TWELFTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
19 JUNE 2016
In
Saint Luke’s Gospel, Jesus always spends time in prayer before an important
event. Emerging from prayer today, Jesus
reveals his identity. First he asks his
disciples the opinions of others. He
asks, not because he is curious, but because he wants his disciples to be aware
of the common expectations of those awaiting the Messianic Era: that he is John the Baptist or Elijah back
from the dead, or one of the ancient prophets.
When he asks directly who do they say that he is, Peter gives the
correct answer: “the Christ of
God.” Even though he correctly
identifies Jesus’ true identity, Jesus rebukes them and directs them not to
tell this to anyone.
Jesus has a
good reason for giving this directive. Having
established his identity, he now talks about his mission as the Christ. His mission is to give himself totally out of
love, a mission that even his disciples will not understand until after the
resurrection. His mission will include
suffering, rejection, and a humiliating and painful death on the Romans’
favorite means of execution. His mission
will have nothing to do with dominance or power or prestige. His mission goes against the grain of the
cultural norms of his time. His mission
is all about service, self-sacrifice, and a love that wills the good of the
other as the other (Saint Thomas Aquinas).
Then Jesus
tells his disciples that following him will involve sharing in this same
mission. Maybe they will not suffer the
horrors of a Roman execution – the dreaded cross. But they will share in a daily dying to self
if they follow him. They must go against
the grain of cultural expectations about what it means to love. That is what Saint Paul talks about when he writes
to the Galatians. He reminds them that
they obtained their truest identity in Christ when they were baptized. It does not matter whether they are Jew or
Greek, slave or free person, male or female.
They are one in sharing the identity of Christ. They are one in sharing his mission of dying
to self out of love for others.
Saint Paul
gives the same message to us. We are
united with one another through Baptism.
We emerged from the waters of Baptism clothed in Christ. It does not make any difference whether we
are men or women, young or old. It does
not matter what our skin color is or what our national origin may be. Neither does it matter whether we are single
or married, or what our vocation or occupation might be. We share in the mission of Jesus Christ: to
love as Christ has loved us, to will what is best for the other as the other.
Loving as
Christ loves us goes against the grain of our cultural norms and our fallen
human nature. We are always fighting
temptations to take care of “number one” and put our own needs and interests at
the center of everything. Many
temptations stand in the way of sharing in the mission of loving as Christ has
loved us. We are quick to judge and even
quicker to gossip about coworkers or fellow students. We are tempted to believe that possessions
can fill the voids of our lives. It is
so easy to ignore those things that last and pursue those things that satisfy
us and are gone too quickly.
On Father’s
Day, the Lord might be speaking directly to us who are fathers. He commends us for the sacrifices that we
already make for our families and encourages us to continue loving our families
as Christ has loved us. The Prophet
Zephaniah talks about the Lord pouring out on us a spirit of grace and
petition. He invites us to admit the
mistakes we have made as a way of accepting God’s mercy to change whatever
needs to be changed to make us loving Fathers.
In a spirit of humility, we can gently do the same with the members of
our families whom we love so much, inviting them to turn more firmly toward the
Lord and his mission of loving others as he has loved us.
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