11th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Ezekiel 17:22-24; 2^nd. Corinthians 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34)

St. Paul, speaking in our second reading today:
 
WE ARE ALWAYS OF GOOD COURAGE;  for we walk by faith, not by sight.  YES, WE ARE OF GOOD COURAGE …  we make it our aim to please Him;

reminds me very much of our Blessed Lord Jesus’ words recorded by St. John in his Gospel (16:33)
In the world you will have tribulation; but TAKE HEART; I have overcome the world.

Actually, the two Greek words translated in the one case by ‘We are always of good courage and in the other by ‘take heart’ are very closely related, so we do well to understand the dictum of St. Paul in accordance with those words of Jesus, because Paul was a Personally chosen disciple of the Lord, and he most certainly did on many occasions –  more  indeed than any of the other apostles -- suffer for Jesus with great courage. His faith and trust in the Lord urged him to ‘take heart’ in whatever adverse situation he might find himself; and that faith and trust, that ‘taking heart, is most certainly what Paul wanted to teach and encourage in his converts, who were being called daily – in accordance with the words of Our Lord quoted above -- to face up to the pagan power of Rome and give witness to the Lord Jesus as true and faithful disciples.  

And what tribulation there is to be found in our world today, dear People of God, for all who are committed disciples of Jesus!!

I will not speak of wars and rumours of wars, of which there are many that are  serious; nevertheless, I do want to highlight the tribulation in the hearts of so many Catholics and Christians, all of them with so much potential for good as disciples of Jesus, but, of whom, far too many have sadly been turned aside from ‘being of good courage’ in Jesus by the solicitations of that despair which abounds in our world and which is at the heart of all the excitement and lust for immediate pleasure and power, and the blatant evil so easily accepted in our days of religious indifference..
Today, change – even disintegration -- is continual and seems to have ever-greater momentum, sweeping aside what had previously seemed established and inviolable; and, as a result, many find it extremely difficult to maintain a reliable, trustworthy, life style, let alone  an abiding  faith in an unseen God.

In such circumstances the temptation is great -- especially for the young and the needy -- to grasp, seize, what the world offers here and now, before it disappears, before it is lost without their having tasted of it.! And how alien such a world portrays our Christian religion and Catholic faith which teaches us to commit ourselves wholeheartedly to, and learn to find our total joy and peace in, promises given by Jesus, which seem to be only empty, pie-in-the-sky promises, for those denizens of our brave, new, world unable to even conceive of spiritual blessings!

Dear People of God, when power and influence can be, and frequently are, bought by money; when multitudes are swept along by popular tides of mindless enthusiasm when rights are proclaimed -- many of them quite ludicrous -- and responsibilities ignored; when might is right and popularity cannot be challenged; when people are cajoled and led astray by preachers of holiness-without-commitment, and addicts of faith-without-obedience; THEN, would-be-disciples of Jesus find it difficult to  hear and recognize the soul-calming voice  of the unseen, but all-seeing and all-powerful God Who created us.  And in such a situation, it is vitally important for us-who-believe to hear, and take heart from, the concordant voices of our Lord Jesus and His most faithful disciple St. Paul in today’s readings:

These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.
We are always of good courage, although we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.

The believer - Paul went on to say - is confident by reason of his faith: he trusts in the goodness of the God he already knows; and is well-pleased, to look forward to and hope for, the promises of ‘the Friend’ he serves, the Lord and Saviour he seeks to please, and  longs above all to love, wholeheartedly:

We walk by faith not by sight, and we make it our aim to please Him.  For we must all appear  before the judgement seat of Christ
 
Now, that Christian trust and contentment is pictured in Our Lord’s first parable today:
The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground, and should sleep by night and rise by day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he himself does not know how.  
The sower does not know how the planting he has made develops to fruition: he continues to play his part, however, by waiting for the Lord and trusting in Him, before ultimately reaping the resultant harvest.

Dear People of God, too few supposed ‘sowers’ of God’s word, too few such preachers of Jesus’ Gospel, seem to know how to wait for the Lord and trust in His word!  So many ‘high-ups’ -- for example, in the ‘intellectual’ German Church corrupted by power-pence and personal pride -- want to ‘adapt’ Catholic traditional, centuries-long  Apostolic teaching, to the ‘needs’ of  certain ‘modern’ and most-important members of the flock of their pasture -- the providers of their ‘power pence’, the Deutsch Mark! -- who apparently find themselves in moral situations never before known, experienced, thought of, or even imagined, before the German hierarchy ‘discovered’ their proliferance. 

Dear People of God, what, moral, sexual, situations were not experienced in pagan, all- powerful, world capital, Rome; were not thought of in homosexual Greece and Athens;  have not been imagined by exotic potentates all over the world and throughout the ages??  Why are today’s so learned  German leaders (said, by the way, in a popular dictum , to go down deepest but come up dirtiest!) so willing to accept those modern situations supposedly unknown to, and unforeseeable by, the Lord and Saviour of mankind, Our Lord Jesus  Christ!!

Jesus gives special emphasis to trust in and contentment before God in His second parable,  where He no longer speaks of ‘scattered seed’  but of  one single mustard seed, the smallest seed of all.  Telling us that, the initial apparent insignificance of any work intended for God’s glory and His people’s well-being is NO HINDRANCE to the final realization of God’s plan; that a seed so very tiny  can indeed grow into the biggest shrub of all; and that what Jesus requires in all those who would serve Him is patient humility.

So, there we have Jesus’ teaching for all who would serve Him in today’s almost disastrous world: just two little,  complementary, parables, recommending two absolutely essential virtues, life-qualities,  for all who aspire to be His Christian and Catholic disciples today.  Do what you can – however small it may seem;  wait patiently, trustingly, confidently, humbly, for the most Holy Spirit, God’s GIFT, to bring about – in His time – that work of God you want to see effected.

Trust in the LORD, and do good; dwell in the land, and befriend faithfulness.  Delight yourself in the LORD, and He will give you the desires of your heart.   Commit your way to the LORD, trust in Him, and He will act.   He will bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday.  Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.        (Psalm 37:3-7)

If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.  Remember the word that I said to you: 'A servant is not greater than his master.' If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.

I have said these things to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation.  But TAKE HEART, I have overcome the world.       (John 15:19-20 & 16:33)

10th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Genesis 3:9-15; 2^nd. Corinthians 4:13 – 5:1; Saint Mark’s Gospel 3:20-35)

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, Jesus said in today’s Gospel reading words both puzzling and encouraging:

            Whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.

‘Whoever does the will of God‘ seems such an impersonal criterion; whereas ‘my brother and sister and mother’ are words so personal and friendly.  Of course, as you surely well know, we become brothers and sisters of Christ when He, by His baptismal Gift of the most Holy Spirit in Mother Church, draws us to Himself and so enables us to be nourished with His heavenly food: a food which is not assimilated by the recipient, but which, on the contrary, assimilates us to the  One thus giving Himself to us in Holy Communion.  In that way  we become not only His own brothers and sisters but also -- and most wonderfully -- adopted sons and daughters of His heavenly Father.

As regards becoming His ‘mother’  that also is understandable in a Eucharistic context in the sense that Christ is – so to speak – ‘conceived in us’ through baptism and then lives in us and grows gradually to maturity by His ever-renewed ‘gift of the Holy Spirit’ in each fruitful reception of Holy Communion.

Nevertheless, for Jesus, the ultimate and supremely decisive criterion of a true and acceptable disciple is, one ‘who does the will of God’, and that is because   Jesus spent His whole life on earth doing the will of His Father for our salvation.  Therefore all who aspire to become disciples of Jesus  must sincerely seek, intend, aspire, to ‘do the will of God’ as explained by Jesus Himself.

You will have noticed that Jesus’ words to describe a disciple of His, speak of a brother, a sister, and mother; but there is no mention of ‘a father’.

Dear People of God, the relationship of Jesus on earth with His Father in heaven was so mysterious, so intimate and so imperious, that even Our Blessed Lady was, so to speak, ‘at a loss’, even ‘all at sea’, with it at times, as we learn from the occasion when she thought it right to reprove her Son Who had remained behind in the Temple at Jerusalem unknown to herself and Saint Joseph.  At that time Jesus’ answer totally puzzled her:

            Did you not know that I must be in My Father’s house?

Those words ‘ in My Father’s house’ can also mean, about my Father’s business and they thus offered to one so contemplative as Mary something she would ponder  over. Indeed, something she would ultimately treasure when her Son finally left her and went with His disciples to preach His Good News to the people.  She  could most certainly understand and would be most humbly proud to know that on leaving her He was walking alone, wholeheartedly -- ‘about His father’s business’ – all the way to Calvary.

So, brothers and sisters, dear fellow disciples in Christ, Jesus words:

            Whoever does the will of God is My brother and sister and mother,

are both heavenly and earthly words, perfectly befitting Him Who is God-become-Man for men: they are heavenly words of companionship, ‘Whoever does the will of My Father’, and of God-pleasing  personal love, where ‘My brother and sister and mother’ are meant as true expressions of spontaneously  human love, which is firmly established upon a deep personal relationship,  not  founded on the shivering sands of carnal passion.

‘Doing the will of God’ was the aim of the Law under the Old covenant.  St. Paul discussed that question of the role of the old Law and his teaching is admirably summed up by the late C.H. Dodd in one of his early works:

‘Every individual of the human race is so entangled in the general “wrongness” that he has no power left to himself to avoid committing acts which, whether he knows it or not, add to the sum of wrong.  To know these acts are wrong does not prevent him from doing them, but it does imprint upon his conscience, in the indelible characters of shame and guilt, the contrast of good and evil.  It brings “sin” home, from being a general state of the human race, to be a conscious burden upon the mind of the individual.  And Paul sees that it is a great advance to have discovered sin in one’s own heart as guilt.  Only the man who is conscious of his guilt can be saved from the sin of which he is guilty.’

That ‘saving from sin’ comes to us, of course, through the death of the only sublimely Perfect Man,  His Resurrection and Ascension, His bequeathed sacrament of Baptism; and today, our own efforts to conform our behaviour to God’s will in all circumstances ... all of which serves, to quote Saint Paul (Ephesians 4:12-13):

To equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent  of the full stature of Christ;

or, in simpler words, to become truly adopted sons and daughters of God the Father.      

I do not want to keep you unduly, dear fellow disciples of Jesus, but I also would like to encourage your continued  thinking about today’s Scripture readings; therefore, just notice that our first reading centred on God the Father:

The Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”.

Our second, on God the Son:

He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus … so do not lose heart.

And our third reading, centred on the Holy Spirit:

Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.  

Corpus Christi Year B, 2024

 

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,  there are many figures of our Christian Eucharist in the history of God’s Chosen People of old.  From the most ancient times sacrifices offered to the Lord in the Temple were accompanied by a sacred meal, where the faithful partook of the flesh of the victim given in sacrifice.   As you well know, the most famous of all these meals was the Paschal meal, of which Our blessed Lord partook before finally transforming it into His own Eucharistic Offering.

There are, however, other -- less obvious -- anticipations of our Eucharist in Israel’s history. For example, Israel’s traverse of the desert from the slavery of Egypt to the Promised Land, was only made possible thanks to that great historical figure of the Eucharist, namely the manna of the desert. There, God’s food was given directly for Israel’s survival, not even for His own worship: Moses ordered that just one jar of manna be kept as a historical testimony to God’s saving care (Exodus 16:33).  Manna was essentially food of necessity, not of delight.    Likewise, the bread Elijah received from an angel, which enabled him to walk 40 days and 40 nights to meet God on Mount Horeb (1 Kings 19:4-8), surely foreshadowed the bread our Blessed Lord gives to fortify us for our journey to His Father on the holy mountain of the heavenly Jerusalem.

This line of holy and venerable tradition  reaches its summit, as you might expect, in the Gospel, dear friends, but before coming to that we should glimpse for just a moment at one of the very earliest figures in Israel’s history, Melchizedek, interpreted to us by one of Israel’s latest prophets, Malachi.

That mysterious, ancient, person of Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18ff.), foreshadowed our blessed Lord Himself as the eternal King of Peace: for the Fathers of Holy Mother Church saw in his offering of bread and wine a figure of that PURE OFFERING of which  the Lord Himself speaks in the prophecy of Malachi (1:11), telling us that  He, the Lord, saw the nations of the world presenting incense and pure grain to His name from the rising of the sun even to its setting in Messianic times.

Dear Catholic People of God, how impenetrably mysterious is, and sublimely sacred must be, this reality of our Eucharist, which was foreshadowed, prepared for, over so many centuries, and which Our Lord Himself did not transmit to us without much further preparation by His own words and deeds! 

For Jesus Himself knowingly prepared for and presented to us two striking miracles: one feeding 5,000 followers wanting above all to hear His teaching, and then a second where another 4,000 suchlike were fed; both events being figures of, and immediate preparations for, the great Messianic banquet which is now ours: bread consecrated by the words of the Lord, feeding great numbers of listening-and-self-forgetful followers.  Bread, food, given to fully satisfy many very hungry people, but nevertheless, not fully consumed; bread of life and strength, given LEST (THEY) FAINT IN THE WAY as Our Lord said.(Mark 8:3)

Of such bread we can say that it was given to fulfil an immediate purpose – to satisfy His followers’ hunger -- but not to exhaust its full potentiality; because, after all had eaten to their satisfaction, much more was left to be carefully gathered up.  Jesus’ miraculous bread was ordinary -- five loaves and two fish -- in its origin, super-abundant for its immediate purpose, and sublime in its ‘mysterious residue’ of yet greater promise … enough for how many?   The whole world??

Oh, most blessed, most glorious Eucharist!  Glorious indeed, because It is the Body and Blood of the living, glorified Christ!  Jesus, risen from the dead, triumphant over sin, suffering, and death and resplendent with divine Love and Life; Jesus, present there in all save earthly appearances. Jesus, our All, is present in our Mass in His consuming Filial  love for His Father and His self-forgetting  compassion for all those who believe in Him and obey His words.  Jesus is indeed our eternal Rock and bulwark, our unassailable Citadel and sure Refuge;  do you, dear People of God here present today, want to feel secure in, stake your lives on, His faithfulness; do you want to find your true delight by sharing in His love. 

ASK AND IT WILL BE GIVEN YOU (Matthew 7:7).  Yes, ask when this our King of Glory is offering Himself for you  in prayer to the Father at Holy Mass.  Speak then to Him, for a share, however humble, in Him, with Him.    Pray, beseech Him then, for Mass is the supreme time for heartfelt prayer, when your life, your hope, your strength, your desire, your love, your all, is present, and in His eternal act of consummate love wants to draw you to Himself and with Himself, to the Father.  All is yours for the asking at Mass, because Jesus is present for you, for all of us, because He is one of us, one with us. He is so close to us that His very Mother is our Sister, sharing in our humanity and native weakness, but transformed for His purposes by her total obedience and the Spirit’s transcendent and transforming love.

            Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, REJOICE IN THE LORD!  (Phil. 4:4).