19th. Sunday of the Year (C)
(Wisdom
18:6-9; Hebrews 11:1-2, 8-12; Luke 12:32-48)
The deliverance
of the righteous and the destruction of their enemies were expected by Your
people. For by the same means with which
You punished our enemies You called us to Yourself and glorified us. (Wisdom 18:7-9)
My dear
brothers and sisters in Christ, those words, from the OT book of Wisdom, which refer
originally to God’s destruction of the pursuing Egyptian army in the Red Sea in
order to bring His People out of slavery, find a two-fold relevance and
fulfilment in the New Testament: first of all, when Jesus broke Satan’s enslaving
power over us through the allurement of sin and the threat of death, by His
suffering, death, and resurrection:
You punished our enemies
and then
by His ascension, went -- in the glory of the Spirit -- to His Father in heaven,
where He now sits as Man in human flesh at the right hand of the Father:
and (thereby) glorified
us.
Those two
distinct events of Jesus’ life, His suffering for us beginning with His agony
in the garden, and His ascension into heaven in His glorified
humanity -- are made active and effective in our lives -- become SALVATION for
us -- through faith in Jesus.
This gift
of new life with its promise of eternal glory is, so to speak, the overarching cover,
the shielding and sheltering protection, of our lives as children of God, enabling each of us to grow to individual,
personal, maturity in Jesus by the Gift of Jesus’ Holy Spirit, our Helper in
and throughout our lives.
A few
words from the second reading explain why faith is so supremely important for
our life in Christ:
Faith is the substance of things hoped
for.
Our Christian hope is for those heavenly realities and that heavenly fulfilment put before us by Jesus, in promises that resonate to the furthest depths of our being as humans uniquely made in the image and likeness of God. They cannot be apprehended by us here and now because they transcend us; but, in the ultimate realization of God’s providential plan, they will be our sublime fulfilment in the glory of Jesus. Such blessings hoped for from God, according to the promise of the Scriptures, can, however, begin to be appropriated by us, here and now, through faith in Jesus, by the working of His most Holy Spirit in us, through the ministry of Mother Church. We can, indeed, begin here and now, to truly appropriate and gradually appreciate such heavenly realities as we begin to really apprehend something of the fulfilment they offer through faith, which, as St. Paul says: is the substance of things hoped for.
We must
turn to the Gospel, however, to learn an aspect of supreme importance within
this broad outline of our salvation.
Jesus there tells His disciples:
Provide
yourselves money bags which do not grow old, a treasure in the heavens that
does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys.
Now the
reason why He tells them to provide a treasure for themselves in heaven is
because, as He went on to explain:
Where your treasure is, there your heart
will be also.
Because He
is seeking to draw us, in Himself, to heaven where there is no gold or silver, no
tight purses or secure safes, He draws attention to our heart -- the seat of human
affection and attachment – for which personal love alone is the supreme and
exclusive treasure.
Likewise,
when He advises His disciples to:
Sell what you have and give alms,
He is not
really interested in seeing us reduced to poverty: but He does want us to open
our hearts, unreservedly and fully, to receive His Father’s gift of the
Kingdom:
It is your Father’s good pleasure to
give you the Kingdom;
He wants
us to unreservedly love the promise and the prospect of heaven where, He
assures us, our dearest and most precious treasure -- our heart’s treasure -- awaits
us.
And so we
have this outline of our salvation:
The deliverance
of the righteous and the destruction of their enemies were expected by Your
people. For by the same means with which
You punished our enemies You called us to Yourself and glorified us.
By the
glorious Cross and Resurrection of Jesus, and through our faith in Him, God has
called us to Himself. And we have
learnt, broadly speaking, how that glorious calling is to be realised: through the
prospect and promises of hope, faith leads us to open our minds, hearts, and
lives to the ultimate inspiration of divine charity. That is the way we are to finally attain ‘our
treasure’, our hope, or, as Jesus put it earlier, ‘the Kingdom of God’:
Seek
the kingdom of God, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the
kingdom.
Jesus
spoke repeatedly of the Kingdom, the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of heaven; St.
Paul, however, tells us that the Kingdom of God is also the Kingdom of the Son:
He (the
Father) has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the
kingdom of the Son of His love. (Colossians 1:13-14)
Why does
Paul speak of the Kingdom of the Son whereas Jesus always spoke of the Kingdom
of God?
First of
all Paul speaks in this way because, ultimately, Jesus Himself is the Kingdom
of God present in our world and in our lives.
And
secondly, because the Kingdom of the Son, of which St. Paul speaks, will
ultimately to be handed over to the Father, and in that way become the Kingdom
of God, the Father. Listen to Paul’s
explanation:
In
Christ all shall be made alive, but each one in his own order: Christ the first
fruits, afterward those who are Christ's at His coming. Then comes the end, when He delivers the
kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority
and power. For He (Christ) must reign till
He (God the Father) has put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be destroyed is
death. … Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will
also be subject to Him (God the Father) who put all things under Him, that God
may be all in all. (1
Corinthians 15:22-28)
Jesus is
the load-stone drawing the affection of our hearts to God by the fact that He
is God-in-our human-flesh. Like loves
like: and companionship in human flesh – gifted by Mary our Mother -- enables
us to respond most deeply to Him Who is God, yet become One-like-us. Our response to His promises, His example, and His call; our faith in Him and our human love for Him; will gently open our hearts
to the working of His Spirit Who will then form us gradually in His divine
likeness until we come to love God for His divine beauty and goodness.
From this
we can see that our personal treasure will ultimately be the glorious Jesus
when He returns to make the final proclamation and manifestation of His eternal
glory, and to hand all that is His over to the Father, so that He, the Father,
might be ‘All in all’.
Now we
can, as it were, ‘pull all the strings together’ in order to get a complete
picture, a full understanding.
‘Treasure
in heaven’ is essential, as Jesus Himself said, if our hearts are to be fully,
totally attached to heaven. Faith guides
us towards the attainment of our heavenly hope, but faith is commitment to the
teaching of Jesus directly, and only mediately commitment to the Person of
Jesus. Love, on the other hand, being, most
accurately, the gift of divine charity, commits our whole being immediately,
directly, to the very Person of Jesus.
This personal commitment to Jesus – mediated, I say, by faith in His teaching, is directly attained through our sharing in the gift of divine charity, for
Jesus is Himself the Kingdom for us. And
this love -- being, as I said, a heavenly gift, indeed the Gift of the Spirit -- transcends
our present time and this visible world, and takes us into the eternity of God
Himself where Jesus will ultimately, as we have heard, hand over His Kingdom to the Father and lead us -- as
members of His Body in and with Him -- to love, yes, to love divinely, the
Father Himself, as Jesus would have us love Him; for the Father must become, as
you heard, ‘All in all’.
Faith is
the ‘substance of things hoped for’; by our faith, we can, by a life of discipleship
on earth, already gain some experience of what will be our heavenly fellowship
with Jesus, before the Father, in the Spirit.
That experience, that fellowship, that love of charity, can and should
deepen within us throughout our life on earth, but that can only come about in
Mother Church, through our faith in her proclamation of the Gospel, and by the
grace of her sacraments, which bestow on us the Spirit of Love and Truth Who
unites and binds together Father and Son.
And then,
for all those faithful sons and daughters of Mother Church who thus grow in the
knowledge and love of Jesus our Saviour, the words of the Psalmist are most beautifully
appropriate and consoling:
Because
he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on
high, because he has known My name. I
will deliver him and honour him and show him My salvation. (Psalm 91:14-16)
(2022)
