Seventeenth Sunday of the Year

Christianity is a religion of attention. Whom do we notice? What do we notice? Is it a person on the street or a person with a lot of social status?  This relates to the image, a few weeks ago, where Jesus self-described as meek and how that may be reflected in our worship spaces might; what appears in parish bulletins; books we read; the training we offer for youth and religious leaders; how ‘little ones’ are listened to as privileged interpreters of God’s message. What verses and scenes do we hold in our hearts? What images direct our attention to the God of love? The parables suggest that God’s Reign is not only found in places such as monasteries or in the demands and rewards of human religion but in the ordinary, daily, in your face, reality.

The Edmund Rice Centre recently made a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee reviewing the Australian Human Rights Framework. To read the submission (no.60) and others you can click here.

Sixteenth Sunday of the Year

The gospel continually calls us to seek to do relationships differently. To do that means we need to question how we classify people and situations. In the face of evil and people hurting others by unkindness, lack of care and malice, the gospel whilst acknowledging the negative invites us to hope. The parables turn traditional values upside down. Jesus reverses our understanding by insisting that there is wheat among the weeds, not weeds among the wheat. The word is that God is present amid evil, destruction, inadequacy, and insignificance. God is not limited by human weakness or failure. Evil, brokenness, pain, and sin are realities in our world but do not have the last say. God is patient. It comes from love and unlimited concern for all creatures. This is the soil from which God can work. Positive fruitfulness can be found in the messy field. Clearly, the Church is not meant to be a sect of perfect people. We are asked to check our assumptions about what we classify as ‘weeds.’ Might we be mistaken? Might we judge things to be harmful when they are not? Jesus’ teachings about peace and liberation were viewed as a weed that needed to be removed. What was viewed as a weed as with the mustard seed, was actually a lifegiving tree.