Homily for the
14th Sunday of Ordinary
Time
July 3, 2022
St. Pius X, Scarsdale
Homily prepared for St. Pius but not delivered on account
of illness.
“O God, in the abasement of your Son
you have raised up a fallen world” (Collect).
The collects or opening prayers of the Mass are almost always addressed to God the Father. That’s quite obvious today in the prayer, which speaks of what God has done and continues to do thru his Son.
The prayer speaks of the Son’s
“abasement,” his being brought low. The
Latin word in the prayer is humilitate, “by the
humiliation” of the Son. That word is
rooted in the Latin word for “dirt,” humus. The Son of God has been cast down into the
dirt, completely humiliated—to “raise up a fallen world,” says our prayer.
How has God’s Son been abased or
brought down? In 2 ways. The 1st was in the incarnation, when God the
Son came down from heaven and took up our human nature. We proclaim every
Sunday in the Creed, “For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven
… and became man.” In his Letter to the
Philippians (2:7), St. Paul quotes an ancient hymn that says Christ took on the
form of a slave when he came in human likeness, leaving behind all the majesty
of God and becoming one of us by birth—can you imagine that the messiness of a
human birth is worthy of God?—and then he grew up as a carpenter’s son in a
human family in an insignificant village in Galilee. Can you imagine Princess Kate, Duchess of
Cambridge, adopting the role of Cinderella?
St. Augustine has written, “The divine nature could not demean itself
any lower than by taking human nature with all its weakness, even to dying on a
cross.”[1]
And there you have the 2d way in which
God’s Son was abased: crucifixion. Tho innocent and any wrongdoing, he was
condemned to a shameful, painful death like a common criminal, like a slave or
a murderer, exposed naked to every passer-by and mocked by his enemies.
The Son of God was so humiliated for
only one reason: to raise up a fallen
world. Sin has utterly debased us human
beings. We experience the shame of our
sins whenever we come to the sacrament of Reconciliation, in secret, often
barely able to whisper what we’ve done or said or failed to do. Yet by bringing his sinless Person to us, Christ
has cleansed us, made us whole, lifted us up alongside himself.
For his story didn’t end on
Calvary. He rose from his grave and
ascended to where he’d come from, the throne of God. He carried our humanity with him; he still
bears it with him as he intercedes for us with his Father. He raised our fallen nature and made it like
his own.
We are touched by the grace of God in
the sacraments, especially in Baptism, the Eucharist, and Reconciliation. By God’s grace we have a destiny of “eternal
gladness,” rescued from our slavery to sin and becoming, as St. Paul says, “a
new creation” (Gal 6:15). We prayed in
the collect that God “fill [his] faithful with holy joy,” for thru his Son’s
abasement he has “rescued [us] from slavery to sin,” granted us freedom as
members of his own household, adopted us as his own children.
Alongside our Lord Jesus Christ, risen and ascended, God
has planned a place for us in the heavenly kingdom, where we'll be ever joyful,
eternally happy and at peace with the Holy Trinity, the saints, and all of
humanity.
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