6th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Jer 17:5-8
Second Reading: 1 Cor 15:12,16-20
Gospel Reading: Lk 6:17,20-26
How often we wish that “being Catholic” meant simply living “normally” except for going to Mass on Sunday!
This Sunday’s readings show that following Christ is quite different. Catholics have a radically different view of things.
At this time of the year, our thoughts turn to RRSPs, pensions, and income tax, but God says, “Cursed are they who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength … Blessed are those who trust in the Lord.”
Even when we do turn to God for help, we tend to ask for the things we need in this world. However, St. Paul says that “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
Finally, Jesus turns the whole “normal” world upside down when he says that the poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, the excluded, the reviled, and the defamed are actually the ones who are enjoying God’s favour.
The key to these paradoxes is the fact that death, which looks like the end of everything, simply removes the veil from our real life, our supernatural life, already begun here on earth.
Death is not the end. God “gave his only son, that all who believe in him might not perish, but might have eternal life.” Christ, who “has been raised from the dead,” is “the first fruits of those who have died”; we too will rise again.
We are going to live forever. Once we realize that, we no longer spend our last few years or decades in fear. Instead, we evaluate things differently, making decisions the world cannot understand.
For example, we realize that it is better for a child to be born and to grow in the love and knowledge of God, rather than being killed in its mother’s womb on the grounds that it was not wanted.
We realize that it is better for us to live out our time on earth instead of committing suicide, even if it means suffering, because suffering is a necessary part of our pilgrimage on earth, just as it was for Christ.
We realize that what seems unimportant in this world might be of overwhelming importance in our real life, and vice versa. We know that perfect, unending happiness is worth a few years of discomfort now.
We know that God is in control. Christ has already conquered the world, as he said the night before he was crucified. In the war between good and evil we are on the winning side: we are “more than conquerors in him who has loved us.”
God has won a decisive victory, but we on earth are still fighting a “rearguard” action. In that fight, we are still tempted – like the ancient Israelites – to rely on human strength and reduce God to a sort of “backup.”
In his 1986 encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem, Pope St. John Paul II called this reliance resistance to the Holy Spirit.
It surfaces in both theoretical and practical materialism, he said. “In principle and in fact, materialism radically excludes the presence and action of God, who is Spirit, in the world and, above all, in man.”
Materialism “means the acceptance of death as the definitive end of human existence,” he said. If we wish to live by the Spirit, we must reject the “claims of the flesh.”
He pointed out that “the signs and symptoms of death have become particularly present and frequent,” citing the arms race, poverty, famine, abortion, euthanasia, wars, and terrorism.
Nevertheless, he said, “there remains the Christian certainty that the Spirit blows where he wills” and that we already possess his “first fruits.”
Even though “we groan inwardly” as we wait for “the redemption of our bodies,” he said, we do so “in an expectation filled with unflagging hope,” because it is precisely this fallen human being “that God has drawn near to, God who is Spirit.”
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-19 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 20, “Matrimony,” will be available in YouTube form starting Feb. 13.