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Homily:
30th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Cycle B
The priesthood is entered into when a man receives the
sacrament of Holy Orders, one of the seven sacraments of the Church. Holy Orders is one of the two sacraments
through which God pours out grace into the person in order to increase the
holiness of others. A priest receives
sacramental grace for the purpose of sanctifying—that is, making holy—God’s
faithful people. Holy Orders, therefore,
is a sacrament given by God for the whole spiritual family of the Church.
Because of their special role in the Church, priests have a
unique dignity: to stand in the person of Christ for the world. Thus, Saint John Paul II could say this about
the priest: "The world
looks to the priest, because it looks to Jesus! No one can see Christ; but everyone sees the
priest, and through him they wish to
catch a glimpse of the Lord!” And so it
stands to argue that the more we appreciate
and understand this gift to the Church, the more fully we will be able to
benefit from it. Our second reading
today, from the Letter to the Hebrews, points out three aspects of the
priesthood that can help us do exactly that.
The
first key aspect of the priesthood is that it is a vocation, not a career. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews tells
us: "No one takes this honor upon himself, but only when called by
God." Like the other sacraments,
Holy Orders is a gift from God. No one
takes a gift for himself; rather it is of the very nature of a gift that it is
received. Therefore, no one has a
“right” to the priesthood: it is a gift from God to the man who is called to it
and to the Church.
The second key point about the priesthood concerns what the
priest is called to do. A priest is a
servant: he serves God and he serves God's people. The second reading tells us that a priest is
"taken from among men and made their representative before God, to offer
gifts and sacrifices” to God on behalf of the community of believers. Thus, the priest is ordained to be a servant:
a servant of God on behalf of God's people, and a servant of God's people on
behalf of God.
The third key aspect of the priesthood is that every
Catholic priest is a normal human being.
A young man is not called to the priesthood because he is superior to
others or because his is some kind of spiritual superman. And once he is ordained, it is no guarantee
that he will suddenly become either. The
second reading points out that a priest "...is able to deal patiently with
the ignorant and erring, for he himself is beset by weakness..." Priests are normal human beings: ordinary men
with an extraordinary calling.
Having described these aspects of the priesthood, I would
like to share with you an incident that happened recently in my own life that
illustrates these aspects well, especially because they connect well with
today’s Gospel reading. Last Sunday I
was asked to lead the Youth Group in making a renewal of baptismal promises at
the end of their session. It had been a
long day with a lot of demands for my time and attention, but I was happy to do
this for them. That evening, I didn’t
have much time to prepare everything so I hurriedly began making preparations. Just then, a parishioner walked into the
sacristy and asked if I had time to answer a short question. As I mentioned, I was a little tired and was
very focused on getting everything ready and so I retorted rather curtly: “I’m
busy right now, can it wait?” Realizing
that I had been rude, I tried to make up for it by allowing her to ask her
question, even while I continued to prepare, to which I responded with what I
felt was the bare minimum that would satisfy her question so that I could focus
on finishing my preparations. The look
on her face indicated that she was upset by my manner of response, but she
accepted it and left me to finish my work.
In the Gospel, the blind man, Bartimaeus, wanted to be
cured of his blindness and he had faith, because of what he had heard about
Jesus, that Jesus could heal him. Thus,
when Jesus came by, Bartimaeus cried out to him: begging for his mercy. Surely, Jesus was focused on where he was
going and what he was going to do (for he was going to Jerusalem to be
crucified). Nonetheless he stopped, gave
Bartimaeus permission to make his request, and then he responded. Bartimaeus was so edified by this experience
that he continued to follow Jesus instead of returning home.
The parishioner in my incident came looking for Jesus—who
she knows to look for in the priest—and she needed him to be a servant, like
Jesus, and to say “What do you want me to do for you?” What she found, however, was a weak human
being, who failed to live up to his calling at that moment. Thus, instead of being edified (and, perhaps,
strengthened in faith to follow Jesus more closely), she went away seemingly
upset and disappointed.
So, why all of this?
Well, because I think that it gives us a good example of the basic
workings of the spiritual life. By using
the example of my life and vocation, I hope to illustrate how each of us can
grow and strengthen our own spiritual lives.
First, we discussed the priesthood and the sacrament of Holy
Orders. This demonstrates that, before
anything else, we have to know who we are, what our calling is, and acknowledge
the grace we receive from God to live it.
Next, we discussed an incident in my life that correlated to a passage
from the Gospel and we compared how my actions, given my vocation, lived up to
the model that Jesus gave us. This
demonstrates how we have to examine our lives, in the light of Sacred
Scripture, to determine how well we are fulfilling God’s call and utilizing the
grace that God has given us. Finally, we
must respond to the results of our reflection.
If we’ve found that we’ve failed to live up to our vocation, then we
must repent, seek forgiveness (both of God and the person we’ve offended), and
re-commit ourselves to living like Christ in the state of life to which he has
called us. If we found that we did live
up to our vocation, then we must praise God for his grace and redouble our
efforts to remain faithful to this grace.
My brothers and sisters, there is no one way to do
discipleship. A person first has to seek
to hear and understand God’s call, then respond when he calls, and then
constantly reflect on and readjust how we are responding as we strive to follow
and to serve him. /// My prayer for us today is that we would all strive to be
Christ-like in the way we live our vocations, so that every Bartimaeus that we
encounter will have his or her eyes opened to see in us the love and mercy that
we have found in Jesus: the love and mercy that we will
encounter once again, here in this Eucharist.
Given at All Saints Parish:
Logansport, IN – October 24th & 25th, 2015
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