Homily for the
10th Sunday
in Ordinary Time
June
9, 1983
Gal
1: 11-19
Luke
7: 11-17
Christian
Brothers, Iona College, N.R.
“I want you to
know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel preached by me is not of human
origin … but it came thru a revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal 1: 11-12).
The main issue
in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians is law vs. grace: Judaizers demanding that Gentile converts
take on the entire Law of Moses as part of their acceptance of the Gospel, and
Paul’s insistence that Christ in himself reconciles humanity with God.
Paul didn’t come
to that conviction easily. As you know,
he’d been a ferocious foe of the Gospel:
“I persecuted the Church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it,”
and “I was even more a zealot for my ancestral traditions” (1:13-14).
But “when God …
called me thru his grace [and] was pleased to reveal his Son to me” (1:15),
everything changed. Meeting Jesus Christ
personally changed Paul’s understanding of being in a relationship with God and
of salvation. Meeting Jesus Christ
personally changed Paul himself.
The Gospel
supersedes all human considerations, even such venerable traditions as those
built on the Torah: “the gospel is not
of human origin”—not that the Torah is, either; that was what Paul had to
wrestle with, the balance between 2 forms of revelation, 2 ways of being in
relationship with God. God himself, by
revealing his Son to Paul, showed Paul how grace overcomes our failures to
observe the Law; how grace is more powerful than the condemnation our failures
merit; how grace comes from God but so many practices that had grown up around
the Torah were of human origin (as Jesus himself bemoaned in his controversies
with the scribes and Pharisees).
For instance, in
today’s gospel Jesus has no concern for the stipulations of the Law about
uncleanness. By touching the
coffin—older translations use the word bier,
indicating probably that the body was only enshrouded and was being carried on
a litter or stretcher—Jesus incurred uncleanness. “The bearers halted,” Luke says (7:14); they
must have been quite shocked! Jesus was
violating custom, obviously, but also the Law, in a ritual sense. As in so many other instances, that didn’t
matter to him: what mattered was to
proclaim the kingdom of God and to make the kingdom present in people’s lives. He does just that by restoring the dead young
man to life, restoring joy and hope to his mother—and to the awestruck crowd,
who “glorified God” (7:16).
Restoring life
is the core of the Gospel that Paul preached, that Gospel of divine and not
human origin. Resurrection is beyond
human comprehension, as Paul experienced when he tried to preach it in
Athens: “When they heard about the
resurrection of the dead, some began to scoff, but others said, ‘We should like
to hear you on this some other time’” (Acts 17:32)—in other words, this is a
little too far out for us to hear any more of.
Now note what
Paul does to confirm his understanding of this outlandish Gospel—not only the
resurrection of Jesus Christ and the forgiveness of sins leading to eternal
life, but, further, that all this is grace, not dependent on our moral
perfection but on God’s love. After a
period of meditation and prayer in Arabia, and then some preliminary preaching
in Damascus (1:17), he “went up to Jerusalem to confer with Cephas and remained
with him for 15 days” (1:18). Paul
tested his theory of the Gospel, as it were, against the opinion of Peter,
against apostolic authority given by Jesus.
Then he was sure of the authenticity of his own revelation, his own
encounter with Jesus, and of his understanding of what that revelation of the
Gospel meant.
So, brothers and
sisters, Paul shows us how to receive and take up the Word of God. We haven’t received any direct revelations
from Jesus; at least I haven’t. But we
have God’s authentic Word, already certified by apostolic authority, i.e., the
Bible. Like Paul, we need to reflect on
it, meditate on it, pray with it, and let it guide our lives. And like Paul, we need to measure our
understanding of that Word—its interpretation, its meaning for our lives—by
what apostolic authority teaches. What
is true Gospel teaching? That teaching
cannot be measured against any human origins, against any general sorts of
human wisdom, against popular opinion, against elections, against the
entertainment industry, against the ideas of today’s men of Athens (the
academic and media elite). Rather, what
does Peter say when we confer with him—which today, of course, means, What does
Peter’s successor teach? That’s where we
find the teaching of Jesus, “the great prophet” who was—and still is—“God
visiting his people” (Luke 7:16). That’s
where we find what God has revealed to us so that we might have eternal life.
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