33rd. Sunday of Year (C)
(Malachi 3:19-20; 2 Thessalonians
3:7-12; Saint Luke’s Gospel 21:5-19)
After
forewarning His disciples of the trials and persecutions which lay ahead of
them and would bring them to the same end as He Himself was soon to suffer,
Jesus said:
That will be your opportunity
to bear witness.
That is, the whole wretched process of
misunderstanding, rejection, betrayal, persecution, arrest and trial, would not
be simply the result of blind chance, nor even, ultimately, the outcome of
human perverseness or hatred. No,
threatening clouds would assemble over the heads of the disciples with God’s
permission, indeed, as part of His plan for them, that will be your
opportunity to bear witness.
The word ‘opportunity’ has special connotations which are most important for our thoughts on Our Lord’s meaning, because an
‘opportunity’ has to be grasped surely, must not to be missed, let slip; an
opportunity is something to be welcomed and indeed be most grateful for.
Corresponding to the severity of the threat in
which the disciples might find themselves would be the measure of God’s grace
available to them: as the swelling waters of violence and hatred appear on
every hand and mount up against them, that is when their opportunity
will also be at hand, an opportunity to bear witness lifted up on the wings of
God’s own wisdom, for they will not only be helped to defend the Good News of
their proclamation, but Jesus Himself will, through their words, demonstrate
the Gospel’s truth and power:
I Myself will give you an eloquence
and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to resist or contradict.
That this glorious outcome might take place
the disciples must learn to forget themselves and trust completely in the Lord:
Keep
this carefully in mind: you are not to prepare your defence.
They must commit themselves entirely to the
Spirit of God in the Church Who will give them – in a manner of His own
choosing and perhaps imperceptible to themselves at the time – the necessary
eloquence to utter His wisdom, despite their personal inadequacy or
feelings of natural anxiety.
This belief and appreciation, that Christ is
ever with His Church and, through His Spirit given to and through her, seeks to
guide all her children -- living members
of His Body -- in their and her need, as indeed He is seeking to guide
us personally here and now, for God’s purposes – that is an essential part of
Christian self-awareness and Catholic strength, BUT it is also something not to
be presumed, imitated, ‘put-on’ like show people; rather is it something to be
most humbly desired, and lovingly prayed for.
In the world of classical music, it is
supremely desirable for a singer to be able to sing the words and music he or
she is performing ‘from the heart’, that is, without the direct supervision of
mental scrutiny.
Of course, that ready, disciplined, ‘heart’
needs to have been previously formed with careful attention to the vocal
techniques required, to a deeply sensitive understanding and expression of the
emotions evoked by the words and music, and indeed it needs to have an appropriate observance of current
life in society and even a sharp awareness of the concert-hall atmosphere
itself. All that however, once the
performance is about to begin, must be put aside, ‘forgotten’, in order that
the performance might be a ‘living and heart-felt experience’ thanks to the
unmistakable beauty and truth of ‘artless’ (!) spontaneity.
Now, the witness of Christians and Catholics
to Christ is something of that nature.
It is not, ultimately, a matter of expressing a merely human
appreciation of and response to, Jesus the Christ, and to His Church’s
proclamation of His Gospel. It is rather
a matter of baring (sic) a loving and obedient relationship between
disciple and Lord, between (our) God and (my) Saviour. And the bearing (sic) of such witness is not
for anybody to presume for themselves, it is promised in our Gospel reading
only to those disciples who had been with Jesus throughout His public ministry
and who were prepared to suffer, with Him and for Him. That means for us today, that one can only hope
to fully trust in, rely on, the guidance of the Holy Spirit of God, on the
basis of a whole-hearted conversion to Christ, a life of faith not to be
measured in years necessarily, but in sincerity and commitment lived with Him
according to His discipline in joy and peace.
In the Old Testament we are told that the Lord
had wanted Moses to go and speak not only to the People of Israel enslaved in
Egypt but even to Pharaoh, the autocratic King of Egypt himself, with a message
from the Lord:
But Moses said to the Lord, ‘Oh, my
Lord, I am not eloquent. I am slow of
speech and of tongue’.
Moses was painfully aware – from previous
experience it would seem – of his inability to express himself with ease and
fluency, and he was afraid that he might make a fool of himself before the
mighty ruler of Egypt and prove to be an embarrassment for the People of Israel,
and above all, that he might fail the Lord Himself most miserably. Nevertheless, the Lord said to him:
Who has made man’s mouth? Is it not I, the Lord? Now, therefore, go, and I will be your mouth
and teach you what you shall speak. (Exodus 4:10ff.)
Moses’ ‘opportunity’ was to be given him despite
his fears, and the Holy Spirit did enable him to do what was above him for the
glory of Israel’s God and the saving of His people.
Our Blessed Lord Himself, soon after having
spoken to His disciples about their coming opportunity to bear witness, Himself
had such an ‘opportunity’, something which, despite the accompanying
circumstances of betrayal and hateful hypocrisy, He did indeed embrace
whole-heartedly from His Father:
If you loved Me you would rejoice that
I am going to the Father ... The ruler of the world is coming. He has no power over Me, but the world must
know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded
Me. Get up, let us go! (John 14: 28-31)
Thus, He left the warmth of the Last Supper to
go to Gethsemane with His faithful disciples in order to grasp His own
‘opportunity’, to meet up with and face down His enemies, Judas Iscariot and
the Temple police.
People of God, opportunities will come our
way and only when we have experienced
and humbly accepted our own measure of helplessness and personal nothingness,
only when we are dead to self-glory and truly seeking God’s will, can we and
should we most confidently hope for and trust in God’s supplying grace to grasp
such moments of special grace.
Throughout the Christian life there is a most
delicate balance between a God-graced mistrust of personal pride, and a like
confidence in the goodness and mercy of God, and the true, exemplary, source of
a life-sustaining and life-promoting balance is to be seen in Our Lord and Saviour and He assumed our lowliness in order that He might bestow on us a share in His Own
divine prerogatives.
Dear People of God, we are now living in
persecution times when Christians are suffering all over our world from radical
fanatics, mocking unbelievers, and those whose lives are dedicated to seeking
pleasure and power ‘a plenty’ or, at least, wherever they can be found. In such times ‘opportunities’ – which can appear
unexpectedly and are gone if not seized -- abound for all Christians. We may miss some, but let us remember with
holy fear that among those whom Jesus said He will deny before His Father and
the angels are those who ‘are ashamed of My words before men’, those
that is who never see any opportunities for them to personally witness to the Faith
and Our Lord.
For all of us,
however, there is one ultimate and supreme ‘opportunity’, the moment of
our death. May we all make good use of
that opportunity to give thanks to God the Father, bear loving witness to
Jesus, the Son of Man and our dear Lord and Saviour, and invoke the Holy Spirit
of love and truth for sincerity and peace in our final moments.
As we proceed in this Mass, therefore, let us beseech Our
Lord that in Him we might share His death to the flesh and participate in His
Risen Life by the Spirit. Let us receive the pledge of eternal life which He
has left to us, His own must precious Body and Blood, with hearts truly humbled
and contrite in the acknowledgement of our own sinfulness and poverty, and
thereby sincerely opened up to, and ever more desirous of, the infusion of His
most Holy Spirit into our lives, for His greater glory and our ever-greater
proximity to, understanding of, and love for, the Father in Christ Jesus Our
Lord.
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