Two Worlds: Homily for Thursday, August 14, 2025

Reason and Faith. For a Catholic, these two worlds are integrated. Reason without faith can limit our ability to receive all God wants to give us. Readings for Today.

Two Worlds

Increasingly, we live in a world where we have the ability to do multiple things at the same time. Some of it is the equipment we use. You can carry a cell phone now and have two different numbers or more ring to the same cell phone. We have on televisions the ability to watch a program in English but to hear the audio in Spanish. There are many instances where we look and see that we can accomplish many things.

We live in a world where much can be accomplished. But we also live in a world where we have both kind of our reality, our earthly reality, and the reality of God. We live both in a physical world and a spiritual world. And without knowledge of the spiritual world and openness to the grace of God, it can be like we’re this person in the gospel.

Firstly, Peter, what’s reasonable in terms of forgiveness? Seven times seems more than reasonable. And in fact, in this life, we would say perhaps that’s a lot. But in the spiritual world, Jesus tells us that we must forgive every time.

Today we celebrate St. Maximilian Kolbe, the great Conventual Franciscan, who at the age of nine had a vision of the Blessed Mother. And in this vision, she handed him two crowns, a white crown and a red crown, the crown of glory and the crown of martyrdom. A bit heavy for a nine-year-old, if you ask me, but he saw this in the depth of his being as something that he was easily able to say yes to.

“Yes, I will accept both crowns.” He had a tough life. A couple of brothers died of tuberculosis. His father died of tuberculosis. He himself had tuberculosis but didn’t die. But of course, the very famous story that is only possible because of God’s grace. And that is this.

It seems that a prisoner had escaped from the concentration camp. And to make a point, the guards decided to make an example of the particular unit that housed Maximilian Kolbe by trying to starve them to death. Now I say trying because four survived despite their best efforts. So they decided they were going to inject them to kill them right away.

And there was a man who had a family and children who pleaded that he be spared. And Maximilian Kolbe offered himself in place of this man. In the first reading, we get a sense of the place of the spiritual world. We get a place in the spiritual world that Joshua is able to demonstrate that all he has done is because of God’s power. He has to establish himself as the heir to Moses. And God knows that the people need many signs of God’s ability and grace.

What about us on this day? Are we able, like you can on a remote control, hit the grace button and see what it is that God is asking of us? Are we able to really believe that with God all things are possible? Are we able to ask God to help us to see more clearly the spiritual aspects of our lives? Would our hearts be open, like St. Maximilian Kolbe, to receive the gifts of whatever it is that God wants to give to us? Even if it be the crown of martyrdom?

We face so many instances in our world where the standard of decision making is just what we can see and just what we believe, through reason alone, is right for us. But Jesus reminds us that because we have been forgiven a debt we could not repay, we must do the same for others.

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