Fr Sellery Presents This Weeks Focus

Don’t look for hidden meanings in this week’s gospel. Jesus gives us the punch line right up front: Pray always. This wasn’t a message he reserved for scribes and priests… for people in the ritual praying business. Pray always: is a message Jesus gives to everyone: to fishermen, to laborers, to homemakers… to people scrambling to make a living. Pray always: is Christ’s message for us this morning… knowing we have mortgages and student loans, car payments and grocery bills.

What would it take to convince you that you are totally dependent on God’s love? What would it take to get you to thank him for every breath; to praise him for every sunrise? How about an instant cure of a deadly disease that had destroyed your body and made you a wretched outcaste? Think that would get your attention? Well, it wasn’t quite good enough for nine of the ten lepers in this week’s gospel. Jesus cured them and they went their merry way … presto, changeo… from outcastes to ingrates in an instant. Not a word of “Thank you.” No “God be praised.” Not even a “See you later, Jesus.”

This is another one of Luke’s confusing, even troubling, gospels… made even more troubling by linking two apparently unconnected parables into one confusing narrative. To begin, the disciples make what seems a perfectly reasonable request: Give us more faith! And Jesus gives them a stinging reply. We can sympathize with their confusion. For chapter after chapter of Luke, Jesus has been challenging them to embrace some pretty radical concepts. This Nazarene, this journeyman carpenter tells them that he and the Father are one; that they must change their hearts or perish; that love of God and neighbor supersedes sacred ritual; that they cannot serve God and wealth; that they must forgive and forgive again… and on and on… one tough nut after another. No wonder they ask: Give us more faith!

“Them that has, gets.”  So the old expression goes… but exactly what do they get? And what does it cost them? In this week’s gospel Jesus addresses the price of worldly wealth, its value… and its unintended consequences. The “poor little rich girl” is a familiar figure from 19th Century literature. She inherited everything, but happiness. Her male counterpart is “Scrooge,” the picture of hard-hearted, money grubbing. But whether they inherited it or acquired it, both paid a terrible price for their wealth.

Fifteen years after the atrocities of 9/11, the pain remains – intense for those closest to the victims, a dull ache for those of us further removed. Jesus reaches out from the gospel to take our pain – if not with a quick cure, surely with a sound road to recovery.