16th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Gn 18:1–10a
Second Reading: Col 1:24–28
Gospel Reading: Lk 10:38–42
Ora et labora (“pray and work”), a Benedictine motto, encapsulates the theme of this Sunday’s readings.
In the Second Reading, St. Paul describes his work of spreading the Gospel. Except for the fact that it was done “according to God’s commission,” this is work as we understand it in the West today: long working days, numerous journeys, organization, teamwork.
In the West, we are brought up to believe that this is what work is. Taking time out to rest is seen as laziness or lack of ambition.
However, in this Sunday’s First Reading, Abraham begs the strangers to rest themselves before they pass on. In the Gospel Reading, Jesus rebukes Martha not because she is working, but because she wants Mary to stop listening to Jesus in order to help her. “Mary has chosen the better part,” he says.
Remember that God made us “to know him, love him, and serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.” Remember that God identified himself to Moses as “I am,” not “I do.” In one of the psalms, he says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”
According to St. Mark, Jesus chose 12 of his disciples to be not only preachers of the good news, but also “his companions.” When, after being sent out to work, they returned to him and reported “all that they had done,” Jesus said, “Come by yourselves to an out-of-the-way place and rest a little.”
He gave the same invitation to everyone: “Come to me, all you who are weary and find this world burdensome, and I will refresh you … Your souls will find rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.”
When we love someone, we want to be with them. Indeed, a young couple who have just fallen in love want nothing else; they do not care what they do as long as they are together.
The purpose for which we were made was to be with God, and therefore it must be the aim of our whole life. God is within us and around us all the time, of course, but as long as we are too concerned with doing things, we can easily ignore him. We must deliberately set time aside simply to be with him.
Work has been blessed by God. It represents our co-operation with God the Creator. God’s only Son worked as a carpenter. His legal father, Joseph, is the patron saint of workers; we celebrate the feast of St. Joseph the Worker on May 1.
However, the purpose of work is to accomplish something; then the work ceases. When we stop doing, we go on being what we have become.
I remember someone saying to me, “I’m a human being, not a human doing.” It is because the world regards people as human “doings” rather than “beings” that it kills the unborn and the elderly. To the world, “contributing” means “working,” and nothing more.
Someone in Agatha Christie’s Towards Zero tries to commit suicide, but is rescued. Afterward, he tells one of the nurses that he has the right to do what he wants with his own life. “No, you haven’t,” she replies seriously. “God may need you … It may be just by being somewhere, not doing anything.” The rest of the story shows how true that is.
Men and women join contemplative religious orders not to do something, but simply to spend their lives being with God. However, the rest of us need frequent reminders that that, ultimately, is the goal for all of us.
In fact, God commands us to rest. “Remember to keep holy the sabbath day,” he said. “Six days you may labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord, your God. No work may be done then.”
How many of us obey?
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English for the summer. The whole course will remain available in written form and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course until it starts again, with new insights, on Sept. 7.
As there was no July 7 B.C. Catholic, Father Hawkswell’s homily for that Sunday is published here.
Commandments: Directions for Life and Love
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Dt 30:10–14
Second Reading: Col 1:15–20
Gospel Reading: Lk 10:25–37
Most of the Ten Commandments start with “thou shalt not.” However, in this Sunday’s First Reading, Moses sums them up positively (“Turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul”), and so does the lawyer in the Gospel Reading (“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself”).
Speaking of my 36-week course The Catholic Faith in Plain English, a man said, “Of course, you start with the commandments, right?”
“No,” I replied. “We don’t mention them until Session 24. Until then, we focus on what God promises us.”
On December 8, 2005, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady and the 40th anniversary of the close of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Benedict XVI spoke on the commandments.
“It was foretold that the struggle between humanity and the serpent (that is, between man and the forces of evil and death) would continue throughout history,” he said.
The story of Adam and Eve, he noted, is our own: we do not “trust God.” Tempted by Satan, we “harbour the suspicion” that we will be “fully human” only when we have cast him aside; that a person who does not sin is “basically boring”; that “the freedom to say no, to descend into the shadows of sin,” is part of being truly human; that only in sin can we make the most of all the vastness and depth of our being men and women, of being truly ourselves; and that we should put our freedom to the test, even in opposition to God, in order to become, in reality, “fully ourselves.”
Accordingly, we see God as a rival who curtails our freedom. We do not want to be dependent on him for existence and the fullness of life; we want to raise ourselves to God’s level and to overcome death and darkness by our own efforts.
“Rather than on love,” we set our sights on the power to take our own lives in hand “autonomously,” the Pope said. However, “in doing so,” we trust “in deceit rather than in truth” and sink “into emptiness, into death.”
On the contrary, he said, the truth about human beings is that we are finite, or limited, and therefore our freedom is limited. To live fully, we must “live in accordance with the truth of our being.”
“At the heart of the divine act of creation is the divine desire to make room for created persons in the communion of the uncreated persons” of the Holy Trinity, said the International Theological Commission; and the nature of that communion is perfect, self-giving love.
Love, therefore, is not dependence, but a gift that makes us live. If we live in opposition to love, we live against the truth of our being, and we find not life, but death.
“The person who abandons himself totally in God’s hands does not become God’s puppet, a boring ‘yes man,’” said Pope Benedict. “He does not lose his freedom.”
In fact, “only the person who entrusts himself totally to God finds true freedom, the great, creative immensity of the freedom of good. Those who turn to God become not smaller but greater, for through God and with God we become great; we become divine; we become truly ourselves.”
God’s commandments are not constraints on our humanity, therefore, but directions for living as free beings in his image.
In this Sunday’s Second Reading, St. Paul says that “all things in heaven and on earth” have been created through Christ and for him. “Look for yourself,” says C.S. Lewis, “and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay; but look for Christ and you will find him, and with him everything else thrown in.”
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