Thursday, September 9, 2010

Twenty Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Link to Mass Readings: http://www.usccb.org/nab/082910.shtml

Welcome home.

The Church is our home. God, in His goodness, has made a home for his poor. The psalm mentions orphans, and widows, the forsaken and the prisoners, and it literally means that for each of these God has made a home; but we should not fail to recognize ourselves among them. We are all needy, and have all come to be healed.

The readings today warn against the pride that comes from forgetting that. Yes, in the words of St. Paul we have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, in becoming part of His body. And we celebrate with the angels every Sunday a mystery which still awes us two millennium after it happened. But sometimes we become too familiar with what we have been given. We assume that we are wiser in God than our brothers and sisters, or pride ourselves in the extremity of our devotion. Or in studying the Scripture we become fixed on the meanings we have divined and close our ears to anything else. It happens.

But it does not matter how much we have to give, if we do not have the spirit in which to give it. Jesus cautions us to cultivate a humility beginning with smallness. It is sometimes hard to hear the words “What is too sublime for you, seek not,/ into things beyond your strength search not.” We, especially as Americans, grow up thinking that everything is within our reach if we want it and work for it. But Christianity is not like that. Everything begins in faith where one has nothing, not even the certainty of God. In faith, we grow depending on the wisdom God plants in us, and grow more strongly when we work less and listen more.

It is not an insult for us to be told not to seek into things beyond our strength. It is a waiting, where the victory we have won expands within us, and we rejoice in the Lord not because we are saved, but because He is God. It is not easy; it takes a long time to change our hearts. But God calls to the Holy Spirit inside us steadily and unceasingly, like waves on a shore.

In humility, we are always the needy ones. We take the lowest place because others merit it more. When Jesus enjoins us to throw a banquet and invite “the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind,” we can do so because even in our abundance we recognize our poverty before God, and recognize the blessedness within the poor of our world.

Some of those called last shall be first, and those called first shall be last. In humility we recognize what we lack, and wait in our soul for God to make up what is lacking. In our poor humility, we share our abundance of food, knowledge, wisdom, and strength, knowing how little it is. But we do so with joy because of the God who became poor with us, whose blood upon the cross teaches us how to walk humbly with God more eloquently than ten thousand words.

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