Daily Reflection Thursday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

Music time was always a highlight of the religious education classes for kindergarteners that I led as a newly minted Catholic. Our repertoire, complete with energetic hand gestures for each song, included the hits "This Little Light of Mine," "Zacchaeus Was a Wee Little Man," and a lively version of Jesus' parable of wise and foolish men building houses on rock and sand, the reading from today's Gospel from Matthew. ("The rains came down and washed the house away" was always enacted with particular vigor and seemingly dastardly delight!)

 

The lessons in the parable present us with very adult challenges, however. Jesus is asking us foundational questions. What will be the bedrock, the foundation, on which we will build our lives? Where will we stand, and what will we stand for? Get these questions right, and our beautifully unfolding future awaits us, no matter the weather, he promises. 



No matter the weather….  We know all too well that life will come to us unbidden, with joys unmerited yet flooded, too, with unexpected sorrow and tragedy. Four of our women friends are caring for their husbands (our friends, too) who require full time medical care. We marvel at their patience, their energy, their stamina – a sign to us of the sacramental commitments they made fifty, sixty years ago to “love in sickness and in health,” vows made then perhaps in innocence but lived out now on the firm rock of their faith.



And we will be buffeted with the consequences of our foolishness and sinfulness. The sad story in our first reading from Kings has no better example. Jerusalem, the jeweled city on the hill, has been attacked, besieged, destroyed, by Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon. King Jehoiachin and his court, military leadership, all craftsmen and smiths, are taken captive. Only the poor, people of no value, will remain as a remnant of the Chosen People. Betrayal of that sacred title, a House built on sand.


Jesus came to take on all that it means to be human, all the joys and all the ugliness. His witness shows us that God is our firm foundation... and our destination as well. In faith, we know where we are headed, the marvelous promise beyond our power to imagine, joining the glorified communion of the saints in the fullness of time. With this as our hope, we can afford to 'live on the backfill,' wearing this world a little more lightly.

 

It's time to ask Alexa to play us an adult song today, a legacy from my Protestant days: "On Christ, the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand."