Since most of us of us have trouble forgiving even once or twice, the standard set in today's Gospel is hard to comprehend. To help Peter, and us, understand that we are to forgive so much because we have been forgiven so much, Jesus tells the parable of the servant who owed a great debt to his m...

In the parable of the workers in the vineyard, we are confronted with what we might consider an unfair situation. The owner of the vineyard goes out and hires workers, starting in the early morning and ending close to sundown. But no matter what time of day the workers are hired, all get the same...

It is helpful to understand the context in which Jesus was speaking when he taught in parables. In the case of our Gospel passage this week, Jesus had been preaching and teaching in the Temple when the chief priests and elders began questioning his authority. In response, Jesus tells them about t...

It's said there are only a few basic plots for most stories. What the storyteller does with the plot—the twists and turns that are added—is what makes a story memorable. In this week's Gospel, Jesus takes a story of a vineyard, which would have been very familiar to his audience, and gives it an ...

Who doesn't love a party—especially when someone else is footing the bill? Well, in today's Gospel we hear about several people who turned down an invitation to a banquet. And not just any old banquet, but a feast put on by the king! These people even went so far as to kill the servants who invit...

How many times have we heard the expression, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and render unto God that which is God's?" Today's Gospel gives us the origin of that phrase.

In his response to the Pharisees in today's reading, Jesus quotes the Shema, the great prayer from Deuteronomy 6:4, which begins, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord" (RSV). However, Jesus subtly changes the wording. Instead of saying that we are to love the Lord with all our heart, sou...

Today's Gospel has two parts that don't exactly seem to fit together. First Jesus is condemning the Scribes and Pharisees for the "hard burdens," they put on the people and then, all of a sudden, he says that we should not call anyone Father. What's going on here?

The story of the Foolish and the Wise Virgins can be difficult for us in the 21st century to appreciate fully. Not only do we not understand the wedding customs themselves, the actions of the Wise Virgins seem rather selfish: Why wouldn't they just share with the Foolish Virgins and then everyone...

Jesus is telling us that we must put our abilities at the service of the Master, God our Father. But before we can do that, we have to discern what our gifts are. We all have been given special abilities by God. It's up to us to figure out what those abilities are and how we can best put them int...

When the world ends, we are told that God is going to focus on one thing: How did we care for the poor, the sick, the suffering? Nothing else will matter. Just how we treated who Jesus called "the least" among us.