Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
June 05, 2016 5:00 pm · Father Jim Blantz
If you think about the world today there is so much sadness, tragedy, aggravation and sorrow and things like that. Do we add to it in any way whatsoever or do we try and change that and take away some of that tragedy and so on as we go thorough life. We have a good example today on how Christ handled things. He sees this widow, she's lost her only means of survival. She's a widow, he's her only son. He is dead. In those days the only occupation for a widow like this is prostitution or begging. Begging would normally last about a year and half. I lived in Bangladesh for a while and the average age of a widow was a year and half after the death of her husband, because people would stop giving after a year and a half. We see in India years ago, how the Hindu wife would jump of the burning body of her husband who had died, rather than face that starvation. She would commit that type of suicide.
We look at Christ, he sees the situation and it must have occurred to him that it wouldn't be very long before his mother would lose her only son and she would be a widow. So He's filled with compassion and he lifts that person up and gives back her son. We see other instances of this, where he changes the situation. The wedding feast at Cana, they run out of wine, the host is panicking, He takes care of it. We see a couple times in the Gospels, where the fishermen come in and they've caught nothing. He says to lower their nets on the other side of the boat there is fish over there, he helps them over their difficulty. How many times we see in the scripture, where they need to send the people away to go and buy food, where are we going to find so much food to feed of all of these people, He takes care of it, He multiplies the fish and the bread. He is constantly looking for ways to take people out of their stressful situation and make it easier. This is what we should be looking at. Do we really do that with the people we meet or do we bully people. We find people today who's sole purpose is to make life miserable for other people, hackers for example. In our life we should try and uplift the people and take away their stress.