One way of understanding today’s Gospel is to see it as a conflict of understanding over the goals and the methods of mission. And, throughout the church’s history, we have struggled with both of those questions. But, through it all, what Isaiah has said in the first reading is the thing that motivates missionary work. And that is that “My heart is burning. I cannot keep in the message of the Good News.” To tell us more about how her missionary order uses mission in the 21st century is Sister Maria.

I am Maria Goetschalckx. I am a Cuban. And, with the exception of one sister, my family lives in Belgium. My family in the Church are the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill. I am proud to speak to you today about our foreign missions in South Korea, China and Ecuador.

Catholics are preconditioned to hear, in this reading, two truths. That the Pope is the successor of Peter and the head of the Church and that the Church has the power to forgive sins in the sacrament of Penance. Both of those things are true. And they emerge from a different context of this reading as the Church grows. When, finally, there were so many Christians that some sort of order, some sort of structure, was needed for their own benefit. It became obvious that the person in the See of Rome was carrying forward the traditions of Peter. When there were so many Christians who were baptized at birth instead of as consenting adults, the problem of sin after baptism became a very powerful reality in the Church. And so, the Church had to look at what Jesus had said about forgiveness to understand what it could do to reconcile those people. But that’s not what this passage was all about when Matthew wrote it. It was about something entirely different.

Remember last week? Jesus went to the region of Tyre, in Sidon, and met that Canaanite woman and very reluctantly cured her daughter after saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” You have to know the geography. All of our Gospel writers create a theological geography to tell their story, using real places that people knew about back in those days that we don’t know anything about. Tyre and Sidon were two cities on the Mediterranean seacoast and for Jewish people they were vacation destinations. They were about 30 or 40 miles outside of the actual end of Jewish territory but, because so many people of Jewish ancestry lived there and worked there, it was a comfortable enough place to go, where Jews and Pagans mingled in a friendly manner.

A couple of weeks ago, I found a little article in a news magazine. This group someplace in the Southwest started a charter school. Charter schools are neither public nor religious, they’re private. And they’d just gone to court seeking federal aid for their school. And two bishops of the area had filed an amicus curiae brief in support of their desire for federal aid. The charter for the school says that it’s “open to all children, but we will actively attempt to convert any non-Catholic children to the Catholic faith so that they will not burn in hell.” I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was more angry or sad when I read that because it does not reflect Catholic teaching in any way.

The bishops of the Second Vatican Council issued a large number of decrees, but only one was promulgated as a doctrinal decree, meaning that it required the assent of Catholic people. And that was the doctrine that we call the one on the church, but its Latin name is Lumen Gentium. Beautiful name. The light of the nations. In the twelve paragraph of that document it says that no one is outside the church except those who, knowing for a fact that Jesus is the only Savior of the world, deliberately refuse to believe in Him. That’s, pretty much, people who are insane. So, nobody’s outside the Church.

When I look in the mirror in the morning, I see my father looking back at me. When I sit down like this, unconsciously my posture is frequently that of my Italian grandmother. And I often find myself saying things my mother said forty years ago. Like it or not, we almost all become our parents in some ways at some time.

Sometimes we do ourselves a disservice having these little snippets of scripture at Mass. The only way to understand today’s first reading would be to read the whole thing, which is very, very long, but I’ll summarize it for you. Elijah had a contest with the priests of Baal to get something done and Yahweh God caused Elijah to win. But, after his win, in his victory dance, so to speak, he had all 450 prophets of Baal executed by being beheaded which, of course, enraged Queen Jezebel and King Ahab and she put out a fatwah on him. So, the story picks up today as he’s escaping, running for his life, into the desert. He comes to an oasis and plops himself down under a tree, exhausted and despairing. And that’s when he says, “Lord, take my life, I am no better than my father.” That line, “… take my life, I am no better than my father,” is the key line to this entire story and it’s buried.

So, did you spot the things in the first reading and the gospel that were similar images?  If you didn’t, it’s likely because our minds don’t go in the direction of imagery when we’re reading scripture, but it’s there all the time. The two images that match, in the two readings, are “something clothed in brightness and light” and “someone who is an ordinary human being.” In Hebrew terminology, the expression Son of Man simply is a circumlocution for human being or man in the sense of a member of the human race. And it’s the Ancient of Days that is clothed with light, sitting on a throne of fire. Everything is all brilliance and dazzling to the eye. In today’s gospel, it is Jesus Himself who is clothed in light and dazzling to the eye. But at the end of the story, it’s just good old everyday Jesus, a man like all other men, who speaks to his frightened disciples.

We don’t really know if Daniel was a historical human being. What we do know is that the Book of Daniel is made up of two different parts. The first part has what you might want to call “The Adventures of Young Daniel.” He is part superhero, part advisor/counselor, part political dealmaker. And, in each of the stories, there is either a moral lesson or a happy ending thanks to the work of Daniel. Then, suddenly, in the middle, the book changes and Daniel becomes the interpreter of and the spokesman for various revelations.

Jesus begins by saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like…” The kingdom of heaven is like… And then He tells us two brief stories about searching and strife. The person finds the treasure, digs it up - probably illegally, on somebody else’s property - hides it, goes and buys the property. The other one is searching, always, for valuable pearls. Maybe next week he’ll find a more valuable one than the one he found in the parable, and then what? He’s already sold everything.

Our understanding of heaven is that, at the very least, heaven is where all strife and searching ends. We are at peace. We have all that we need because we have God. And so, how could the kingdom of heaven be a place of searching, strife, and even duplicity? That’s because Matthew changed a key word. He changed something else to heaven.