4th Sunday In Ordinary Time – Year C
Jeremiah 1: 4 – 5, 17 – 19
4 Now the word of the LORD came to me saying,
5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
17 But you, gird up your loins; arise, and say to them everything that I command you. Do not be dismayed by them, lest I dismay you before them.
18 And I, behold, I make you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls, against the whole land, against the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land.
19 They will fight against you; but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, says the LORD, to deliver you.”
Psalms 71: 1 – 6, 15 – 17
1 In thee, O LORD, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame!
2 In thy righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline thy ear to me, and save me!
3 Be thou to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress, to save me, for thou art my rock and my fortress.
4 Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel man.
5 For thou, O Lord, art my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth.
6 Upon thee I have leaned from my birth; thou art he who took me from my mother’s womb. My praise is continually of thee.
15 My mouth will tell of thy righteous acts, of thy deeds of salvation all the day, for their number is past my knowledge.
16 With the mighty deeds of the Lord GOD I will come, I will praise thy righteousness, thine alone.
17 O God, from my youth thou hast taught me, and I still proclaim thy wondrous deeds.
1 Corinthians 12: 31
31 But earnestly desire the higher gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.
1 Corinthians 13: 1 – 13
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful;
5 it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
6 it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away.
9 For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect;
10 but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away.
11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
13 So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Luke 4: 21 – 30
21 And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
22 And all spoke well of him, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth; and they said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”
23 And he said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, `Physician, heal yourself; what we have heard you did at Caper’na-um, do here also in your own country.’”
24 And he said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his own country.
25 But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Eli’jah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, when there came a great famine over all the land;
26 and Eli’jah was sent to none of them but only to Zar’ephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow.
27 And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Eli’sha; and none of them was cleansed, but only Na’aman the Syrian.”
28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.
29 And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong.
30 But passing through the midst of them he went away.
Over the past two Sundays we have spoken a little of the fact that we must be the means of renewal in the Church. St. Paul told us that each of us has a job to do, as part of the body of Christ, just as each part of our bodies has its own job to do. If we are to continue this theme of renewal of the Church we have to realize that there will be people who are skeptical. They may be those who are outside of the Church who have never been to Church at all and they have never really wanted anything to do with it. They may be those who were raised in the Church but have long since left and have had no real interest in coming back. And they may be those that come to Church regularly but are quite comfortable with the way things are and see no need for renewal or anything else that might shake up their lives.
And guess what? All of these people know you in one way or another. They may be neighbours, co-workers or they may sit just one pew over from you at Mass. Perhaps there are also family or friends who are quite happy to be in some Protestant ecclesial communion and have a lot of ready made attacks against the Catholic Church if you so much as breath a word about the faith to them. The point is, you are from their neighbourhood. They may have seen you as a kid, doing whatever it was that you did then, good or bad. They may have seen you in high-school and know what kind of trouble you got up to in those days when you were a rebellious teenager.
In today’s Gospel Jesus is pointing out this problem. Now he was the perfect child. He didn’t get into trouble the way that we did. He didn’t break something of the neighour’s like a window, or hang out with a gang in high-school that picked on some kid or hung out at the mall and generally annoyed everyone. He didn’t run with the jocks and think he was immune to being respectful of other people and their property. He was the perfect child, the perfect son. And you know something, if we had known him we wouldn’t have found him irritating for that, because in his goodness he was humble and good humoured. He didn’t parade his goodness as a reproach to others. But still, here he is in today’s Gospel pointing out that in his own land, the man who becomes a prophet of God is not welcome.
What could they have had to hold against him? There was nothing. Yet because he was from their neighbourhood, they couldn’t take him seriously, at least until he pointed out the same fault in Israel of old and it became apparent to them that he was drawing a direct comparison to them. Then they got angry with him. They couldn’t accept that they might be doing the same thing. But he reminds them that the miracles of God did not happen to those in the prophet’s own country. He mentions Elijah, highly revered as a prophet to the Jews, and points out that even in the time of famine in Israel the Lord sent him to an outsider to perform a miracle. They all knew the account. It is from 1 Kings 17. Perhaps we should read about it.
1 Kings 17
“And Elias the Thesbite, of the inhabitants of Galaad, said to Achab: As the Lord lives, the God of Israel, in whose sight I stand, there shall not be dew nor rain these years, but according to the words of my mouth.
2 And the word of the Lord came to him, saying:
3 Get you hence, and go towards the east, and hide yourself by the torrent of Carith, which is over against the Jordan;
4 and there you shall drink of the torrent: and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there.
5 So he went, and did according to the word of the Lord: and going, he dwelt by the torrent Carith, which is over against the Jordan.
6 And the ravens brought him bread and flesh in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening; and he drank of the torrent.
7 But after some time the torrent was dried up: for it had not rained upon the earth.
8 Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying:
9 Arise, and go to Sarephta of the Sidonians, and dwell there: for I have commanded a widow woman there to feed you.
10 He arose, and went to Sarephta. And when he had come to the gate of the city, he saw the widow woman gathering sticks, and he called her, and said to her: Give me a little water in a vessel, that I may drink.
11 And when she was going to fetch it, he called after her, saying: Bring me also, I beseech you, a morsel of bread in your hand.
12 And she answered: As the Lord your God lives, I have no bread, but only a handful of meal in a pot, and a little oil in a cruise: behold I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in and dress it, for me and my son, that we may eat it and die.
13 And Elias said to her: Fear not; but go, and do as you have said but first make for me of the same meal a little hearth cake, and bring it to me, and after make for yourself and your son.
14 For thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: The pot of meal shall not waste, nor the cruise of oil be diminished, until the day wherein the Lord will give rain upon the face of the earth.
15 She went, and did according to the word of Elias: and he ate, and she, and her house: and from that day
16 the pot of meal wasted not, and the cruise of oil was not diminished according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke in the hand of Elias.
17 And it came to pass after this, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick, and the sickness was very grievous, so that there was no breath left in him.
18 And she said to Elias: What have I to do with you, you man of God? Are you come to me, that my iniquities should be remembered, and that you should kill my son?
19 And Elias said to her: Give me your son. And he took him out of her bosom, and carried him into the upper chamber where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed.
20 And he cried to the Lord, and said: O Lord, my God, have you afflicted also the widow, with whom I am after a sort maintained, so as to kill her son?
21 And he stretched, and measured himself upon the child three times, and cried to the Lord, and said: O Lord, my God, let the soul of this child, I beseech you, return into his body.
22 And the Lord heard the voice of Elias: and the soul of the child returned into him, and he revived.
23 And Elias took the child, and brought him down from the upper chamber to the house below, and delivered him to his mother, and said to her: Behold your son lives.
24 And the woman said to Elias: Now by this I know that you are a man of God, and the word of the Lord in your mouth is true.
This was a reminder that God performed miracles at the hand of Elijah for a foreign woman, a widow of Sidon, and we see that she believed in God when her son was restored to life from grave illness. Jesus points this out because he was performing miracles as well, healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind wherever he went. Even so, they were saying in his home town, “who is this guy? We know him, he’s the carpenter’s son. Who does he think he is?”
How much more are we likely to hear the same thing if we begin to take our faith to those around us? We must expect to hear some of the same sort of thing. Jesus himself took his ministry elsewhere but eventually the ones that crucified him were saying the same thing at his trial. This is the son of Joseph the carpenter. How can he claim to be God? Does this mean that we must be quiet? Not at all. The Scriptures have been reminding us in the past few weeks that we all have a job to do, each person according to his gift, his talents, his abilities. We are not all evangelists in the sense of proclaiming the Gospel on the street corners. Most of us are not. How then are we to proclaim the message?
The first place to start is given to us in the words of St. Paul to the Corinthian Church. This is his famous discourse on love, often used as a reading for weddings. That is a great passage to read at weddings but perhaps not for the reason that we think at first glance. We know that usually the couple being married are “in love.” That is a given. Often I don’t suppose they even hear the words of Scripture during the wedding, so absorbed are they with the ceremony and with each other. This is a glorious day for them, a beautiful day, and there could be nothing that anyone could teach them about love on that day. And we would not have it any other way. It is a beautiful thing to behold, a young man and young woman, sacramentally binding themselves together before God until death. But St. Paul’s passage on love is very relevant to them, if not in that moment, then later on.
The love that St. Paul talks about here is a higher form of love than “being in love” as great as that can be. We all know that for most people, the shine comes off that infatuation over time. But that is not a criticism, it is simply human nature. What St. Paul is talking about is the love that carries us through and becomes very deep between a man and woman, long after the years have passed since the wedding. It is the love we refer to as Agape. It is the love that God has for us, the love that we are supposed to have for each other. This is the love that Jesus speaks of when he talks of the two greatest commandments; first that you love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind; and second that you love your neighbour as yourself. This kind of love does not even require that you like the person. It is the will and the action that is concerned with the good of the other, for no other reason than that they are another human being whom God loves as he loves us. It is the love that seeks the good of the other, primarily that they come to know and have faith in God. This is the love that should drive our evangelization and in most cases is the love that actually is our evnagelization.
The point here is that when we actually take our faith seriously and try to live it, we find that the command of Jesus is facing us at every turn in life. We have not said a thing, but when we treat someone, anyone, everyone with the kind of love that St. Paul is talking about, we are being what we have to be to please God and inevitably there will be those who notice it. If we are genuine and in humility treat people with their good in mind, never mind whether we like them or even really know them, we will find that they will seek us out, either for help, for talk and sometimes even for the truth about God. We should never be shy about letting people know that we are Catholics, in one manner or another, yet our lives should so mirror Christ that people will see Christ or seek him because of us. And it may never be something conscious on their part. It may be much later or never that we hear from them how it was our example that began to bring them to the light.
But remember, that is not easy to do. It is accomplished one minute at a time, one day at a time through the strength of God’s grace which flows to us when we ask for that grace. When we will it, desire it, and ask God for it, the Holy Spirit will provide the help that we ask for in order to be Christlike every day. We will fail miserably at times. That is where we apologize to anyone who deserves it from us and then we confess to God and ask his forgiveness and carry on.
Sooner or later, however, we are bound to run across the question or something like it, “What, do you think you are better than us?” We will have to take a stand some day, about something relatively minor, or about something very major. It may be something that you do not want your children to be involved in taking place in the community because it will tend to teach them poor morals, atheism or something like that. It may be some organization whether political or charitable that is supporting something like abortion that you cannot support. It may be local politics, it may be union politics. It may be good friends that want to get involved in something and take you along with them. Whatever the scenario, they may respect you and they may not.
We know that sin loves company. It likes to bring everyone to its level. In fact it has a problem dealing with the fact that there actually exists someone who will not bring themselves to go along. This was always the case. We see it in the account of Lot and the angels that came to his house in Sodom to warn him of the coming destruction. The men of the city were at Lot’s door clamouring for the young men, who were actually angels, to come out and party with them. They were not happy with refusal.
This is an important lesson that we must always remember. We like to think that we live in a free and pluralistic society, but it is always moving in one direction or the other, towards God or away from God. It does not stand still. And here is the problem. Satan and his fallen angels do not believe in live and let live. They are not tolerant of us. When Christians had the ascendency in the free world, the forces of evil only wanted tolerance they said. Just leave us alone to do our own thing and don’t punish us. That quickly changed to become more aggressive. On the present course we will be the ones who must ask for tolerance soon, just so that we won’t be persecuted and prosecuted for our faith. We have seen the first stages of that already; a bishop here, a priest there brought before that kangaroo court known as a human rights commission. But we cannot forget, sin is not tolerant of Christ nor his followers.
“Come on, what’s the harm?” “Loosen up a little.” “Just try it once.” “Hey who’s going to know?” “What are you, better than us?” These are the kinds of come-ons that our young people face all the time. We have faced it in our youth and in our working life. We have faced it in our social lives. When we refuse and walk away there are consequences, socially and otherwise. Let us make no mistake. But remember, when those same people are in trouble they seek out the one who is centered in Christ, the one who is humble but moral, the one who listens, the one whose life is not sunk in the same depths of sin as their own. They may not do it publicly, but they will know who to go to for a straight answer. They may not even like the answer, but as always our answer is Christ.
Through all of this, if and when the going gets tough, we can take comfort from the first two readings of today. God tells Jeremiah;
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
Is that not reassurance? God tells Jeremiah, and insofar as we are his children, and doing his will, he tells us that he knew us before we were even conceived. Think of that. Before we were even conceived he had a plan for us and knows just what we need to carry out his plan. All we have to do is obey him. Pretty simple. And the psalmist today reminds us that it is God who is our refuge;
3 Be thou to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress, to save me, for thou art my rock and my fortress.
4 Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel man.
5 For thou, O Lord, art my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth.
Praise the almighty God! Bless his Holy Name! We rest in him and not in our own strength nor the approval of our neighbours.
Increasing in Him,
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