Foot-washer

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/083026.cfm  In today’s first reading, we hear the prophet Jeremiah complain that he is suffering beyond what he can bear.  In response to his preaching, his audience called him “a madman who poses as a prophet.”  They whipped Jeremiah 39 times and publicly humiliated him, locking him up in stocks where he was abused by passersby.   As Jeremiah says, “All day long I am an object of laughter; everyone mocks me.”  He curses the day that he was born, and asks, “Why did I come forth from the womb, to see sorrow and pain, to end my days in shame?”   Sometimes, when people are suffering, we say the expression, “God will never give you more than you can handle.”  These words are meant to bring comfort and are said with good intentions.  Jeremiah reminds us today, however, that there are times when people do, in fact, experience more pain than they can handle.  Being told ot...

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle C https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/072725.cfm Two weeks ago, I went on a pilgrimage to Poland with a group of Catholic high school teachers. As part of that experience, we spent two days at Auschwitz-Birkenau , the Nazi extermination camp at the center of the Holocaust that operated between May 1940 and January 1945. Auschwitz has become a byword for evil, and rightly so, it is the site of the worst atrocities of the 20th century (if not human history): 1.1 million people—Polish people, Soviet prisoners, Roma, criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay people, criminals, and most especially Jews—lost their lives in the camps. It is hard to grasp the intensity of “man’s inhumanity to man” at this place, and it is difficult to understand how God permits such awfulness to exist. In today’s 1st reading, we hear Abraham argue with God about the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah . In that story, God hears people crying out in anguish from those cities, sayin...