching for those who proclaim the Good News: “The preacher should so trust in God that he is convinced that he will have everything he needs to support life, even if he cannot himself obtain it; for he should not neglect eternal things through worrying about temporal things.” In the end, it gets back to the question raised by the Evil one in the Garden of Eden to Adam and Eve, “Did God really say…?” In essence, he was asking them, “Do you really trust God’s word?” We see in the action of the disciples what occurred when they obeyed Christ and put their total trust in Him. How does our life reflect trust in God? All we need to do is look into our hearts, our minds, and our souls. We will either be affirmed or challenged. Embrace the answer and change your life.

Everyone has experienced this feeling of being stereotyped in some way. It might be returning to the area where you grew up after graduating college and working for a few years. But the people “back home” only recall the youth who often get into trouble. So, they would be skeptical to the point of laughter and possibly mocking you when you told them you were working for the FBI. Today’s Gospel develops an uncomfortable theme. It tells how the people of Nazareth rejected Jesus. Bishop Barron writes that authentically religious and authentically spiritual people will almost always be opposed. The logic behind this is simple and unanswerable: we live in a world gone wrong, a world turned upside down; therefore, when someone speaks the truth to us, we will think that they are crazy and dangerous. Think for just a moment what would happen to you if you consistently and publicly spoke the word of God to our culture. If you spoke out against abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, human trafficking, rampant materialism, and ideological secularism, what would happen to you? If you presented, in a full-throated way, the full range of Catholic social, moral, and spiritual teachings, what would they do to you? Perhaps this is an excellent day to consider our reactions. Just because we have known people for years, we sometimes fail to recognize that they have changed. In our blindness, we can miss the talents they have acquired. How open and gracious are we in seeing people in a positive light when we are caught off guard by a revelation about who they have become that is different than what we pictured? How willing are we to listen and accept them as they are now?

The centerpiece of today’s Gospel is Jesus healing the hemorrhaging woman. Having a flow of blood for twelve years meant that anyone with whom she came in contact would be considered unclean. She couldn’t, in any meaningful sense, participate in the ordinary life of her society. The afflicted woman in this episode is a model for approaching Jesus. While crowds of people were bumping into him as he walked along, she touched him. The woman touches Jesus and how radical and dangerous an act this was since it should have rendered Jesus unclean. But so great is her faith that her touch, instead, renders her clean. Jesus effectively restores her to full participation in her community. Her faith brought her into living contact with Jesus, and as a result, she experienced a dramatic healing. The difference between the crowds and the woman prompts the question: How often do we merely bump up against Jesus—for instance, when we receive him in the Eucharist? Do we half-consciously jostle against him amid all the other preoccupations of the day, or do we come to him determined to touch him personally, with a lively awareness of the grace and power that can flow forth from him into our lives? Bishop Barron notes that what is perhaps most important is this: Jesus implicitly puts an end to the ritual code of the book of Leviticus. What he implies is that the identity of the new Israel, the Church, would not be through ritual behaviors but through imitation of him. Notice, please, how central this is in the New Testament. We hear elsewhere in the Gospels that Jesus declares all foods clean, and throughout the letters of Paul, we hear a steady polemic against the Law. All of this is meant to show that Jesus is at the center of the new community.

There’s a well-known marble quarry in our area. Recently, we went over for their annual festival, where sculptors spent a week working on a piece of stone. One artist was sculpting a complicated knotted figure. He explained how he spent time with the stone, studying and almost “listening” to it, learning how to work with it. If he imposed his will upon the stone, he risked destroying it. Today’s Gospel shows Jesus driving the unclean spirit from the Gerasene demoniac. The people of Gerasene experienced God’s grace, the healing of a profoundly tormented man. But they didn’t get it or perhaps didn’t want to. They had their own narrative. Jesus didn’t fit, and so they turned from him. We must wonder what moments of God’s creative grace and healing we miss when we see life simply as a chance to work out our own agenda instead of responding to the present moment. Though God typically lets the universe run according to its natural rhythms and patterns, what is to prevent God from shaping it and influencing it occasionally in remarkable ways to signal his purpose and presence? Jesus, open my heart to your presence here and now.

Our Gospel verse from Mark describes Jesus arriving at Capernaum, where he enters the synagogue on the Sabbath and begins to teach. Bishop Barron writes: “The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.” The ordinary teachers would have appealed to their own teachers and authorities and, finally, to Moses and the Torah, which were unassailable. What would prevent the people from saying he was just crazy? Well, watch what happens next. Into the synagogue, there rushed a man with “an unclean spirit.” And he knows who Jesus is: “I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But then Jesus demonstrates his authority: “‘Quiet, come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit convulsed him with a loud cry and came out of him.” The claim to God’s own authority is now ratified by showing power over the spiritual realm. Dr. Mary Healy writes that for Mark, evil is not an impersonal force but is concentrated in invisible, malevolent beings who are bent on destroying human beings and hindering God’s plan of salvation. These evil spirits are responsible for various mental and even physical disorders. The Church has always taught that demons are real spiritual beings, fallen angels who were created by God but became evil by their own free choice. Anyone tempted to dismiss accounts of demons as fables does not have to look far to see evidence of their influence today. Such phenomena as “racial cleansing,” group suicides, and the sexual abuse of children show more than merely human malice at work, seeking to destroy the image of God in man. But as frightening and real as the power of demons is, the authority of Christ is infinitely superior. Through his cross and resurrection, Christ definitively conquered the powers of hell. For the present time, however, their malicious actions are permitted by God, who can work good out of every evil.

The Gospels of Matthew and Luke describe Jesus calming a raging storm with His disciples, as does our passage from Mark’s Gospel today. This story exemplifies how Jesus’ disciples were just like you and me. They saw Jesus perform countless miracles and walked with Him day to day, but they still found it hard to believe that Christ would not let them drown. When Jesus rebuked their lack of faith, by extension, He also rebuked our lack of faith. We face many storms in our daily lives, yet we often fail to acknowledge that the Lord can calm us during these storms. He is with us and is happy to bring us peace and comfort. Do you know the de profundis prayer from Psalm 130? “Out of the depths, I have cried to you, O Lord. O Lord, be attentive to the voice of my pleading.” It is the prayer we should offer at the darkest times of life, when we find ourselves lost and in the shadow of death, when, in our desperation, we feel utterly incapable of helping ourselves. What calms the storm in life is not that all of our problems suddenly disappear but that, within them, we realize that because God is still in charge, all will be well: illness, financial loss, painful relationships, lost jobs, loneliness, and the shadow of death itself notwithstanding. All will be well because, even asleep with his head on a cushion, God is still Lord.

Does the mustard seed realize what it is destined to become? In the familiar parable, Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” From such a small, seemingly insignificant start grows “the largest of plants,” with branches attracting birds of the sky. Deacon Greg Kandra writes that it’s all so improbable. Let’s face it: the mustard seed is so tiny that most of us would easily overlook it. But it holds something tantalizing; a tiny grain contains growth, life, shelter, and shade. Its future is vast—a story aching to be told, a purpose waiting to be fulfilled. How often do we forget that? And how often we fail to understand this simple but humbling reality: life is full of mustard seeds. We share the world with so many who are easily neglected, abandoned, and swept away: the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the lonely, and the unborn. But Jesus assures us that every seed, even the smallest, contains possibility and purpose. Hold a seed in your hand, and you’re holding an unwritten future. We can’t begin to imagine what will come. Faith is like that. God’s kingdom is like that. It’s a place where even those who feel small and forgotten are given the grace to grow. We become more than we ever thought possible. In this way, we are all mustard seeds. Do we realize what we can become?

A beautiful story today of what I have come to embrace about the conversion of Paul is what Fr. Michael Rubeling refers to as Paul’s “everyman” nature. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul refers to his own conversion “as to one born abnormally.” Paul was not one of the Apostles who walked, ate, and slept with Jesus. Like Christians today, he came to know the resurrected Jesus through a conversion. The Early Church Father Origen speaks to this similar nature: “Many have come to Christianity as if against their will, for a certain spirit, appearing to them, in sleep or when they are awake, suddenly silences their mind, and they change from hating the Word to dying for him.” The divine voice in Paul’s conversion orders him to get up from the ground, and the future apostle of the Gentiles obeys immediately. The physical movement of getting up is a kind of symbol of the spiritual uplift God’s call gives his soul. Bishop Robert Barron brings another aspect of this conversion into view. Paul waited three years to visit with Peter and the other Apostles. Bishop Barron thinks that during this period, Paul was “trying to reconcile his encounter with Jesus and the traditions of Israel that he loved.” Many in Israel expected a Messiah, but theirs was an “avenging military and political ruler like Solomon or David or a great lawgiver and leader like Moses. What Paul saw in Jesus was someone greater than Moses, Solomon, or David—and someone wholly unexpected.” Paul’s conversion is an outstanding example of what divine grace and divine assistance in general can affect in a person’s heart.