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Joseph Pich

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Short Sunday homilies. Read by Peter James-Smith

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30 Sunday A You shall love the Lord Your God

Shall love the Lord your God Chapter twenty two of Matthew’s Gospel is question time. We saw last week about the tribute to Caesar, then a question about the resurrection of the dead and today about the greatest commandment. It is a lawyer who asks to test him. He wanted to know how much Jesus knew about the law. Be careful with lawyers. Don’t forget Jesus is the one who made the law. The Pharisees loved to fulfill the law but had 613 commandments. There were endless arguments about their importance, because some of them were not easy to live by. Jesus gives us a simple answer: love God above everything and others as yourself. It is a simple commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” It is the core of the Gospel in a nutshell, it’s a summary. It is very demanding, not easy to put it into practice. If you do it, you’ll become holy. We heard this many times and we would like to do it. But, is it possible? It is; God cannot ask us something we cannot fulfill. The saints have done it. We can do it, but do we want to do it? We are created to love God. It is the only way for us to be happy. The Old Testament says that Moses was very much loved by God. He talked to Him as a man talks to his friend. After conversing with God he had to cover his face because it shone like a powerful light. The Israelites couldn’t look at his face. Moses wanted to see God’s face. But man cannot see the face of God and live, so God in his merciful love promised to place Moses in a cleft of a rock. “There I will station you while my glory passes by, and cover you with my right hand till I have gone past. So, when I take my hand away, then you shall follow me with your eyes, but my face you cannot see.” Thus God allowed Moses to see his back. We cannot imagine what he saw. We too want to see God. But our love for Him is not strong enough. At the end of our lives we are going to be measured by our love of God. Jesus, our judge, is going to hold a scale with two plates: one with our sins, and on the other with our love for him. We already have our sins; the plate is full of them. We need to make sure our love is heavier. Look at big sinners who became great saints: Mary Magdalene or Saint Augustine. They eventually loved God above everything. They give us plenty of hope. We are small sinners, but we can become small saints. Don’t worry too much about your sins; make sure we keep growing in our love of God. There is a secret: we love him with his love; therefore ask Him for this gift. How much do I love God? It depends of how much I am ready to do for him. Are we ready not to offend him? How do we grow in our love of God? In the same way we love people: doing things for them, trying not to offend them, thinking about them. Our mind goes to the people we love. We have five main languages of love. Acts of service: we need to serve God, doing things for him alone. Words of praise: we adore God mainly going to Mass. Quality time: we should spend more time with him in prayer. Physical touch: the best way to touch Him is to receive Him in Communion. Offering gifts: we should be generous with Him, giving Him whatever He is asking from us now. josephpich@gmail.com
Oct 13

29 Sunday A Giving to Caesar

Giving to Caesar The Pharisees wanted to catch Jesus. They planned a clever trap. How silly! Sometimes we think that we can fool God. Other times we get upset with Him. We blame Him for things that are our own doing. We bring God down to our level to wrestle with Him. If we knew the infinite difference between us and God, we wouldn’t dare to mention even his name. When we place God in the proper context, we realise our nothingness. Thanks to Jesus, the Son of God who became man, we can become closer to Him. It was a good trap, a catch twenty two. There was no way out. Whatever Jesus said, it would had upset one side. Even though both sides were against each other, they both hated Jesus, and they were allied against him. The Herodians were pro Romans, supporting Herod who was a puppet of the authorities; the Pharisees were Jewish nationalists. If Jesus had said no to paying taxes, the Herodians would have told the Romans. If he had said the opposite, the Pharisees would have had something against him in front of the people, to discredit him. It was a brilliant answer from Jesus, a good come back, one of his most famous one liners, like the one with the adulterous woman. This allowed him to walk the thin middle line, avoiding both extremes. So many times in our faith we take sides, either or, black or white, and we fail to keep the balance. Heresies normally emphasise one side of the question, falling down through the gap. The truth is trying to keep both together, showing the mystery in all its splendour: grace and freedom, man and God, one and three, virgin and mother, body and soul, sinner and saint. What Jesus is telling us today, through the trap that was put to him, is that we need to give to Caesar what is his due, but no more, because to God we must give everything. God and Caesar are on two quite different levels. We need to provide for the common good, help society in the way we can, but we cannot forget that we are passing by, that we come from God and we are going back to Him. Everything we have comes from Him and we need to recognise this reality in our own lives. Jesus asked the Pharisees to show him a coin, not to keep it, but to ask them what was the image on the metal: the face of Augustus. It is a good reminder of what it is inscribed on our bodies: the image of God. Our bodies carry the most lovable face of Jesus Christ. We need to preserve His image, make it shine, portray it in the best possible way. It doesn’t belong to us, it’s not ours; don’t try to appropriate it; give His image back to Him. They say that Saint Francis of Assisi was the most perfect image of Jesus Christ. We can all be a special image of Jesus in our own way. Blessed Carlo Acutis used to say: “we are all originals, don’t become a photocopy.” We try to copy the people the media presents to us as role models. If we could meet them, we would realise their lack of virtue and holiness. We Christians, because of our Baptism, we have a special character inscribed in our soul, that enables us to become what we are: an image and likeness of God. You are the only one who can make it so. josephpich@gmail.com
Oct 6

28 Sunday A Parable of the marriage feast

Parable of the marriage feast God has invited us to a wedding banquet in the kingdom of heaven. We are all invited; he wants all us to be saved, to be with him. No one is left out of his invitation. But He respects our freedom; it’s only an invitation, it is not compulsory to accept, even though it is for our own good. It is a wedding banquet. For the Jews it was the highest degree of happiness. It lasted for few days. For us a wedding reception is also a big celebration, but only lasts for few hours, where everything has to be perfect and normally it costs a lot of money. We all love going to weddings. But this is a special wedding. It is the wedding of Christ and his Church. Christ is the bridegroom and we are his bride. He is not only inviting us to his wedding as guests, but as his bride. He is proposing a union with us, a union more intimate than the marriage union. Marriage is only for this earth, where we need to generate children. Jesus says that in heaven we won’t get married. The union that Jesus is proposing to us is an everlasting union, a union for the whole of eternity. He wants us to be so united with him, that we become more like him. Now here on earth Jesus is already offering us his engagement ring. This engagement normally lasts for the years we live here. But for the saints, the wedding banquet begins here. If we want to, we can also have it here. But most of us don’t want to go to his wedding. It is silly but we don’t know much about it; we are not sure. We invent plenty of excuses not to go: “I have a business to attend, I just bought a new gadget, I am watching tv, listening to music, resting in my bed, doing my own thing.” Every time we don’t follow his will, every time we sin, we are telling him that we don’t accept his engagement ring, or we are throwing the ring back in his face, breaking the engagement. We fail to see the beautiful, precious stone in the ring. It has more power than the ring of “The Lord of the Rings”. It is the ring that opens for us the gates of paradise. It is impossible for us to imagine what heaven is like. That’s why we reject the invitation. This rejection can be so blatant that it merits eternal punishment. Both, the no to God and the existence of hell puzzle us. I’ve heard a man saying that he doesn’t believe in a God that created hell. We are the ones who have created it with our evil deeds. God on the contrary wants to be with us for ever. People in hell don’t want to leave, they won’t ask God for forgiveness. We should better concentrate in our yes to God and to the amazing place he has prepared for us. One of the guests at the wedding banquet is thrown out because doesn’t have the proper dress. Saint Gregory the Great says that the wedding garment is the theological virtue of charity, our love of God. It is the only virtue that perdures in heaven. If we are not dressed with this garment, we are going to be thrown out from the banquet hall into the outer darkness. We have our whole life to weave our wedding dress. We cannot do it in one go; it is a long life task. We do it every day, one step at a time, one thread a day. Sometimes we are like Penelope, who weaved during the day and unraveled it at night. We need to renew our love of God every day. josephpich@gmail.com
Sep 29

27 Sunday A Parable of the wicked tenants

Parable of the wicked tenants Today’s readings talk about how much God has done for us and our failure to correspond to his love. The first reading from the book of Isaiah is a song exulting the vineyard. An orchard with vines was very precious in the Mediterranean area. It produced grapes, fruit for the time, wine, a good healthy drink with no bugs, and dried fruit, raisins, for the months ahead. It required a lot of work to keep the vines healthy, and to learn the art of winemaking. The parable of the wicked tenants highlights our responsibility in looking after the vineyard of the Lord and the duty to produce a good spiritual wine in due time. It is also a reminder of our history of salvation. God first entrusted his vineyard to the chosen people. He gave them what they needed, a promised land, a land of milk and honey; he dig a trench around it, making sure they lived in peace and prosperity, getting rid of all the enemies surrounding them; and built a watch tower in the middle of it, giving them prophets and kings to lead them. But they were unfaithful to him and adored the neighbor’s gods. God tried everything with them and forgave them when they repented. But they kept rebelling against him and in the end He sent them his only Son as the last resort. They seized him, threw him out of Jerusalem and killed him. Today is good day to examine ourselves. How are we taking care of the vineyard, of the piece of the kingdom God has entrusted to us? It is not ours, but we should take care of it as if it was ours, our personal responsibility. We should make sure we yield the fruit God is expecting from us, not our personal product; it should be something for others, not just for ourselves. It will be a pity if we were to hear the admonition of Jesus at the end of the parable, directed to the Jews: “The kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that will produce its fruit.” What sort of fruit are we producing? Are we only collecting wild, sour grapes? Is our life worthwhile, full of beautiful sweet grapes? God has been so good to us. He has given us all we need to look after his vineyard. And we, like the chosen people, are often ungrateful, we are lazy, we don’t put the time and dedication our job deserves, and we let the vineyard to go waste. Instead of looking after what God has given us, we look over our neighbor’s fence and we envy him his vineyard. We think that his grass is greener. At the end we fail to produce the wine God is expectimg from us. A friend of mine, a winemaker, told me about this famous winemaker who makes only five hundred bottles a year, mixing with art good vintages, and sells them in the US for a thousand dollars a bottle, a wine only for the rich and glamorous. He makes half a million dollars. I asked him if it is a good wine. He said: “It must be a good wine, but I don’t know if it is worth a thousand dollars. I cannot afford the test it.” This is the wine we need to produce, a wine worth a million dollars, worthy for the table of the Lord, a wine to be tasted for eternity, that will last for ever. josephpich@gmail.com
Sep 22

26 Sunday A Parable of the two Sons

Parable of the two sons Last Sunday, today and next Sunday we have the parables of the vineyard. Israel is described in the Old Testament as the vineyard of the Lord. It represents the care God has for his people. A vineyard demands a lot of work to produce the right wine. The first miracle Jesus performed was to convert water into wine. Wine is compared to the grace God gives us to make us happier, to become more like him. Saint John of Cross says that “The cellar is the highest degree of love to which the soul may attain in this life.” We cannot forget that which becomes the blood of Christ during the Mass is wine. God allows us to help him to produce a good vintage. He sends us into his vineyard. It is important to consider that the vineyard is our own inheritance. The wine we are producing is for our eternal life: this is the wine that we are going to drink for all eternity, and we need to make sure it is of the best quality. A king once asked his son to build a castle. He gave him a lot of money for the project. The son, who was a greedy man, kept most of the money and built a cheap castle. When he finished, he gave the keys of the castle to his father. The king gave the keys back to his son saying: “This is precisely your inheritance.” We should be very interested in working in the vineyard of the Lord, working hard and well, because we are directly interested in producing our best. When God asks us to work in his vineyard, sometimes we say yes, sometimes we say no; sometimes we go, sometimes we don’t go. We are sinners and many times our first reaction is negative. But afterwards we change our minds. We shouldn’t be too concerned about our first intention, many times a product of our selfishness or pride, but make sure we change our minds and we do what God wants us to do. What’s important is the end result. The parable of today was proposed to the Jews who rejected to work in the vineyard of the Lord and therefore God gave his vineyard to all of us. We should be grateful that we are allowed to make wine, a marvelous privilege, a wine that is going to last for ever. When we obey, we conform our will to God’s will. God prefers our obedience rather than heroic acts which maybe product of our selfishness. Saint Teresa of Avila was jealous of a famous nun who was doing a lot of penance. Her spiritual director didn’t allow her to imitate this nun. When she complained to Jesus, he told her that he preferred her obedience rather than the penance of this nun. We can do a lot of good things out of pride, but obedience always brings about humility. The second reading of today’s Mass, from the letter to the Philippians, Saint Paul proposes the example of Jesus, who humbled himself and became obedient unto death and death on the cross. The crucifixion was considered the most degrading form of execution. It was reserved for the worst criminals. Jesus gives us a lesson in obedience, following the will of his Father, to give his life for us in a most cruel way. When we find it difficult to do what God wants us to do, we can look at Jesus dying on the cross. josephpich@gmail.com
Sep 16

25 Sunday A Labourers in the Vineyard

Labourers in the vineyard We can relate to this parable in South Africa. So many people looking for work. Often you see them at roundabouts, with a sign announcing their skills: electrician, plumber, carpenter, painter. All waiting for somebody to hire them for the day. We can pray for these people that they find work to feed their families. And pray for the corruption to go away, greedy people who only look after themselves. We all feel uneasy with this parable, sympathising with the workers that worked for the whole day and got the same wages as the ones who worked only for an hour. It is not fair. Children use this expression when they see something that lacks equality. But parents treat different children differently. The same with God. We are all the same in God’s eyes, with the same dignity, but God gives different graces to all of us. Why? Because we are all unique, and we all show different perfections and qualities of God. Variety brings forth many more gifts. Imagine if all of us were the same; life would be boring, all cracking the same jokes, inventing the same stories, composing the same music. Opposites attract each other, different skills balance societies, the more choices the more richness. At the end God gives the same reward to everyone: heaven. In paradise everybody will be filled with gifts, as much as they can hold. But if you compare them, some will contain more than others; the containers all have different capacities. What is going to happen with people becoming Christians at the end of their lives, Catholics going to confession after many years just before they died, babies dying just born, fetuses being aborted in their mother’s womb? We all agree that they should go to heaven, in spite of their brief or non existent Christian lives. What about the good thief who stole heaven at the last moment? Jesus promised him: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” We cannot limit God’s mercy, goodness and generosity. Precisely as Jesus asks us in the parable: “Are you envious because I am generous?” In the first reading from the book of Isaiah the Lord says: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” How can we dare to pass judgment on the Lord? How can we try to fit God in our mind, to measure him with our imperfect and limited human standards? We cannot cage him in our small world. It is like trying to fit all the data of the servers in the cloud on a single floppy disk. The Lord continues: “As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.” We are a bit like babies trying to read the Summa Theologiae of Saint Thomas Aquinas. We human beings see things with our eyes directed towards earth, only seeing the flat surface of the ground with no spatial perspective. Jesus finishes his parable saying: “The last will be first, and the first will be last.” In heaven our society will be up side down: the poor will at the top and the multimillionaires will be the rubbish collectors, the famous and influencers will be forgotten and the real good deeds will come to the light. Imagine a race where this saying is fulfilled: everybody would run backwards. This is what we need to do: instead of running towards our own ego, we need to run towards God. We should be first in our love of God and last in our pride. josephpich@gmail.com
Sep 13

Our Lady of Sorrows

Our Lady of Sorrows Standing at the foot of the Cross is our mother. She is standing, not crying or fainting; she is there supporting her son with her presence. Silent tears run down her cheeks. And Saint John is also there, the celibate apostle, the one Jesus loved. Other women are there too. Women are stronger than men. Many artists tried to capture this moment but with different results. It is almost impossible to represent in a painting what happened at Calvary. Where are the other apostles? Where are the big guys? They said they were going to die for him. They ran away from the cross. We too are still running away from the cross. When are we going to stop running away? Today is a good day. We can ask Saint John to help us to be at the foot of the cross, not to be afraid of the cross. We ask him to grasp our hand tightly and help us to remain there at this critical moment in human history. We are between him and Mary, hiding our face in our mother’s robes. We don’t want to see what’s happening. We can only hear. The passion of Jesus is the passion of Mary. It is impossible to know what is happening through Mary’s heart. We can only imagine. Spiritual sufferings are more acute than physical ones. Why do we bring to our consideration something that happened 20 centuries ago? Because it is still affecting us. In eternity everything is present. We are the cause of their suffering, mother and son, united in their sorrow. The more we look at what happened at Calvary, the more we will try to avoid our sins. The more we love Jesus and Mary, the more we will avoid what is offending them. Our sins affect the people we love, the same way our love for them empowers them. Jesus says: “Woman, behold your son.” It is not a detached expression calling his mother “woman”. He is reminding us that when Adam saw Eve for the first time, he called her “woman”, bones of my bones. Eve was the first woman. Mary is the second woman. The first one let us down because of sin. The second one was the cause of our redemption, of our healing. The Fathers of the Church loved this parallelism between Eve and Mary. Jesus called first his mother “woman” at Cana; at the beginning. Now it is the end. Then he changed water into wine; now the wine is becoming blood, Eucharistic wine. She still remembers that moment. For Jesus has to die for us; for her, to become our mother. She gave birth to him at Bethlehem without pain; now we are born at Calvary in a bloody and painful manner. We have caused her so much blood, so much suffering. This is what we are considering today, Mater Dolorosa, Sorrowful Mother, to foster our love for her: how much pain we have delivered to her, for her to deliver us. The more we suffer, the more we love. We contemplate her sorrows for us to react, to change our lives, to have a deep conversion. We cannot remain indifferent in front of her sufferings, specially knowing that she is there because she wants to be there, the fruit of her love for her son and for us. “Behold your mother.” Now Jesus talks to us. First he asks his mother to look after us. Some people say that he wasn’t planning to give us his mother, but when he saw from the cross our feebleness, he decided to give her to us. Now he asks us to look after her. He gave us his treasure, his masterpiece. We are represented by Saint John. Nothing is left for him but the wood of the cross. josephpich@gmail.com
Sep 9

24 Sunday A Parable of the Unforgiving Servant

Parable of the unforgiving servant The parable of the unforgiving servant is at the heart of the Gospel. It is an example for us to learn how to forgive and forget. We know by experience that it is not easy. Until we forgive the other person from the heart, we won’t be able to forget. If the grudge keeps coming back to our mind, it is a sign that we haven’t managed to forgive. It is only a desire, an intention, something we would like to do, but we don’t have the heart to do it. Jesus gave us this parable to learn how to find true forgiveness. This parable puts things into perspective in a very graphic way. The difference between what the servant has been forgiven and what he should forgive to his friend is colossal; it must have blown the minds of the listeners. For us it is difficult to grasp the ammount of money, because the Gospel uses the local currency of the time and we are not familiar with it. It is the difference between millions of dollars and few hundred dollars. It doesn’t make sense that the servant didn’t forgive the debt of his friend, specially just after a big debt was canceled. It is so ridiculous that it highlights the selfish attitude of the unforgiving servant, and at the same time our own pettiness. This parable helps us to understand a bit better the difference that exist between us and God. God forgives us everything, but we keep track of little petty things. When we go to God with our complaints, pointing out the offences we have suffered from our brothers and sisters, the first thing he asks is: “Do you want me to show my list? Do you really want to see it? It is so long that it is rolled up as a toilet paper. And I have a whole warehouse full of them.” Once we see how ridiculous our small list of grievances is, compared with the infinite list of our offences to God, we can forget about our little grudges and learn how to forgive. Once I saw a cartoon where God was displayed as an old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud, looking a bit sleepy. There was a small angel flying around asking God: “What do you do all the time? Aren’t you bored?” And God responded: “What do I do? I forgive.” This is what God does with us all the time. We are little children, being naughty, trying to push the boundaries, trying to get away with things. And God, who is a good loving Father, is always ready to forgive and forget. He says that once he forgives, he buries our sins in the deepest black hole in the universe, and they disappear from his eyes, sucked in by the dark matter. God’s delete button is for ever; you cannot retrieve the files from his hard disk. God doesn’t keep grudges and he doesn’t remember once he has forgiven us. He has a very short term memory. We need to learn from him if we are to be good sons and daughters of his. He loves when we make up with his children. If the unforgiving servant had forgiven the little debt of his friend, he would had become the forgiving servant, even though the parable would had disappeared. But It would had started a chain of forgiveness that would have reached down to our own time. We can start this chain ourselves, beginning to pray about the grudges we keep in our hearts and trying to heal them, comparing them with all the offences we have caused to our Father God, and learning from Him how to delete them from our minds. josephpich@gmail.com

Short Sunday homilies. Read by Peter James-Smith

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Joseph Pich
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