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The 30^th Sunday in Ordinary Time; Cycle A, October 27, 2002

Readings: Exodus 22.20-26; 1^st Thessalonians 1.5-10; Matthew 22.34-40

The simplicity and the directness of this Sunday’s Readings are riveting. They draw us into the heart of the Divine Life. St. Therese of Lisieux described herself as a little bird with the eyes and the heart of an eagle. Indeed, a little bird, she said, who had become disabled by fooling around too much in puddles and sand so as a result she couldn’t fly. Christ was her eagle who flew with her on His back into the Sun, right into the heart of the Sun, "to the bosom of the eternal Sun, the Holy Trinity." Her faith gave her the intuition that she was carried into the divine life of Trinitarian Love.

Even though the circumstances of the question put by the Pharisees were cloaked in an attempt to trap Jesus, our Lord answers with words that summarize the whole of divine revelation. In the midst of duplicity and confusion, our Savior proclaims the everlasting Truth. The darkness cannot put out the Light. Jesus directs our eyes into the Sun—he flies us there in his Holy Spirit:

"Teacher, which commandment of the Law is the greatest?" Jesus said to him:

"You shall love the Lord your God

with your whole heart,

with your whole soul,

with all your mind.

This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it:

You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Of these two commandments the whole Law is based, and the prophets as well."

(The Gospel Reading)

These are the sacred words that the Jewish Law had always held out as the foundation of all life with God. It is the Shema written on all the doors of a believing , practicing family. It is touched reverently leaving and coming. Now it is written on our hearts; the words bring us higher and mysteriously deeper into the very life of the Triune God. There is no entrance into God except in living these words in the Spirit by the power of Christ’s grace.

Jesus, the fullness of all revelation, with sacred words, leads us into prayer. Whether the prayer is the Liturgy of the Eucharist or the Liturgical Hours or meditation on Sacred Scripture or the silence of interior prayer of the heart, the call of God to love Him is the grace that allows us to pray. No one can even say the name of Jesus without the power of the Holy Spirit, St. Paul tells us. And the Holy Spirit is the Love of the Father and the Son. So we are in the Father through the Son by the power of divine Love who is the Holy Spirit.

The First Reading tells us how God describes Himself. For I am compassionate. The First Reading tells us that divine love acts not only deeply in the transformation of our souls, but it runs over into the daily service we give to others. Thus the Second Part of the Great Commandment is bound to the first. Jesus expands the Hebrew Shema to include the fruit of divine love in the love for others, especially those who need compassion in special ways. The widow, the orphan, the poor are always with us. St. Antony goes into the desert only when he has given all that he owned away to feed the poor and has provided for his sister.

The Second Reading is about conversion. God’s compassion is first shown in grace that purifies us. I read the review of a new theological book written by a radical feminists. She writes that the new, re-imagined Christianity must not look upon Christ as the Savior who saves us and empowers us. Christ is among us only to show us how to live. We have the power within ourselves without any redemptive act on his part. This is the thrust of radical feminism to free woman from the necessity of a "male savior." A cause for justice has been misdirected against the Revelation concerning the Son of God, Jesus our Savior who became a man to be with us as our sacrificial redemption.

Man or woman, we are powerless to love without the saving power of the Holy Spirit who comes to us by the sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus. The people of those parts are reporting what kind of reception we had from you and how you turned to God from idols to serve him who is the living and true God and to wait from heaven the Son he raised from the dead—Jesus who saves us from the wrath to come (Second Reading).

As we enter into our prayer we must consciously with simplicity and gentleness call upon the Holy Spirit to empower us in the grace of Jesus to move into the heart of the Father in contemplative love. How unlike that radical feminist is the woman, St. Thesese. She compared herself to a bird flying upon the wings of the Eagle Christ into the Sun of the Trinitarian life of love. The gift of that simple intuitive gaze into the Sun of the Trinity is the definition of contemplative prayer.

Pray for the Church that her members may be spared from such misdirected teachings about the nature of redemption.

I do not find in myself the capability of sharing in the divine life. I am nothing without the creative act of God and the redemptive act of His Son, our Lord Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Rather I will sing with the inspiration of the Sunday’s Responsorial Psalm:

I love you, O Lord, My strength, O Lord, My rock, My fortress, my deliverer, my shield, the horn of my salvation, my stronghold!

Lord Jesus, I surrender into the saving love of the Eucharist; and I am one with you in Holy Communion by the gift of the Holy Spirit. So transform me that I will be more and more your compassion among all I meet and serve in the practical call of my particular vocation. Mary, pray for me that I will be a servant of divine compassion having known compassion in the Sacred Heart of your Son, Jesus, my Lord. St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, teach me about Christ who bears me up on eagle wings.

--William Fredrickson, Obl.OSB, D.Min.

Questions, comments: please direct to f499@erols.com

--William Fredrickson, Obl.OSB, D.Min.

Questions, comments: please direct to f499@erols.com

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The 29^th Sunday in Ordinary Time; Cycle A

Readings: Isaiah 45.4-6; 1^st Thessalonians 1.1-5; Matthew 22.15-21

Today’s Readings suggest several themes about our contemplative prayer practice.

In the First Reading we consider two related themes. First, Cyrus, a pagan ruler, is chosen by God and given a special name in the service of God’s Kingdom. Cyrus has a role to play in God’s plan of salvation. How much more, we, who have been baptized into Christ in the fullness of faith, have a special name. In the Bible, a name from God gives to a chosen person a new identity and mission. We have a vocation within a vocation. Our vocation within our Baptismal vocation is to be faithful to contemplative prayer.

Each morning we rise, most probably extra early so as to enter into the silent prayer of contemplation, and the prayer of the Church in the Psalms, and the offering of the daily Eucharist. We rise only because God’s grace calls us by name to enter into communion with the Triune God in the mystery of Christ our Savior. Our alarm clock is the voice of God calling us by our name and our title. Our name is our intentional commitment to enter into the very prayer of our Lord Jesus. We do not know God fully as we would by seeing Him; but it doesn’t stop us because we can love God fully in the virtue of charity poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, our Lord.

I have called you by your name, giving you a title, though you knew me not (First Reading).

The second theme of the First Reading is that the heart of our contemplative prayer is the absoluteness of God. God is for us absolutely all in all in Christ. We come, therefore, to prayer in profound adoration informed by divine love. Our whole identity, our name, is one with this complete surrender to God who completely embraces us in His immensity of creative love and beauty beyond comprehension. I am the Lord and there is no other, there is no god beside me. It is I who arm you, though you know me not, so that toward the rising and setting of the sun men may know that there is none besides me. I am the Lord, there is no other.

The Second Reading, at the very beginning of this letter of St. Paul, spells out the very essence of our union with God. We live in union with God at the depths of our souls by the power of the three theological virtues infused at our Baptism. Faith, hope and charity enable our understanding, knowledge and will to be elevated into sharing in the divine life of the Trinity.

Our growth into the contemplative life; indeed, the very definition of the contemplative life, is the development of faith, hope and love. In that growth into contemplative union, the Holy Spirit becomes almost entirely the active agent. We become more passive, silent, receptive in the life of these virtues. Understanding, knowledge and wisdom, the three highest of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, perfect the virtues: understanding perfects faith; knowledge perfects hope; and wisdom perfects charity.

We keep thanking God for all of you and we remember you in our prayers, for we constantly are mindful before our God and Father of the way you are proving your faith, and laboring in love, and showing constancy in hope in our Lord Jesus Christ (Second Reading).

The conviction and commitment of faith within the assembly of the Church and growth in the holiness of contemplative prayer, are the work of the Holy Spirit. We are the willing and committed recipients. We know, too, brothers, beloved of God, how you were chosen. Our preaching of the Gospel proved not a mere matter of words for you but one of power, it was carried on in the Holy Spirit and out of complete conviction (Second Reading). "The power of the Holy Spirit" relates to a phrase in the First Reading: It is I who arm you.

Finally in the Gospel Reading, we have by negative example how we are to approach the mystery of Christ in contemplative prayer. We do not come with our rational maneuvering so as to maintain our human control. We tend to come to Christ with a reservation. "I will come to you as long as I can keep my identification with this modern culture, with this secular clinging to an image of false freedom—thinking for myself. I will pick and choose from the Scripture what is relevant and what is not; I will be the Catholic who can choose what is acceptable according to the conventional wisdom of what is approved in the media and academia."

The Pharisees went off and again to plot how they might trap Jesus in speech. They sent their disciples to him, accompanied by Herodian sympathizers. Jesus recognized their bad faith and said to them, "Why are you trying to trip me up, you hypocrites? (Gospel Reading)

The lesson of the Gospel is an echo of the First Reading. The Gospel says, "Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s." Give to Caesar relative service. Give to God absolute service.

The virtue of prudence inspired by the Gift of Counsel, enables us to give to every person in every circumstance the needed love and respect, justice and service. But to God what is God’s. Give to God in Christ everything in the very depths of our consciousness. There is no limit to the depths of transformation that is our contemplative union with God—faith, hope, love inflamed by understanding, knowledge and wisdom of the Holy Spirit. As the Second Reading demonstrated, it is the power of the Holy Spirit that works transforming union with God. The Holy Spirit enables us to give to God all that is God’s in absolute, adoring, consuming love, faith, and hope; and to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s in justice and temperance of life.

Hold in great love and gratitude the moments of your immersion in the Holy Eucharist, in the sacrifice that consumes you entirely and in the Holy Communion that transfigures your likeness more and more into Christ’s image. Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now in the moments of our prayer and service, and at the hour of our death, when we will be God’s absolutely, when we are embraced in His judgement and mercy.

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