Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XVI per Annum B
21 July 2024

 We have a rather brief Gospel passage today that draws upon prophecy from the Old Testament.  The first reading from the Prophet Jeremiah gives us some insight into the background of the Gospel passage.  The prophet Jeremiah speaks of wicked and sinful shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock.  The sinfulness of their religious authorities, leads God’s people into idolatry and dissolves their proper identity.  Ten of the twelve tribes of God’s people settle in the north and these ten tribes come to be called Israel.  The remaining two tribes in the south come to be called Judah.  Israel, the ten tribes in the north, pay the price for their idolatry when they are invaded by Assyria and taken away into exile.  From there, they are scattered among the Gentile nations in the region, mixed in with other peoples, such that they are lost, their proper bloodline cannot be identified.  Using the image from Jeremiah, the sheep have been scattered and driven away and bad shepherds have contributed to this.  Jeremiah goes on to prophecy about God’s solution.  God Himself will gather the remnant of the flock and he will appoint new shepherds over the people.  This is to take place in the time of the Messiah, for Jeremiah says the promise that God Himself will do this will take place when a shoot is raised up from David.  And then both Judah and Israel will be saved and will dwell in security.

In the Gospel we are in the time of the Messiah.  Jesus is identified with the promise of a righteous shoot from David.  Jesus is the priest, the prophet, and the king whose throne will last forever.  He is also the shepherd who will fulfill what Jeremiah said.  Jesus, the Good Shepherd, associates other shepherds with his work.  He establishes a hierarchy in his kingdom.  In the Gospel, we see that the Lord has sent the apostles out to begin their work as shepherds.  In the Gospel passage they return to report to the Lord all that has taken place.  And people are responding with great enthusiasm.  In fact, the response to the proclamation of the Gospel is so great and exhausting that the apostles don’t even have time to eat and need to pull away to rest.  The vast crowds pressing around Jesus and around the apostles call to mind the image hanging in the air from Jeremiah and other prophets regarding God’s people who had been scattered by past exile.  The remnant sheep are indeed being gathered from distant places and brought to graze in good pasture where none shall be missing.  The sheep are being gathered by Jesus himself, but also by other shepherds the Lord chooses to associate with this work.

When Jesus saw the vast crowd responding to this work his heart was moved with pity.  What he does next, how he responds to this movement of pity is telling.  The Gospel says that the Lord began to teach them many things.  The Lord recognized that a deeper hunger and longing was drawing the crowds to respond.  The people are leaving their homes and their work to come and hear the good news because they ultimately hunger for more than physical food.  They hunger to know God, to know God’s love and to have salvation.  They hunger to know truth.

I want to make two applications from this brief gospel passage.  The Lord looks upon us with pity and compassion too.  The spirit of the world, the spirit of this age, is marked by confusion about truth.  In this sense, Pontius Pilate can serve as an example of the spirit of the world in his interrogation of Jesus before the crucifixion, when Pilate asks, “What is truth?”  Just as there is the story of the Good News, the world also has its own secular narrative.  Our modern means of communication help that narrative to be spread far and wide such that vast crowds accept the secular message.  To the degree that the world’s narrative is lacking truth, or even downright false, souls in our age can be scattered in exile like sheep without a shepherd.  But the Lord, the Good Shepherd, has pity on us.  And so, he desires to teach us.  He has established his Church and associated other shepherds with him so that we may be taught.

Thus, the first application of this Gospel is, we ourselves must be interested in being taught, so that we are fed with truth that comes from the Lord and is communicated in every age through his Church.  We let the Lord teach us when we listen to his Church and study saving doctrine.  We also let the Lord teach us when we take responsibility to study the Scriptures and the faith.  We don’t have to become scholars or academics, but we should put forth some effort to be informed of sacred teaching and truth.  To not study and know the teachings of Jesus will result in feeding on half-truths and lies, which leads to being shepherded more by the spirt of the world than by Jesus.

The second application is, we ourselves need to be willing to speak the truth to others.  In this way, we are like the apostles who are sent out to other sheep.  We have received saving teaching not only for ourselves, but to share.  We need to respond with pity and compassion to people’s deeper hunger by speaking the truth.  We should instruct our children properly and we should be willing to speak to others in our places of work, in social gatherings, in politics, and in encounters during our ordinary day.  This is not always easy, but it is our duty.  Our sharing of sacred teaching, of truth, may be rejected, but that does not absolve us from sharing first of all our living relationship with Jesus and the teaching that goes hand-in-hand with responding to the narrative of the Gospel.

We first need to have a living relationship with Jesus.  And we must be interested both in knowing the truth and in sharing it with others so that the vast crowds of our day, like sheep without a shepherd, may experience the love of God and be saved.

Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XIV per Annum B
7 July 2024

  Last weekend we had the great joy of celebrating the ordination and First Solemn Mass of Fr. Stephen Jones, a son of this parish.  He came home from seminary to his native place and gathered here with family and friends from his hometown…. And I’m just grateful that his First Mass wasn’t this weekend because this Gospel passage might have made things a bit awkward.  Jesus came to his native place.  The people took offense at him.  And he could not do many mighty works there.  We were privileged to see the signs of God’s work in a new priest, the third son of our parish ordained to the priesthood since 2017.  Thanks be to God and thank you for supporting Fr. Jones as he has prepared for this day!

 The selection of the first reading foreshadows and sets the theme of Jesus being rejected as a prophet.  In the first reading, Ezekiel is given the vocation to be a prophet.  He has the unenviable task of being sent to a people who will reject him and his message: “Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, rebels who have rebelled against me”.  Ezekiel was a priest in the Jerusalem temple and it was a time of great hardness of heart and grave sin, even among the priests of the temple.  Ezekiel had to be a prophet to these rebels warning of the coming destruction of the temple.  In this, we can understand a foreshadowing of the Lord.  He will come and he will be rejected by his own native place and by the religious leaders and authorities in Jerusalem, the same place that hears the warning from Ezekiel.

In the chapters leading up to Mark 6 Jesus has been on a steady march performing mighty signs and speaking words of wisdom.  It comes to a depressing halt in Mark 6 in today’s passage.  The power that disease, demons, and death could not stop, now is stopped by what we learn is a stronger obstacle: unbelief, lack of faith.  The Gospel passage tells us that Jesus’ hometown lacked faith and therefore “he was not able to perform any mighty deed there”.  “He was amazed at their lack of faith”.

We learn that faith is a critical doorway, an entry point for Jesus’ operation, his working within souls.  We know from other Gospel episodes involving miraculous healings that it seems the person’s faith was a critical factor in the miracle.  A sick person comes to the Lord, or a person comes to the Lord because of a dead loved one, and in several episodes Jesus performs the miracle but highlights “your faith has saved you”.

We should think carefully about this lesson.  Jesus is God.  God is all powerful.  The lesson we learn in this Gospel passage tells us something about the mysterious relationship, almost like a recipe, of the power of God to give grace and the necessary part the recipient plays in whether the gift of grace is received or not, or to what degree it is received.  We clearly do not understand the passage to mean that Jesus was unable to do a miracle or to do what he wanted.  He is God and he has the capacity, the ability to do all the things he did in other places before arriving home at Nazareth.  His inability to perform mighty deeds there is a reflection on the limitations placed by the lack of faith among those who gathered around him.  It is not a reflection on any supposed lack of ability on Jesus’ part.

Our faith and receptivity to Jesus’ action in our lives is a significant factor in whether he can work among us.  The disposition of the person the Lord encounters is a critical determining factor for the outcome of Jesus’ presence and action.  Now, none of us should leave here today wracked with shame or imagining that we are to blame when some miracle we wanted didn’t take place.  God always maintains sovereignty and the wisdom to give what is needed, no matter what we might wish He would do.  However, we should leave here today aware of the important relationship we are part of when it comes to whether we let God’s action have greater influence and outcomes in our life.  We need to train ourselves in trust of Jesus such that we seek to maintain a proper disposition and receptivity to God’s action.  Our faith and openness to God sets the stage for Him to do whatever He wills to do with us and in us.  I hope it doesn’t seem trite, but I think there is a helpful image to capture this mysterious relationship between God’s almighty power and our faith.  It’s an image that perhaps helps us understand the variables that seem to be present from disciple to disciple.  I don’t have props, so you’ll have to imagine a pitcher of water being poured constantly.  The pitcher is God and the water is an image of how He constantly gives forth His grace in generosity.  Now, imagine a cup, which represents the person.  When the cup is turned upright, it is in the best position to catch all that is being poured out.  But if you gradually start to turn the cup upside down it is less and less open to catch the water.  And, when upside down, the failure of the cup to have water is not at all because the pitcher has failed to pour forth.  That can serve to help us think about what variables we present to God who we trust generously gives His grace.  Are we like a cup turned upright?  In our lukewarmness and distraction with material things, do we start to turn ourselves away from Him as we perhaps let up on our prayer routine?  When we grow cold and distant or when there is grave sin, we have turned ourselves away from that posture that permits us the greatest openness to God’s life, love, and power.

 This Gospel invites us to recognize the important two-way relationship of the Lord’s grace and our receptivity that permits his action in us and among us.  We cannot so easily and frequently go to Nazareth, but in the Church we can go regularly to Jesus’ hometown, so to speak.  We come here to Holy Mass and we can accept the invitation to commit to time in the Lord’s “hometown” in our chapel where he waits to be adored.  There we come to look upon the ordinary-appearing Host, just like those in Nazareth looked upon the ordinary-appearing man whom they knew as a carpenter and the son of Mary.  At the same time, let’s not forget to let the Lord into our “hometown” too, figuratively, that is, into all the facts and the truth of our lives.  We should open ourselves to him in honest prayer, placing before him, and exposing to him all that seems right and all that seems wrong in us.  We do not keep from him the all-too-ordinary things of our lives, because we do not want to turn our cup upside down.  Rather, we open ourselves to him to await whatever he wants to do in us.