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Kings and Commoners

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Today’s readings offer us something that we in this current age of television, movies and mystery novels are pretty familiar with — the flashback. In the First Reading, Sirach flashes back to the glory of King David hundreds of years before the writer of Sirach picked up his pen. In the Gospel of Mark, King Herod flashes back to his own killing of John the Baptist as he tries to figure out who this Jesus is that he is hearing about. Two kings — David and Herod — two flashbacks, at least two very interesting lessons for us today.

Not that many days ago, our daily readings told us about David’s big sins, the taking of Uriah’s wife and the sending of Uriah to die in battle, and the prophet Nathan confronting him with the truth. Adultery and murder, of course, are Ten Commandment-level bad, yet Sirach hails him as Israel’s greatest, “like the choice fat of the sacred offerings.” Numerous great things are attributed to David, things previously chronicled in the books of Samuel. Perhaps the most important for our purposes is that “With his every deed he offered thanks to God Most High, in words of praise” and “With his whole being he loved his Maker and daily had his praises sung.” Sirach admits David was not perfect, because “The Lord forgave him his sins.” 

Sirach reminds us that kings can be just like the rest of us, sinful and in need of forgiveness. And David reminds us of what we need to do: to love God with our whole being, to thank and praise Him always, to repent of our sins and turn to God’s mercy.

And then there’s Herod. Mark reminds us that kings can be just like the rest of us, refusing to see the wrongs we have done, committed to our own pride instead of the will of God. Herod had John arrested because he didn’t like the truth John told him; he killed John to impress others. And when he heard of Jesus, he couldn’t comprehend that there would be one ever greater, one whom John wasn’t fit to untie His sandal straps. Instead of trying to hear the Lord’s message, he dismissed it as some sort of supernatural hocus-pocus.

Sirach’s flashback shows us that God can forgive our sins and exalt us when we repent and love, serve and praise Him. Mark’s flashback shows us that it is up to us to want God’s forgiveness and love. If we only focus on ourselves and reject our Lord’s most loving gift, we waste that most precious love of our own accord. 

Today’s Responsorial Psalm wraps it all up very nicely. The psalmist tells us “God’s way is unerring” and “He is a shield to all who take refuge in Him.” Once again, it comes down to this: God, who doesn’t need us in the slightest, wants a relationship with us. He wants to be our God if we will be his people. And I know God knows it’s hard for us to overcome ourselves, but His love and grace are freely given to all who sincerely call on His name. He is more than willing to transform us commoners into kings after His own heart.

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Mike Karpus is a regular guy. He grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, graduated from Michigan State University and works as an editor. He is married to a Catholic school principal, raised two daughters who became Catholic school teachers at points in their careers, and now relishes his two grandchildren, including the 3-year-old who teaches him what the colors of Father’s chasubles mean. He has served on a Catholic School board, a pastoral council and a parish stewardship committee. He currently is a lector at Mass, a Knight of Columbus, Adult Faith Formation Committee member and a board member of the local Habitat for Humanity organization. But mostly he’s a regular guy.

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The Soil of Our Souls

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If you’re like me, you probably can’t even count the number of times you’ve heard or read today’s Gospel, Mark’s version of the sower and the seed. That familiarity with the parable puts us in a polar opposite situation with the Twelve Apostles. “We get it, we get it. Good soil — fruit; bad soil — withered,” our minds might be saying, not understanding how or why Jesus’ closest followers had to ask him what the story meant.

Yet, Jesus’ response to us, I think, would be exactly the same as it was to his disciples. To paraphrase: “Don’t you get it? If you don’t get it here, how will you get any of my teaching?” Because responding out of familiarity, “We get it” seems to be just what he’s warning against. We think we know, so we let the teaching get snatched away, or let it wither, or let it get choked by other worldly concerns, including our own arrogance that “We get it.”

Looking at it like that made me realize, while the four types of soil can be seen as four types of people, four types of hearts our Lord is looking to penetrate, they also can be seen as four varying stages in our own hearts and our own faith journeys. Anyone who has ever been to a retreat, Cursillo, spiritual conference or other faith-filled event can’t help but leave it thanking God for how much they have been moved and changed and enlivened. God forbid on the drive home we see a broken-down car on the side of the road or a homeless person panhandling on the corner and we give them no thought at all. Or someone cuts us off and we’re quick to scream loudly. Fertile ground and a rocky path, right there in the same heart.

The key, Jesus tells us, is hearing the word and accepting it. In the context of the parable, the seed is sown in the soil of our souls. Accepting it, then, is the tending of that seed and that soil, becoming our own gardeners to make sure that seed bears fruit that is thirty or sixty or a hundredfold. We have to have an active role in the process, the accepting, the nurturing, the cultivating, developing and sharing of that which has been given to us.

Paul reminds us in his salutations to Timothy and Titus how the seed sown by Jesus is planted in us today, 2,000 years later. “Timothy, my dear child,” he says, and “Titus, my true child in our common faith.” Faith is handed down to us in close, personal relationship. Our parents, priests, teachers, catechists, spiritual directors; the writings of saints baring their souls; the epistles and Gospels and prophets and psalms. With the Holy Spirit’s help, these personal connections transmit the love of God through our Lord Jesus Christ down through time and space to our very souls. Now it is up to us to tend the soil of our souls, to accept the seed planted there and make it bear much fruit. And what do you do when you have fruit, abundant and overflowing? You give it to others.

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Mike Karpus is a regular guy. He grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, graduated from Michigan State University and works as an editor. He is married to a Catholic school principal, raised two daughters who became Catholic school teachers at points in their careers, and now relishes his two grandchildren, including the 3-year-old who teaches him what the colors of Father’s chasubles mean. He has served on a Catholic School board, a pastoral council and a parish stewardship committee. He currently is a lector at Mass, a Knight of Columbus, Adult Faith Formation Committee member and a board member of the local Habitat for Humanity organization. But mostly he’s a regular guy.

Feature Image Credit: Joshua Lanzarini, https://unsplash.com/photos/Vct0oBHNmv4

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The Wisdom of God

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O Wisdom of our God Most High,
guiding creation with power and love:
come to teach us the path of knowledge!

I never knew my maternal grandfather; he died a year and a half before I was born. But I have learned the stories about him: how he lied about his age so he could join a brother in coming to America; how he drove an ambulance in France for the U.S. Army during World War I; how he, just like the usual Greek stereotype, owned a “greasy spoon” restaurant; how he was an older man when he married the feisty Sicilian woman who was my grandmother. It’s a little funny how, my whole life, I’ve been asked, “So, you’re Greek?” and I’ve always said, “Why, yes, on my mother’s side.”

Yes, people make assumptions (for example, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”), and seeing that my last name is a Greek word — which means “fruit,” by the way — they assume. And so I have to explain that I’m Polish on my father’s side, but I have no idea how a Polish family took a Greek word for their surname. I did know my grandfather on that side, perhaps the kindest and most generous man I’ve ever known. But he was also opinionated, opportunistic, and an alcoholic.

We can’t choose our ancestry, and yet it is very important in our lives because we are the culmination of it; it is the foundation of who we fundamentally are. Both Matthew and Luke use a genealogy of Jesus to show the importance of ancestry, especially how Jesus was the culmination of Old Testament prophecies and covenants, putting him in direct line with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Judah and King David. No, we can’t choose our ancestors, but today’s Gospel shows that God can and does do that choosing. And for Jesus, as well as for us, that ancestry chosen by God contains both the faithful and the sinner. Judah, as the First Reading tells us, may have been destined for greatness, with kings as descendants; and he may have saved his brother Joseph from their other brothers’ wrath, but he also sold Joseph into slavery. Jesus is considered a descendant of David, but he’s also a descendant of Ahaz, the guy who wouldn’t listen to Isaiah about asking the Lord for a sign. And God, in his infinite wisdom, used them all to fulfill his plan. His promises to Abraham, to Jacob, to David, even to Ahaz, are fulfilled in the birth of Jesus, the Messiah.

I began this reflection with today’s “O antiphon,” the ancient exhortations the Church has used since the eighth century to accompany the Magnificat canticle of Evening Prayer from December 17-23. As the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says on its website, the antiphons are “a magnificent theology that uses ancient biblical imagery drawn from the messianic hopes of the Old Testament to proclaim the coming Christ as the fulfillment not only of Old Testament hopes, but present ones as well.” And today, when we say Come, O Wisdom, we know that that Wisdom is Jesus Christ, our very Lord and Savior. Christmas is just a week away: Come, Lord Jesus, Come!

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Mike Karpus is a regular guy. He grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, graduated from Michigan State University and works as an editor. He is married to a Catholic school principal, raised two daughters who became Catholic school teachers at points in their careers, and now relishes his two grandchildren, including the 3-year-old who teaches him what the colors of Father’s chasubles mean. He has served on a Catholic School board, a pastoral council and a parish stewardship committee. He currently is a lector at Mass, a Knight of Columbus, Adult Faith Formation Committee member and a board member of the local Habitat for Humanity organization. But mostly he’s a regular guy.

Feature Image Credit: Pexels, https://pixabay.com/photos/bible-open-book-pages-open-bible-1846174/

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The Apple of God’s Eye

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I was born to a Catholic couple and raised in a Catholic family. I lived in a Catholic house on the same block as a Catholic school, a half a block away from a Catholic church. I was baptized in that church, graduated from that school. The sisters from the convent would come over on Saturday mornings and have coffee with my mother. Nuns have seen me in my pajamas! 

My mother was — and, at 83, still is! — organist at that church. I made my First Communion and First Reconciliation there, and I was confirmed and married before that altar. I served as an altar boy and lector and, living just a half a block away, answered many a call to fill in at the last minute when some other server failed to show up. Bottom line, I was nurtured in the faith, as Catholic as those seven brothers were Jewish.

And yet, I specifically remember our priest teaching us one day during a visit to religion class that we had to choose for ourselves: are we going to believe, or not? I don’t know if it had the effect he intended, because for me, it sounded like, “hey, you have an out.”

Clearly, I was not a Maccabean son, ready to give up my very life for my God and beliefs. And yet, I, too, had a parent who exhorted me to keep the faith they taught me, and that made all the difference. I learned by example that our God is a God of love who is deserving of all our love, praise and worship, however imperfect. 

In the Gospel, Jesus teaches us where we go from there. One might think the parable of the talents is sort of a faith economics lesson — God gives you gifts and expects you to be productive with them. But it’s so much more, and it all starts with that Maccabean concept of loving God above all. When our focus is on the Lord, then the using of our gifts to the best of our ability for him is the natural course of action. Because God loves us, we love him, and we serve others out of love for God and them, for his glory alone. 

It’s a big call, and the servant who did nothing with the talent shows the consequences. But note that the servant who returns fivefold is not chastised for failing to gain 10, he is rewarded for doing his best. The one who did not try is the one who must answer for it.

But then Luke throws in that unexpected twist: the people who didn’t want this nobleman to be king in the first place. Suddenly, “you have an out” comes into much clearer focus. If we’re going to believe, we need to love God above all and use our talents to further his kingdom in love and service. And if we aren’t, if we opt out, God will oblige by opting out on us. The king had his enemies slain before him, cutting them off completely. How could we possibly want that? Our prayer indeed must be, as the psalmist says, keep us “as the apple of your eye.”

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Mike Karpus is a regular guy. He grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, graduated from Michigan State University and works as an editor. He is married to a Catholic school principal, raised two daughters who became Catholic school teachers at points in their careers, and now relishes his two grandchildren, including the 3-year-old who teaches him what the colors of Father’s chasubles mean. He has served on a Catholic School board, a pastoral council and a parish stewardship committee. He currently is a lector at Mass, a Knight of Columbus, Adult Faith Formation Committee member and a board member of the local Habitat for Humanity organization. But mostly he’s a regular guy.

Feature Image Credit: Priscilla Du Preez, https://unsplash.com/photos/CoqJGsFVJtM