My paternal grandparents carved out a living from the land as farmers in southwest Michigan. Early on, we lived about 20 minutes away, across the border in Mishawaka, Indiana—a small town next to South Bend, only about two miles from Notre Dame.

I loved spending some of my summer at the farm, helping my grandpa in the field and eating my grandma’s cooking. She did exciting things in the kitchen that we didn’t experiment with much back home. Like she put onion soup mix in the hamburger, and then she’d put the meat in wax paper and stick it into a hamburger press (I mean, seriously! Who has a hamburger press?!?)—and she’d pull out these perfectly formed hamburger patties that looked like they came from the pages of Southern Living, or something. Then she’d take the buns and butter them, put a little garlic salt on them, put them under the broiler, toast ‘em up good … throw in some french fries, deep-fried with a little bacon grease thrown in?

And for dessert? She’d go out into the garage to the big freezer chest, from which she’d already extracted the hamburger generously “donated” by one of the beef cattle. Next to the mounds of white-wrapped beef and pork was a long Tupperware container filled with cookies my grandma made—ginger snaps with this white icing and raisins, snickerdoodle, peanut butter cookies, and my favorite—frozen mint chocolate chip cookies.

Mmmm. Man, that was good! But my poor mom, how was she supposed to compete with that on the $ 50-a-week grocery allowance my dad “generously” gave her to feed six of us?

Not only in summer, but we went to my grandparents’ house a couple of times a month on Sundays and holidays. But that all changed when we moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in my seventh-grade year. We were in the same state now, but instead of twenty minutes away, we were an hour and forty-five minutes away.

And that trip seemed like it took forever because we’d travel south on I-196, creeping along the edge of Lake Michigan until we got down to I-94, the big artery between Detroit and Chicago. Pretty uncomplicated … until we got off the expressway. At that point, we had to get on a state road that would take us to US Route 31—that’s right, the same Highway 31 that comes down from Mackinaw Island to South Bend, through Indianapolis to Louisville, and all the way down to Spanish Fort, Florida, near Mobile, Alabama.

The trip to my grandparents’ house after getting off the expressway was a little over 20 miles on two-lane backroads—which was made even more arduous because we could see that they were in the process of building an extension of US Highway 31—which would eventually go right through South Bend, up past my grandparents’ house about 1 mile away, and would ultimately connect with I-196. The thought of cutting off that excruciating last twenty miles of the two-lane road felt like such an obvious thing to me as a kid. Just build it, for crying out loud!

I’ve waited and watched as the government would do a little work here, and then things would stop for what seemed like forever. Then, maybe the Department of Transportation would get a Christmas bonus or something, and there’d be a flurry of work. Then, another drought of inactivity. A little bit would open here. Then a bit more.

My grandparents have been gone for years, but I still take US 31 from Louisville to see my family in Michigan. For over forty years, I’ve followed the progress of this stupid little patch of highway, waiting to finally be able to take the shortcut I’ve been dreaming about since before I even started driving. Over forty years.

This summer, when we drove back to Michigan for my high school reunion, I finally, for the first time, got to take the shortcut straight up through South Bend, past my grandparents’ farm, and straight up to I-196.

Now, I realize this doesn’t hold the same emotional impact for you as it does for me, but … Man! … driving that shortcut was awesome! That’s a long time to wait to shave fifteen minutes off of the trip, but it felt so good!

But when I got home, I tried to reconstruct the way we used to take before the shortcut—the long one we had to drive when I was a kid. And to my horror, I found that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t remember the way we’d gone countless times. It was gone. With the new highway, nothing looked even vaguely familiar.

Has that ever happened to you?

You get a new route to take, whether you want to or not, and after a short time, the old route starts to fade from memory. New maps help get where you want to go in a new situation but can add to the confusion of remembering how things used to look.

No matter how disconcerting it feels to forget something you figured you’d remember for the rest of your life, you still face a new map. And the new map can make the old map fuzzy or even begin to disappear.

But it’s not just maps that get updated, is it? Stuff is changing around us all the time. The way landmarks and milestones we’ve used to make sense of the world fade, and before we know it, the world we’ve been so at home in is an entirely different place.

Unfamiliar places require new maps. And unfamiliar times require that we tell ourselves new and different stories about the world we live in right now—what it all means, how we're supposed to survive, and what we need to focus on. The stories we used to tell don't always fit our situations as things change. Sometimes, we need a new story or at least a different take on an old one.

Because as much as we need the new map, the new story, the old one keeps bleeding through. We see hints of it here and there, out of the corner of our eyes. And we’re reminded that the urgency of the new never completely replaces the familiar landmarks, the old stories. They’re still there, but we need new ways of incorporating those old landmarks and lost highways into our understanding of the world we currently inhabit if the new maps are going to connect us to the dreams we’ve held dear for so long.

Take this story from our Gospel this morning. Matthew has Jesus tell it a few days before he’s crucified—the culmination of three stories that directly attack the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.

The only other Gospel that tells a version of this story is Luke, who includes it early on in Jesus' ministry. It seems clear, then, that Matthew includes this story for his own reasons.