"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
The Gospel passage this week is a continuation from last week’s Gospel Reading. It takes place the Wednesday before Good Friday and, oh dear, the Jewish leaders are in trouble again with Jesus! For the last few weeks we have heard Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of Heaven using the image of a vineyard. This week, Jesus uses an alternative image, that of a banquet…
Often in Scripture we have to harmonize two passages which seem to present some kind of conflict with each other. Today I would like to present one such conflict, one with which I’ve struggled over the years.
In the fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says:
“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.
“In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” – Matthew 5:14-16
So, we’re supposed to let our light shine before others. Got it. Yet…in the next chapter it says…
“Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” – Matthew 6:1-4
So we should let our light shine….but only in secret? Hmm….
I’ve had people ask me about these two passages before and I have given them an answer, providing some distinctions between each of these passages, but today I’d like to turn the question over to you. How do we reconcile these two passages? What is Jesus trying to teach us? And if we follow His teaching here, what does it practically look like?
A few weeks ago I attended a presentation after Mass given by my friend Huliana, describing her journey from Islam to Catholicism. My friend Nessa took some photographs and I recorded the audio. Here it is…
From Islam to Catholicism (Download)
The other day I did a post in which I looked at the sequence of events in the creation narrative of Genesis. In verse two of Chapter 1, we are told that “the earth was without form and void” and I explained how God spends the rest of the chapter fixing these two problems.
He solves the problem of formlessness in the first three days by creating the domains of time, space and habitat. He then solves the problem of emptiness by then populating each of these realms with rulers: first sun, moon and stars, next fish and birds, and then finally land animals and humanity.
I compared Genesis chapter one to the building of a house, God first builds the structure of the house and then fills its rooms. However, at the end of the post I explained that God wasn’t just building a house, but a temple…
Why do I say that God was building a temple? Well, we know that other cultures at the time of Genesis’ authorship also considered the cosmos to be something of a temple in which the gods were to be worshiped, but we also find a similar strain of thought concerning the first book of the Pentateuch…
I’ve already written a “Quick Apology” to this topic before, but as I was responding to a recent commenter on this subject, I thought of an even shorter response…
Here’s the standard objection:
“Mary is not the ‘Mother of God'”
In response to this, you may ask a very simple question: did the child Jesus call Mary “Mama”? Yes or No?
UPDATE: As the more pedantic among the readers have pointed out, Jesus would have spoken Aramaic and therefore called her “Ima”.
Yesterday I posted the MP3 recordings of “Dei Verbum”, the document on Sacred Scripture from the Second Vatican Council.
I decided that today I’d also post the section of the Catechism on Sacred Scripture, which draws extremely heavily from that Council document.
Catechism On Scripture (PDF) (MP3)
Speaking of the Catechism, did you know that Flocknote have a service which will email you a short section of the Catechism each day?
Summary
Lewis recounts another overheard “conversation” between a Ghost and a female Spirit named Hilda. The ghost begins by saying that she would not dream of staying in Heaven if she were expected to meet Robert, her husband and Hilda’s brother. She says that she forgives him “as a Christian…but there are some things one can never forget.” She even seems puzzled as to how he came to be in Heaven at all.
She then begins to retell the story of her life with Robert. Her chief complaint was “The ingratitude! It was I who made a man of him! Sacrificed my whole life to him! And what was my reward? Absolute, utter selfishness”. She explains that he was relatively poor man, completely lacking ambition, and that she was the one “who had to drive him every step of the way”. She nagged him to take on extra work, which is regarded as nothing in comparison to her own workload, since she “I had to keep him going all evening…draw him out of himself and brighten him up and make conversation”. He didn’t appreciate her flower arrangements, particularly when she spilled a vase on the manuscript of a book he was writing (something which she “cured him of…in the end”)
She complained about Robert’s attempts to “just slink off by himself every now and then to see what he called his old friends… and leave me to amuse myself!” Instead, she insisted that the friends come to the house instead. She both subtlety manipulated her husband and made his friends feel uncomfortable, managing to drive them away by the end of their first year of marriage.
Upon receiving a promotion, Robert hoped for peace, but his wife now wanted to get a bigger house and was irritated that he doesn’t seem thoroughly enthusiastic about the house-hunting process. She convinced him to buy a house they couldn’t really afford, but she was excited that she could now “entertain properly”. In contrast, she said that Robert “…just set himself to get old and silent and grumpy”, even though he “hadn’t always been like that”. Robert would just sit there, hating her and she grew to hate him too. There appears to have been some issue with the “younger men who came to the house” who liked her better than her “old bear of a husband” and “used to laugh at him”.
Towards the end of Robert’s life, she bought a great Dane and forced him to walk it for his health. She kept hosting parties, “took him for the most wonderful holidays…[and] saw that he didn’t drink too much”. She even allowed him to take up writing again (“It couldn’t do any harm by then”). But in the end, Robert had a nervous breakdown, but the ghost said her conscience is clear – she had done her duty.
Reconsidering, the ghost says that she will, in fact, meet Robert. If Heaven will give her “a free hand”, she’ll “take charge of him again…make something of him…. There’s lots, lots, lots of things I still want to do with him”. When Hilda tells her this is not possible, she becomes desperate: “Please, please! I’m so miserable. I must have someone to – to do things to…. No one minds about me at all [in Hell]. I can’t alter them”. The ghost snaps, saying “I hate you. How can I pay him out if you won’t let me have him?”. Lewis says that “The Ghost which had towered up like a dying candle flame snapped suddenly… and then there was no Ghost to be seen”.
Questions
Q1. How would you describe the ghost? How would you describe the husband?
Q2. Why is the ghost reticent about meeting her husband? What does she think about forgiveness?
Q3. How did she regard the relationship with her husband? What kind of relationship does Christianity imagine?
Q4. What do you think was the ghost’s motivation regarding her husband?
Q5. What did she think of his desire to write a book?
Q6. Why do you think Robert’s ability to be a good host declined?
Q7. Why does the ghost change her mind about seeing Robert? Under what condition? How does she respond?
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