Homily: 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle A
Ten
years ago, I had just completed my first six months as a priest. My pastor, Father Mike, thought it would be a
good idea for me to return to Guatemala (where I first studied Spanish) in
order to assess how I was doing in Spanish and to take some lessons that could
improve my Spanish. I loved my time in
Guatemala when I first visited and so, needless to say, I enthusiastically
supported this idea!
As
I arrived in Guatemala, I was feeling good about how I was doing in
Spanish. I knew that I was still
stumbling over a lot of words and in using the correct conjugations, but I
thought that I had improved a lot and I was confident that this trip would help
me move to the next level. The first
days that I spent with my teacher, however, revealed something different.
In
those first days, I spoke confidently with my teacher. Quickly, though, I became frustrated, as it
seemed like she was correcting almost every sentence I tried to say! By the end of the second day, I was so
frustrated that I stopped and said to her, “What language have I been speaking?
Obviously, it wasn’t Spanish!” She
calmly assured me that it was Spanish that I was trying to speak, but that, in
my effort to communicate without a strong capacity in the language, I had
developed some habits of speaking that were incorrect. She assured me that she could help correct
these habits over these next days.
By
the time that I left Guatemala I was still frustrated and way less confident in
my ability to speak Spanish. My teacher
had made me very self-conscious about how I was speaking and so, after I
returned to the parish, I found myself very hesitant to speak in Spanish. I felt dejected and for months following,
aware of all the ways I had been speaking incorrectly, I kept running into my
bad habits, instead of finding the correct new habits. This was a huge setback for me and I wasn’t
sure I could recover.
Finally,
around the beginning of Lent that year, something broke through. Without any particular change in my behavior,
something “switched” in my brain and I started using more of the correct words
and conjugations, instead of running into the barriers of my bad habits. It was like a new light started to shine in
the darkness that unlocked my capacity to engage in pastoral ministry in a more
effective way. I’m still far from
perfect, and some of my bad habits have likely crept back in, but I haven’t
felt unsure of my capability to correct myself since that breakthrough
occurred.
I
think that if any of us reflects on our lives, we will each find situations in
which we encountered some adversity that threatened our achievement or
prosperity, and which caused us to feel dejected or rejected in some way. A repair or renovation in your house that you
thought you could do yourself that you ended up calling a professional to
finish. A promotion at work that you
were sure you had earned, only to see it go to someone else. A test for which you thought you were
prepared that you ended up failing. Perhaps
what we also found, however, is that through humility and an acceptance of our
limitations we were able to unlock new levels of confidence and ability that
made us more resilient to future encounters with adversity, as if a new light
was shining into our lives.
In
today’s first reading, we heard the prophecy of Isaiah that a land that, at one
time, appeared to be rejected by God (the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali), would
now become favored by him. Isaiah
describes this change in the beautifully poetic words that we remember from our
celebration of Christmas: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great
light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone.” Of course, in the context of our Mass today,
Isaiah is anticipating the coming of Christ to those same lands—the area of
Galilee that we know so well from the Gospels—where he manifested himself as
the long-awaited Messiah, bringing a great light to those people and to people
of all time. Nevertheless, we can also
see how God is showing us how he teaches us: that he will often allow us to
suffer some sort of rejection in order to teach us humility and perseverance,
but then unlocks new opportunities for us that we couldn’t have realized had we
not first grown in resilience due to the adversity. In other words, God permits us to experience
the darkness of adversity so that we might experience greater joy and
confidence when his light breaks through that darkness to unlock new
opportunities for us.
Reflecting
on today’s Gospel, I wonder if Jesus “withdrew” to the land of Galilee because
he felt dejected by the arrest of John the Baptist. I wonder, then, if he hadn’t withdrawn, would
he have chosen Peter and Andrew, James and John, or would he have chosen others? We certainly can’t know for sure, but that
moment of adversity certainly moved Jesus in a new direction that unlocked for
him (and for his first disciples) new opportunities that he might not have had.
Perhaps
we have no better example for us than what we celebrate this weekend in our nation. For the past 49 years, men and women of good
will have marched in Washington D.C. to protest the legal protection of
abortion in this country. Throughout
these years, most of us felt that the darkness of abortion would never leave
us. Nonetheless, we persevered in faith
and humility and last year a great light shone into our darkness: the absolute
protection of abortion in this country was eliminated! From this light, new confidence and capacity
has been unlocked in us to do more and more to protect the lives of unborn
children and to help their mothers.
Without that time of darkness, I’m not sure if we’d be ready to do all
that is needed today.
My
brothers and sisters, these readings and what they reveal to us are a sign to
us of the great richness of the Word of God.
As we reflect this weekend on this great richness, let us give thanks to
God that he has made himself both knowable and known. Let us also give him thanks for the adversities
that we have experienced (and, perhaps, we are experiencing now) and for the
new light that he has brought into (or is bringing into) our lives through
them. Finally, having seen how,
throughout history, he has brought his faithful people through each adversity
into his glory, let us commit ourselves to trust God and to walk faithfully
with him each day as he leads us through this darkness into the fullness of his
light: the kingdom of heaven which, even now, is here, present among us.
Given in English and Spanish at Saint Paul Parish: Marion,
IN
January 21st, 2023
No comments:
Post a Comment