Year B Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-14; Ephesians 1:3-10; Mark 6:7-13

To be a Christian is to be called. The Lord sends those he calls. In today’s Gospel, Jesus, having already called the Twelve, sends them. While he “gave them authority over unclean spirits” and they cured many sick people, they were primarily sent to preach repentance.¹

Along with our Gospel, our first reading from the book of the prophet Amos provides some insight into who God calls as well as what he sends them to do. Amos was a shepherd “and a dresser of sycamores.”² LLike Jesus, was also not of the tribe of Levi, the priestly tribe, Amos was not a priest. Nonetheless, God called him to be a prophet.

Amos lived in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, in Galilee. This is the area where, centuries later, Jesus came from. Judah is where Jerusalem is and, being the holy city, where the Temple was. The main Israelite shrine in the Northern Kingdom, as well as its capital, was Bethel. It was to Bethel that God sent Amos to prophesy. His prophesy was to call those prophets and leaders to repentance, back to fidelity to God’s covenant.

As you might imagine, Amos’ prophesying went over like a lead balloon. He was told to leave Bethel and go prophesy in Judah. In essence, the chief priest, Amaziah, told Amos, “Get out of here. Who do you think you are to speak to me, to speak to the king, like that?” This should take us back to our Gospel for last Sunday.

If you remember, after healing, casting out demons, and preaching repentance throughout the rest of Galilee, Jesus went home to Nazareth. On the sabbath, he taught in the synagogue. As a result of his preaching, the devout people in Nazareth, Mark tells us, “took offense at him.”³ Their offense caused the Lord to observe: “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.”⁴ You see, being Messiah means that Jesus is a prophet.

Immediately after being baptized, a child is anointed with sacred chrism with the words: “As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet, and King, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life.”⁵ “By Baptism,” the Catechism teaches, we “share in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission.” Together, the Catechism continues, the baptized “are ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that [they] may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light.’ Baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers.”⁶

Your being called and sent is no accident, at least if our second reading from Ephesians is to be believed: “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ.”⁷ This is a clear reference to baptism, through which you are reborn, through Christ, by the Holy Spirit’s power, as a child of God. Through the blood of Christ, “we have redemption…, the forgiveness of transgressions…”⁸

Amos, the prophet, by Naomi, used under the rules of Creative Common License

It is only by experiencing the sweet fruits of repentance that you are able to share them with others. It is then, like Amos, like the Twelve, you are sent on mission, so that you can evangelize, share the Good News. Because it is only then than you can tell others what difference knowing Jesus makes in your life.

Living as we do at the intersection of time and eternity, truly knowing Jesus makes a lot of difference. It is easy to be mistaken about this difference and all too common to exaggerate it, often to an absurd degree. Michael Knott, who was a pillar of Christian alternative music and who passed away earlier this year, when asked the usual question during a lengthy interview, something like “Who are you?,” he replied:

Basically, I'm a human being and I believe in Christ, period. It doesn't make my life rosy, it doesn't make my life terrible, it doesn't do anything with that. I know Christ⁹

What Knott nailed was that knowing Christ isn’t transactional. In other words, it doesn’t work by believing in Christ and neatly following all the rules in exchange for nothing bad ever happening to you, let alone a promise to live your best life now. As our Gospel from three Sundays ago showed us, Jesus is with us in and through the storm, even when, maybe especially when, it doesn’t seem like it, when it seems like he’s asleep. Rather, as the psalmist puts in Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”¹⁰

To know Christ, to really know him, means that being a Christian constitutes your identity, becomes who you are. As Saint Paul insisted, “whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”¹¹ Knowing Christ isn’t just a way to add a little morality, a little religion, to your life. That is old and dead, not new and alive.

Like Jesus in the garden, you must learn, to borrow the title of a great spiritual classic, to abandon yourself to divine providence. In other words, to trust him even when the chips are down and when the deck seems stacked against you.

The only way to really know Christ is to experience what I am trying to describe for yourself. Only then, can you fulfill your prophetic call. Only then can you be sent to proclaim the Gospel, that is, to tell others what it means, through experience, to say, “I know Christ.”

Only once you truly repent, can you preach repentance. For a Christian, repentance is just another word for redemption, another word for true freedom, another word for realizing what the Lord means when he says, “Blessed are you…”

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1 Mark 6:7.13.12.^↩
2 Amos 7:14.^↩
3 Mark 6:3.^↩
4 Mark 6:4.^↩
5 Rite of Baptism for Children, “Rite of Baptism for Several Children,” sec. 62.^↩
6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 1268; 1 Peter 2:9.^↩
7 Ephesians 3:4-5.^↩
8 Ephesians 3:7.^↩
9 Doug Van Pelt & Daniel Johnston. “Michael Knott- A Candid Interview.” HM, 2003.^↩
10 Psalm 23:4.^↩
11 2 Corinthians 5:17.^↩

Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Hosea 2:16.17c.18.21-22; Ps 145:2-9; Matthew 9:18-26

Our Gospel today is Saint Matthew’s version of events first written about in Mark’s Gospel. This should sound familiar because Mark’s version of these things was our Gospel reading for the Sunday before last.

Our understanding of today’s Gospel should be shaped by our first reading with which the Church pairs it. Our first reading today is from the Book of the Prophet Hosea. Before getting to our passage for today, a little background is useful.

As is the case with the prophets, both major and minor (Hosea is a minor prophet), Hosea was commissioned to call Israel back to fidelity to her covenant with God. One way God commanded Hosea to do this was through his marriage to a woman named Gomer.

Gomer was a practitioner of “the world’s oldest profession.” In other words, she was a prostitute. Nonetheless, God called his prophet to marry this unreformed harlot. Not only did they marry but they had children together. Despite this, Gomer still plied her trade.

What we have, then, is a pretty ham-fisted allegory: Hosea is God and Gomer is Israel. While God remains faithful to Israel, his beloved, Israel plays the harlot, chasing after other gods. One of the many things John Calvin was right about is that “the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.”¹

The truth of Calvin’s assertion is not only verified in the exploits of ancient Israel but also through the history of the Church. One of the four “marks” of the Church is that she is holy. Just before saying the Prayer Over the Gifts, the priest says to the assembly- “Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” To which we respond: “May the Lord accept this sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his holy Church.”² The Church is his, meaning Christ’s.

In answer to the first question of an interview he gave at the beginning of his pontificate, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?,” Pope Francis said, “I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”³ The Church is holy because she is the Bride of a Husband who is indefatigably faithful, loving, and forgiving: Jesus Christ. The Church is holy because it is Christ’s, not because you or I, or even the Pope, belong to it.

Hosea and Gomer, by Barry Moser, used under the rules of Creative Common License

Like Gomer, like ancient Israel, Christ’s Bride is not always faithful. This is why the Church earned the patristic moniker casta meretrix- chaste whore.⁴This points to an inseparable union of the human and the divine that constitutes the Church. At least for now, the Church is a union between sinful, unfaithful, idol-chasing people, and her holy and wholly faithful Lord.

What makes our reading from Hosea so beautiful is that it tells us of God’s tender fidelity not just despite our individual and collective infidelity but, like Hosea, because of it. This suggests that great line from the Exsultet, sung at the Easter Vigil:

O happy fault
    that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!⁵

Or this from Preface III of the Sundays in Ordinary Time:

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory, that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself, that the cause of our downfall might become the means of our salvation, through Christ our Lord⁶

In light of this perhaps we should also understand today’s Gospel as something of an allegory. The Church is the woman with the hemorrhages who Jesus heals and makes whole. The Church is also the community of those who, through the mystery of Baptism, have died, been buried, and risen with Christ to new life.

Indeed, as we sang in the Responsory, the Lord is “gracious and merciful.”⁷ As Christians, as members of Christ’s Body (through the Eucharist, He becomes one flesh with his Church), let us recommit, with God’s help, to never again say, “My baal.”⁸ Let us be ever mindful that, in the end, only those who, forsaking all other gods, say to Christ “My husband” may enter the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

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1 John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. I.11.8.^↩
2 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, The Liturgy of the Eucharist, sec. 29.^↩
3 Fr. Anthony Spadero. “Interview with Pope Francis.”^↩
4 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Casta Meretrix,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 2, Spouse of the Word, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 193–288..^↩
5 Roman Missal, Sunday of the Resurrection, The Easter Vigil, The Easter Proclamation, sec. 19.^↩
6 Roman Missal, The Order of the Mass, Preface III of the Sundays in Ordinary Time, sec. 54.^↩
7 Psalm 145:8.^↩
8 Hosea 2:18.^↩