Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
June 12, 2016 5:00 pm · Father Jim Blantz
As you know I feel the future of the Church depends on an educated laity, so you get another course tonight. We see the political parties today, divided, trying to get together in unity for the next election. But this is very similar, or perhaps maybe not quite as bad as the division within the early Catholic Church. The Jewish people wanted to keep Christ for themselves, they did not want Christ shared with the outsiders, the Romans and the Greeks. Christ was the only thing that the Jewish people had. They'd been conquered by the Romans, as the Romans had conquered the whole world at the time, they had to go with Roman law, they had to have soldiers, marshal law in the market place, they didn't have their own policemen, they had some Roman customs they had to follow and so on. There was some relaxation of the laws, but mostly they hated the Romans.
And now Christ was one thing they had that belonged to them and them alone. They were God's chosen people, for years God told them this Messiah, this Savior was going to come. For many of them their hope was the savior would save them from the Roman government. Even at the Last Supper we see one of the Apostles asking Jesus Christ is tonight the night we're going to overthrow the Roman government and be in charge. So we see that that was their idea of a savior, but they knew the savior was coming. The prophets told them that this guy was going to come. And they knew a little bit about him and they knew roughly when he was going to come. There was a window of about 200 years when there was peace in the world. By this time the Romans had conquered who they wanted to, nobody was in rebellion, there was peace. So, they were thinking the Messiah is coming. Whenever any holy person arose in Judaism, they ask, "Are you the Messiah"? They asked John the Baptist, he said, "No, one is coming after me that is greater than I". They asked Christ, "Are you he who is to come, or do we look for someone else?" But they constantly had this expectation that this Messiah was going to come.