The Generous Landowner
The parable that Jesus tells in our Gospel for today is one of his most disturbing and confounding. Giving the same wage to those who worked for one hour and those who labored the whole day just seems...
18 Sep 200514min
Seventy Times Seven Times
Our capacity to forgive others is tightly linked to our realization that we have been forgiven by God. When we try to justify an ethic of radical forgiveness on purely humanistic grounds, we will fail...
11 Sep 200514min
Offer Your Bodies as a Living Sacrifice
Paul tells the Christians in Rome to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice of praise. I suggest that this Pauline image provides a very good context for thinking about the moral life. We want our b...
28 Aug 200514min
Testing Our Faith
The idea of testing faith is a common one in the Bible. Abraham's faith was tried on Mt. Moriah, as was Jacob's and Joseph's. The Gospel story of the Syro-Phoenician woman is a New Testament instance ...
14 Aug 200514min
Walking on the Water
Often in the Bible, water functions as a symbol of chaos and sin: the waters at the beginning of creation, the waters of the Red Sea, the waters of Noah's flood, etc. Just as the Spirit of God hovered...
7 Aug 200514min
The Loop of Grace
It all begins with grace, and it all ends with grace. Bernanos' country priest summed up Christianity with the phrase "Toute est grace," everything is grace. God gives graciously, gratuitously, supera...
31 Juli 200514min
Both the Old and the New
At the conclusion of chapter 13 of Matthew's Gospel, the chapter of parables, Jesus says, "the scribe who is learned in the Kingdom of God is like the householder who brings forth from his storehouse ...
24 Juli 200514min
The Mystery of the Wheat and the Weeds
In our Gospel for today, we hear the parable of the wheat and the tares. Jesus speaks of the mysterious, and often frustrating, intertwining of good and evil. Don't be too eager, he says, to tear out ...
17 Juli 200514min
