Our lives must be acts of praise and gratitude to the Creator.
Such obligations would indeed be burdensome and dehumanizing if they proceeded from a competitive and needy supreme being, but since they come from the one who cannot compete with us and who stands in need of nothing, they are in fact liberating. The gratitude that we offer to the true God is not absorbed by God but rather breaks against the rock of the divine self-sufficiency, redounding to our benefit.
In one of the prefaces to the Eucharistic prayer in the Roman rite of the Mass, we find this remarkable observation directed toward God: “You have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself your gift, since our praises add nothing to your greatness but profit us for salvation.”
It is precisely because God has no need of our praise that our act of gratitude is a gift; it is precisely because God’s plenitude cannot be increased that our prayer intensifies rather than compromises our participation in the loop of grace.
--Bishop Robert Barron
Image source: Noah in the ark as the dove returns, from the Catacomb of St. Peter, ca. 2-4 B.C., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah#/media/File:Noah_catacombe.jpg
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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
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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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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