Year C
Discover the deeper meaning and connections found in this week's readings, through these great commentaries written by our priests.
Explore this week's readings and hear what God is saying to us through His Word.
Find out more about how we can mark this special day in our liturgy.
See our music recommendations for the liturgy.
Gospel: Luke 14;1, 7-14. ‘Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, ad the one who humbles himself will be exalted’.
The mark of God is on the face of the stranger, the one who isn’t like you and me. That’s true about all those who look, act, and live differently from us. It’s true about those whose religious or political beliefs are not anything like our own. And it’s true about us and all those times we’ve felt like a stranger in our skin.
Over and over Jesus opened his heart, spirit, and life to the stranger: lepers, prostitutes and tax collectors, the blind and lame, the poor and powerless, widows and orphans, the hungry and sick, Gentiles and foreigners, the lost and outcast, the weary and burdened, the ones on the edge and the ones hanging on by a thread. No one was excluded. All were welcomed.
That’s how I want to live and yet I struggle with the stranger. I think we all do. We’re not sure what to do, what to say, or how to act. We fear the one who is different from or unknown to us. We resist being vulnerable and opening ourselves to the stranger.
The world’s hospitality is always conditional. The guests are already known, vetted, and welcome. Their names are on our invitation list. Other names are not. We take the initiative. We extend the invitation. And we decide in advance the terms and conditions of the invitation. That’s not, however, hospitality in the kingdom.
In the kingdom, (or the Kin-dom) hospitality is unconditional. We have lost the initiative. Hospitality in the kingdom “is not an invitation we initiate but a visitation we did not see coming” (Caputo, Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim, 85).
Biblical hospitality, the kind Jesus offered and taught, means welcoming into our house and life the other, the one who is different from us, the stranger. For Jesus, hospitality extends beyond “your friends or your brothers/sisters or your relatives or rich neighbours.” It’s about “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,” those who are different from us and have no power, ability, or resources to reciprocate, payback, take us out to dinner, or serve our interests.
Kingdom hospitality leaves us feeling vulnerable and at risk. And for good reason. Kingdom hospitality tells us to open the door even before we know who is there. Let me be clear, however. I am not suggesting that we open the door to just anyone at any time of night. Jesus is not asking us to be reckless with our safety or the safety of others. And I don’t want our children running up to any and every stranger they see on the street or road. That’s not hospitality, that’s foolishness.
Hospitality does not begin with opening the door of our house. It begins with opening the door of our heart. Hospitality challenges me to face the ways I’ve closed and locked the door of my heart. When we shut the door of our heart and exclude the stranger we also imprison ourselves. Strangers have a way of showing us ourselves and the doors we have closed.
Hospitality isn’t so much about who the other is or isn’t but who I am and how I want to be. Instead of making a guest list of who is welcome maybe we should take an inventory and make a list of our own fears, prejudices, judgments, scepticisms, cynicisms, and profiling of others. Those are the locks on our heart’s door.
What does hospitality look like in your life today?
To whom is your heart open and to whom is it closed? What locks are on your inventory?
Who are the strangers in your life? In what ways have you become a stranger to yourself?
Let’s start now unlocking and opening the door of our heart. What would that look like for you today? What locks need to be unlocked? What is one door to your heart that you could begin opening today?
“Proud people are full of themselves. Humble people are full of God”.
Lord, teach me to know myself well, so that I can better know your love.
Today’s Collect is an attempt to tidy up the Collect originally in the old Missal for the sixth Sunday after Pentecost. Its English rendering cannot be said to have been successful, as its latinate syntax makes speaking it difficult, without careful preparation. It is a pity that the key word in the Latin, praesta was not rendered in the English translation, which might have read:
Grant a deepened sense of reverence
that you may nurture in us what is good,
and grant also your watchful care
to keep safe what you have nurtured.
The Prayers after Communion in the Missal broadly speaking fall into two different categories. There are those that speak of the eternal effects of receiving Holy Communion, and those that speak of its temporal effects in Christian Mission and life. Today’s Post communion prayer belongs to the latter category. The Sacrament is given to us as the ‘food of charity’ to strengthen us and arouse us to service of our neighbour.
As the holiday season ends and young people prepare to return to school and college, what better word could there be for all of us to take away from Mass today?
Hymn choices are taken from the Laudate hymnbook:
Be thou my vision 970
Make me a channel of your peace 898
Bread for the world 625
Diverse in culture, nation, race 841
Blest are the poor in heart 908
Do you have questions about the liturgy and how we are called to participate in it? Explore how the Church councils, saints, and popes have answered this key question and many more.
Every movement of the Mass is rich in meaning but we can become over-familiar with it. Rediscover the Mass and explore how it relates to the Exodus story, where many of its rituals come from, and how it makes Jesus present to us today.
