6th Sunday Year A 2023

 

6^th. Sunday of Year (A)

(Sirach 15:15-20; 1^st. Corinthians 2:6-10); Matthew 5:17-37)

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We should be eternally grateful for the gift of the Faith which we have received, dear People of God, because it is the very wisdom of God, a wisdom which can lead us to that heavenly glory for which the Father chose us in Jesus, His beloved, only-begotten-Son, and Our Lord and Saviour:

 I have revealed Your Name to those whom You gave Me out of the world. They belonged to You and You gave them to Me and they have kept Your word.  (John 17:6) 

This God-given wisdom, this keeping of His word revealed to us in and by Jesus, is not something the Pharisees and Scribes, the Temple hierarchy and their officials, appreciated in His days on earth, for they were most diligent in their endeavours to entrap Jesus in His speech that they might crucify Him all the more quickly.  Consequently, we are not surprised that in our modern world -- every bit as ‘evil and adulterous’ as Judea in Jesus’ days -- the ‘woke’, moralists, demagogues with neither authority nor science; and the ‘pure’ scientists, with no appreciation of the fulness of human nature yet scanning planets over limitless distances for the slightest traces of possible human life, while  refusing to recognize the face of God in the beautiful universe He created, all laugh at us too:

         If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but you do not belong             to the world now that I have chosen you out of the world, and for that reason the             world hates you.    (John 15:19) 

Such opposition and disregard, however, actually serve to deepen our bond with Jesus:

           Remember what I said: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will also keep yours.   And they will do all these things to you on account of My name, because they do not know the One who sent Me.  (John 15:20-21) 

Our gratitude and confidence, however, must never slide into complacency or pride, because we are taught that no one can become truly wise without having a reverential fear of the Lord, as you heard in our first reading:

            The eyes of God are on those who fear Him; to none does He give license to sin.

Reverential fear of the Lord is the root of wisdom and the anchor of faith.  Faith, however, calls for more than the obedience required by reverential fear; it calls for some initial appreciation of, and commitment to, the supreme beauty and  sublimity of God in Himself; it evokes heart-felt gratitude for His great goodness to us now in this present life, and an all-transcending hope for His sublime plans/promises for our eternal future. Such faith, dear People of God, can, and is intended to, gradually nurture in us -- even here on earth -- a heart-warming  foretaste of God’s supporting love and understanding, before leading us to its ultimate fulfilment by our sharing, as adopted children of God, in Jesus’ Own heavenly beatitude of eternal life and love.

And yet, because the worldly and the ‘woke’ loathe obedience in the intimate details of their lives, and want to choose for themselves from the many and varied pleasures of pride and sensuality, or to rejoice in a pseudo personal awareness of moral superiority over others around them, they all love to ridicule religious faith and deny the existence or relevance of any God.

For our part, however, we who come to worship with full intent and quiet sincerity, praise the God we desire to know and love better; we long to walk the way His word traces out for us; aspiring to love with our whole being -- mind and body, heart and soul -- Him Whom we know gave His only-begotten Son for love of us, and Who has, St. Paul assures in our second reading:

         Prepared for those who love Him, (blessings) no eye has seen, no ear has heard,             no mind conceived. (1 Corinthians 2:9) 

We come, as the psalmist says, prepared to ‘sow in tears’, if need be, so that we might reap a personal share in the Divine love and fellowship which is eternal.

 Our Gospel reading today is difficult to fully understand because it comes to us from St. Matthew’s evangelisation of his own Church congregation of former Jewish believers and synagogue worshippers, and consequently it refers to  issues at the back of their minds which are not part of our make-up.  For that reason, today we can only follow the chief ‘headlines’, so to speak, of Jesus’ words in the Gospel; and, as if to prepare His disciples and us for what He was about to say, Jesus began by saying: 

         Do not think I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have come not to             abolish, but to fulfil. 

Therefore, His disciples would need to be very careful in their understanding and observance of the Law’s commands, as He went on to say:

         Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will               not enter the kingdom of heaven. 

Jesus, did not want cold, meticulous, literal observance of laws written in letters of carved stone, but an obedience such as I earlier described as needed for our Catholic Faith-life.  He therefore went on to make clear His own deeper appreciation and understanding of the Law of Moses on certain most serious issues.

         You have heard it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’, 

Jesus went on to give them His own fuller appreciation of this understanding of the commandment by explaining that God’s refusal to allow anyone to rob a man of his life by murder, also implied and required that no one should rob him of his reputation either, by mordent, bitter words and lies meant to harm and to hurt. 

 He next spoke expressly and most emphatically against sexual infidelity and divorce:

              You shall not commit adultery.

Here He both deepened and elevated the issue by, on the one hand going on to speak of lust of the eyes supplying for physical adultery; while, on the other hand, speaking of divorce as a procedure incurring the danger and the charge of causing a rejected wife to commit adultery.  Moreover, those who went along with divorce by marrying any such divorcee would be themselves committing adultery.

Against taking oaths, He speaks in our sense of using the Lord’s name in vain, and urged simplicity and humility when speaking:

         Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes’, and your ‘No’ mean ‘No’.  Anything more is from the             evil one. 

Jesus knew Himself as having been most definitely sent to fulfil the Law; and so sure was He of the validity of the Law that He solemnly declared:

         Amen I say to you: until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the         smallest part of a letter, will pass from the Law until all things have taken place. 

Therefore when, speaking of the Law and current Jewish practices, although several times He went on to add:

             You have heard that it was said to your ancestors …. But I say to you; 

Jesus was in no way abolishing the Law, but teaching His Apostles, His Church, you and me, how to live and die with Him for the greater glory of God, for His Kingdom on earth, and for the true fulfilment of our brothers and sisters in the world of our time.

Jesus’ main grief against the Scribes and Pharisees was:

            This people honours Me with their lips, but their hearts are far from Me.                        Hypocrites!  Your pay tithes of mint and dill and cumin; but you have overlooked          the weightier demands of the Law – justice, mercy, and good faith.  (Matthew                15:8; 23:23) 

And we have so much of that today, People of God!

Many of those with no faith in, no acknowledgement of, God, love to take up particular social issues along with religious aspects of Christianity -- bits and pieces perhaps of remembered Catholic teaching -- and put themselves forward as the correct interpreters of those bits and pieces of religious teaching ripped out of the context of the fullness of Catholic faith, and understanding them merely as words. 

Dear People of God, do not get embroiled with faithless people arguing about words of faith!

 In the beginning:

         The Lord God took the man and settled him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate             and care for it.  The Lord God gave man this order, ‘You are free to eat from any             of the trees of the garden, except the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  From             that tree you shall not eat! 

Now notice how Satan started arguing about words:

             The serpent asked the woman, ‘Did God really tell you not to eat from any of                 the trees in the garden?’

God actually said to Adam as you have just heard:

             ‘You are free to eat from any of the trees except one’ 

Dear fellow disciples of Jesus, how true and how beautiful, are these following words of Our Blessed Lord  (John 15:11; 16:33):

         In this world you will have trouble, (but) I have told you this so that My joy may             be in you and that your joy may be complete.  Take heart!  I have overcome the             world, that in Me you may have peace.

 So, though facing mockery and opposition for our faith, we have the soul-satisfying joy of being close enough to Jesus to be able to suffer something for Him in return; and, what is more, in so doing we are being endowed with the protection and guidance of His most Holy Spirit, to be not only with us in Mother Church, but even to be in us His obedient disciples, for which we give whole-hearted thanks to God for His Fatherly love.    

 

 

5th Sunday of the Year A 2023

 

5^th. SUNDAY of Year (A)

(Isaiah 58:7-10; 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; Matthew 5:13-16)

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               You are the salt of the earth.

With those words, Jesus wanted to impress upon His disciples an awareness of their dignity and responsibility.

You, He says – not the official representatives of the Jewish Synagogue – You who are following and hearing Me, You who are perhaps beginning to order your lives according to My words and not according the traditions of the Pharisees and their Scribes,

            You are the salt of the earth.

Salt was, in those days, obtained from evaporated pools by the shore of the Dead Sea, or from small lakes on the edge of the Syrian Desert which dry up in the summer.  This salt crust, dug from the soil, contained various impurities which, when the salt was dissolved and removed, remained as useless refuse.

Could that be the possibly double meaning of those mysterious following words of Jesus:

But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot;

a reference perhaps, on the one hand, to the obvious fact that once the original clod of salty earth had lost its salt content nothing but useless refuse remained; while, on the other hand, hinting at possibly disastrous consequences if disciples were to lose their purified saltiness.

Those disciples whom Jesus was addressing as ‘salt of the earth’ were actually following Him around and gladly listening to His words; and they, Jesus was saying, could be purified from their earthy contagions and become pure salt for His, and for God’s, purposes; if, that is, their following Him were to become obedience to Him, and if their hearing of His words were to develop into appreciation and understanding of them, and ultimately, to faith in Himself.

Disciples who are true lovers of Jesus, dear People of God, can never be artificial, overly delicate, characters.  No!  They are of-the-earth, ‘gotten’ from the basic humanity created by God, and found originally ‘good’ in His sight’  As such, thanks to Jesus’ saving Death and Resurrection. they can be cleansed of supervening sin and become fully and most truly human, indeed, salt of the earth in the way we commonly mean the expression, by the washing of Jesus’ Gospel which, even now in our days, is still to be heard in Mother Church, and can be accepted through repentance, and embraced in the power of His Most Holy Spirit, still available through her sacraments.

            Now, you are clean by reason of the word I have spoken to you. (Jn. 15:3)

 

Jesus then went on to tell them:

You are the light of the world.  A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.

The picture of a city on a hill- or mountain-top, stems from the message of the Old Testament prophets (cp. Isaiah 2:2–3) concerning the future rule of God:

In days to come, the mountain of the LORD’S house shall be established as the highest mountain and raised above the hills.  All nations shall stream toward it; many peoples shall come and say: “Come, let us climb the LORD’S mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, that He may instruct us in His ways, and we may walk in His paths.”  For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.

And in today’s Gospel passage we hear Jesus saying to His disciples:  

You are the light of the world.

A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden   Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.

The light of this city of God, shining, as the prophets foretold, in the darkness of the world, cannot be hidden; that is quite simply impossible, for it is illuminated by the glory of the Lord.  Jesus’ true disciples are authentic denizens of that city and so they too cannot fail to shine out -- or in more modern terms, stand out from today’s masses who glory in the light of the world, and, hope to taste all that it seems to offer them.  And so confident are they in the light of the world they are enjoying that they ‘demand’ the blessing of the Church of England under threat of otherwise losing its national appellation and prestige, or the blessing of the Catholic, universal, Church under threat of open and vicious persecution, preceded by an intellectual muddying of the waters of salvation for children yet unborn.

Notice however, that the disciples of Jesus do not have to make strenuous efforts to be seen by men; indeed, Our Blessed Lord Himself has warned them:

Take care not to perform righteous deeds in order that people may see them; otherwise, you will have no recompense from your heavenly Father. (Matthew 6:1)

For our purposes, however, a more literal translation from the original Greek and the Latin Vulgate, puts it most pertinently:

Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.

Our Lord, therefore, said that, on the one hand, our light must shine in the sight of men, but He also told us to be careful not to make a show of our religion, nor of our personal piety, before men.  The light of the city of God shines out by itself, and in the same way, the light of its inhabitants – the true disciples of, and witnesses to, Christ – will not fail to shine and be seen, because they are a light set burning by God Himself, and Our Lord solemnly assures us:

No one lights a lamp and then puts it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house.

God lights the lamp of Christ’s disciples – by calling them to faith in Jesus --in order that it may give light to all His children in the world; and our endeavour should be that in everything we may be true to the soil from which we are dug – God’s original creation and the unity of Christian fellowship – and true to the purifying word of Christ, so that we:

(may) be found in Him, not having any righteousness of (our) own based on the Law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God, depending on faith. (Philippians 3:9)

 

Today, in our Western, God-denying and self-worshipping, societies, people generally only acknowledge, and children are only taught about, a ‘law’ emanating from governmental authority and supported by popular acceptance. They are societies in which people, increasingly, dare no longer publicly acknowledge a moral difference between right and wrong: avowing only what is legal, as distinct from what is unlawful and unapproved, and what is permitted, as against what is dangerous and possibly criminal, such as daring to stand silently praying even in the vicinity of an abortion clinic!!

 

Let us finally look a little more closely at those who were addressed as ‘You’ in Jesus’ words?  Crowds had come to Him and we are told that:

When He saw the crowds, He went up the mountain, and after He had sat down, His disciples came to Him.

Then He pronounced what we call ‘The Beatitudes’ speaking in general of ‘those who mourn’, ‘the meek’, even ‘those who are persecuted’; but He only became directly personal in His words when He said:

Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of Me.

Those blessed witnesses to Christ are those to whom He then went on to say, ‘You are the salt of the earth.’

Today, our modern legislators, men of money and power perhaps, women of renown and persuasion perhaps, are increasingly legislators not for an equality which is impossible: undesirable for the majority, and even unviable, in a society of free-born individuals; they are becoming legislators against faith in general, and against Christianity in particular.  Above all, however, they are becoming discriminators against, even haters of, Jesus Himself:

Blessed are you when they persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of Me.

Today’s Gospel, calls upon all Catholics and Christians to hold ever harder on to  their ‘saltiness’: that is, to their native human one-ness with and love for their fellows, including even their persecutors, but above all, to the Person of Jesus the Christ, by their endeavours to deepen and strengthen their commitment to His saving Gospel, and by bearing public witness to Him, in the courage and strength of God’s abiding Gift: His most Holy Spirit of Truth and Power, ever with us and for us in the sacraments and life of Mother Church.

That was the model Paul himself gave, as we heard in the second reading:

When I came to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God, I came to you in weakness.  My message and my proclamation were not with persuasive (words of) wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

Today, dear People of God, we do not see much ‘demonstration of the Spirit and Power’; what then, is our faith as Catholics based on mere human wisdom as is the case with the modern German Church which wants to remain Catholic, but ‘different’: based not on Catholic traditional values for which countless martyrs have shed their blood over thousands of years, but on the suggestions and propositions of any Tom, Dick, and Harry, any Molly, Mildred, and Margaret keen to vocalize and promote themselves along the Synodal Pathway, and on the decisions of those choosing to be prominent and influential in an extremely rich gathering of rootless religious, nominal Catholic, but whose only stable name today is German.  Or is it really, South German??

No, dear Catholic People, though we do not today see much demonstration of Power and Spirit so necessary for the original evangelisation of unenlightened pagans, our faith today rests on the traditional teaching and practice of the Catholic, Universal, Church founded upon the Apostles whom Jesus chose, and to whom He said, ‘I have told you all that I have heard from My Father; the Holy Spirit Whom I shall send you will recall to your minds all that I have said to you’:

 I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth, which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows Him.  But you know Him, because He remains with you (in Mother Church), and will be in you (personally). (John 14:16–17)

Whoever does not love Me does not keep My words; yet the word you hear is not Mine but that of the Father Who sent Me.  The Advocate, the Holy Spirit the Father will send in My name — He will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you. (John 14:24, 26)

I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from My Father.  (John 15:15)

Dear People of God, every week, here at Mass in the house of the Lord, we open our human minds and hearts to the Saviour Who, in the name of His heavenly Father, loves us beyond measure, that we might be enlightened by His teaching, inflamed with His very presence, and endowed and empowered by the abiding Gift of His Most Holy Spirit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4th. Sunday (Year A) 2023

 

4^th. Sunday (Year A)

(Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13; 1^st. Corinthians 1:26-31; Matthew 5:1-12)

 

Once again, People of God, we have the Sermon on the Mount for our Gospel reading.  We are given it because it is indeed a compendium of the Good News brought by Christ to bring peace on earth for all those of good will.  Today, however, it is to be approached from the point of view of the accompanying readings from the prophet Zephaniah and St. Paul’s first letter to the Church he founded in Corinth.

Our reading from the prophecy of Zephaniah started with the words:

Seek the LORD, all you humble of the land who have observed His law.  Seek  righteousness, seek humility; perhaps you will be sheltered on the day of the LORD's anger.

‘Righteousness’ is personal to God, and “seek righteousness” means: ‘try to imitate the holiness of God’, it requires that we learn from Him what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is beautiful.  In order to “seek righteousness” we need to be prepared to gradually die to ourselves, our opinions, and to OUR own passions; it also means that we learn to fight against our weaknesses, such despondency, anxiety, and self-solicitude, in order to walk in the ways of Christ by the power of His Spirit; that, we may gradually become ever more truly children of God: true to Him Who is our heavenly Father, our earthly Companion, and ever-faithful Guide and Strength.

How great the gulf is between the translation ‘seek righteousness’ and its modern ‘woke’ versions ‘seek integrity’, ‘seek justice’, becomes clear when we realize  that the greatest sinners are often  those who are most proud of their assumed personal integrity, and of the promotion of their own versions of social justice, such as – in Canada – persuading, encouraging, the infirm needing some care, the disturbingly ill, and, indeed, the elderly generally, to agree to die-to-order!  In our own country, ‘chosen’ or  ‘designated’ words are being declared criminal, while other things such as blatant and provocative sexual display are approved: special groups allowed to be themselves and do what they want to do, while the population in general is not free to speak their normal minds.  Today, dear People of God, we find ourselves in a world where the Devil’s own pseudo-virtue is both gladly embraced and proudly promoted, as Our Blessed Lord insinuated saying (Luke 18:8):

             When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?

That is why the prophet Zephaniah declared in the name of the Lord:

I will remove from your midst the proud braggarts, and you shall no longer exalt yourself on My holy mountain.   I will leave as a remnant in your midst a  people humble and lowly, who shall take refuge in the name of the LORD.   (3:11)

And to confirm his vision of a purified Israel, Zephaniah’s prophecy ends with words evoking for us the thought of Mary:

Shout for joy, daughter of Zion!  Sing joyfully, Israel!  Be glad and exult with all your heart, daughter of Jerusalem! (3:14)

Mary the supreme daughter of Zion and purest flower of Israel!  Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, beloved of God because of her humility!  Mary, forgotten and almost despised by today’s feminists of greatest renown, with fullest public image!!

With Mary, how far we are, indeed, from the modern understanding of personal integrity which makes the hearts of so many people today unresponsive and indeed impervious to God’s offer, in Christ, of true righteousness; because such divine righteousness can only enter the hearts of those prepared to hear Jesus’ call to repentance and be willing to respond with humility before God:

From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."  (Matthew 4:17)

St. Paul in today’s reading taken from his first letter to the Corinthians tells us:

Whoever boasts, should boast in the LORD;

and he insists that God wills that:

            No human being might boast before God.

God, Paul says, chose what is foolish by human reckoning: the weak, and those whom the world regards as common and contemptible.  Not, indeed, that God loves ignorance or lack of moral fibre; but rather that He wants to give us true virtue, heavenly wisdom, and divine strength, gifts that will free us from the chains of sin and allow us to fulfil our authentic selves by becoming, in Jesus, God’s true children.  In order to change the old stale water of our stagnant lives into best wine God must first of all get rid of the illusory human righteousness involved in ‘personal integrity’ and ‘woke justice’; for it is only when such modern boasts have been shown up in all their deceitfulness that God can then make us, as Paul says, members of:

Christ Jesus, Who became for us wisdom from God -- and righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.

People of God, observe how wisely, how lovingly, Mother Church tries to lead us to a true and fruitful understanding of Jesus in the Scriptures!  These two readings from Zephaniah and St. Paul are most helpful if we are to understand and try to live the message of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.  It is our human pride – we cannot even recognize the complementarity of MEN and WOMEN !! -- which so blinds us that we are rendered unable to recognize what is true and what is false, what is real and what is illusory, what is ours and what is of God.  The gentle, who do not fight for power, the merciful, who are unwilling to condemn, the peacemakers, who refuse to malign others, such people cannot prosper on a diet which feeds “personal integrity”, because they find it poisonous.  Neither can the worldly ‘woke’ understand what they regard as the  indecisiveness and weakness of those who are unwilling to condemn, the ‘flabbyness’ of those who, in order to preserve peace, are loath to speak ill of others.  And, of course, the worldly ones, so eager to assert and stand up for their own personal integrity, are bound to be disgusted with what they regard as the insipid and servile attitude of those the prophet so lovingly mentioned in our first reading:

The remnant of Israel will do no wrong and tell no lies, nor will a deceitful tongue be found in their mouths.

 The words of Jesus at the end of the Beatitudes are totally alien to those committed to this world, its standards, and its aspirations; for such people, they are not so much mysterious words, as utterly ridiculous words, depicting a despicable attitude:

Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake.

However, for those who have begun put on the righteousness of Christ, those words are, indeed, both eternal and true; for, as authentic disciples they have learned to recognize and to confess the truth about Jesus, together with the very first committed followers of His  -- Peter and the holy apostles -- who said of Him:

Lord, You alone have the words of life.