3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 9:1-4
Second Reading: 1 Cor 1:10-13, 17-18
Gospel Reading: Mt 4:12-23
The Church’s Jubilee Year of Hope has ended, but Christian hope has not.
Unfortunately, Catholics have almost ceased to notice that Christian hope “ensues from a real encounter” with God, said Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Spe Salvi (“Saved by Hope”).
Non-Christians try to comfort themselves at funerals with empty promises like, “He’ll never be dead, for we will always remember him.”
A man dying of AIDS told a pastoral worker that he had “no hope.” He burst into tears, sobbing like a child, and cried out, “Tell me how I can have hope!”
In contrast, Christians know that “they have a future,” the Pope said: they do not know “the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness.”
This Sunday’s readings tell us that when God became Man, “the people who walked in darkness” saw “a great light”; “the yoke of their burden” and “the rod of their oppressor” were broken; “anguish and gloom” were replaced by hope.
Jesus “knows even the path that passes through the valley of death,” the Pope said; he walks with us “even on the path of final solitude,” where no one else can accompany us.
“He himself has walked this path, He has descended into the kingdom of death, He has conquered death, and he has returned to accompany us now and to give us the certainty that, together with him, we can find a way through.”
“This was the new hope that arose over the life of believers” when God became Man, he said.
According to the Christian faith, our salvation is not simply a given. In the Second Reading, St. Paul speaks not of “us who have been saved,” but of “us who are being saved.”
No; “redemption is offered to us in the sense that we have been given hope, trustworthy hope, by virtue of which we can face our present,” the Pope said.
Without such hope, life is unbearable, he said. With such hope, we can face poverty, persecution, and even death. “The present, even if it is arduous, can be lived and accepted if it leads toward a goal, if we can be sure of this goal, and if this goal is great enough to justify the effort of the journey.”
Humans have a profound need for hope, as that AIDS patient realized. “We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day,” the Pope said, “but these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain.”
Humans need “unconditional love,” he said. We need “the certainty” which makes us say, with St. Paul, that nothing whatever “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
“If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then—only then—is man redeemed, whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances,” the Pope said. “This is what it means to say [that] Jesus Christ has redeemed us. Through him we have become certain of God, a God who is not a remote first cause of the world, because his only begotten Son has become Man, and of Him everyone can say: ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’”
“In this sense,” the Pope said, “it is true that anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life. Man’s great, true hope, which holds firm in spite of all disappointments, can only be God—God who has loved us and who continues to love us to the end.”
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 Mass: Sacrament and Sacrifice.
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