5th. Sunday
(A)
(Isaiah 58:7-10; 1st.
Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16.)
My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, if
you take your mind back to our first reading from the prophet Isaiah you will
recall the words:
Then your light shall break forth like the
dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed.
Your vindication/righteousness shall go before you and the glory of the
Lord shall be your rear guard.
The all-Holy God wants to heal sinners
from the sting of sin, the wound of pride, and the fear of death, and the
result of His healing is righteousness which is God’s prerogative, His gift;
and those thus healed who continue their ongoing recovery will be backed up by
the following, ‘backing-up’ protection of the glory of the Lord. All is God’s gift.
God’s work of healing, however, is not
like that of some picture restorer, cleaning away the grime of ages and
revealing the original beauty of some painting in all its integrity; on the
contrary, by His gift of divine righteousness God is -- for Jesus’ sake --
restoring what we have most seriously blemished indeed, but also bestowing what
we have never known:
Then your light shall break forth like the
dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed.
Your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the LORD shall be
your rear guard.
This healing thanks to God’s merciful gift
to us in Jesus, and this abiding and sure protection given by His glory which
follows us, are the source and the shield of our “righteousness”, that
righteousness which makes us, “salt of the earth”, and “light of the
world”. And this our light, must shine
in the sight of men, not as a witness to our ‘personal integrity’ but, as Jesus
said, should “glorify your Father in heaven”, whereby we become living members
of Him Who summed up His whole life in the words:
(Father) I have glorified You on the
earth. I have finished the work which You have given Me to do (John 17:4).
Living members of Him Who wanted
even His final act of dying on the Cross to serve that very same end (John
17:1):
Father, the hour has come. Glorify Your
Son, that Your Son also may glorify You.
And so, in order to fulfil our vocation as
members of that beloved Son, we have to recognise that we are special, not as a
result of our own ‘personal integrity’, but by reason of God’s special gift
to us in Jesus; a gift whereby we are entrusted and endowed with a special
work to do in today’s world, with Jesus, for the Father:
You are the salt of the earth; but if the
salt loses its flavour, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing
but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men.
Our realising that our righteousness is the
gift of God thus becomes tantamount to the awareness of our responsibility
before God: we cannot allow our life in Christ to become tasteless by lukewarm
Catholic observance, and most certainly not by adopting worldly standards to
obtain worldly praise.
If we look closely at Jesus’ choice of
words to describe His disciples: ‘salt of the earth’ and ‘light of the world’
we will understand that both ‘salt’ and ‘light’ are self-less words, so
to speak. Salt in the ancient world was
widely used to preserve food items, and today most of us use it to bring out
the ‘taste’ of food; of itself salt is little or nothing. Even more so is this the case with light, for
light serves to illuminate whatever is there for us to see; otherwise, apart
from the things it illuminates for us in our daily usage, light is seemingly
nothing.
That self-less character which
Jesus would like to see in His disciples was well exemplified in the first
reading, where Isaiah advised:
If you take away the yoke from your midst,
the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness; if you extend your soul to
the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul; then your light shall dawn in the
darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noonday.
Paul, likewise, told us that he
deliberately centred his converts’ faith on Jesus by making himself and his
preaching as unpretentious as possible:
Brethren, when I came to you, I determined
not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in
much trembling. And my speech and my
preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration
of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men
but in the power of God.
As Apostle of the Gentiles, Paul was truly
‘salt of the earth’, ‘light’ par excellence for the Gentiles, and yet he sought
to preserve, confirm, and establish his converts in their newly professed
Christian faith by proclaiming and glorifying not himself but Jesus, alone and
entirely.
One of the characteristics of many modern,
self-styled, religious people is that, first and foremost, they are not self-less; they are looking to get
something out of religion for themselves, here and now. They want to hear and experience something
new, something that will, hopefully, relieve them of the weariness of a
religion they have long been aware of and accustomed to, but without ever
having truly known or vitally experienced it.
They want to feel divine
presence/power at will (their will), they long to know the excitement of
being swept along by supercharged emotions, or to be able to surrender
themselves to a surreal, oriental, bliss: lulled by a surrounding, scented, and
gently swirling fog of mystery. Such
people are centred on their own earthly feelings and experiences, and they find
Christianity which speaks of a transcendent God – One over and above their
control -- quite boring, because the Christian message is addressed to those
willing to respond to that message with faith, and commit themselves to
a personal encounter of love and obedience.
Our modern ‘religious’ and ‘experimenters-in-religions’ on the other
hand, aspire to have their emotions directly and agreeably stirred up, with
their minds left comfortably disengaged in their ‘status quo’ of no
responsibilities being required of them.
The apostle Paul said that he was acutely
conscious of his own personal weaknesses which meant that He proclaimed the
mystery of God to them ‘in fear and much trembling’; he had deliberately
refused to impress them by his outstanding Pharisaic learning and Greek ‘wisdom’, though he
was -- as Festus the Roman governor testified before Paul’s adversaries (Acts
26:24) -- a very highly educated man, at least bi-lingual, and privileged as a
citizen of Rome. Nevertheless, he
desired above all that his converts’ faith should rest on the power of the pure
word of God and of His accompanying Gift of grace, not on the astuteness of
self-centred men who can, at will, speak words that are almost salacious in
their ability to delight and to sway the hearts of any hearers into praise of
and submission to such oratory and specious learning.
But there, you might think, is something
that needs further explanation: Paul speaks of the power of God, and displays
of power are, surely, just what our worldly religious people want to see and
experience?
Yes, that is indeed the case. But the power of God of which St. Paul speaks
is never displayed: it is, indeed,
sometimes exercised for the encouragement and benefit of people in particular
circumstances, such as hearing the word of God for the first time, or, striving
– under exceptional difficulties -- to live according to His teaching. Nevertheless, God's exercise of power on such
occasions and for such people is not a display of spiritual fireworks to make
all who witness it gape, but rather an expression of God’s continuous and
largely invisible battle in and through Mother Church for the minds and hearts
of men and women of all times and all cultures against the abusive and
tyrannical rule of Satan over this world.
Today, in our affluent society, we see the
awful consequences arising when society as a whole acquiesces under the power
of Satan and opts for the wages of sin: ever more and more disgusting and
degrading exuberances of evil appear in our midst against which the miserable
fig-leaves of human self-righteousness, politically-correct morality, and laws
of a totally secular character, are powerless to recognize, let alone control
or redress.
People of God, Christians, above all
Catholics, should gratefully recognize and confidently embrace their God-given
vocation to be salt of the earth and light of the world. Salt was used, as I said, in the ancient
world to preserve food from corruption; and those disciples of Jesus who do not
resist the corruption of evil, become like tasteless salt, as Jesus said:
Good for nothing but to be thrown out and
trampled underfoot by men.
Likewise, a light is meant to show the
way, to lead in the right direction. Catholics who do not, in any way, lead
along that way but always follow the popular path, consistently excusing
themselves saying that 'what everyone else is doing can't be that bad', are not
true Catholics, not authentic disciples of Jesus at all; they follow the pagan
majority into fornication, divorce, adultery, and contraception; they steal,
they malign, and they lie. Indeed, there
are some who do such things and then parade their vaunted ‘personal integrity’
– and consummate their sin -- by receiving the Eucharist with oodles of
hypocritical self-righteousness but no confession, no contrition.
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, be
simple and sincere before God in all your dealings with men, and be quietly but
totally confident in Jesus’ promise that, because you are His disciples,
you are indeed the salt of the earth and the light of the world; and the
witness that you bear for Jesus will, ultimately, bring forth fruit for God’s
greater glory and the refreshment and delight of His People. Do not be concerned about yourself and your
standing among men, but rather, trying to be true to Jesus and His teaching in
Mother Church, trust in God and allow Him to care for you and take care of you,
for He is the unfailing Shepherd of His flock.
In that way the prophecy of Isaiah will be verified in you:
Your light shall break forth like the
morning, your healing shall spring forth speedily, and your righteousness shall
go before you; the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will
answer; you shall cry, and He will say, 'Here I am.'
