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Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time Mk 10/35-45 |
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| Background: The apostles simply didn't get. No matter how many times Jesus told them that the kingdom he was restoring was not the old military and nationalist kingdom that the people wanted, but a kingdom in which humans reflected God's forgiving love, they never got the point. What other kind of kingdom was there besides one like David and Solomon ran? OK, Jesus was David or Solomon or maybe even someone better. What kind of jobs would they have in the new nobility of this new kingdom? They had made a lot of sacrifices for Jesus, what were they going to have in return. In the immortal words of city politics, they asked, "Where's ours?" Jesus told them what it would be, but they still didn't understand. |
read the padre |
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Story: Once upon a time there was a man who worked for many years as an usher in the church. He came early every Sunday morning and sometimes worked as usher for three masses. Everything was done efficiently when he was on duty. Even though he was not technically the head usher, he was the one to took the collection money from the other baskets and piled it into one basket to bring up to the altar. If some of the other ushers were slow or inefficient, he didn't bother to hide his impatience. It was a privilege to be an usher and one was supposed to work hard to live up to that privilege. Then the man who had been the head usher in the parish since before the flood moved away to Arizona. Our friend personally believed that the retiring head usher was a doddering old fool, but he never said that. He assumed that his good work would be rewarded and that he would be made head usher. Then everything would be done efficiently. But the pastor called a meeting of all the ushers and announced that a much younger man who had worked as an usher for only two years would the new head usher. Our friend wrote a letter of resignation from the ushers group and went to mass on Sunday at another parish. |
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