Catholic lectionary for 3 November 2014

Clementina Vulgata (lat)

Epistula ad Philippenses, Caput 2, versae 1-4

¹ Si qua ergo consolatio in Christo, si quod solatium caritatis, si qua societas spiritus, si qua viscera miserationis: ² implete gaudium meum ut idem sapiatis, eamdem caritatem habentes, unanimes, idipsum sentientes, ³ nihil per contentionem, neque per inanem gloriam: sed in humilitate superiores sibi invicem arbitrantes, ⁴ non quæ sua sunt singuli considerantes, sed ea quæ aliorum.

Evangelium secundum Lucam, Caput 14, versae 12-14

¹² Dicebat autem et ei, qui invitaverat: Cum facis prandium, aut cœnam, noli vocare amicos tuos, neque fratres tuos, neque cognatos, neque vicinos divites: ne forte te et ipsi reinvitent, et fiat tibi retributio; ¹³ sed cum facis convivium, voca pauperes, debiles, claudos, et cæcos: ¹⁴ et beatus eris, quia non habent retribuere tibi: retribuetur enim tibi in resurrectione justorum.

NOTES

When speaking of the Kingdom, Jesus never tires of reminding His listeners that they still have to enter it and that this will not happen by itself. For the sake of the Kingdom one must leave everything behind and be ready to take up the cross. These words of the Saviour were perfectly clear: His listeners still remembered how, a little over a century before the events of the Gospel, during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus in the then independent Judea, those who took part in an uprising against the government and demanded that the authorities strictly observe the norms of the Torah in the country were crucified. The rebels wanted one thing: the Kingdom, the kind they knew about, of course. And for its sake they gave up everything. Their ideas about it bore little resemblance to what Jesus speaks of, but He holds up their determination as an example to His listeners. They truly did leave everything behind.

Not like the characters in Jesus' parable who refuse to come to the feast, for reasons that might seem perfectly reasonable, but still refuse and lose what matters most. Their places are taken by those who have nothing in this world and no reason to decline. Is it a matter of priorities? Yes, of course, priorities too, but not priorities alone. It is no accident that Jesus speaks of a feast, of the first and the last, and of the places that many strive to occupy even at the risk of being driven from them.

The Kingdom is not a place, a structure or a hierarchy. The Kingdom is a state in which one can abide, but which one absolutely cannot, so to speak, fix in place, however much one may wish to do so. The desire to occupy better or worse places comes from this. For in the Kingdom there are, in fact, no good or bad places. There is only one criterion: is a person in his or her own place, in the very place God intended, or in one chosen personally because it seemed more suitable?

This also gives rise to the question: should one go to the feast or to the field just purchased? The wedding feast is a symbol of the Kingdom. If a person does not know which to choose, it means that he does not know what the Kingdom is. If he did know, it would never occur to him to compare the importance of the life he lives with anything he owns. Life is fullness, whereas a purchased field, possessions and even family are merely derivatives of that fullness. What matters here is not to confuse the part with the whole or the principal with the secondary. Only one thing can help us do this: the experience of the true life of the Kingdom, that very life which is salvation.

The meal in the house of one of the Pharisees, because of its rich symbolic meaning--a feast as the Messianic Kingdom--immediately gives Jesus material for...

Behind Jesus' words about whom one should invite to one's feast stands a definite Jewish tradition connected with the idea of the distribution of goods in the present age and in the age to come...

Behind Jesus' words about whom one should invite to one's feast stands a definite Jewish tradition connected with the idea of the distribution of goods in the present age and in the age to come. At the foundation of this tradition lies the understanding that each person is allotted by God a certain amount of those goods he can receive, common to the present age and the age to come. Accordingly, the greater amount of them a person uses in the present age, the less will remain for the age to come. From this point of view, it is indeed better to invite to the table those who cannot repay you in kind in the present age: your reward in the age to come will be that much greater.

There is also something more in the Savior's words, something connected with the Kingdom, its laws, and its life. The issue here is no longer the present age or the age to come, but how we relate to our own deeds and actions. It should be noted that practically all ascetic traditions in one way or another reflect an understanding of the fact that normal spiritual life and spiritual growth are possible only with the right attitude toward one's own activity. The right attitude is considered to be one that does not involve attachment to the results, to the fruits of one's labor.

Every task must be, for a person in a certain sense, an end in itself; it must have value in itself. The intention with which a person undertakes his work must be directed precisely toward the work, not toward future results. This is not only because striving for the fruits, for the results themselves, can make a person neglect the quality of his work for the sake of reaching the result more quickly. It is also because, by shifting the center of one's spiritual effort into the future, a person thereby concentrates on the unreal, on something that does not yet exist and whose nature remains unknown.

If this is true for our world, which has not yet been transfigured, then it is even more true for the Kingdom: in the Kingdom there is not and cannot be either past or future in the form in which they are known to us. In relation to the Kingdom, one can speak only of life here and now and of what one receives here and now. And if there is no fullness here and now, there will be none later. For the Kingdom is one for all times. And so is its life.

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