"YOU JUST CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" 2025 #16

 

FATHER WHO? FATHER WHAT? FATHER WHEN? FATHER WHY? FATHER HOW? 

This year is the 55th anniversary of my First Mass at St. Theresa Church down in Rhodelia, Kentucky. I thought it might be a good opportunity to recall some of my favorite situations where my priesthood was called into question. Almost all of them took place in my first 10 years when I was stationed down along the Tennessee border where Catholics make it one-tenth of one percent of the population. 

Disapproval for what I had become came very soon after my ordination. At one of the receptions, either after my ordination or after my First Mass, I was confronted by a young woman who asked how many years I had gone to school to be a priest. When I answered, "Counting  eight years of grade school, four years of high school, four years of college and four years of theology studies, I guess you could say twenty years altogether!"  She took a step back and responded, "My God, you could have been something!" Obviously, she was thinking "doctor" or "lawyer" or "scientist" - the professions that really "count?"

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Not too long after I arrived in the southern part of the state, I went to a barbershop to get a haircut. It was my day off and I was dressed "down" as they say. Like most people in that area, he was curious about this stranger sitting in his barber chair. It didn't take him long to ask the "big" question, "What do you do? I took a deep breath and answered "Catholic priest." He was obviously taking his time thinking about how to respond. Then he asked his second question which surprised me. Instead of questioning me about why I was Catholic, he asked, "Was your father a priest too?" Obviously, he knew very little about "priests" so I decided to give him my short answer. I simply said, "Oh, I hope not!" He didn't "get it" so we moved on to other topics, leaving him still trying to understand what I just said!  

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Not too long after I settled in the the southern part of the state, I took 12-15 young adults from the parish to one of the Lake Cumberland's local beaches. As we got in and out of the water and interacted with each other, the young adults were calling "Father this" and Father that!" Not being used to having priests in that area, this caused a woman not far away to come over and ask about the young adults who were calling me "Father," "Excuse me sir, but you look very young! Just how many kids do you have, anyway?" 

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In a few years down there, I volunteered to do some campus ministry at Somerset Community College. I was probably reaching more non-Catholic students than Catholic students. Once in a while, they would come by the rectory and ring the doorbell looking for me. One day, one of them came by and rang the doorbell. Instead of me, answering the door, the other associate pastor answered. This caused the young man who came looking for me to panic. He had a momentary lapse of memory and in his panic, he could not recall my name "Father Knott." Instead, he asked to see "Father Bump!" 

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So many of the students down there had grown up with Protestant warnings about Matthew 23:9 that said you should "call no one your father."  They were comfortable calling their male parents "father," but they were reluctant to call a Catholic priest "Father." As I result, I was given the nickname "Pad," which is short for "Padre!" To this day, over 55 years later, some of the people down in that area of the state still address me in their Christmas cards and texts "Pad."  Others addressed me as "Reverend," "Brother" or "Preacher." 

COMING SOON

A COLLECTION OF SATURDAY BLOG POSTS FOR 2025

DEDICATION

To Fergal Redmond, my good friend from Ireland and fellow-missionary volunteer in the Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, with whom I have enjoyed many good laughs, several memorable successes, a few mishaps and lots of gin and tonics.

A Companion To My 2018 Humor Collection 

I JUST HAD TO LAUGH: available already from Amazon Books

use this link 

ronknottbooks.com 

EXTRAVAGANT LOVE

 

Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil

made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed

the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair.

John 12:1-11

Jesus had a large circle of friends, both men and women. On the fifth Sunday of Lent, we got an inside glimpse at three of those friends: Martha, her sister Mary and their brother Lazarus from the little town of Bethany, on the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was that special place in the life of Jesus where he and his disciples could stop in, get some rest, enjoy a good meal and then go on their way!

If you pay attention to the details of John’s gospel story about Martha, Mary and Lazarus, you soon realize just how close Jesus was to these people. Martha was the famous extrovert who complained from her kitchen about getting some help. Mary was that famous introvert who would rather sit in the living room with the men and listen to Jesus talking. It was this Mary, in today’s gospel, who kissed Jesus’ feet in public, rubbing them with perfumed oil and drying them with her hair. You must be pretty close to do that, not to mention a woman doing that in public!

Sunday before last, we read down the text and saw how John underlined, again and again, just how intimate these friends were with Jesus. Here’s what it says: “Lord, the one you love is sick.” “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus very much.” “See how much he loved him!” They are even so close that both of these women can “chew him out” and get away with it: “Lord, if you had been here, (meaning if you had not dilly-dallied around so long) my brother would never have died!” Remember the text told us that Jesus had delayed two days after he heard that Lazarus was sick!  And finally, seeing Mary weep, we are told that “Jesus began to weep,” too.  What we have here is a continuation of that story of intense love colliding with intense stinginess.

Mary may not have been a good cook or a hopeless extrovert like her sister Martha. Mary may not have been the head of the household or the subject of a great miracle like her brother Lazarus, but her dramatic all-in gestures of love for Jesus were breath-taking! Let’s compare her full-throated gestures of love with the narrow minded and self-serving reactions of Judas and the religious authorities. 

First, we see Mary’s extravagant love. She gave the most precious thing she owned – a vial of very expensive ointment. Second, we see her humility. It would have been a great honor to anoint the head of Jesus, but out of humility, she anointed his feet. Third, we see a total lack of self-consciousness. After anointing them with perfumed oil, she dries them with her own hair. At the time of Jesus, no respectable woman would appear in public with her hair unbound. It was the sign of being an immoral woman. Mary loved Jesus so much that she did not care, or even notice, what others thought about it.

Then we have Judas. Judas ungraciously questioned her action as sheer waste and then hiding his flawed self-serving nature behind the excuse that it “could have been given to the poor” while he himself was guilty of regularly stealing from the poor. Jesus probably knew at this point that his days were numbered. He accepted Mary’s lovely other-focused gesture of generous love. He exposed the hypocrisy of Judas who turned this loving gesture into a story about his own greediness!

Finally, for the religious leaders who were there, it was a chance to “check out both Jesus and Lazarus.” From there they plotted not only to kill Lazarus, but also Jesus, because they were drawing followers from their ranks. Like Judas, they were filled with self-serving stinginess, while Mary was filled with other-serving love. 

 

 

 

 

 

PALM SUNDAY

 

Picture it! Jerusalem 32AD! Things were crowded and tense in Jerusalem when Jesus arrived for the Passover. It was worse than Derby Day in Louisville the year cruising was outlawed on Broadway! Jesus; popularity with the masses had reached fever pitch. The jealousy of religious leaders had reached the boiling point! The government’s worry bordered on paranoid.  The whole city was on edge that year! 

Everyone in authority, as well as Jesus himself, knew that his arrival in the city under these circumstances smacked of a showdown. Everybody seemed to know that the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem during the Passover could set off a riot!

When the great crowd that had come to the feast

heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, they

took palm branches and went out to meet him,

throwing their coats on the road.

Palm waving and the throwing of coats on the road was not just some spontaneous gesture of welcome. These two actions had serious political overtones. People threw their coats on the road when a new king arrived to ascend his throne and palm waving was a symbol of Jewish nationalism akin to a rebel flag.  Even though the people had tried to make Jesus a king, in hopes that he would be the one to throw the hated Romans out of their land, Jesus had said “no” on more than one occasion to being the political revolutionary they wanted.  This was one of the temptations presented to Jesus in the desert even before he began his ministry. With the crowds in that frame of mind, no wonder the Roman authorities were nervous about the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem that day!

In response to the people’s misguided reception as some kind of political revolutionary, Jesus deliberately came into the city, not in a chariot pulled by white horses, but on the back of a jackass. By choosing that kind of animal, the animal of the poor, Jesus made the statement that he did not come with political power, but with spiritual power! The people just didn’t want to hear it. They wanted a powerful Jewish king and so this symbol of humility simply went over their heads!

Palm Sunday has a lot to teach the Church, even today! My friends, our power is not to be found in political power, no matter how many preachers still try to snuggle up to politicians even today. Our power is even more powerful than political power. Empires and kingdoms have come and gone, but Christianity is still around. We have spiritual power – the power of Jesus himself! Now we only need to own it and unleash it for the good of the world!  We have Pope Francis leading us there! The less worldly power he claims, the more powerful he becomes!