My dear People of God, we heard in the second reading:
The word
of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to
the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning
the thoughts and intentions of the heart;
and that passage, taken from the Letter to the Hebrews --
one of the very earliest of the Epistles, and written by ‘only God knows’ who,
according to the great scholar Origen - - gives us a remarkable insight into the
teaching and witness of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, the Word
of God, speaking uniquely the Word of God. Dear fellow disciples of Jesus, let us all, for this short time together,
listen to and learn from Him.
The rich young man in our Gospel reading had, lived a devout
life according to the Law of Moses; but he now learned that his appreciation of
the word ‘good’ was somewhat superficial and perhaps even somewhat blasphemous,
when Jesus said to him:
Why do you call Me
good? No one is good except God alone.
This young man had given his life thus far to fulfil his
Jewish desire to be holy in accordance with God’s Law given to Moses for the
children of Israel, and therefore Jesus
took him seriously, immediately; and Jesus’ words are serious, potentially
determinative for our spiritual better-being.
As the new People of God, we are called, by those words of
Jesus, to recognize that we do not learn from ordinary life what is spiritually
important for us. We can be called by
God in the course of our ordinary life, but we don’t learn from popular films,
from pagan do-gooders in social media, much less from the faith-less majority
around us. At the very best, we can only
occasionally pick up, from ordinary life, some nugget that might be of
spiritual help, if our spiritual awareness appreciates and begins to
chew over what we have just picked up, just come across. Whatever is truly good and determinative for
our personal relationship with God; whatever will help us to experience a life
of authentic human fruitfulness, peace, and joy; and embrace our
death; all that is from God’s grace and His P/personal calling (“No one
can come to me unless My Father …” ) and all that will – if lovingly followed –
lead us to our ultimate share in the divine
fulfilment of eternal life in the family of God.
Now, the young man in today’s Gospel, considered himself to
be “good” but Jesus’ words were meant to disabuse him of that idea:
Why
do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.
We are now studying Jesus’ teaching about God, and there is, perhaps, among
some of Jesus’ Catholic disciples today, a serious mis-understanding about the ‘Trinitarian
Love’ uniting Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, in the One Godhead we worship.
That love is a reciprocal love between those three divine Persons, a
Love for each One, calling forth a like love in return from each one. Our ultimate human destiny is not just our being
present at a heavenly feast where God loves all present there. God’s love for
all those human beings brought by the Spirit ‘through Jesus’ to the banquet of
heaven is the Father’s reciprocal love demanding an appropriate
reciprocal love. There are no mere
human beings at the feast in heaven, there are only human persons,
loving with a divinely reciprocative love, the God and
Father Who has invited them as His guests to
be present there. The reciprocal
love of God is the beatific life of heaven in the Godhead Itself; and also – in
its right degree – among the human guests and all invited to that feast.
Our time on earth, dear friends in Christ Jesus Our Lord, is given us to
learn how to begin loving that way … that is why Jesus was sent among us,
why Jesus became one of us, and why He left us His Most Holy Spirit, and
this most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass when He Himself returned home. And Jesus had that process of learning
for heaven in mind, when He said to the young man in our Gospel reading:
You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have, and give to the
poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.
Those words pierced the young man so deeply that, we are
told that:
Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful,
for he had great possessions.
He went away because he had just been brought to realise
how much he loved his earthly possessions: they were real, his heavenly
aspirations were, in comparison, imaginary. As yet, the exercise of
those earthly possessions meant more to him than his heavenly rituals and
aspirations. And so, he went away
sorrowful because he knew that he was thereby turning away from the best option,
for the call of Jesus to personal discipleship was, he realized, though not a
command, certainly a wonderful offer, a supreme opportunity. Nevertheless, he could not turn his back on
his money and all the good things of life on earth that it afforded him: above
all, perhaps, that prominence which brought him the esteem and subservience of
others.
Recall now, dear friends, how we began Mass. You will remember that we said, “Lord, you
were sent to heal the contrite”, “You came to call sinners”; for Jesus is
continually calling all -- be they contrite or sinners -- to open their hearts
and minds ever more and more to the healing power of His word and His love.
The Word of God proclaimed at Mass to the contrite, is:
and, as such, it is meant to pierce each and every one of
us. And, having penetrated the manifold
layers of human sinfulness, self-satisfaction, and personal ignorance, to thereby
enable each and every one of us to see our own sinfulness more clearly, just as
it did with the rich young man. That
young man had to be shown the depth of his attachment to money in order that he
might appreciate and be able to respond to a higher vocation in life here on
earth, namely, with Jesus, to learn to love the Father above all else, and in
Jesus to attain to eternal life and glory before the Father in heaven:
Sell all that you have, and give to the poor,
and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.
Now, Jesus does not say the same words to every person who
turns to Him for salvation. The Word of God, which Mother Church proclaims here
at Mass and throughout her liturgy and public ministry, can be of special significance
to any and every one of us who hear it aright: it can, at any stage in our life,
open us up to ourselves anew, showing us how much His healing is still
needed in our lives, and enabling us to respond to a further call and closer
embrace from Jesus.
Remember, Jesus does not look bleakly at us with a cold eye
and critical appreciation, for we have already been lovingly called and guided
to Him by the Father:
No one can come to Me unless the
Father Who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.
(John 6:44)
Therefore, Jesus loves us, just as He loved the rich young
man, as we heard:
Jesus looking at him, loved him.
Jesus loved him because He saw what He could make of that
young man if he were to become a disciple and learn how to love aright and give
glory to the Father. The Word of God
had penetrated to the core of his being for his greater blessing; if only he could
have accepted that Word, and the revelation of his present self generated by
it.
People of God, never turn away from God’s Word heard or
read in the Scriptures and in the teaching of the Church because it makes you
feel uncomfortable; because Jesus does not seek or plan our ultimate
discomfiture. He loves us and wants only
to help us love and glorify the Father with Him; He wants to lead us to the
fullest realization of our divine potential, and to that end we must never
forget what we heard in the second reading:
No creature is hidden from His sight, but all are naked and exposed
to the eyes of Him to Whom we must give account.
Like foolish children, we simply do not know either the
truth about ourselves, or what is truly good for us. All things are “naked and open to the eyes of
God”, and His holy Word comes to us, at times, to cut us to the quick and
thereby help us first to realize, and then hopefully to embrace, what is best
for us, for:
The Word of God is living and effective,
sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division soul and of spirit, of
joints and of marrow;
it is, however, only piercingly sharp at those times when
God wants, by that Word, to help us, as Scripture says: to discern the thoughts and
intentions of (our own) heart;
And this He does to fulfil the words of the prophet Malachi (4:2) who declared in the name of the Lord:
For you who fear My name, the Sun
of Righteousness shall rise with healing
in its wings.
People of God, if -- as yet -- you don’t truly appreciate
the dignity of your calling as a Catholic disciple of Jesus, then allow the Word
of God to be active in you, do not reject its occasional piercing, penetrating,
and yet healing, smart. Remember the
advice given us in the first reading from the book of Wisdom:
The Spirit of wisdom came to me; I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases.
