From Season to Season

“What will you give me if I had him over to you?” “What’s that man’s life worth to you?” “How much is your power, your agenda, your comfort, your security worth to you?”   We’ve heard the story and we know the answer: 30 pieces of silver.   It’s a very specific amount. In Exodus we read that 30 pieces of silver was the value of a slave. Later in the Old Testament, the Prophet Zechariah received 30 pieces of silver as payment for his work as a shepherd. Saint Matthew wants us to make those connections. And we could, of course, spend time reflecting on the theological or symbolic value of those pieces of silver, and perhaps you can do that on your own today.   But as I reflected on the Readings of this “Traitor Wednesday,” I found myself coming back to the Lenten series on morality and the Ten Commandments that led at Saint Pius X Church [in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin] these past six weeks. And, one of the basic ideas of morality that we explored in the ser...

In the opening verse of Sirach , we read, “All wisdom is from the Lord / and remains with him forever.” Praise of Wisdom is echoed in other places in the Old Testament, including Proverbs , Wisdom , Baruch , and Ecclesiastes and certain psalms. Continuing its praise of Wisdom, however, Sirach continues: “Before all other things wisdom was created; and prudent understanding from eternity. The root of wisdom—to whom has it been revealed? Her subtleties—who knows them? There is but one, wise and truly awesome, seated upon his throne—the Lord. It is he who created her, saw her and measured her. Poured her forth upon all his works, upon every living thing, according to his bounty, lavished her upon those who love him” (1:4-10). The passage from the Gospel of Matthew that we heard on the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Matthew 11:25-30), comes in a section in which Jesus can be said to take on the persona of the Woman Wisdom, “speaking with the words and images attributed to he...

The question Jesus poses to his closest followers in this Sunday’s Gospel is one of the most essential in all of Scripture: “Who do you say that I am?” For many of us today, this question has lost some of its power to surprise and intrigue us. After all, wasn’t all that settled centuries ago?    Icon of Christ, the Divine Bridegroom   If we only want to approach the question of who (or even what) Jesus is from the perspective of orthodox, historical theology, then the answer is yes—ecumenical councils and some of the greatest minds of the Early Church worked to understand and explain Jesus’ relationship to the Father/Creator, his place within in the Trinity, and the interplay of his human and divine natures. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§423) sums it up in this way: We believe and confess that Jesus of Nazareth, born a Jew of a daughter of Israel at Bethlehem at the time of King Herod the Great and the emperor Caesar Augustus, a carpenter by t...