Sunday Gospel Reflection, October 18, 2026: Give the Lord glory and honor!

Give the Lord glory and honor!
Are we ready to give God thanks, always? 

    When the Lord God empowers Cyrus, King of Persia, to send the people of Israel home from exile with the wherewithal to rebuild, the people are meant to understand that God is at work through Cyrus, even if Cyrus himself is unaware of this. I am the Lord and there is no other, God announces through the prophet Isaiah. God is at work even when we ourselves are not doing God’s work. This is why we have hope: because God is at work and so we do not despair. Rather, all are to give the Lord glory and honor, as Psalm 96 reminds us, singing a new song that speaks of God’s wondrous deeds to all nations. 

    In Matthew’s Gospel, the Pharisees are still blind to all that God is doing in their midst, and so they go off and plot how they might entrap Jesus in speech. But their plan is faulty. Is it lawful to pay the census tax to Caesar or not? they ask him. Their thought is that, if Jesus says they should pay the census tax, he would be seen as supporting their oppressor, Rome, whereas if he says they should not pay the census tax, the Roman authorities could arrest him. Instead of responding immediately, Jesus asks them to show him the coin that pays the census tax. The very fact that the Pharisees can readily produce such a coin in itself condemns them. Yet Jesus simply says, Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God. And what is it that we owe God? Glory and praise! Jesus is calling upon the Pharisees to open their eyes, their ears, and their heart so that they can see what God is doing right in their midst, and give praise. 

    The greeting of Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians demonstrates quite clearly the praise that Paul knows is due to God: We give thanks to God always for all of you, Paul says. Paul and Silvanus and Timothy can be with the Thessalonians in spirit, supporting them in their prayers, unceasingly calling to mind the Thessalonians’ work of faith and labor of love and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ. To endure in hope is to continue to follow the gospel even though you are not yet experiencing it in its fullness, allowing God to dwell in you and to work in you. In so doing, the Thessalonians praise God, and so should we, allowing God to continue to speak to us, that our relationship with God might form and deepen over time, hearing the Word and living the gospel with our hearts and with our lives, in praise! 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture Class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

Come to the wedding! (St. Thomas Aquinas / Pope Francis)

Nothing created has ever been able
to fill the heart of man.
God alone can fill it infinitely.

 --St. Thomas Aquinas

    To return to the king’s command in the parable, the servants are told not only to “go”, but also to “invite”: “Come to the wedding!” (Mt 22:4). Here we can see another, no less important, aspect of the mission entrusted by God. As we can imagine, the servants conveyed the king’s invitation with urgency but also with great respect and kindness. In the same way, the mission of bringing the Gospel to every creature must necessarily imitate the same “style” of the One who is being preached. 

 --Pope Francis

Image source: Andrey. N. Mironov, Parable of the Wedding Feast (2014). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parable_of_the_Wedding_Feast.jpg
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Your soul unites with mine (St. Edith Stein)

I can do all things in him who strengthens me.

--Philippians 4:13

Full of love, you sink your gaze into mine
And bend your ear to my quiet words
And deeply fill my heart with peace. 

Yet your love is not satisfied
With this exchange that could still lead to separation:
Your heart requires more. 

You come to me as early morning's meal each daybreak.
Your flesh and blood become food and drink for me
And something wonderful happens. 

Your body mysteriously permeates mine
And your soul unites with mine:
I am no longer what once I was. 

--St. Edith Stein,
scholar and nun
who was killed at Auschwitz

Image source: https://wherethewind.com/2021/02/15/the-loving-gaze-of-god/
Quotation source & full prayer

How do you live in a dangerous world? (Rabbi Harold Kuschner)

    The twenty-third Psalm [states]: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” 

    The psalmist is not saying, “I will fear no evil because evil only happens to people who deserve it.” He’s saying, “This is a scary, out-of-control world, but it doesn’t scare me, because I know that God is on my side, not on the side of the hijacker. God is on my side, not on the side of the illness, or the accident, or the terrible thing that happened. 

    And that’s enough to give me the confidence.” The twenty-third Psalm is the answer to the question, “How do you live in a dangerous, unpredictable, frightening world?” 

--Rabbi Harold Kuschner

Image source: https://nypost.com/2014/05/25/three-young-men-survive-horrific-car-crash/
Quotation source

Donning the wedding garment of love (St. Augustine / Bishop Robert Barron)

God is always trying to give good things to us,
but our hands are too full to receive them.

--St. Augustine

    [Matthew’s] Gospel likens the kingdom of God to a king who gives a wedding feast for his son. The biblical authors couldn’t find a more apt metaphor for the coming together of divinity and humanity than a wedding banquet. God and humanity are married, and they are surrounded by joy, peace, celebration, and good food. 

    What was Jesus’ strategy? Open table-fellowship; outreach to all, to the righteous and the unrighteous, to the healthy and the sick, to the mainstream and the marginalized. Here comes everybody. You don’t have to be good to receive God’s grace; that’s why they call it “grace.” 

    But then something puzzling emerges. When the king comes to welcome his guests, he finds someone not properly dressed: “The king said to him, ‘My friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’” It was customary at the time (as it still is) for people to come to a wedding dressed up. 

    The play here is between grace and works. We can refuse the invitation altogether, or we can refuse the transformation that should follow from grace. We have to cooperate with grace, donning the wedding garment of love, forgiveness, peace, and nonviolence. 

--Bishop Robert Barron 

Image source: https://sparkleinpink.com/products/red-sequin-hearts-dress?srsltid=AfmBOopU3xCkYf9vAKPpty0Xo0e79l69uuoboK_DwpCDQ5w3ltu0vEj3
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The hope of the Gospel is meant for all peoples (Pope Leo XIV)

   The hope of the Gospel is meant for all peoples, for such is the breadth of God’s heart and the abundance of his harvest. Indeed, God continues to work in the world so that all his children may experience his love and be saved. 

--Pope Leo XIV 

Image source: https://www.humandevelopment.va/en/eventi/2023/hope-for-the-earth-hope-for-humanity.html 
Quotation source

No one is left out (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

How do you have a victory banquet
when everyone is invited?
 It’s a victory because everyone is invited.
 No one is left out.

--Fr. Patrick Michael,
Homily, December 6, 2023
(Funeral Mass for Mary Cosgrave)

    What is it we have to celebrate? 

    The people of Israel saw a victory over their enemies as something to celebrate. When they could see their enemies – who had threatened their way of life, threatened their peace, threatened their way of being – crushed, they were grateful to their God for having crushed them. 

    When Isaiah says that the web that is woven over all people, the veil that veils all people, would be removed, and then he says, He will destroy death forever, I’m not sure death is the veil. Fear of death is the veil. Fear is what keeps us from seeing the Lord’s hand at work in our everyday life, because it sends our focus somewhere else when we worry and we fret and we are disturbed by many things… 

    We may have lots of things to be worried about, lots of things to fret about. If you get the New York Times notifications on your phone, you will be sent all sorts of reasons to worry twenty or twenty-five times during the day. It’s not the handiest service from that standpoint, and you could focus on what the New York Times is concerned about, or you could focus here, on what you’re living, on what God is doing right now, what God is unfolding in our lives that will help remove the veil, help destroy the web that hangs over us, that blinds us. 

    We gather here to celebrate at a Eucharistic banquet. It foreshadows the banquet of eternity when we are one with him. Perhaps we just have to learn how to not use the veil or the web, but to see past it, and to find everything there is to celebrate in a day for what God is doing for us. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, December 4, 2024

Image source: Studio Tomás Saraeno (Berlin), spider web (one of the artist’s main sources of inspiration), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/t-magazine/tomas-saraceno-spiders-shed.html