4 August 2026 - washed up?

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?
They do not wash their hands when they eat a meal.

Naturally we want to have clean hands before eating, but that was not the concern of the Pharisees and scribes. Neither was this among the ritual washings prescribed by the law, but was rather additional, extending a mandate meant for priests serving in the temple to others. The initial impulse of such a tradition was probably good. They wanted to be pure before God. If it made sense to purify oneself at the highest points of religious life, why not expand it to everyone everywhere for an even greater totality of purity through the nation? The Pharisees hoped that if this was done God would see them as righteous and finally come and vindicate them against their enemies. A corollary to that belief was that anyone who refused to participate was implicitly a traitor, one who couldn't be bothered to change his behavior for God and country. But there were several problems with this insistence on tradition.

Hear and understand.
It is not what enters one’s mouth that defiles the man;
but what comes out of the mouth is what defiles one.

One problem was that these ritual behaviors did not actually effect the purification they were meant to signify. If the heart was engaged, if they were done in a prayerful spirit, there might have been some value in them. But when they were performed only as required routine they could not be helpful. Even such actual requirements as kosher food laws were not in the last analysis about impurity that could be acquired by contagion from animals. At that time it was indeed necessary to keep those food laws. But their point was that the people of Israel might by a people set apart for God. Thus, even there, it was what happened in the will of the individuals, not that external acts, that mattered most. They were signaling by what they would and would not eat that they belonged to God and not to the surrounding nations.

The Pharisees took a tradition that had begun based on a good impulse and weaponized it to assert their own superiority over others. By the time they criticized Jesus and his disciples for not doing it there way they themselves were apparently more concerned to have grounds to criticize Jesus than they were for the righteousness of the nation. Thus the Pharisees were defiled by what came forth from the hearts, rather than Jesus and his disciples being defiled by their failure to wash their hands, since "from the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, unchastity, theft, false witness, blasphemy" (see Matthew 15:19). It is easy to extrapolate how the Pharisees themselves harbored many such evil thoughts in their hearts, particular in their attitude toward Jesus himself, and how those thoughts were expressed in a religiosity that was ultimately superficial.

We have to be careful that we ourselves don't turn our own initially helpful traditions into laws which we insist that others follow. There is a vast treasury of devotional practices in the Church. But no matter how effective any of them are for us we ought not to denigrate people who don't choose to practice them themselves. These lower case 't' traditions of various kinds are of course different from the Traditions handed down to us by the Church, the teachings passed down from Jesus and his Apostles. Of these Saint Paul wrote:

So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter (see Second Thessalonians 2:15).

But this is the point. We need to distinguish our own traditions, preferences, and predilections, from what has been handed down to us for the sake of our salvation. With the first we should be generous and flexible. But with the second we should be steadfast, unwilling to renounce them even in the face of persecution, desirous to be seen as faithful to the entirely of our call to be followers of Christ.

Chris Tomlin - Give Us Clean Hands

 

3 August 2026 - through the storm

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

When the disciples saw him walking on the sea they were terrified.
“It is a ghost,” they said, and they cried out in fear.

The presence of Jesus during storms in inherently harder to recognize than it is during times of tranquility and peace. We might assume that when Jesus makes us get in a boat to go somewhere we will have good weather and smooth sailing all the way to the other side. However, we can see from today's Gospel that Jesus doesn't always lead us around storms. Nor does he always encourage us to stay at home and wait them out. Rather he trains us to be obedient to his calling, but on the watch for his presence and grace when storms do arise.

At once Jesus spoke to them, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.”

At first the presence of Jesus only adds to the disciples' fear. Coming across the water as he does makes him seem like another danger in addition to the storm, as though nature and the spiritual powers were all set against them. Jesus certainly must have inspired awe when he appeared. But it became clear that he had no alliance with the storm, and that the power of his peacefulness was superior to that of the terror of the storm. The wind and the waves could not affect a heart so completely anchored in the heart of the Father.

Peter said to him in reply,
“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.”
He said, “Come.”

Peter needed more than visual spectacle in order to fully trust his senses. He knew Jesus best when Jesus called him to do what was beyond his natural capacity but made him able to it by grace, just as when Jesus summoned him to become a fisher of men in spite the fact that he was a sinner. And so Peter's desire to step out from the boat was not necessarily only a foolish desire to show off or experience the supernatural. It was motivated more by a desire to be near to Jesus in a way that was familiar, even if it was also wildly different from what had come before.

It may be that we all need help to grow in our ability to recognize Jesus during times of storm. Perhaps, like Peter, we learn to recognize him by learning to rely on him and take him at his word. We too may need to use this formula of "if it is you, command me", and then put his promise to the test by obeying. 

But when he saw how strong the wind was he became frightened;

The difficulty for us will often be the same as it was for Peter. We will make some new and bold effort to serve the Lord and draw near to him only to discover anew just how bad the weather of our circumstances truly is. There will not be fewer temptations to take our eyes off of Jesus when we step out of the boat, but more. It becomes more essential than ever to keep our eyes fixed on him, on his presence, on his word, and on his promise. If we fail to do so we won't have the solid safety of the boat on which to fall back, because we have taken steps into new and uncharted waters that are unique to us and to our calling.

he became frightened;
and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!”
Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand and caught him,
and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?”

It is almost inevitable that we will sometimes take our eyes off of Jesus and sink a little. The important thing is to turn back to him and ask for help before we go under entirely. Jesus himself knows that there is a learning process when it comes to walking by faith, just as we did not learn the physical skill of walking perfectly the first time we tried. Parents know that their children may fall as they learn to walk. But even so they do their best to spare them any significant injury, avoiding sharp corners and bruised knees to the best of their ability. Like any parent would have done, Jesus reached out immediately to catch Peter, restoring the stability that his presence alone could provide.

Those who were in the boat did him homage, saying,
“Truly, you are the Son of God.”

Because they had seen the presence of the power of Jesus in the midst of the storm they discovered that it was Jesus and not the storm that was the greater force at work in their lives. They discovered this in an existential way that went beyond the merely theoretical. It is one thing to know Jesus as Lord. But it is another to know him as the Lord of our lives and over our own unique circumstances. This is why it is not enough to know that Jesus is the Son of God. We must grow in understanding what that means for us. One thing it does mean is that he is the source of a healing power that knows no limits, as the crowds realized.

People brought to him all those who were sick
and begged him that they might touch only the tassel on his cloak,
and as many as touched it were healed.

Graham Kendrick and Reuben Morgan - Keep My Eyes On You

 

2 August 2026 - he makes me lie down in green pastures

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

When he disembarked and saw the vast crowd,
his heart was moved with pity for them, and he cured their sick.

He was planning some personal time for recovery from the physical and emotional demands of ministry. Many of us tend to become aggressive when our downtime is threatened. But not Jesus. He recognized the desperation that drove them to pursue him even in that deserted place. As with other times, his heart was moved with pity for them. In an earlier encounter he had described the crowds as sheep without a shepherd. Now that they had found in Jesus a truly Good Shepherd they were unwilling to let him slip away. And Jesus, as the Good Shepherd, was absolutely unwilling that they should need to do so. He always responded to the needs of his sheep, even when he might have preferred to do otherwise on a personal level. He was thus the opposite of most the leaders known in the history of Israel, who were meant to be shepherds, but mostly sought to feed themselves rather than the sheep. Thus Jesus fulfilled a promise of God made through Ezekiel.

Thus says the Lord GOD, Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand and put a stop to their feeding the sheep. No longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them (see Ezekiel 34:10).

The sheep were in need, so he cured their sick. When it grew late and they grew hungry he refused to send away those who had made such an effort to be near him. This surprised his disciples, who assumed that there was no other option but to send them away. After all, they neither had enough for the crowds nor the means to acquire it. The disciples demonstrated normal human limitations. On their own they could not create the conditions in which the sheep could remain with the shepherd. They were not self-serving in the way that the previous corrupt leaders of Israel had been. But they believed had to content themselves to do the least harm in conditions where they could not themselves tend the sheep. As such, the sought to acquit themselves of responsibility for something that seemed beyond their power, nevermind the fact that it would force the sheep to a world that had taken advantage of them and could not satisfy their deepest needs. But from the perspective of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, his disciples needed to understand what to do with sheep who needed more than they had to give. He needed his disciples to understand this because, spiritually speaking, it would always be the case. They never possessed that for which the crowds spiritually hungered. Which is not to say they had nothing to contribute, or even that such a pittance as they did have to give was not required in the plan of Jesus.

“Five loaves and two fish are all we have here.”

Could Jesus have started from zero and still fed the crowds? Absolutely. But instead he chose to involve the boy who had these scant resources and the disciples who found him. He could have multiplied the food and then distributed it himself. But he clearly preferred to involve the gifts, talents, and treasures which he himself had sown in the natural order of creation. They were not enough on their own. But when people learned to bring what they did have to Jesus, however insufficient it might have seemed, they would discover an abundance to meet any task to which he called them. 

One problem of the Church is that even when we manage to identify the loaves and fishes we tend to try to make up for their insufficiency through strategy. Perhaps we attempt to make the portions sufficiently small that everyone can have some microscopic amount. But trying to make do with the merely human is always going to end in situations where it can't be said of the crowds that they "all ate and were satisfied".

Taking the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven,
he said the blessing, broke the loaves,
and gave them to the disciples,
who in turn gave them to the crowds.

As much as the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves provided a model for his disciples to follow in their later ministry it said still more about the heart of Jesus himself. His ultimate concern was not so much the hunger of the crowds but rather that they not need to depart from his presence. Thus the miracle pointed toward the greater miracle yet to come in which he would multiply his own precious Body and Blood in order to give the world, not merely as nourishment, but as his very abiding presence within them. People who ate the manna in the desert at the time of Moses still died. And people who ate the bread Jesus multiplied in that deserted place would still die. But people who fed upon the bread of life, Jesus himself, would live forever (see John 6:41-51). In a small way, even the multiplication of the loaves of physical bread was the result of a sacrificial self-gift on the part of Jesus. But the bread of the Eucharist was given precisely through the gift of his flesh for the life of the world. It is to those thus joined to Christ that the words of Paul to the Romans apply.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life,
nor angels, nor principalities,
nor present things, nor future things,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth,
nor any other creature will be able to separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
 

Songs In His Presence - Abide, O Lord

 

1 August 2026 - the splendor of truth?

 

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

This man is John the Baptist.
He has been raised from the dead;
that is why mighty powers are at work in him.

There was something so compelling about John the Baptist that it made it impossible Herod to fully accept that he was dead, even in spite of the fact that it was at his order and in his presence that the man was killed. John spoke with a voice filled with truth that refused to compromise or accommodate itself to the circumstances. Herod liked to hear John speak even given the fact that he never let him forget about his unlawful marriage. Therefore we can imagine how easily John might have changed his message to gain the friendship of Herod and, eventually, release from prison. If it was any of us imprisoned for the truth we might well think that a temporary compromise to gain our freedom would not be so bad, only a temporary betrayal of what we knew to be true in order to escape from difficult circumstances. We would go to lengths to justify it, thinking of all the good we might yet do with freedom. And John surely must have thought of all that he might yet do for his followers. But nothing he could place in the scales could outweigh the importance of faithfulness to what he knew to be true. Moreover, it wasn't merely a secret acceptance along with an absence of public denial. It was repeated public affirmation, testimony to the truth. It was for this reason that he was killed. It was as though he understood the connection between truths and the God who is Truth. Thus his death can be understood as a kind of martyrdom to the one who is himself the way, the truth, and the life (see John 14:6). 

Although he wanted to kill him, he feared the people,
for they regarded him as a prophet.
But at a birthday celebration for Herod,
the daughter of Herodias performed a dance before the guests
and delighted Herod so much
that he swore to give her whatever she might ask for.

John was someone who never compromised. But Herod demonstrated how quickly a compromise can snowball out of control, far beyond anything he originally envisioned or intended. We know that he liked to hear John speak, that he did not want to kill him, and that he could not entirely discount the possibility that he was rightly regarded as a prophet. He had absorbed some of the holy fear with which the people regarded John. However, he did not remember any of that when he saw the daughter of Herodias dance. The momentary sensual delight overrode his judgment, making him willing to subject his mind and and his will to his feelings in a way that proved, as it so often does, disastrous.

“Give me here on a platter the head of John the Baptist.”

We too are often willing to give away half of our kingdom, that is, our freedom and agency, for the sake of brief intense feelings. We allow the moment to overwhelm us with its poignancy and so forget the things that matter more over the long-term. This is simply going to be what happens unless we have a sufficiently firm and unbending commitment to the truth already, in advance, before it is tested. Ultimately this lack of commitment to the truth can lead to a life of compromise, in which we do things that distress us, and make us sad, but to which we can no longer find viable alternatives.

The truth cannot be killed, nor can it be silenced forever. The upshot to this reality is that long as we live we have the opportunity to finally and definitively renounce compromise and find freedom from a life in which our fears and desires rule us, rather than we them. Instead of giving away our kingdoms we should remember that we are meant to be a royal priesthood, kings and queens because of the royal dignity of Jesus who lives within us. So let us rediscover and recover this identity so that we may live it to the full.

 

Casting Crowns - Voice Of Truth

31 July 2026 - homecourt disadvantage

 

Today's Readings

(Audio)

 

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue.

It first they seemed to be impressed by "the gracious words that were coming from his mouth" (see Luke 4:22). But it seemed that they wanted more than words. They had heard of the mighty deeds done at Capernaum and wanted to see him work similar wonders in Nazareth. But this initial demand issued not from genuine need, but rather from a sense of entitlement. They believed that as the place from where, as was thought, Jesus came, they deserved at least as much as anyone else. But Jesus was unwilling to give them spectacle that they didn't need just because they felt they deserved it. The fact that he was from Nazareth didn't imply anything special for them if they were unwilling to let him change their hearts. Jesus was intentionally provocative to those who presumed on God's mercy in this way.

I will treat this house like Shiloh,
and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth
shall refer when cursing another.Now the priests, the prophets, and all the people
heard Jeremiah speak these words in the house of the LORD.

The fact of the presence of the Ark of the Covenant in Shiloh was not enough to save a rebellious and unrepentant people from divine judgment through defeat at the hands of the Philistines. And neither the temple nor the Ark in themselves would be enough to turn the wrath of God away from the people in the time of Jeremiah unless the people listened and turned back, "each from his evil way". Thus the presence of God in the midst of his people is never meant to justify complacency. It is never meant to be presumed upon like magic that we can manipulate even in the midst of moral compromise. True mighty deeds of God come about when we realize the depth of our need for him. However impressive such deeds may appear to an observer, they are always even more transformative at an inner level.

Is not his mother named Mary
and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?
Are not his sisters all with us?

When Jesus didn't act in such a way that privileged the people of Nazareth merely because of their proximity they began to turn that proximity into a verbal weapon against him. We sometimes do something similar when we don't receive what we want from the Lord. We may reflect and comment on the fact that we've only ever seen ordinary things as a result of our proximity to him. We've lived near his Eucharistic presence for how long with nothing to show for it? Needless to say if we have nothing to show for our proximity to the Eucharistic Lord the fault does not lie with him. We need to differentiate between the depth of our need for God, which is easy to forget, and what we deserve or believe we have earned, which is easy to assume. This becomes all the more necessary the longer we have lived as followers of Jesus. We never enter a mode of being where we can simply coast and let the momentum carry us, where faith is no longer necessary. We want to be like Jesus himself, consumed with zeal for the Father's house, and not with complacency. It is better for him to purify the temples of our hearts than to allow us to grow forgetful of the purpose of those temples, which is always the right praise of God.

But I pray to you, O LORD,
for the time of your favor, O God!
In your great kindness answer me
with your constant help.

 

Vineyard - Help Us Our God

 

30 July 2026 - carry that waiting

Today's Readings
(Audio)

  

The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.

The part of this analogy that is taking place now is only the collection. The classification of good and bad will not happen until the end of the age. However, we tend to fixate on trying to figure out which is which right now. We often try to shift the motion of the gathering nets so as to avoid those whom we perceive as undesirable. We are often all too willing to take the task of throwing away of the bad upon ourselves. We attempt to create a pristine environment for ourselves within the net even before the boats reach the shore. No wonder that Jesus told so many parables about the impossibility these attempts and the futility of these efforts at preselecting only those qualified for the Kingdom. 

 

We learn this lesson from many of the parables of Jesus. We can't know with certain which are weeds and which are wheat until harvest. It is not possible to observe the action of the leaven when it is first mixed. The growth of the tiny seed goes unobserved at first and is not immediately identifiable with the large tree it may one day become. It is not until the last day that the sheep and the goats are divided. The wise and foolish maidens interact until just before the coming of the bridegroom. The point is not that we are meant to try to remain hidden. It is rather that much of what happens in the process of Kingdom growth is necessarily obscure to us. We are meant to be light and salt for the world. But none of us do this perfectly all the time. Even we ourselves can't have absolute certainty about whether we will be the good that is put into buckets or the bad that is thrown away. The reason we can't is that it is not yet the end and we can still change for better or for worse. One thing that is both certain and obvious is that none of us is perfect while this mortal life lasts. Thus we want to be and remain in the hands of the potter who will continue to help to reform and refashion us until we become all that he, the divine artists, knows we can be.

Whenever the object of clay which he was making
turned out badly in his hand, 
he tried again,
making of the clay another object of whatever sort he pleased.

In virtue of repeated exposure to these parables we have become, in a sense, scribes who have "been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven". We can now see the direction that all that came before was tending, the Old Covenant that Jesus himself fulfilled. So we bring forth the old to point ahead to Jesus. But we must also bring forth that which was unique to the message of Jesus, the new, the good news of what God did for us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and what he desires for us for all eternity. The new and the old are thus too halves that are only fully intelligible together. When we keep our Kingdom instruction in mind we are less likely to succumb to temptations to choose false alternatives, such as this one against which the psalmist warns:

Put not your trust in princes,
in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.
When his spirit departs he returns to his earth;
on that day his plans perish.

 

 Hillsong Worship - The Potter's Hand

29 July 2026 - now and then, here and there

 

Today's Reading

(Audio)

 

Lord, if you had been here,
my brother would not have died.
But even now I know that whatever you ask of God,
God will give you.

Martha seemed to mean that she knew Jesus had no limitations to expressing his power in a way the was preventative, that avoided evil in the first place. Neither did she assume that when he did not exercise this power in response to her specific circumstance that it necessarily meant his power was necessarily any less. But she she did seem to question the degree to which he cared for her and her family specifically. That uncertainty did not lead her to give up on Jesus entirely. She still recognized that God would give him whatever he asked. It was just that it had now become obvious that he wasn't always going to ask for what mattered to her. 

Jesus said to her,
“Your brother will rise.”
Martha said to him,
“I know he will rise,
in the resurrection on the last day.

Given the fact that Jesus could have saved Lazarus but did not do so Martha could only infer that it was not to be during her mortal life. To be sure on the last day, so distant from Martha as to be little more than dream, he would rise. But would it not have been the case that if Jesus cared for her, Mary, and Lazarus in their lives here and now, and not only in the future, that he would have already done what she knew he could have done to save him? If all things work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose why do some of those things seem to be obviously and entirely negative? It is not enough to say that the last day will more than make up for it, though clearly, it will. The point is that if the statement "All things" really means "All" it must include even those which seem to us difficult to square with divine providence. "All things" must even include the evils that we know that God, in the mystery of his wisdom, does sometimes permit. Yet sometimes we so surrender to that mystery as to assume that God is really indifferent to things that occur in this mortal life, to our daily joys and sorrows, caring instead only that things will be sufficiently good in the end.

Jesus told her,
“I am the resurrection and the life;
whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live,
and anyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
Do you believe this?”

Jesus revealed to Martha what she had not dared to hope. She might have agreed that he would be the resurrection and the life on the last day, that at his voice those who slept in the tombs would awake to life, but she would not have been able to believe or imagine that he was the resurrection and the life now. Her grief had already made her abandon hope that she could experience life from Jesus in the way she desired until the last day. He apparently hadn't helped in the first place. So why would she imagine he might do so now? Indeed, from her perspective, it would have been almost unfathomable to imagine that he might he stayed away for a time just to perform this miracle. After all, wouldn't it have been better to save Lazarus in the first place and spare them the grief? If the purpose was only to restore him to a mortal life in which he must eventually die again one day would not sooner be better? Yet there was something greater that came about because of the choice of Jesus to do this. It was precisely the revelation that he was the source of life now, and not only later, and that by knowing him we could share in that life. It didn't always take the form of miracles, and when it did, they weren't always the ones for which we asked, but it remained available and possible nevertheless. It remains so now. We don't in fact have to wait for the last day to experience the gift of supernatural life from Jesus. And it is precisely this life within us that helps to anchor us as we navigate the trials and challenges of this life. Rather than giving up when God doesn't give us exactly what we want exactly when we want it let us so with Martha, "Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world".

 

 Pat Barrett - The Way (New Horizon)