15th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Am 7:12-15
Second Reading: Eph 1:3-14
Gospel Reading: Mk 6:7-13
“What’s the point of it all?” someone asked me at a funeral.
The deceased was a dearly beloved wife whose husband of 54 years was now alone. “She was born, she fell in love, she married the man she loved, they had a family, and they never stopped loving each other. Now she’s gone, and anyone can see he won’t last long without her. What’s it all for?”
This Sunday’s Second Reading gives the answer. God “destined us for adoption to sonship as his own through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will.”
Moreover, “with all wisdom and insight God has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth.”
This is very poor consolation, you might think, to offer a bereaved husband. Nevertheless, it is the truth. For the Church to offer us anything less would be for her to deceive us, to cheat us of the “inheritance” we have “in Christ.”
God made us not for contentment, happiness, or fulfillment in this world, but for something much greater: so great that St. Paul said, quoting Isaiah, “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it so much as dawned on man what God has prepared for those who love him.”
If we think we have found what we want in this world, God in his mercy wakes us up by removing it. I say “in his mercy,” for, ultimately, we can depend on nothing but God, and we must realize that everything else will fail us in the end.
The world does not want to hear this. “Pie in the sky,” worldly people scoff when the Church proclaims its message; “we want our happiness here and now. Go away; do your teaching somewhere else; stay out of practical, worldly affairs.”
Just so did the priest of Bethel rebuke the prophet Amos in this Sunday’s First Reading: “O seer, go, flee away to the land of Judah, earn your bread there, and prophesy there; but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary.”
Like Amos, the Church replies that it is the Lord himself who told her to prophesy. Like St. Paul, she cries out, “I am under compulsion and have no choice. I am ruined if I do not preach it! If I do it willingly, I have my recompense; if unwillingly, I am nonetheless entrusted with a charge.”
Christ knew that not everyone would listen. “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them,” he said in the Gospel Reading.
In his discourse at the Last Supper, he said, “If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I am not the one to condemn him, for I did not come to condemn the world but to save it. Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words already has his judge, namely the word I have spoken – it is that which will condemn him on the last day.”
Christ does not ask us arbitrarily to accept one option out of a number of viable, alternative options; he offers us the only option that promises what we all yearn for: unending, unshakable, unbreakable, satisfying happiness. As we say in the Psalm, in his kingdom “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.”
We must trust him and trust his Church, for all he wants is our happiness – indeed, he made us for no other reason – and he knows perfectly what he is doing.