Year B Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Wis 1:13-15.2:23-24; Ps 30:2.4-6.11-13; 2 Cor 8:7.9.13-15; Mark 4:21-43

“Death is a part of life,” or so we’re told. This is true insofar as all of us will die. As Jesus, drawing attention back to the beginning in Genesis, pointed out to those who asked him about divorce and who noted that Moses permitted it, from the beginning it was not so.¹ As our reading from Wisdom tells us: “God formed man to be imperishable.”²

As the inspired author of the Book of Wisdom notes: God created human beings “of his own nature.”³ This amounts to the same thing we learn about in the first creation account in Genesis: man and woman were made in God’s image and likeness.⁴ While God’s image, the imago Dei, cannot be lost, our likeness to God is lost through sin.

While we are not born merely to die, because death entered the world, it is not enough to be born in order not to die. You must be reborn by water and the Spirit. The primary effect of the sacrament of baptism is to restore the baptized to a state of original grace. Through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, our likeness to God can be restored by grace.

This same grace is operative in the sacrament of penance, which is an extension of baptism. While it may seem old-fashioned to say so, you should strive to live in a state of grace. What does it mean to endeavor to live in a state of grace? It doesn’t mean being perfect, even though we should strive for and deeply desire perfection, which, in a Christian context, can also be called holiness.

The fruit of the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Blessed Virgin’s Most Holy Rosary, which mystery is Jesus’ Transfiguration, is a desire for holiness, a desire for transfiguration, transformation, conversion, the desire for sanctity. What it means to be holy is to be like Jesus Christ. What it means to be like Christ is to love perfectly, to love God with your entire being, and to love your neighbor as yourself. All of the various ways we have to access grace, even the sacraments, are means to this end.

Today’s Gospel powerfully shows us how Jesus rescues and restores us. While there is no reason to doubt the historicity of these encounters with Jesus, these were not remembered and written down to be handed merely as biography.

What I am getting at is illustrated by last Sunday’s Gospel. If you remember, it began with Jesus climbing into the boat with his disciples and saying, “Let us cross to the other side.”⁵ Perhaps the best way to grasp this episode is as an allegory.

Uou and I, all of us hearing God’s word together, are the disciples to whom Jesus speaks. The boat is the Church. The sea, which in the ancient world, including for the Jewish people, was a place of chaos, a place where dangers lurked, where storms often proved deadly, is what we experience as we make our way through life to what the old hymn calls “God’s celestial shore.”⁶ Jesus is the master of wind, the sea, the sky, of all there is. Therefore, because we are in the boat with him, we need not fear even while the storm rages.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus’ bringing Jairus’ daughter back to life is interrupted by the woman who sought healing from something that afflicted her for twelve years. Let’s translate this into something more relatable for most of us. In terms of sin, how long have you struggled with the same damned thing? How often does it seem like your confession is just the same thing over and over? It’s easy to get discouraged.

You need to remember three things. First, Jesus has already won the victory. Second, you’re never beaten until you quit. Third, you will get tired of asking for God’s mercy before God tires being merciful to you, which requires nothing other than your acknowledgment of and sorrow for your sins. Divine Mercy is infinite.

What God limits is evil, even though this is sometimes far from evident. Pope Saint John Paul II insisted that the cross of Christ “marks the divine limit placed upon evil.” Through the cross, he continued, “evil is radically overcome by good, hate by love, death by resurrection.”⁷

The fruit of the third Luminous Mystery is repentance and trust in God. Maybe this is going off on a tangent but pray the Rosary. If possible, pray the Rosary every day. In a letter he wrote to an archbishop, Pope Pius XII noted that the Rosary is “the compendium of the entire Gospel.”⁸

To trust God is to trust Jesus, who, as Son of the Father, is also God. Each Christian amid life’s storms must not ask, “Jesus, why don’t you care that I am perishing?” Instead. We must learn to say, even if only in a quivering voice, “Jesus, I trust in You.” Thomas à Kempis in his timeless spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ, writes about Jesus saying,

Come to Me when it is not well with thee.
This is that which most of all hinders heavenly comfort, that thou art slow in turning thyself to prayer⁹

These are lovely words. But like those featured in today’s Gospel as well as last week’s, we must get beyond the sentimentality of these words and verify this truth through experience. Is Jesus trustworthy, or isn’t he? Everything hinges on the answer to this question! Proof in favor of the Lord’s trustworthiness is not whether he does your bidding according to your timing and in just the way you ask him to. Rather, it lies in abandoning yourself, like he did, to the loving care of the Father, who is committed only to your good.

Don Francisco, a contemporary Christian music artist from years past, has an amazing ability to bring Gospel stories alive through his songs. He wrote an amazing song called “A Little Closer to Jesus,” the first verse of which, along with the chorus, strikes me as very illuminating today:

Well, a woman with a burden of sickness twelve years
Heard that Jesus was coming her way;
She didn't stop to worry 'bout her doubts and her fears
She had to fight for every step of the way
Through the crowds that were pressing around Him
Through the heat and the dust of the road,
And when she touched his cloak, God healed her body
He lifted her heavy load

If I can get a little closer to Jesus
Just a little bit closer to Jesus…
Everything's gonna be all right¹⁰

For those who like to be given something to do in a homily: this week, get a little closer to Jesus by praying the Rosary each day. To Jesus through Mary is the fruit of the Rosary’s second Luminous Mystery- the miracle at the wedding feast of Cana. Given that this happens during a feast, one can taste a Eucharistic undertone, pointing us to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. As Catholics, we must always be aware that it is impossible to get closer to Jesus than through the Eucharist.

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1 See Mark 10:3-7.^↩
2 Wisdom 2:23.^↩
3 Wisdom 2:23.^↩
4 Genesis 1:26.^↩
5 Mark 4:25.^↩
6 "I'll Fly Away."^↩
7 Pope John Paul II. Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium.^↩
8 Cited by Pope Paul VI in Apostolic Exhortation Marialis Cultus, sec. 42.^↩
9 Thomas à Kempis. The Imitation of Christ, Book III, Chap 30, verse 1.^↩
10 Don Francisco, “Closer to Jesus.”^↩

Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: 1 Kings 21:1-6; Ps 5:2-7; Matthew 5:38-42

Jesus, Ahab, or Jezebel? This is the question posed to us by our readings. What do you do when life doesn’t go your way because of someone else? Do you mope about, lamenting loudly about that person? Do you, in the words of the Foo Fighters song “Monkey Wrench,” waste another night planning [your] revenge?” Or, do you recognize that things aren’t going well and practice benevolent detachment, giving that and everything else that worries you to the Lord?

Our Gospel reading for this evening is one of those very challenging passages from Saint Matthew’s Gospel. One temptation that must resisted when dealing with a passage like this is to water it down, attempting to make it less convicting. Let’s be clear, in this passage, the Lord doesn’t only tell us not to seek revenge. As his follower, he teaches you to turn the other cheek, to go out of your way for the one whom you perceive has wronged you.

In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul summarizes the response of a Christian disciple well: “Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.”¹​ This isn’t just a slogan. The passage begins with “Vengeance is mine, I will repay says the Lord.”² By conquering evil with good, the apostle tells us that by doing what Jesus instructs in today’s Gospel, “you will heap burning coals” on the head of one does you evil.³

God is a God of justice. Like there is no love without truth, there is no mercy without justice. In his encyclical letter on hope, Pope Benedict XVI insisted: “Only God can create justice.”⁴ “The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror,” Pope Benedict continued, “but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope.”⁵ Mercy does not cancel out justice.

Jesus at Bethany, by James Tissot 186-1894

Among fallen and sinful human beings, justice easily becomes revenge. Revenge is to justice what indifference is to mercy. Mercy is only genuine when extended with the recognition that a true wrong has been committed. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is known as the lex talionis. The lex talionis is the law of retribution.

Early Christians explicitly rejected retributive justice, choosing restorative justice instead. Concerning judicial punishment, the Catechism teaches that “in addition to preserving public order and the safety of persons, has a medicinal scope: as far as possible it should contribute to the correction of the offender.”⁶ In this regard, the Church views capital punishment as retributive, a punishment that leaves no possibility for the offender to correct.

In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, in a meeting of the men of the village, fearing another pogrom, one man says that rather than leaving, “We should defend ourselves!” Another man yells, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” To which Tevye, the main character replies: “Very good. That way the whole world will be blind and toothless.” Finally, the village leader says, “Rabbi, we’ve been waiting for the messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?” The old rabbi responds: “We’ll have to wait for him someplace else.”

My friends, Jesus came to make the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the toothless chew. We are his disciples only insofar as we join his messianic mission. As we sang in our Responsory: “Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.”

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1 Romans 12:21.^↩
2 Romans 12:19.^↩
3 Romans 12:20.^↩
4 Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi [On Christian Hope], sec. 44.^↩
5 Ibid.^↩
6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 2266.^↩

Year B Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Ezk 17:22-24; Ps 92:2-3.13-16; 2 Cor 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34

As indicated in our reading today from 2 Corinthians, as Christians, “we walk by faith, not by sight.”¹ What this means in practical terms is that we don’t always, or even usually, see the fruit of our spiritual endeavors. We’re used to living by the law of exchange, which, in our society, threatens to make all relationships quid pro quo, characterized by “You do something for me, and I will do something of less or equal value for you.” As Bob Hope once quipped about his comedy partner Bing Crosby: “There's nothing I wouldn't do for Bing, and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. And that's the way we go through life—doing nothing for each other!”

As Jesus shows, divine life is not ordered that way. Rather than the law of exchange, the divine economy adheres to the law of gift. This means rather than this-for-that it is simply this, given the impossibility of giving something equal in return.

Think about how Christian life would be if for everything God gives you, God explicitly expected something in return to the point that if you did not return what was expected, God would take away what he gave you. But it isn’t that we don’t owe God anything. We owe God everything. It’s just that, having given us his only Son, God isn’t interested in collecting debts. God is gracious. Rather than take back what he gives, God leaves it to us whether to accept his gift, which is nothing other than himself. A gift not received is a gift forefeited.

What do you owe God? You owe God praise and thanksgiving! Among the reasons it is important to attend Mass each Sunday is to thank God, to praise him for the gift of his only begotten Son. Another reason is to offer yourself, again, as a living sacrifice to the Father, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.² As you have no doubt heard- in the Eucharist, Christ gives himself to us body, blood, soul, and divinity.

“Eucharist,” as you are likely aware, means thanksgiving. Coming as it does from the Greek verb eucharisteō, more specifically it means simply to “give thanks.” As the suffix -urgy indicates, liturgy refers first and foremost to something we do. It’s easy to lose sight of the reality that the Eucharist is an exchange of gifts but not a quid pro quo.

Each Eucharistic Prayer starts with the priest saying, “The Lord be with you,” to which we instinctively reply: “And with your spirit.” He then exhorts us “Lift up your hearts.” We reply by saying what we should also be doing: “We lift them up to the Lord.” The priest then invites us to “give thanks to the Lord our God,” to which we respond, “It is right and just.”³

That this praise and thanksgiving is what we owe and should freely desire to give God is further indicated by the beginning of the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer:

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,
always and everywhere to give you thanks,
Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God⁴

In what does the Eucharistic exchange consist? In the bread and wine transformed into his body and blood by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ gives us himself whole and entire and in doing so, refills us with divine life, which is infinite, eternal, and inexhaustible.

What do we offer God? In our humble gifts of bread and wine, along with the collection, which is not some new-fangled invention but part of the liturgy from the beginning, which are presented to the priest at the foot of the altar, we offer ourselves, whole and complete. This ritual act is deeply symbolic. Hence, those who bring forth the gifts should be members of the faithful through baptism who represent the rest of the gathered baptized.

What we see is a ritual act, one that always runs the risk of becoming ho-hum, just one of those things we do at Mass for some reason. What we believe is the reality to which the ritual symbolically points: through our humble gifts of bread, wine, and collection, the offering of ourselves to God, through Christ, by the Spirit’s power. By means of these gifts, we offer ourselves body, blood, soul, and humanity. While this is visible to all, one needs to understand the symbol that underlies the ritual to make the offering. In other words, it is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer, too often even to the Catholic observer, what is happening.

In Eucharistic Prayer III, with now consecrated bread and wine on the altar, the priest prays: “May he [Christ] make of us an eternal offering to you [the Father].”⁵ Like the tender shoot taken from the top of the mighty cedar tree in our reading from Ezekiel and the mustard seed from our Gospel, nourished by the Eucharist, we grow ever more into the image of Christ, becoming not just the ekklesia, the assembly, the Church, but the veritable Body of Christ.⁶ God takes our gifts, makes them himself, and then gives us back something infinitely greater than what we offered, gathering us to himself and uniting us to one another.

Spiritual growth is usually imperceptible to the ones experiencing it. But whether you see it, feel it, or in some other way sense it, walking by faith and not by sight, continue trusting “that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”⁷ And “as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ,” do not take God for granted and do not be presumptuous, using God’s patience to exempt yourself from the demands of discipleship.⁸ Above all, do not neglect the Eucharist, which is an indispensable means through which God accomplishes his good work: the redemption of the world.

As we sang in our Responsory: “Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.”

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1 2 Corinthians 5:7.^↩
2 Romans 12:1-2.^↩
3 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, Eucharistic Prayer III, sec. 107.^↩
4 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, Preface VI of the Sundays in Ordinary Time, sec. 57.^↩
5 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, Eucharistic Prayer III, sec. 113.^↩
6 Ezekiel 17:24; Mark 4:30-32.^↩
7 Philippians 1:6.^↩
8 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, sec. 125.^↩