12th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
1st Reading: Jb 38:1-4, 8-11
2nd Reading: 2 Cor 5:14-17
Gospel: Mk 4:35-41
Now that Christ has suffered and died for us, risen from the dead, ascended to his Father, and sent God’s Holy Spirit to remain with his Church always, “everything has become new,” St. Paul says in this Sunday’s Second Reading. Those “in Christ,” he says, “regard no one from a human point of view.”
That is something Mother Teresa knew. Her sisters, she said, “firmly believe that they are touching the Body of Christ in his distressing disguise whenever they are helping and touching the poor: feeding the hungry Christ, clothing the naked Christ, taking care of the sick Christ, and giving a home to the homeless Christ.”
“We are not social workers, not teachers, not nurses or doctors,” she said: “we are religious sisters. We serve Jesus in the poor. We nurse him, feed him, clothe him, visit him, comfort him in the poor, the abandoned, the sick, the orphans, the dying. All we do—our prayer, our work, our suffering—is for Jesus. Our life has no other reason or motivation.”
“I serve Jesus 24 hours a day,” she stressed. “Whatever I do is for him.”
“I love him in the poor and the poor in him,” she continued. “But always the Lord comes first. Whenever a visitor comes to our house, I take him to the chapel to pray for a while. I tell him, ‘Let us first greet the master of the house. Jesus is here.’”
Without Jesus, she said, “our life would be meaningless, incomprehensible. Jesus explains our life.”
Accused of “spoiling” the poor, she replied, “Almighty God is the first to spoil us. Does he not give freely to all of us? Then why should I not imitate my God and give freely to the poor what I have received freely?”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that at the beginning, God entrusted the earth to the “common stewardship” of humankind. Among fallen humans, private property is legitimate, but the universal destination of goods “remains primordial.” We must use our goods in moderation and communicate their benefits to others: first, our families, then the sick and the poor.
Everything we have, everything we are, everything there is, is God’s gift to us. It is not just people whom we must regard from God’s point of view; we should regard everything from his point of view.
For example, the First Reading stresses that the universe is God’s creation. The Gospel Reading reveals that it is still under his care.
“From the beginning of human existence,” Scott Hahn says in A Father Who Keeps His Promises, “the orders of nature and grace were meant to be married. But in our day they’ve been divorced.
“The wedding occurred at the dawn of history, with creation, as Genesis reveals. The seventh day, the holy Sabbath, was the sign of this nuptial covenant, marking the union of heaven and earth, God and man, male and female. The initial separation was triggered by Satan’s rebellion, the divorce by Adam’s sin.”
As the new Adam, Hahn says, Christ renewed this nuptial covenant, sealing the new covenant with the Church, his bride.
Accordingly, we have to see everything from God’s point of view. Creation is “the house that God built to be our temporal and temporary home, a place of pilgrimage where we come to know the Lord through his awesome creation as a loving Father, not just a wise Creator,” Hahn says. Human beings are “God’s children, not just his creatures,” living “in the beautiful palace that the King of kings made for his royal family.”
As God’s children, under his care in the home he built for us, we should raise our minds and hearts to him throughout the day: “Thank you, God”; “I’m sorry, God”; “Please, God!”; “Help, God!”; “All right, God”; “I love You, God”; and that line from the psalm: “Lord God, how great You are!”
A different homily by Father Hawkswell originally published June 15, 2015, appears in the June 14 B.C. Catholic.