“Be watchful. Be alert! You do not know when the time will come.”

This weekend, the time has come for us to begin our yearly pilgrimage to Bethlehem. Last week we finished up the liturgical year of 2023 with the Parable of the Final Judgment in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 25. Today we pick up at essentially the same place, except we are now in St. Mark’s Gospel, which will be our Gospel Scripture for 2024.

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Jesus Christ is the Same Yesterday, Today and Forever

We wrap up this Liturgical Year of 2023, as always, with the Solemnity of Christ the King, or as it’s now more formally known The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe In sports terms, this Sunday is our Catholic Super Bowl or Game 7, and we learn about the Final Judgment, the big decider, today. The test of true holiness is how we treat one another. Are you an obedient follower of Jesus, the Good Shepherd: humble, maybe suffering silently, and treating others in our community well? Or are you a wild goat...? To be with God and to be happy with Him forever in Heaven is our Christian destiny.

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"When one finds a worthy wife, her value is far beyond pearls"
The Wisdom of God is personified as ‘woman’ in last week’s and this weeks’ First Readings. These readings and the parables are a call to use our God-given talents wisely and well in order to do God’s work to build the Kingdom. We should never be afraid of God, and we should always have complete and total trust and confidence in the Lord.

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We get to know Jesus through our practice of living the faith, through the Sacraments. He knows us best through our attendance at Mass, by receiving Him in the Eucharist. What is this oil that is so prized by the wise and the prudent? The oil is faith and it is also what we do with our precious faith: in other words, how do we light up our world by living out our faith.

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“The greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted” (Mt 23:11-12).

We are now in the Holy Month of November and in our Scriptures today we are in the Holy Week in the Holy City of Jerusalem. Jesus and His Twelve Disciples have been on their final Passover journey after three years together. Now, Jesus criticized the Pharisees and scribes for many reasons, and one of those reasons was their wanting to be better than everybody else in public and receiving honor and praise.

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Jesus says: “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the Shema Prayer, the most famous prayer in the Jewish faith, and the equivalent of the Our Father in the Catholic Church. Then He goes further: “The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

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“Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”

The Romans thought Caesar a God and since Julius Caesar, this new religion began, but his legendary assassination in 42 BC proved definitively that he was not a god.

Again, at the Temple in Jerusalem during Holy Week, in a high-stakes game and the ante is getting higher. Jesus’ parables of Judgment and Grace have fallen on deaf ears. Rather than repent, His enemies hardened their hearts against Him.

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Everyone loves a wedding and especially the special party afterwards, which is a joyful feast. For the second weekend running, we celebrated weddings on Saturday mornings. We wish these two young couples truly blessed, long and fruitful married lives together. This weekend, we’ll celebrate four baptisms!

Reflecting on these Sacraments of Initiation and on the Vocation of Love, we consider what happens after we are baptized, after we become members of the bride of Christ. We are then clothed in our white baptismal garment, which represents the love of Christ, the charity of Christ, washing us of our sins.

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I had to travel to Ireland this past week for the funeral Mass of Annette Higgins, my mother's youngest sister and my Godmother. When I grew up, there was no such thing as abortion in Ireland. I heard about it, of course, but it was a very strange, dark and alien concept, like the evils of World Wars I and II. I knew the Catholic Church spoke out strongly against abortion, and that was good enough for me.

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“It’s easier to say ‘no’ now and ‘yes’ later than to say ‘yes’ now and ‘no’ later.”

These words of a holy man ring in my ears when I think of this great Parable. I don’t know if he was referring to this parable, or if he was just saying that sometimes we have to say “no,” but once again, this little-known parable is very timely, as we are now in the harvest season: the man in the parable is God and His vineyard is the Kingdom of God.

“Go out and work in the vineyard today.”

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Of all the parables, this is my absolute favorite. I have been studying it for over 15 years, and I am still learning more about it. Why so? Because I’m still learning about the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Heaven. I also see it as the Parable of Hope. I was turned on to this parable by Stu Long while we were in Seminary. He told me the story of when he was working at Harbor View Hospital in Seattle. He was taking a course called Clinical Pastoral Education (or CPE), learning the ropes of hospital ministry.

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Have you ever experienced how the floodgates of grace open up when we honor the will of God and purposely decide to forgive? This is available to all of us in Confession. However, we all have the power to forgive: The French Dominican theologian Fr. Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, who once taught the future Pope John Paul II, in his great book Life Everlasting, tells us of the transformation of a Jewish man that he personally knew and who had the courage to forgive. He relates how: “I knew a young Jew, the son of an Austrian banker, in Vienna. He had decided on a lawsuit against the greatest adversary of his family, a lawsuit that would have enriched him and his family.

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“For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

This is one of my very favorite lines in all of the Bible. In one astounding phrase, split up in two short and simple parts, Jesus tells of the mystery of God’s presence always among us:

Recall how Jesus sent His disciples out two by two, to proclaim Him.

It also speaks to our need for the Sacraments. It speaks of our need for right relationship and also of our community most perfectly gathered together in the Sacrifice of the Sunday Mass. We begin Mass with the Sign of the Cross and the Apostolic Greeting, followed by what we call the Penitential Rite, where we ask God to make us pure and worthy of standing in His presence and worship in a fitting manner.

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