Homily for 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
6th Sunday 0f Ordinary Time

Feb. 11, 2024
Collect
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx              
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

We prayed in this morning’s collect that we might become dwellings pleasing to God, who abides in hearts that are just and true.  If our hearts are just and true, it’s because God’s grace has so fashioned them.

When we were young, we learned that Baptism makes us temples of the Holy Spirit.  That is, God dwells in us by his Holy Spirit, the Spirit of grace and of special virtues like wisdom, fortitude, understanding, and piety.

Pouring out of the Holy Spirit
(National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception)

The grace of the Holy Spirit transforms us.  It makes us just and true rather than evil and false.  The Evil One, the enemy of God and of our souls, is a liar; Jesus tells us, “He is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).  That’s been so from the beginning of humanity, when the serpent deceived our 1st parents and caused them to rebel against God.  He tricked them into thinking they could become like gods themselves; that’s what he told Eve in the garden of Eden (Gen 3:5).

God’s grace, on the other hand, makes us just and true, friends of God, so that he may abide with us and we with him.  God’s grace conforms us to himself, the way he created us to be:  “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27).

When we look at the world around us, we see so much injustice:  so much violence between nations and within nations, on our own streets, even in our schools; so much hatred, rancor, and dissension in families, in politics, even in the Church.  It’s hard to see God’s image in warlords, dictators, terrorists, drug pushers, human traffickers, gangsters, racists, abusers of children and of women, etc.

Such criminal activity, such injustice, begins with a failure to see God’s image in every person, with a desire to act like God and use others for one’s own selfish purposes.

When G.K. Chesterton was asked what’s wrong with the world today, he responded, “I am.”  Injustice begins in the hearts of individual men and women—your heart and mine.  The healing of the world can come about only when our individual hearts are healed by God’s grace; when each of us regards everyone else as a child of God, a brother or sister, and treats everyone with justice, fairness, and respect rather than selfishness.

Christ before Pilate
(Mihaly Munkacsy)

According to the collect, we also need hearts that are true.  When Jesus was on trial, he told Pontius Pilate, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”  And Pilate retorted, “What is truth?” (John 18:37-38).

Truth is the great problem of our time.  So many of the political, academic, media, and entertainment leaders of society recognize only scientific truth.  No one will contest that 2+2 must always equal 4, or that there’s a law of gravity.  A corollary of that law holds that any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible place in the universe.

Joking aside, even scientific truths are argued.  Believe it or not, there still are people who maintain that the world is flat, and who deny that NASA put men on the moon.  More complicated are questions like “What’s the origin of the universe?” and “What’s its destiny?”  Not to mention whether climate change is a fact or just a theory.

Truth becomes a bigger question when we go to questions of right and wrong.  A lot of people deny that there’s an objective or universal morality.  Many people think that they personally decide what’s true, which can change according to circumstances.  What I think is good and virtuous, you think is abhorrent, and vice versa.

For instance, Planned Parenthood and its friends in politics and the media insist that women need access to abortion for their freedom or their dignity.  To that end, they deny the truth that abortion kills a human being—a person made in God’s image and destined for eternal life like you and me.  They use language to hide this reality.  They speak of a “fetus,” not a baby.  They speak of “reproductive health,” “reproductive rights,” and “products of conception,” not of killing a human being.  They can’t admit that reproduction takes place when a child is conceived, not when it’s born—as if, at the moment of birth, a “fetus” magically becomes a baby and a person.  They speak of “choice” as if choice is the gold standard of morality.  Moral questions aren’t like choosing between McDonalds or your mom’s spaghetti and meatballs.  In morality what we choose gives our choice its moral character.  Regarding unborn human life, are we choosing to preserve human life or to extinguish it?

Jesus teaches us that he is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).  Everyone who loves truth follows him and belongs to his kingdom.  To help us grasp the truth, we have not only the sacred Scriptures but also Jesus’ living Body, the Church, which makes his teaching and his grace available to us 2,000 years after his death and resurrection.  So we listen to the Church when it teaches us about human dignity, human life, the meaning of human sexuality, marriage, and gender.  Christ’s truths don’t vary from one person to another, one place to another, one time in history to another.  The Letter to the Hebrews tells us, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (13:8).

Therefore we pray that God’s grace will fashion our hearts into hearts that are just and true, places where God may dwell now and forever.