The Ministry of Hope
by Fr. David M. Knight
July 6, 2024:
Fourteenth Sunday of the Year
Lectionary 101
Ez 2:2-5/2 Cor 12:7-10/Mk 6:1-6a
Inventory
The Entrance Antiphon celebrates God’s “loving kindness” — because of which God’s “praise reaches to the ends of the earth.”
What do you praise God for the most? What do you hope to receive from God’s kindness? Is it just some ordinary human benefit or is it a mystery that makes God’s “praise reach to the ends of the earth”?
Input
The Opening Prayer(s) proclaim that God has “raised a fallen world” and that “his rising gives birth to new life.” This is a mystery. We ask God to do more than “free us from sin” and bring us back to the “par” of normal human goodness that we lost by sin. We pray, “Make us one with you always” so that our “joy may be holy” and our “love may give life.” Life and joy beyond imagining. That “last forever.”
It is from this perspective that the Responsorial Psalm declares “Our eyes are fixed on the Lord, pleading for his mercy.” The key word in Psalm 123 is “eyes,” repeated three times, emphasizing expectation. The readings call us to look to God with hope, to look for more than what is normal in this world. We hope for “the fullness of life” (Prayer after Communion) and “joy that lasts forever” in the mystical union of one shared life with God.
Unparalleled promise
In Ezekiel 2:-5 God sends the priest Ezekiel to speak to the people of Israel exiled in Babylon. But he calls them “a nation of rebels” who may “hear or refuse to hear.”
Why would they not listen, especially since they had already brought misery on themselves by refusing to follow the way of life God showed them? But then, why do we not reflect on God’s words night and day to live by them? Why do we as individuals and as a nation look for happiness in money and destructive pleasures, trusting in force and violence for security? Why do we still see religion as restrictive of life rather than as “life to the full”? Why do we keep sinning as stupidly as the Israelites?
For some reason, we don’t respond to “not-not” — to God saying, “If you will not sin, you will not ruin your lives.” Something within us won’t settle for just not suffering pain. We want “life to the full,” and if we are not finding it in bounds, we will look for it out of bounds.
So God gives us more than the absence of calamity to hope for. He promises a fulfillment we cannot even imagine. After ten chapters of describing ruin, Ezekiel proclaims:
Thus says the Lord GOD: I will gather you... and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered…. I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean…. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you….
I am going to... bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live!
Ezekiel is describing in preview, and without knowing it, the “grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” the “favor of sharing in the divine life of God.” God does not just offer us a pleasant, pain-free human existence. He offers us life and love on the level of God — literally a passion of happiness worth dying for.
Christian ministry does not consist in exhorting people to good behavior. To minister is to hold up hope for something “far more than all we can ask or imagine.” Paul’s prayer for those to whom he ministered was:
that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…. the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power [which] God put to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead….
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. lxvii
This is the goal, the focus and the preoccupation of Christian ministry: “life to the full” through love to the full! “Our eyes are fixed on the Lord, pleading for mercy” without bounds.
Unbelievable indifference
In Mark 6:1-6 Jesus is rejected by the people of his home town because they could not break out of the narrow dimensions of their daily experience. Even though they heard him speak with their own ears and saw with their own eyes that he “cured a few sick people by laying his hands on them,” they could not believe the hometown boy they had grown up with could be great beyond their comprehension. They just said, “Where did the man get all this? What is this wisdom granted to him, and these miracles that are worked through him?” And they would not accept him.
Before we judge too harshly, we should check to see whether familiarity is breeding contempt in our own thinking about our religion. We grew up with Jesus too: taking for granted his presence in our churches, his words read to us in Scripture, his actions visible in the sacraments. We were taught that we share in his divine life, and that the infinite Spirit of God dwells in our hearts; that God is not just our Creator, but — because we have “become Christ” through Baptism — we are true children of the Father and heirs of the kingdom of heaven. We proclaim in every Eucharist that we are “nourished by his Body and Blood.”
Does this impress us?
Is the word of God so commonplace to us that we don’t bother to read it? When we hear others’ thoughts on Scripture or experiences in dealing with God, do we just say, “Where did they get all this?” Or do we believe in the source and try to find what they found?
Every Sunday (every day, if we like) we can be present and unite ourselves to Jesus Christ offering himself for the life of the world. Has the Mass become so commonplace to us that we don’t see any value in it? When he offers himself in our home town, our home parish, do we even bother to be there?
At every celebration of the Eucharist Jesus Christ, God himself, gives himself to us physically with overwhelming personal love. He gives himself as the Bread of Life, promising us the gift of eternal life. Are we so used to this that we hardly even think of what is happening when we receive Communion?
When the people Jesus grew up with did not accept him, Jesus “was amazed at their unbelief.” But we see ourselves and each other not appreciating the religion we grew up with, and it doesn’t amaze us at all!
Why are we blind to the “breadth and length and height and depth” of God’s gift to us? Why can’t we recognize mystery? Are we so imprisoned in the petty dimensions of our lives that we cannot imagine anything outside of them? Does our spirit have such a short range that we cannot look farther than the next MacDonald’s sign or raise our eyes higher than a scoreboard? What is the matter with us that we do not appreciate God? Why are “our eyes” not constantly “fixed on the Lord, pleading for mercy” without bounds?
Now I see
St. Paul didn’t have this problem. He tells us in 2Corinthians 12: [1-4 and] 7-10 that in “visions and revelations of the Lord” he was “caught up to the third heaven…. into Paradise and heard things… that no mortal is permitted to repeat.” He continues: “To stop me from getting too proud, I was given a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me….” When he asked God to take it away, God said, “My grace is enough for you; my power is at its best in weakness.”
Oddly enough, it is when things are at their worst that we are most open to the best. When we have minor problems we pray for minor solutions. When the bottom drops out, we reach for the stars! It took the death of Jesus to reveal the glory of the resurrection. When we die to human hope we look beyond our human hopes to the promises of God. When “our eyes are fixed on the Lord, pleading for his mercy,” we find it is “far more than we can ask or imagine.”
Insight
What does Jesus Christ offer me in my religion? Do I take him seriously?
Initiative:
In every religious act, ask, “What do I hope to get out of this?” Think big!
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
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