Fr. Frank Majka, SJ – The Bridge

One Master

In our day, we have choice as to which person or values we will serve, but even so, Jesus says we can choose only one to be our master. Depending on which we choose, everything else takes on its meaning. If we make money our master, then everything else has value insofar as it helps us to make it, spend it, or hoard it. If we make God our master, then everything else is valuable to the extent it brings us closer to intimacy with God and availability for his service.

But, slaves in the ancient world didn’t have that freedom. In most cases, their masters bought them, inherited them, or won them in war. Thinking in that context, Jesus was saying that there is only one master, and that master is God — not because we make him that but because he already is. And if we try to have another master besides, we are trying to do the impossible.

Either interpretation brings us to the same conclusion: if something else in our life becomes equal to God — if we split our bets, to use the gambling term — we split ourselves and end up losing everything.

Alaska Snow

Allowable Hatred

Jesus said, “You have heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But Jesus saw things differently. He taught that all men and women were brothers and sisters, children of the same God.

Some people may think this is naïve. But if a little boy asks his mother if he can hate his cousin or a little girl asks her father if it’s ok to hate her sister, should the parents say, “Dear, you can love whomever you like and hate whomever you don’t”? Isn’t the right answer, “You may not like them, but you shouldn’t hate them. They are still part of the family”?

If we took that approach to relations between people, religious communities, even nations — in other words, if there were no “allowable hatreds” — how different would our lives be?

Spring Inside

Not-Good-Enough Goodness

In this week’s gospel, Jesus told us that if our goodness doesn’t exceed that of the Pharisees, we won’t be able to enter the kingdom of Heaven.

The Pharisees were thought by everyone to be the experts at being good. How can we hope to be better than them? The answer is that the Pharisees often thought that their goodness actually made them better than everyone else; they had turned their goodness into an excuse to look down on others.

The goodness that Jesus wants from us is one that doesn’t make us proud, but opens us up to everyone, including the people others routinely think of as bad. It’s the kind of goodness which God has, who Jesus says lets his sun shine on both the good and bad alike. That’s the kind of goodness which will lead us into the kingdom of Heaven.