In today’s first reading at Mass [Jeremiah 18:18-20], the prophet is experiencing the trials that come from serving the Lord. He is proclaiming God’s message to a people whose hearts are hardened towards God’s word. Some citizens decide to silence the prophet. They figure that there are enough prophets in Israel, so one less won’t make a difference. Unfortunately, their thinking is wrong, as many of the prophets simply proclaim what the leaders of the nation want to hear:
Come," they said, "let us contrive a plot against Jeremiah. It will not mean the loss of instruction from the priests, nor of counsel from the wise, nor of messages from the prophets. And so, let us destroy him by his own tongue; let us carefully note his every word." Heed me, O LORD, and listen to what my adversaries say. Must good be repaid with evil that they should dig a pit to take my life? Remember that I stood before you to speak in their behalf, to turn away your wrath from them.
This chapter of the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah begins with the wonderful image of God as the potter and we are the clay. As long as we are willing to allow God to mold our lives [thy will be done], God will continue to transform us so we can be holy as God is holy. Part of the molding process includes our transformation into being servants of God. Saint Paul reminded us of this on Ash Wednesday in 2 Corinthians 5 when he said that we are ambassadors for Christ. Jesus in today’s gospel at Mass [Matthew 20:17-28] reminds us that service is the way to greatness in the kingdom of God and that serving will require us to “drink from his cup” at times. In other words, we will encounter trials and difficulties as we serve the Lord. It is all part of the “Potter’s Plan.” Jesus too will experience this reality as He drinks from the cup of suffering during his passion and death.
For us to keep our commitment to God and to one another will cause us to experience some of the same trials that Jeremiah did, as Jesus did, and as countless other Christian witnesses (ambassadors of Christ) have done in the past. For instance, the vocation of marriage. When I have taught the RCIA class on the priesthood, I have also included the sacrament of matrimony in my class. Strange? NO! Both are sacraments of service. Ordination to the priesthood or married life is a call to service for richer or for poorer, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. As one author stated, to keep commitments, we will have to sweat blood at times. Anyone who has lived either of these two vocations can identify with Jesus’ words to James and John in the gospel. They want positions of power and authority in the kingdom but without the cross:
My cup you will indeed drink, but to sit at my right and at my left (, this) is not mine to give but is for those for whom it has been prepared by my Father." [Matthew 20:23]
Today, we celebrate an American saint, Saint Katharine Drexel. Born into a prominent Philadelphia family, she would eventually feel a call to follow Christ in the religious life. From her religious order’ information about the saint, Saint Katharine’s drinking from Jesus’ cup was part of the discernment to religious life:
Young Katharine felt called to the contemplative life. Bishop O’Connor, her spiritual director, finally agreed she had a religious vocation, but almost commanded her to found a new order serving the Native Americans and African Americans. Katharine was appalled at the thought. She did not think she was virtuous enough. She wrote back…“I know the privations, the trials, the temptations, and I ask myself, could I go through all these things in a manner suitable for edifying the religious of my order?” Bishop O’Connor replied, “I was never so sure of any vocation, not even my own, as I am of yours. If you do not establish the order in question, you will allow to pass an opportunity of doing immense service to the Church which may not occur again.”
When Pope Francis came to the United States several years ago and visited Philadelphia, he mentioned Katharine Drexel:
Most of you know the story of Saint Katharine Drexel, one of the great saints raised up by this local Church. When she spoke to Pope Leo XIII of the needs of the missions, the Pope – he was a very wise Pope! – asked her pointedly: “What about you? What are you going to do?”. Those words changed Katharine’s life, because they reminded her that, in the end, every Christian man and woman, by virtue of baptism, has received a mission. Each one of us has to respond, as best we can, to the Lord’s call to build up his Body, the Church.
As I preached several Sundays ago, Lent is part of a 90-day journey that ends with Pentecost when we are sent out into the world like Saint Katharine. These 40 days are designed to let the Potter (God) mold us into more committed prophets and holier ambassadors for Christ. People more ready to drink from the cup from which Jesus drank.
In today’s first reading at Mass [Isaiah 1:190,16-20] the prophet compares Israel to Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities destroyed over their sinfulness and injustice. Wow, what a call to conversion and building a more just society. Isaiah encourages the Jewish citizens to remake their society by caring for the least among us, the widows and orphans.
Jesus began his public ministry by proclaiming the Kingdom of God. When God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven, THEN society is one of justice, love, and peace. It is the society that we all desire. In today’s gospel at Mass [Matthew 23:1-12], Jesus instructs us not to pay attention to the things that society often focuses on. The rich and the famous. For instance, in the gospel, it is the religious leaders who make a show of their religiosity that attracts peoples’ attention. Unlike these religious leaders, if you recall, on Ash Wednesday, we were instructed to give alms in secret, to pray without of public display, and to fast without letting others know what we are doing.
Jesus is instructing us in various ways how to build the Kingdom (Regin) of God. Take for example the end of today’s gospel:
The greatest among you must be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled; but whoever humbles himself will be exalted. [Matthew 23:11-12]
The kingdom will be on the attitude embraced by all that we are called to serve rather than to be served. It will be a society where pride does not guide peoples’ lives but humility. As one author stated, humility is not thinking less of ourselves (that is humiliation) but thinking less about ourselves so we can be servants.
Think how radically different the kingdom world is as compared to our present day society? For instance, Sunday was the Golden Globes award ceremony. Prior to the pandemic, when these Hollywood award ceremonies were held, the female movie stars wardrobes were featured in pictures. Modesty out the window. Expense to look elegant? Forgotten. With the kingdom of God, would we pay so much attention to the movie stars; who is married to whom; who is getting divorced? In other words, the rich and famous?
Wouldn’t we rather focus on the servants among us? When I served at Christ the Good Shepherd, the woman in charge of the social ministry of the parish would greet those coming for assistance with the words:
Thank you for this opportunity to serve you.
She greeted those in need with a servant’s heart and not with the attitude of:
What do you want?
Those who work at Casa Juan Diego in Houston also exemplifies the attitude of humble servants. They accept on government funds so they can simply minister to the homeless and the undocumented immigrants that come to this country. With the recent changes in the immigration policies of the United States, they are already receiving more requests from the government to house people from many different nations of the world. In their quarterly newspaper, there was an article about a spiritual vaccine for people. In the article, the author stated.
This insistence on keeping our distance from government is not just tactical, it is part of our heritage, and the very thing that facilitates our solidarity with people on the margins…..Casa Juan Diego is that most hallowed of places today, a place of common good and common ground. A place where political affiliation is unimportant. Where the real and tangible chance to care for a stranger means more than the judgement of your peers on social media. We find common ground not in our beliefs about who is to blame for hunger or food insecurity, but in our daily practice of giving individual people the food they need. We find common ground not in our ideas about immigration policy, that may not happen, but in our direct service, for example to a new family that just arrived from Angola in need of bandages for their feet. These Works of Mercy are a balm for our own injured souls, and this space of common ground, where we are more connected than separate, is what our creator must have envisioned for us. In the past 40 years of work at Casa Juan Diego, in good times and in bad, this has always been the way forward.
If you go to the parish web site and my letter or welcome, you will find a quotation of the type of parish that I wish ours to be. I think that the quotation somewhat describes the kingdom of God that Jesus came to build:
The Church is a unique kind of community, the union of those baptized into Christ, formed by his Word - gathered around the table where we share Christ's Body in order to become his Body for the world. It is a community in which, as St. Paul states in his letter to the Galatians, there is no slave or master, no national or ethnic superiorities, no gender domination, no inequality that is significant except holiness; a community in which even distinctions of role and function are differences which must serve the unity of the whole. It is a community in which all vie for the lowest place, wash one another's feet, lift up rather than impose burdens, and dwell among their sisters and brothers as those who serve."
Small acts of generosity, service, kindness – mustard seed actions, so to speak – will build the kingdom of God.
To what shall we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use for it? It is like a mustard seed that, when it is sown in the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade. [Mark 4:30-32]
I am reading an interesting book titled I Thirst: 40 days with Mother Teresa. In the book the author discusses satisfying Jesus’ thirst for souls. Quenching this thirst was Mother Teresa’s mission. The author has some wonderful statements regarding satiating Jesus’ thirst:
The Eucharist is the sacrament of the thirst of God – the sacrament of that supreme moment on the Cross – a thundering echo of “I thirst.” It is the total gift of God’s thirst to satisfy our thirst for him and for his love.
In the Eucharist, God our Father is making a total personal gift of his Son to each one of us. All that Jesus is and all that he has done is poured into our poverty. The power of Christ’s thirst in the gift of the Eucharist gives us the power to make our thirst become a gift in return.
Jesus is the vehicle, the expression, and the channel of our thirst for the Father and his thirst for us. Responding to the Father’s thirst in Christ leads to satiating his eternal thirst for us.
In one chapter about the Kingdom of God, the author has this to say about Jesus’ basic message of proclamation.
There seem to be four essential principles, four “secrets of the kingdom” inherent in the Good News announced by Jesus – principles that should inform the way we offer service in Christ.
The first of these is total gift. The Good News is a proclamation of God’s free and unmerited gifts. All of creation and all of revelation proclaim God’s freely given love toward his creatures, rooted in the mystery of endless self-gift toward his creatures, rooted in the mystery of endless self-gift among the Persons of the Trinity. As Paul reminds us “What have you that you did not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7) Free gift is the moving force behind the outpouring of God’s mercy and the underlying theme of the Good News, the mater key to understanding the Kingdom of God. When we accept the free love and mercy of God, we are not made smaller; we grow larger. It is the only path to our truest dignity and freedom.
The second principle is total trust. “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on…. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.” (Matthew 6:25,33) Our doubts, our lack of trust, testify against us that we have not fully understood the Gospel. But once we do understand, then we not only proclaim our trust in the kingdom, but we live a pattern of trust. Total trust is a sign that we are in harmony with the kingdom. It sets us free to give the kingdom away.
The third is total love. The gift we have received is not to remain fruitless, bottled up within ourselves; it must overflow to others. “You received without pay; give without pay.” (Matthew 10:8) Friendship with Jesus in the Kingdom means that we fulfill the new commandment to love one another. Just as Jesus is loved by the Father and loves us in turn, so we are to continue the same expanding cycle, allowing the Son in the Spirit to love through us. As the Son has loved us, so we have loved others.
The fourth is total conversion. Our response to the Good News in the kingdom involves accepting Jesus’ invitation to radical conversion. We need to be ready to change whatever needs changing, to do whatever it takes to live as true members of Christ’s kingdom of love.
When we understand the Lord’s thirst, we then desire to satiate his thirst and to give ourselves entirely to him – to thirst for him with all of our being.