19th
Sunday, Year (C)
(Wisdom 18:6-9; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-12; Luke12:32-48)
Today's readings afford us
both encouragement and warning: but the warning is only given to help us hold
fast to the hope we are encouraged to treasure:
Do not be afraid, for your
Father is pleased to give you the kingdom.
We know that the Father has
indeed chosen to give us the kingdom because He has called us to become
disciples of Jesus:
No one can come to Me unless
the Father who sent Me draws him. (Jn. 6:44);
and we actually become
disciples of Jesus through faith and baptism:
Since all have sinned and fall short of
the glory of God, they are now justified by His grace as a gift through the
redemption that is in Christ Jesus; (Romans 3:23)
Jesus answered, "Truly, truly, I
say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the
kingdom of God." (John 3:5)
What about the warning I
spoke of? It was contained in those
words of Our Lord:
Be ready; for the Son of Man
is coming at an hour that you do not expect.
Be dressed in readiness, and keep your
lamps lit, like men who are waiting for their master when he returns from the
wedding feast, so that they may immediately open the door to him when he comes
and knocks.
He warns us further that, for
anyone who becomes negligent, then:
The master will come on a day when he
does not expect him and at an hour he does not know, and will assign him a
place with the unbelievers.
So we can gather that Our
Lord is telling us to be watchful and ready in our faith, because those
who fail to do this will be "assigned a place with the unbelievers",
"sent to the same fate as the unfaithful".
What then is this gift of
faith that we have been given? In the
second reading we heard:
Faith is the assurance of
things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
How can we have a
faith-conviction about things not seen?
Because God has solemnly promised these blessings will be ours. Therefore we can see that faith is very,
very, important, because it is, in fact, an acknowledgment of God's
truthfulness and utter reliability. To
refuse to have faith in His promise is the same as saying He is a liar, or at
the very least, that His promises are untrustworthy.
Faith is not only a witness
to God, it is an opportunity for us: an opportunity to achieve something wonderful;
indeed, as many unbelievers themselves will and do say frequently, an
opportunity to experience and live something "out of this
world". Jesus Himself told us
something of the wonder of faith:
If you had faith like a mustard seed,
you would say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and be planted in the sea’,
and it would obey you. (Luke
17:6)
All things are possible to
him who believes. (Mark 9:23)
The Scriptures give us
examples of the countless men and women who have trusted God and lived by
faith. In the first reading we heard of
the hitherto enslaved Israelites, how:
With sure knowledge of the oaths in
which they put their faith, Your People (took) courage (and) awaited the
salvation of the just and the destruction of their foes.
Their faith was not
misplaced, God did indeed bring them to arrive at, and take possession of, the
Promised Land.
In the second reading we
heard of Abraham "our father in faith" as we hear at Mass:
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was
called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; he went
out, not knowing where he was to go.
By faith Abraham, when he
was tested, prepared to offer up Isaac his only begotten son. Because of such
faith, Abraham was given the fulfilment promised by God -- descendants as
numerous as the grains of sand on the sea-shore -- through Isaac, whom he had
been willing to offer to God.
There was a practical
illustration of this power of faith in the Gospel. After Jesus had miraculously fed the five
thousand He remained behind in prayer; meanwhile, the disciples, crossing the
Sea of Galilee alone in their boat, found themselves in distress when a hard
storm blew up. Jesus then came walking
on the rough waters to the help of His struggling disciples:
Peter said to Him, "Lord, if it is
You, command me to come to You on the water." And He said, "Come!" And Peter got
out of the boat, and walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But seeing the
wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, "Lord,
save me!" Immediately Jesus
stretched out His hand and took hold of him, and said to him, "You of
little faith, why did you doubt?" (Matthew
14:28-31)
At another time:
As they were sailing along He fell
asleep; and a fierce gale of wind descended on the lake, and they began to be
swamped and to be in danger. They came
to Jesus and woke Him up, saying, "Master, Master, we are perishing!"
And He got up and rebuked the wind and the surging waves, and they stopped, and
it became calm. And He said to them,
"Where is your faith?" (Luke 8:23-25)
On those two occasions, the
disciples of Jesus -- becoming frightened by what was happening around them --
began to doubt the Lord; and too many Christians, even Catholics, show the same
weakness today. They quickly lose faith
because they want to see, experience, blessings now, while they are
young enough to enjoy them, they will say; whereas faith requires, indeed
demands, hope. Many Christians,
basically, want and will what this world has to offer, as a result of which the
promises of God mean less and less to them the more they indulge themselves in
worldly satisfactions. This selfishness
even leads some, in their search for present comfort and well-being, to renege
on the most solemn commitments and break the closest bonds of love and trust;
indeed they even come close to destroying their own humanity by stumbling
around in miasmas of drug-addiction.
Such people -- imagining that this world is all we can aspire to, that
this world alone can fulfil all our longings and desires -- will never accept
the offer of faith.
An even closer likeness with
the Twelve is shown in the attitudes of certain apparently religious people
today who fear just as the disciples' feared, not indeed under the threat of
the Galilee’s swelling waters, but at the thought of possible waves of criticism,
opposition, and mockery from the world around.
Many desert the Faith in the face of such prospects; whilst others try
to change their faith in such a way that it will fit in with whatever is acceptable to and approved by the world
around.
If, however, there is that
in you which makes you yearn for something ‘better’ and more ‘fulfilling’ than the
satisfactions of this world; a longing that lifts you up from, and thereby
makes you somewhat independent of, this world, then there is for you the option
of faith; because, as St. Paul tells us (Timothy 2:4):
God desires all men to be saved and
to come to the knowledge of the truth.
True humanity -- that
humanity which knows itself to be more than the surrounding things of this
world be they ever so beautiful and majestic -- is ever able to lift up its
perhaps drooping head afresh, and even today one can find some young people experiencing
and expressing the desire to give themselves wholly to some supremely worthwhile
cause, purpose, or person. Such young (at
least in spirit) people are the hope for our Christian civilization because
they are capable of appreciating God's gift of faith.
For them and for all of us
there is the example of Jesus Our Lord. Who has won for all humankind the
possibility of life, eternal and full beyond all measure. He, indeed, is the author of our faith, and:
it was fitting for Him, for whom are all
things, and through whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to
perfect the author of their salvation through sufferings. (Hebrews 2:10)
He went to the sufferings of
death for our sake, trusting entirely in His Father; and we who have faith in
Him must, like Him, trust God the Father totally, we must, like Jesus, have
unshakeable faith in His promise of the Kingdom:
Do not be afraid, for your
Father is pleased to give you the kingdom.
However, our faith is not
meant to be a stoic refusal to yield to whatever trials may come our way, it
should not involve cultivating a stiff upper lip and a ramrod back whereby we
might able to hold on to God no matter what the threats, mockery or criticism
of those around us, for God Himself has told us:
I desire steadfast love and not
sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.
(Hosea 6:6)
The Father is pleased, has
chosen gladly, to give us the kingdom and we must likewise take up that promise
with rejoicing: our response of faith must not only be firm but filled with gratitude, on fire with love, and sure in
knowledge of the truth. In this Our
Blessed Lord is indeed the example, for we are told in the Letter to the
Hebrews (12:2):
(Let us) fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and
perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising
the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
We too, like Him, should
find such joy in what the Father has promised us, in what He is already giving
us in Jesus, that we not only endure the sufferings that come our way in this
world, we not only positively despise them as nothing in comparison with what
awaits us in heaven, but we even learn to embrace them and rejoice in them
because of the wondrous new fellowship with Jesus they bring us. This was the attitude of St. Paul who tells:
I count all things to be loss in view of
the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered
the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ.
(Philippians 3:8)
The practice of faith, the
living of faith, can be the supreme joy of our lives because it is the supreme
love of which a human being is capable, in Jesus. There are, as I mentioned, some young people
today, and there always will be some, who are not only able, for all humans
beings are able, but also are longing and yearning to give themselves
whole-heartedly to what is immeasurably greater than themselves. Human beings, however, do not remain young
for long, and as youth declines so, all too easily, can our longing for beauty,
truth, and love gradually diminish. It
is so easy, almost inevitable, indeed, for an elderly person to become more
selfish with the years and to begin to hanker after that which, in their youth,
they had generously set aside. Therefore
we have to listen Our Lord's warning today.
We have to work on our faith, so to speak. We first embraced it with love, and we have
to try to love it more and more as the years come and go:
Where your treasure is,
there your heart will be also.
We need to recognize that
our faith is indeed a treasure: it will bring us greater joy, peace, love,
fellowship and fulfilment, than the human mind can conceive of or imagine. Our future happiness and glory will be a
share in Jesus' own beatitude with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the
heavenly kingdom where, fulfilled by divine beauty, holiness, life and love, we
will find our ultimate selves:
According to God’s own purpose and grace
which was granted us in Christ Jesus from all eternity.
