2024/06/09 SCRIPTURE REFLECTION
Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
- Fr. Matt Litak, Assoc. Pastor & Dir. of Formation
All of Scripture is in some ways an attempt to undo the first effects of this Sunday’s first reading. In that reading we get a glimpse into original sin, into the typifying action of sin. The sense that God is a rival, that God doesn’t want our happiness, that He is hiding something from us. And we toss aside everything we have with Him and ‘bite the fruit’ as it were. We choose to become arbiters of right and wrong apart from God. We choose to try and make ourselves happy and in the end we end up harming our relationship with God, others, ourselves, and all of creation.
In sharp contrast with that is the way of Jesus shown in the Gospel. It is so radically different from our own ways, that people think he is crazy. Jesus is the culmination of the law and the Old Testament. The Old Covenant was in many ways the story of God taking or preserving the good in contrast with the majority—with the broken world, so that the good could be both magnet and leaven for the world to draw all of us back into right relationship with Him, one another, and ourselves. Thus, we get the diet and clothing laws, setting the Israelites apart from their neighbors. The “an eye for an eye” of the old Law was a moderation of the world’s ‘if you hurt me I’ll take your life.’ Even the monotheistic and exclusionary drumbeat of the Old Testament would have been a departure from the polytheistic multi-truths of the world around them. The people of God were to be radically different from the rest of the world to transform it.
Jesus ratchets it up a notch further moving from the justice of the Old Testament to the mercy and love that He came to proclaim. Now was the time for full communion and entry into God’s life. Even the idea of family would be changed and transformed. My clan, my tribe, would no longer suffice. Jesus’ family would be those who do the will of God. His family would be multi-ethnic, multilingual, open to all. It would be ‘catholic’ that is universal. As Pope Francis said in an interview, the church is for everyone, needs to be open to everyone. We ALL could become part of God’s family. But, we’d have to give up the ‘fruit’ and isolation of our own ways. We have to do God’s work, and it means taking up crosses, making sacrifices, in order to love.
It has been my privilege for the last four years to experience God’s family in this parish. To be Christian is to be different. Parishioner literally means “sojourner, outsider” in Greek. The Christian is meant to be generous rather than to be someone seeking to acquire wealth upon wealth, to be chaste rather than unmitigated in carnal appetite. The Christian is to be kind and merciful rather than hateful, to be meek rather than proud. The Christian cares for the poor and marginalized, the afflicted and the fellow outsider. We are to be God-centered rather than self-centered, to be vulnerable and willing to risk to share our stories than to be guarded and to lock others out. Friday Hospitality, LCPS dinners, Madonna House, Love Your Neighbor, Men’s Communio, Alpha, RCIA, Following Jesus, Ever Wonder, Clement Couples, YAC small groups, etc. etc.; Clement is rich in opportunities and expressions of the Christian life. Because it has people willing to step up and be different. It is an expression of the family of God. Go to the Chapel some 9:30 Mass and see that. Go to the courtyard on a Wednesday in June and see that. Or on the plaza after Mass. I have and am better for it. I am different because I have. As I leave, I can only hope to bring a little with me. But, as I go I know it’s going to be ok, because God has undone/is undoing our sin, and has made and keeps us family wherever we sojourn.