The Peace Pulpit is made up of the Sunday homilies of Bishop Thomas Gumbleton, a retired Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Detroit.
Perhaps the most important words from today’s gospel are what Jesus says at the end of the lesson, after he tells the parable.
He says that one person went down to his house justified, not the other. If we understand the full implications of what it means to be justified, we perhaps will have a deeper understanding of what Jesus means by this parable.
As we reflect on the readings today, I think it’s important to begin with what happens at the end of the Gospel, where Jesus says to the man who was cured -- the one among the 10 who came back -- he says to him: “Your faith has saved you.”
As we listen carefully to the lessons today, we discover some things about the reign of God -- the realm of God where God is in fullness of presence -- and what we pray for when we say the Our Father, “Thy Kingdom come.”
There is a passage in the Book of the Prophet Isaiah that I have always thought of as a very marvelous, extraordinary way of showing who God is and how God acts in relation to us. This is from the 30th chapter in the Book of Isaiah and it time when the prophet has been preaching to the people, who are threatened with an invasion from the north, not to enter into an alliance with the Egyptians and not to go to war. The prophet is pleading with the people "Seek peace and only peace." But they reject the prophet's message and they go to war. They are defeated, but then the prophet says these extraordinary words, speaking for God: "God is always waiting to be gracious to you. God comes to show you compassion." I have always thought of this as a very beautiful expression of who God is. God is always waiting, waiting to be gracious to us. No matter how we have sinned, rejected God, God is waiting. That is a very reassuring revelation about God.
In today's Gospel, Jesus is heading to Jerusalem and he knows what is facing him there. But he is also attracting this large crowd of people who following him with great enthusiasm. Jesus determines that this is something critical. A decisive moment. It was for the people of that time, and because this word of God is a living word it must be a decisive moment for each one of us. Are we really ready to make the decision to follow Jesus?
Obviously, in our lessons today -- God’s Word that we are listening to carefully -- we are being instructed about humility. This is a virtue that I think many of us have some trouble with -- even though in our first lesson the writer of that Book of Wisdom tells us that the greater you are, the more you should humble yourself and find favor with God. It is the humble that give God glory. We hear that, but we still wonder about being humble because many of us, I think, have an understanding of humility that it somehow means putting yourself down.
Probably we noticed, as we listened to the gospel, that Jesus really does not answer the person's question, the one who cried out from the crowd, "Will only a few be saved?" Obviously the person asking that question is concerned about personal, individual salvation — how many are there going to be that will be saved? Jesus doesn't consider that because he didn't come just to preach personal salvation.
We gather together obviously with great joy to celebrate the feast today: the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven. Mary, according to the feast that we celebrate, went immediately through death to new life without her body falling into decay and being buried. And of course it was a significant blessing for her -- a sign of her unique place in the whole story of our salvation -- and so we rejoice in this and celebrate.
In a few moments, as we always do on Sunday, we will recite what we call our profession of faith, the doctrines that we believe in, and most of the time, I think, when someone says to us, “What is your faith?” we think of those doctrines, a creator, God; or the incarnation, God becoming flesh; or the Immaculate Conception, Mary born without any sin -- all of these doctrines we think of as our faith, and it’s very intellectual. It is an aspect of our faith, but as we listen to the lessons today, we discover a very different understanding of what faith really is, and one that is, I think, much richer than simply assenting to a list of doctrine.
Today Jesus opens up for us a teaching about what can be one of the most difficult parts of our following of Jesus, how to make use and enjoy and, to some extent, accumulate even the material things in the world around us. The teaching we’re confronted with today is a very profound teaching in trying to follow Jesus. It’s the proper attitude toward wealth, toward material things, and coming to grips with that part of the beatitudes, the very first one where Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor. Woe to the rich.” What should be our way of thinking about material wealth, and what should we do by way of possessing wealth or trying to achieve the blessedness of the poverty Jesus teaches about?
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