Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
July 11, 2021 11:00 am · Sergio Muñoz Fita
Today we continue the series of homilies called "Sign of Contradiction". Last week we saw how rejection begins with the Lord Jesus and his Gospel. Two weeks ago, Christ was rejected by foreigners who begged him to leave their country. Last week, it was his own neighbors and acquaintances who despised him. In Luke's gospel account, it says that they took him out of Nazareth to throw him off of a cliff. (Lk 4:16-30) We know that this did not happen only in his own city. Jesus weeps for Jerusalem because the Holy City has rejected the salvation he announced to them. We also remember his words to Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum for their rejection of his preaching and lack of repentance for their sins. (Mt 11:21-24) The Lord’s entire life is marked by his condition of being a "sign of contradiction": from the first day of his life when he is rejected by his people and must flee to Egypt, to the end of his life on earth, when following rejection by the priests, scribes and Pharisees, he hears the voices of his own people crying out: "His blood be upon us and upon our children." (Mt 27:25) The Jews reject him, choose Barabbas and the Lord is tortured to death on the cross.
The Lord explained the reason for the world's hatred of his person and his message in his conversation with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel of John when he exclaimed: "Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed." (Jn 3:18-20)
"People preferred darkness to light." It is really that simple. The Word of Jesus is light. The love of the Lord is light. The world hates light. The verb hate used by the Lord in the Gospel of John on several occasions expresses the intensity of the world's rejection of Jesus Christ. It is not simple scorn or disparaging contempt, it is hatred that leads to the desire to take the life of the other. Hatred of Christ includes those who make themselves one with him in today's world.
This is what today's Gospel speaks to us about: the rejection of the Lord's disciples. Jesus warns them that they will not be received in many places, that they too will be rejected, and so he tells them, " Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, leave there and shake the dust off your feet in testimony against them.” This Sunday, Christ sends his apostles, and as he will say later during the Last Supper, “If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own; but because you do not belong to the world, and I have chosen you out of the world, the world hates you (…) ‘No slave is greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” (Jn 15:18-20)
The disciple who has been united to Christ in baptism participates in the very life of Jesus. To the extent that we are transformed in the Lord, we become light. Love makes us light. Our word, when it repeats the teaching of Christ and his Church, is light. Our whole life is transformed into light... and the world cannot love light because the world can only love what is like itself, and that is darkness.
Are we really aware of what the Lord is telling us here? I remember some words that I read in the seminary written by St. Ignatius of Antioch to the Church of Magnesia before he was martyred. These words impressed me so much that I have never been able to forget them: “if we are not in readiness to die into His passion, His life is not in us” (Epistle to the Magnesians Ch V:1)
Dear brothers and sisters, are we willing to be hated for our fidelity to Christ and to the Church? To be persecuted like the Lord? To be the object of mockery, scorn, rejection and derision? Are we not all called to be witnesses and apostles in our families, in our work and in our communities? That is why the Lord's words in today's Gospel are also a warning. You cannot be a half-hearted disciple, nor can you claim glory without walking the same path of rejection and hatred by the world that the Lord walked. Yes, to be his disciple is also to be hated by the world. Our response to that hatred can only be love and forgiveness, courage and fidelity to the teaching of Christ and of the Church, which shines more beautifully the more it is fought against.
So that the Lord may dispose us to this inner state of love for Him to the very end, let us conclude today with the two prayers I spoke to you about last week:
“In order to imitate and be more actually like Christ our Lord, I want and choose poverty with Christ poor rather than riches, opprobrium with Christ replete with it rather than honors; and to desire to be rated as worthless and a fool for Christ, Who first was held as such, rather than wise or prudent in this world.” (Saint Ignatius of Loyola)
“May the fiery and honey-sweet power of your love, O Lord, wean me from all things under heaven, so that I may die for love of your love, who deigned to die for love of my love.” (Saint Francis of Assisi).