Homily for 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Aug. 11, 2024
Collect
Eph 4: 30—5: 2
John 6: 41-51
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“Taught by the Holy Spirit, we dare to call you our Father” (Collect).

The Holy Trinity by Hendrick van Balen, 1620
St. James Church, Antwerp

Jesus taught his disciples to address God as Father, and at every Mass we’re reminded of that before Holy Communion.  Today’s collect, tho, attributes this teaching and command to the Holy Spirit.  It was, of course, Jesus who bestowed the Spirit upon the Church after his resurrection and ascension.  The Spirit, the bond of love uniting God the Father and God the Son, comes to us from the Father and the Son to bind us to them.

That leads us to pray today that the Father “bring to perfection in our hearts the spirit of adoption as [his] sons and daughters.”  This prayer is related to the prayer we made last week, that God restore what he created.  We were created in God’s image, and the redemptive work of Jesus Christ is to restore that image in us.  When he bestows the Holy Spirit upon us, when he fills us with divine grace, we become images of Christ himself; we become God’s adopted children—his sons and daughters not by nature, like Christ, but by grace, by a magnificent gift from God thru the Holy Spirit.

As God’s children, we have an inheritance.  Our Father intends for us to share his kingdom with his Son Jesus.  We can be encouraged by Jesus’ words to the so-called Good Thief on the cross next to him:  “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).  That’s the destiny God wants for us.  That’s why he makes us his children.  Jesus accepted a convicted criminal dying next to him, and he accepts us too without regard to our sins.  In that, he’s doing what his Father sent him among us to do:  “This is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day” (John 6:39).

Oh, there is a proviso.  Jesus tells us about that in today’s gospel:  “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me” (John 6:45).  We have to believe in Jesus and let him lead us to his Father so that the Father can take us into the divine family as his children.

Then we have to do our best to act like God’s children, to act like Jesus.  We don’t want to be disinherited!  St. Paul tells us today, “Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph 4:30), i.e., marked down as belonging to Jesus Christ as surely as that thief on the cross.  St. Paul gets specific about how Jesus’ family behaves:  “All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice” (4:31).  Another translation (NRSV) speaks of “wrath” instead of “fury” and of “slander” instead of “reviling.”  In other words, be patient and gentle with other people, speak truthfully about others.  Paul continues, “Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ” (4:32).  In that way, Paul adds, you’ll be “imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love” (5:1-2).

And if we live as God’s children, as brothers and sisters of our Lord Jesus, then Jesus, who loves us tenderly, will raise us on the last day (John 6:44), and his Father will give us an inheritance alongside Jesus.