14th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2^nd. Corinthians 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6)

Dear People of God, it behoves us to take special notice of the following excerpts from our first two readings today before going on to study today’s Gospel:

You shall say to them: ‘Thus says the Lord God!’  And whether they heed or resist – for they are a rebellious house – they shall know that a prophet has been among them.

‘Thus says the Lord’: the ultimate authority of God, demanding the prophet’s obedience in speaking to His people, and the people’s obedient hearing for the prophet’s words.

The Lord said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in (your) weakness.’

In our Gospel reading we heard how Jesus went with His disciples to His home town of Nazareth and was amazed at the lack of faith He discovered there: His fellows in the synagogue – that is, the religious, the devout, citizens of Nazareth -- were unwilling to accept either His teaching -- which they understood well enough to recognize its wisdom -- or His miracles, which they had seen for themselves, or concerning which they had received unimpeachable evidence from others who had been witnesses.  And this unwillingness to seriously accept and appreciate Himself, His teaching and His miracles before fully developing into a total rejection of Him, His words and works, was originally motivated by the simple fact that a prominent ‘clique’ thought they knew Him and His family; for He had not only been brought up in their midst but had actually been taught in their synagogue.   What would have become of Him if they had not been at hand to help and guide Him?

Why did Jesus find that amazing?  After all, He had been living among these people from childhood and must have experienced many of their personal idiosyncrasies through daily contact with them; moreover, He most certainly was endowed with enough wisdom to have gained a truly profound appreciation of human nature in general.  Nevertheless, we are told that He did, indeed, marvel at their unbelief; and time seems only to have deepened that amazement and sorrow, for you will remember that, later on, the experiences of His public ministry led Him to say:

When the Son of Man comes, will He really find faith on the earth?   (Luke 18:8)

In the Gospels, we are told that Jesus only marvelled on two occasions: one, as you have just heard, at the unbelief of His home-townspeople; and secondly at the faith of the Roman centurion whose servant He cured:

When Jesus heard this, He marvelled and said to those who followed Him, “Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith.  (Matthew 8:10)

This fact that Jesus is only said to have  ‘marvelled’ on these two occasions involving faith or lack of it, seems to indicate that, of all human activities and attitudes, it is faith which is the most personal, and also the most significant and ultimately wonderful act of which a human being is capable.  And it is here that we should recall those words of St. Paul:

The Lord said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in (your) weakness.’

 

Why is faith so extraordinary?  Because it is a personal G/gift from God the Father; because it is the G/gift on which God’s plan for the redemption and exaltation of humankind depends. For although human eyes enabled men and women to see the wonders that Jesus did, and by their ears they could have heard the words of wisdom that came from His lips, but the transcendent reality at work in and behind those words and deeds could only be recognized and embraced by the humble and loving acceptance of the gift of faith from God’s Gift which is His own Most Holy Spirit:

The glory You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, even as We are One.  (John 17:22)

I have manifested Your name to the people whom You gave Me out of the world. Yours they were, and You gave them to Me, and they have kept Your word.  Now they have known that everything that You have given Me is from You.  For I have given to them the words that You gave Me; and they have received them, and have come  to know in truth that I came from You; and they have believed that You sent Me. (John 17:6-9)

Jesus’ later questioning whether the Son of Man would find faith on earth when He returns, becomes, therefore, more understandable when we consider that faith is truly a most wonderful quality in a human being because it is totally supernatural – a gift, God-given, to raise a weak and sinful creature to the level of a child of God – and, being so sublime, faith can only be rightly received with a corresponding humility.  Did not Our Blessed Lady herself declare:

My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour; for He has looked on the humble estate of His servant.

Now, where faith is weak, and when -- perhaps under extreme pressure -- it might seem non-existent, Jesus, indeed, is disappointed and hurt; but He is never said to have marvelled at that: after all, He knows our human weakness.  

Why, therefore, was Jesus so amazed at lack of faith in those who seemed religious and even devout in Nazareth, why, indeed, did He marvel their unbelief when He could be so understanding of native human weakness? 

Here we encounter something of the mystery of Jesus, something of the wonder of His Person and the beauty of His character.

He came from the Father and had lived the majority of His life on earth in the home of Mary and Joseph where He had been seen to be daily “growing in favour with God and men”.  You will remember that after having seriously prepared for His long-anticipated reception to manhood-before-God as a young Jew, He had been so fascinated with the subsequent opportunity to talk deeply with the rabbis in the Temple – men learned in the Scriptures and the things of God -- that He forgot all about returning home in the caravan with Mary and Joseph.  And now here, as a fully mature man and an increasingly celebrated ‘rabbi’ back in His home-town synagogue at Nazareth, He likewise rejoiced that He might be able to speak again of the things of His Father with those in whose midst He had grown up, with those He so intimately knew and loved despite their faults and failings, those who were members of God’s Chosen People to whom He had been sent:

It is written …, 'And they will all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.  (John 6:45)

However, He was, indeed, amazed to discover how little reverence and love they had for His-and-their heavenly Father and how little they understood of the spiritual endowment they had received through Moses and the Prophets.  He had spoken of what He had learned from His Father, their God; He had done the works His Father had given Him to do for their enlightenment; and, to the fact that they had both heard and seen what He had said and done, their very own words testified:

What is the wisdom given to Him?  How are such mighty works done by His hands?

And yet, they did not respond to His Father, nor would they recognize Himself!

Their great difficulty, was that they were in no way prepared to accept that one who had grown up apparently like any other child in their midst could be fundamentally any better than themselves.  Failure through fear as experienced by His disciples during the storm on the Sea of Galilee was human; refusal from pride as shown by His townspeople in Nazareth was devilish!  Who, indeed, did He think He was?

Jesus said to them, "A prophet is not without honour except in his home town and among his relatives and in his own household." So, He could do no  mighty work there, except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them.  And He marvelled because of their unbelief.

Jesus marvelled because they refused to marvel at God’s goodness shown to One they considered to be like themselves.  The Nazarenes were very proud.   They would, indeed, accept one more learned than themselves (some acknowledged and scholarly rabbi perhaps), that one stronger (some revolutionary leader perhaps), but not one better than themselves before God: better in His knowledge of, response to, and love for, the God Who they had come to consider as theirs.

The fact is that they were no longer God’s People because they had come to consider Him as their god, just as the pagans all around each had their god, who was no true god. The denizens of Nazareth, having come to think that Israel’s ancient Lord was in fact their own Jewish god, found something deeply offensive in this Man before them demanding that they truly REPENT and learn anew to LOVE the God Who had brought their fathers out of Egypt to this Promised Land.  THIS was the stumbling block over which they fell and condemned themselves: Israel’s God was their god, and this ‘fellow’ had been taught at their synagogue, long before He became famous elsewhere.

St. Paul, on the contrary, told us how he had learnt ultimate humility from God:

A thorn in the flesh was given to me, an angel of Satan, to keep me from being too elated.  Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

Faith, dear People of God, is the glory of a human being.  It is a sublime gift of God, as the Gospel tells us, but it is something that can only be received with humility; for, through faith, the very power of God is at our disposal, and we must only use it for His glory, never for our own.     Being born of humility, faith can only be cherished by the constant practice of simplicity and trust in God, for the worries and false solicitudes of the world would choke it, as Jesus lovingly warns us (Luke 12:27-33):

 Seek but the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added to you. 

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, you who have all been personally chosen by the Father to be disciples of Jesus and witnesses to the world:  avoid worries and solicitude which sap away the strength of your faith; above all, never indulge doubt which can destroy faith.  Cardinal Newman used to say that a hundred difficulties do not make one doubt.  Do you think, do you fear, that your faith is still weak?  Then humble yourself gladly before God with St. Paul; and never forget what St. John would tell you also, namely, that you can grow in faith by the communion you have, daily, with God.  Would you aspire, finally, to the crown of faith?  Then give yourself in commitment -- sincere and total -- to God in prayer, to Jesus in the Eucharist, and to the Gospel proclaimed by Mother Church, in all life’s circumstances, big and small; such faith will earn you the eternal reward and crown implied in the words:

            Go in peace, your faith has saved you.  

Ss. Peter and Paul, 2024

 

(Acts 12:1-11; 2^nd. Timothy 4:6-8, 17-18; Matthew 16:13-19)

My dear People of God, we are invited today to give thanks to God for the gift of the Faith with which we have been blessed; to thank Our Blessed Lord for establishing His Church on the foundation Rock of His Good News proclaimed by Peter and Paul, and the Apostolic College; and finally to express our gratitude for the personal witness given by both Peter and Paul in Rome.

In the infant Church there were certain people who claimed to have knowledge of some teachings of Jesus hidden from the general body of disciples, teachings which only those could learn who had been specially initiated by rituals of a secret nature.   For such people, the faith of the simple Christian was only the beginning; the first step indeed, but not, of itself, enough for a deeper understanding of, and closer union with, God. 

All who contested the very idea of such secret doctrines did so stating that:

The authentic Christian teaching is for all Christians,  and can be found by all, in the Scriptures as understood and proclaimed by Mother Church.

The faith taught publicly today by Mother Church is guaranteed by the fact that it is based on, and in conformity with, the traditional Church teaching originating with the Apostles themselves and handed down through the unbroken line of their successors.  

In that way it was made clear that the fullness of the authentic teaching of Jesus is open and available to all disciples, in His Holy Christian and Catholic Church.

You must remember that in the early centuries of the Church there were no printed books; what books there were had to be copied by hand and were very expensive to buy.  Moreover, there were few roads, and the best of them could only facilitate transport by horse and wheeled carriage; transport by sea was very slow and open to attack by robbers or pirates.   All this meant that the church in each city or town generally preached what it had received at the beginning of its establishment from the wandering teachers who first came –at great personal difficulty and danger,  indeed, even despite public persecution -- to proclaim Christ to them and baptise them in His name.   Those itinerant  teachers were well known and accepted as authentic disciples of Jesus; but those with the greatest authority were, of course, the twelve Apostles themselves.   Those Churches founded personally by an Apostle, or those where an Apostle had been active, were specially respected;  above all, however, those churches whose Apostle had not only worked among them but was buried in their midst, were shown the greatest respect, and their tradition of faith was recognized as being most sure.  Examples of these could be found, for example, at Antioch in Syria, at Philippi, Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica.  Nevertheless, even among these “super” churches with “surer” faith because of the founding and/or originating apostolic presence and witness, even among these, there was one which stood head and shoulders above all others, and that was the Church at Rome, where both Peter -- the Rock on which Jesus had said He would build His Church -- and Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles P/personally chosen by the glorified Jesus, had both worked and, indeed, suffered martyrdom for their unflinching witness to the truth of Jesus.   If any Church could remain free from heresy, if any Church could preserve the teaching of Jesus in its purest integrity, it had to be the Church at Rome.  Moreover, all wanting to know the fulness of Jesus’ authentic teaching would find it proclaimed more fully and surely in the apostolic churches, and above all, again, in the Church of Rome, the treasurer and custodian of the unique legacies of both Peter and Paul.  That true faith in Jesus and His teaching was known as the Christian Faith, and that Faith was intended by Jesus to be proclaimed to all peoples and churches throughout the known world, spearheaded by the Apostles, and Paul the specially designated ‘Doctor of the Nations’.  That is why the ‘Christian Faith’ also came to be called the ‘Catholic – which means ‘universal’ – Faith’, because all Christian churches were called, and aspired to teach the doctrine of the apostolic churches, above all the doctrine proclaimed by Peter and Paul – Christian and Catholic -- at Rome. 

Dear friends in Christ, many former Catholics and Christians now rejoicing in a faithless secular society, claim to be creating a better and more fulfilling world-experience for people.  They seek to do this by borrowing from the French Revolution ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ luminaries … proclaiming a likeness to what a modern biographer of Robespierre has termed his ‘Fatal Purity’, a purity uniquely able to separate and destroy even the closest of former friends and associates.   That ‘fatal purity’ of such modern doctrines concerns the nature and development of humanity; and their effect on its social nature is being manifested again in our days.  Modern lapsed Catholics and Christians, and others rejecting Christianity out of hand, borrow heavily from Jesus’ teaching, which they adapt to their own agenda, and as a result we have ever-increasing gender obfuscations, abortions, suicides, and mercy-killings, along with ever more distressing occurrences of children’s mental-health difficulties; all of which arise from modern ideas about and practice of, that sublime Christian virtue of LOVE!!

Our modern secular evangelists like to sound, appear, and show themselves, as good and compassionate people.  And, to cover-up their ignorance of the depths and beauty of human nature as God made it, they use of words well-known from Jesus’ teaching and abuse them to sell the central aspect of their doctrine which is, that no one is excluded from the ‘good things’ they offer, because there is no such thing as sin.   And the apparent closeness of their aspirations with Jesus’ teaching is a sham because they themselves are absolutely against any God -- even so lovable a God-become-man as Jesus -- having any authority over them in their own personal and private lives and decisions.

Dear Catholics and Christians, in our present world of change and uncertainty, where the Faith is openly denied and Tradition derided, we should be both grateful for, and proud of, the blessings we have received: the supreme blessing and gift being that of the one, true, Faith guaranteed by Peter and proclaimed by Paul; the inviolate Faith -- Christian and Catholic -- preserved in and revealed by  the one true Church of Christ through the power of the indwelling Spirit of Holiness and Truth bequeathed to her by her Lord and Saviour.

Here, however, we should take care lest we inadvertently cause the reformation cry of ‘Popery’ to revive; for, although we most wholeheartedly respect, revere, and honour, the Pope, and obey authentic Papal teaching; nevertheless, we do not serve the Pope.  We serve only Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, and we should take care lest enthusiasm for, or after a meeting with, any particular Pope should lead one – and even episcopal conferences are not be excused in this respect -- to splash around servile words of praise, as if they were right expressions of their authors’ Catholic devotion.

Dear Catholic and Christian friends, give great and heartfelt thanks today for the blessings brought us by SS. Peter and Paul and consigned in Mother Church’s treasury of worship, grace, prayer and praise.   Deo Gratias!  Alleluia!!  

12th Sunday Year B, 2024

 

(Job 38:1, 8-11; 2^nd. Corinthians 5:14-17; Mark 4:35-41)

You will recognize the connection between our readings today if I just set before you a short passage from all three.

In the first reading from the book of the prophet Job you heard:

The Lord said, 'Thus far shall you come, and no farther, here shall your proud waves be stilled!'

Just as the Lord of all creation controls earth’s oceans, in like manner did Jesus calm the troubled waters of the Sea of Galilee:

Jesus awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Peace, be still!" And the wind ceased and there was a great calm.

 Moreover, He calmed not only the tumultuous waters but also the hearts and minds of His anxious disciples, as exemplified by St. Paul in the second reading:

The love of Christ impels us, so that (we) might live no longer for ourselves but for Him Who died for our sake.

Or again in a more famous passage from his letter to the Romans (8:38-39):

For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Peace rests on power; and, complementing the calmness of the Lord sleeping in the stern of the storm-tossed boat, was His divine power whereby, on waking, He instantly stilled the raging waters.

Now, these Galileans, His first disciples, would need, later on in their Apostolate, to have the calm strength of an unshakeable faith to which those later words of St. Paul bear witness. For, just as only the omnipotent power of the Lord of all creation could calm the primeval surge of earth’s oceans, so too, only self-committing faith in, and self-forgetful love for, Jesus, as the Lord and Saviour of mankind in Whom:

            The whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9),

can confer that sublime strength which brings true peace and abiding joy to the human soul despite all the tribulations of life in a world which is under the power of Satan and the repeated attacks of his fallen  angels.

In the Gospel story the disciples were as yet immature in their faith, and the situation in which they found themselves was very serious, indeed, it was  life-threatening:

A great windstorm arose, and waves were breaking into the boat so that the boat was already filling.  Jesus was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. They woke Him and said to Him: Teacher, do You not care that we are perishing?

Now the ocean was, for the Israelites and the neighbouring civilizations, the realm of Chaos.  As we read in the story of creation from the book of Genesis, before God created either the heavens or the earth:

Darkness was over the face of the deep (Gen 1:2);

and the greatest threat to man and to the world was that they should slip back again into chaos, be overwhelmed by those dark waters.  And, indeed, did not their own history tell them that it was through wind and overpowering waters that the Lord had overturned the chariots and horses, and drowned the troops, of the pursuing Pharaoh when Israel was being led safely out of Egypt (Exodus 15:8-10):

With the blast of Your nostrils the waters piled up; the floods stood up in a pile; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.  The enemy said, 'I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil; my hand shall destroy them.'  You blew with Your wind; the sea covered them; they sank like lead in the mighty waters.

As Israel became less and less faithful to her covenant with the Lord, she was repeatedly punished for her many failings; and these troubles and trials, this punishment and pain, was pictured by the psalmist as the looming threat of chaos (Psalm 124: 2-5):

If it had not been the LORD who was on our side when people rose up against us, then they would have swallowed us up alive when their anger was kindled against us; then would the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; then over us would have gone the raging waters.

Those traditional memories and fears were deliberately used by Our Lord to teach the Apostles what sort of faith they should have in Him.  For the psalm I have just quoted where the great fear was that the swollen waters would overwhelm them ends as follows:

Blessed be the LORD, Who has not given us as prey to their teeth.  We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped.

The wind over the waters causing the storm had been of Our Lord’s choosing for it was He Who had suggested that they should cross over the sea to the other side,  He had chosen the circumstances that would test His disciples; and, as throughout the history of Israel, God’s punishments and testing had never been for their ruin but for their education and betterment, similarly here, Jesus was testing His disciples in order to strengthen and confirm them.  If they would respond with trust in the Lord as the psalmist had done, great would be their reward; but even their failure could nevertheless serve as a lesson that would bring enduring blessings if they would learn from it.

The disciples’ reaction to their situation was perfectly natural and normal, and all those who have ever been in a small rowing boat on stormy waters will appreciate their alarm.  They were found wanting not because they had been afraid of the imminent threat that their boat might capsize but because they cried out to the Lord without due confidence and trust, so that their words were little better than cries of panic.   Jesus therefore:

Woke up, rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, "Quiet! Be still!"  The wind ceased and there was a great calm.  Then He asked them, "Why are you terrified?   Do you not yet have faith?"

Time was short for Jesus; soon He would have to give the supreme example of confidence and trust under the pressure of mortal torment and soul-destroying abandonment saying:

            Father, into Your hands I commend my Spirit.

The time was coming too when these disciples so close to His Heart would have to follow where their Lord had gone, and therefore it was imperative that they should start to learn the lesson that would prepare them to overcome the world with Him.

This is in accordance with what St. Paul had in mind when, in our second reading, he wrote to the Corinthians:

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away; behold, the new has come.  

Dear People of God, Jesus wills to be our strength and our peace, that strength and peace which alone can enable us to find the true joy of life; and for that to happen we have to turn to Him in all our needs and with all our aspirations and hopes.  However, we must be found using not merely conventional words nor adopting non-committal, provisional, attitudes, but with deep personal sincerity and self-commitment based on divine promises not human expectations:

For the love of Christ controls us; He died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for Him who, for their sake, died and was raised.

We must try to live no longer for ourselves, following our own ideas, seeking our own satisfactions, trusting and serving number one; we must endeavour, more and more, to put Jesus first in our lives: trusting and hoping in Him, following and serving Him in all that we try to do (Psalm 27:14):

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!