Today’s “Word of Day” from our friends at Merriam Webster is “homily.” You’re thinking, “well of course he is going to mention this – it’s right up his wheelhouse.” Interesting expression that: wheelhouse. The word “wheelhouse” has gone from a nautical term, to a baseball term, to a term that describes a person’s area of expertise. Continue reading
This coming Sunday is the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time in Lectionary Cycle A. In the flow of the Sunday gospels since the 11th Sunday there was a strong theme of mission. In those five gospel readings we have witnessed Jesus commissioning the Twelve, encouraging them to proclaim the message of Good News from the rooftops, while warning them that all this will come at a cost. On the 13th Sunday gospel Jesus makes clear they will face opposition and pushback from all quarters of life, including their families – and they may well have to choose between family and Jesus. In the course of those three gospels, in a previous post I noted that Mt 10:9-25 was not a Sunday reading but it only emphasizes the opposition, trials, and suffering that they may well face on this mission. Continue reading
This coming Sunday is the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time. In the context of Jesus’ ministry the parable serves to explain why it is that the good news of the kingdom meets with such a varied response as we have seen in chapters 11–12, from enthusiastic acceptance to outright rejection. The fault lies not in the message, but in those who receive it.
People are both inadequate in themselves to respond as the word of the kingdom requires (compacted and shallow soil), and also exposed to competing pressures from outside (tribulation and persecution, anxieties and lures, and behind them all the evil one himself). The wonder is not that some do not produce fruit, but that any do. But here lies the parable’s encouragement both to Jesus’ followers then and to all who since then have preached this same gospel; not all will respond, but there will be some who do, and the harvest will be rich.
Image credit: “The Sower” Vincent van Gogh (June 1888), Van Gogh Museum, Public Domain
This coming Sunday is the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time and we have been considering Jesus’ parable of the sower who went out to sow. In the parable there are three primary images: sower, seed, and ground. While there may be some differences in emphasis or specific details, the general understanding of the three images and their interconnection can be summarized as follows: Continue reading
Apart from National Football League games, the series Yellowstone is the most watched show on television, consistently averaging more than 12 million viewers per episode. Yet, in its five years of production it has never been nominated for a single industry award in any category. In that same period, the series Succession has garnered non-stop awards and accolades. Succession’s highest-rated episode got only about a tenth of the viewers that a typical Yellowstone episode did in the 2022 season. All this despite that Yellowstone is only available on one source while Succession is available across a number of streaming platforms. Granted that award shows are critic-based and not view-based, but one has to wonder if this disparity has underlying significance. Continue reading
What did they hear?
This coming Sunday is the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Matthew 13 is a “day of parables.” The parable of the sower is spoken in public to great crowds (vv. 1–3), but its explanation and the teaching about parables are spoken only to the disciples (vv. 10–11). More parables are then spoken to ‘the crowds’ (v. 34), but the crowds are again left behind (v. 36), and the second explanation and further parables are spoken to the disciples in ‘the house’ (which Jesus had left in v. 1). The unresponsive crowds are thus clearly distinguished from the disciples to whom alone explanation is given, and this distinction is spelt out in vv. 11–17. Continue reading
In the sequence of first readings for weekday Masses, we have just made a huge leap from Jacob (Gen 28) to the end of the story of Joseph and his brothers (Gen 41). A quick synopsis of the story would include: his brothers, all older, were jealous of Joseph and colluded to sell him into slavery in Egypt. Long story, short, Joseph eventually thrives and serves as a chancellor to Pharaoh himself. A famine hit Israel and Joseph’s brothers came to buy grain. That all serves as background to our first reading today. Continue reading
In the blink of an eye, I decided to add another post to explain the word “blink” as used in the previous post on the post Groups of Three. In the previous post I noted the use of the word “blink” by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissent on the recent college admissions decision.
The word “blink” comes from the Old English word “blincan,” which means “to close or shut the eyes quickly.” It is related to the Old Norse word “blikna,” which means “to twinkle.” Justice Brown wrote: “This contention blinks both history and reality in ways too numerous to count.” In the legal setting “blink” means to “neglect, fail to acknowledge.” She was arguing against the idea that the law must be colorblind.
I did not know that meaning and use of the word “blink.” But it gave me an understanding to one of my dad’s expressions which I always found intriguing but vague. He offered: “a blink is as good a nod to a blind horse.” Or was it “wink”? Dad was rather flexible with that idiom.
While scientists have long known of the general problem known as the “group of three,” families have always experienced the problem. There is an old adage about kids that goes something akin to: one child presents the spoiled child possibility, two children begets the “mommy loves me best” retort, while with three children, one will be ganged up on by the other two. It is the third child which brings a new level of chaos to the family. Continue reading
This coming Sunday is the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time. “A sower went out to sow.” As France [2007, 504] notes, in a primarily agrarian society the choice of agricultural imagery for parables needs no special explanation; three of the parables in this chapter are set on the farm. It is estimated that 90% of Israelites worked in some aspect of agriculture. There was also already a tradition in the prophetic books of using agricultural imagery, primarily in judgment narratives (e.g., Is 32, 35 and 44; Jer 31 and 51; Joel 3; and Amos 8). Continue reading
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