Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
June 26, 2016 9:00 am · Sergio Muñoz Fita
Today's Gospel reading brings to a critical point in Saint Luke's Gospel. St. Luke tells us at this point in his Gospel, that Jesus turned his face toward Jerusalem. From this point on in Luke, everything that Jesus said or did took place while He was on His way to Jerusalem. This part of Luke's Gospel is referred to as the journey narrative. When Jesus decided to go to Jerusalem, He knew what was ahead of Him. None the less He started his journey with courage and determination. He warns those who would follow Him, that following Him would require sacrifice and there wasn't time for second thoughts or to be indecisive.
The Gospels have one objective, to lead us to Christ. Christ has one objective, to lead us to God His Father. And God has one objective, to bring us to eternal happiness. Today's Gospel in it's desire to lead us to Christ, does not picture Christ as an easy going, do whatever you want, you are going to get to heaven anyway kind of person. Jesus is the most loving person who ever lived, at the same time when it comes to eternal life, He is a non-wishy washy ambivalent person. Some people might even consider his words hard. Let us consider some of these hard sayings. We hear of first of all, about an encounter with the Samaritans. Most of us probably think that Samaritans are or were nice people because of the Parable of the Good Samaritan. But there was animosity between the Jews and the Samaritans, a Jew could risk his life traveling through Samaria. And as we see in today's Gospel, Jesus is prudently sending messengers ahead of Him to see if particular town would receive Him. They wouldn't. James and John were all for calling down destruction on that town. Not only did they want bad to happen those people, they wanted to be involved. They asked Jesus to call down fire from heaven upon them. Our Lord rebuked them and moved on. Jesus did not come to condemn, but to save.