During Ordinary Time, the Sunday lectionary seeks to harmonize our reading from the Old Testament with the Gospel reading. Today’s readings make this very apparent. No similar effort is made to harmonize the second reading, which follows the Responsorial Psalm. This, too, is evident in today’s readings. Sometimes the second reading “fits in” and other times it strikes a discordant note.
Our readings today from Isaiah and the Gospel According to Saint Matthew are both seem a bit anxiety-inducing. Whereas, we hear Saint Paul, in our reading from his Letter to the Philippians, tell us to “have no anxiety at all.”1 As with all Scripture, our second reading has an immediate context.
At the beginning of the fourth chapter of Philippians (the chapter from which our second reading is taken), Paul names two women: Euodia and Syntyche. Although both women labored together with Paul to spread the Good News, they came to be at odds with each other. Apparently, their dispute threatened the stability of this new Christian community. In our reading today is Paul urging the community to come together and be reconciled.
What better way to come together than through prayer? In exhorting the community not to be anxious, the apostle urges the Christians in ancient Philippi to make their desires known to God “by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving.”2 Indeed, disunity, dissension, and unkindness, cause anxiety. We live in an age of anxiety.
Even before the pandemic, which has raised it to a new level, many people in our society, in our community, struggled with anxiety. Belonging to a Christian community, being a member of a parish, should be different than any other kind of belonging. But, as most of us know first-hand, “church” can sometimes be a brutal place. Our second reading today shows this is nothing new. But that is cold comfort.
It is important not just to know but to experience how gathering around the table of the Lord, listening to God’s word, and responding to it, along with partaking together the bread that makes us one body, enables us to overcome all that separates us from each other.
In the Preface for the second Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation we pray:
For though the human raceThe Church’s work of reconciliation for which the Eucharist prepares us requires every member to be a minister of reconciliation. The ministry of reconciliation with which God has entrusted us is too big, too important to confine to small space at the back of the Church. It bears noting that today is Sunday is Respect Life Sunday. One major work of reconciliation that we, as Christians, are called to undertake is defending and advocating for human life. Being pro-life is bigger than one issue.
is divided by dissension and discord,
yet we know that by testing us
you change our hearts
to prepare them for reconciliation3
In addition to making it easier for women in crisis pregnancies to choose life, being fully pro-life means advocating for and assisting the elderly and those who are chronically and terminally ill. Access to healthcare is a major life issue. Being for life means working to end the death penalty and seeking constructive ways to eliminate firearm violence, which, among advanced countries, is a particular scourge in the U.S. It also means working to prevent suicide, which means understanding what people are at the highest risk for taking their own lives, like middle aged men, older people who feel they've outlived their usefulness, and LGBTQ youth. Being an advocate for life also means working for racial justice as well as assisting immigrants and refugees. Another name for the Eucharist is “the Bread of Life.”
This is a tall order! Perhaps so tall as to induce some anxiety. From the perspective of Church teaching on the inherent value of human life from conception to natural death taken in its totality, both major parties fall short. Therefore, heeding the teaching of our bishops, when voting, it is important to make sound prudential judgments, which we do by utilizing proportional reasoning.
Presumably, it is our desire for changed hearts that brings us to this table. Without this desire, everything we do is for naught. In the Prayer after Communion today, we ask God to transform us “into what we consume.”4 What do we consume? The Body of Christ. What, then, do we pray to become? The Body of Christ.
If today were not Sunday, we would observe the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi. The Prayer of Saint Francis begins with these words:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:In today’s Gospel, Jesus provides an allegory about the coming of God’s Son and his rejection by those to whom he is sent. The tenants are the chief priests, scribes, and Pharisees. The slaves are the prophets. Remember the role of prophecy in ancient Israel was not to magically foretell the future but to call God’s Chosen People back to fidelity to their covenant with God and to warn them of the natural consequences of their failure to repent. Their infidelity had mostly to do with social injustice: neglecting the widow and orphan, mistreating the foreigners who lived among them, cheating the poor, etc.
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy5
The son, of course, is Jesus. This same warning can be just as true of the Church as it was of ancient Israel. This happens whenever we become enclosed, self-absorbed, or, to use Pope Francis’s phrase: “self-referential.” It is by overcoming these all-too-human tendencies that we become people who produce good fruit.6
1 Philippians 4:6.↩
2 Philippians 4:6.↩
3 Roman Missal, Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation II.↩
4 Roman Missal, Ordinary Time: On Sundays and Weekdays. Twenty-seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time.↩
5 Peace Prayer of Saint Francis.↩
6 Matthew 21:43.↩
