Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 49:3, 5–6
Second Reading: 1 Cor 1:1–3
Gospel Reading: Jn 1:29–34

This Sunday’s readings seem to continue the theme of the Epiphany: God’s “manifestation” to humans.

For example, John the Baptist came baptizing with water that God “might be revealed to Israel,” God’s chosen people.

However, although God chose Israel from all the nations and loved her, he did so “precisely with a view to healing the whole human race,” said Pope Benedict XVI.

“It is too small a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel,” God told Isaiah. “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

Accordingly, St. Paul, “called to be an apostle” of Jesus, addressed “all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”—both Jews and Gentiles.

Nevertheless, we must never forget that it is through the Jews that God has been manifested to humans and humans reconciled to God.

In his Letter to the Romans, Paul compared the Gentiles to branches of a wild olive tree that have been grafted on to the tree cultivated by God, namely Israel. “If the root is consecrated, so too are the branches,” he said, but “remember that you do not support the root; the root supports you.”

The Church cannot “forget that it draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree on to which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles,” said Vatican II.

“Spiritually, we are all Semites,” said Pope Pius XI. When Pope St. John Paul II visited a Jewish synagogue in Rome, he called the Jews “our elder brothers in the faith.”

Yes, it is thanks to the Jews that we Gentiles have come to recognize and know God.

However, we all manifest God to each other, all the time.

In fact, we who have been baptized have become members of Christ’s Mystical Body, as St. Paul says; we are his hands, feet, and tongue in his continuing manifestation of himself to the world.

Therefore, we can really help, or really hinder, others in their journey to heaven. St. Therese of Lisieux said that even picking up a pin off the floor, provided it is done for the love of God, can save a soul.

However, the corollary is that even a fleeting lack of charity on our part, a momentary impatience, can help someone to lose his soul.

The privilege of being a member of Christ’s Body—of living for all eternity the perfectly happy life God lives in the Trinity—will cost us all we have and all we are. We may ask God to leave us alone, to let us be happy in our own way, to let us remain “private citizens,” so to speak, but that is not God’s way. He loves us more than that. He wants more for us than that. As St. Paul says, we are “called to be saints.”

“The dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship,” says C.S. Lewis, “or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.” All day long “we are, in some degree, helping each other to one of these destinations.”

“It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities … that we should conduct all our dealings with one another,” he says: “all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics … It is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

Therefore, he says, “our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays (2–4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver) and Mondays (10 a.m.–noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver). The title of next week’s talk is Baptism and Confirmation.

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