Homily for 33d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
33d Sunday of Ordinary Time

Nov. 17, 2019

Mal 3: 19-20
St. Anthony, Bronx, N.Y.

“Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven” (Mal 3:19).

Malachi, the last of the Old Testament prophets chronologically—he preached in the 5th century B.C.—is also placed last among the books of the Old Testament in the arrangement of our Bibles.  The verse and a half that make up our 1st reading today come close to the end of his very short book.

Malachi (James Tissot, partial)

The reading—the prophecy—is about the day of the Lord, which we also know as “the last day” and “judgment day.”  Like most of the Old Testament prophets, Malachi lived in a disordered world, afflicted by various social injustices and, of course, the normal afflictions of human life—people trying to make a living, raise a family, stay healthy, and live tranquilly in their towns and villages.  In particular, Malachi addresses religious laxity—people and even priests either ignoring their religious obligations like sacrifice, worship, adherence to the Torah, and marital fidelity, or carrying them out carelessly.

So Malachi warns the people and priests of Judah that the day of the Lord is coming (3:19), a day when God will put everything right, punish evildoers, and reward the just (3:19-20).

We Christians see Malachi’s prophecy fulfilled in the coming of Jesus Christ.  The prophet says that “ the sun of justice” (or “the sun of righteousness”) will arise (3:20).  We recognize our Lord Jesus as that sun, that light from heaven, the dawn that drives away the darkness of our lives, purifies our hearts, and shows us how to make the situation of men and women even on this earth more tranquil, more just, happier.  When John the Baptist, forerunner of the Messiah, is born, his father Zechariah prophesies, “You, child, … will give his people knowledge of salvation thru the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the daybreak from on high will visit us to shine on those who sit in darkness and death’s shadow…” (Luke 1:76-79).  That “daybreak from on high” for which John the Baptist will prepare God’s people is Christ.

Malachi prophesies that this salvation, this “sun of justice with its healing rays,” is coming on the day of the Lord for those “who fear [his] name” (3:30).  But that warm and bright sun will not heal “the proud and all evildoers” (3:19); it will, instead, burn them like stubble in an oven—the stalks left after the grain has been threshed, and the remnants, the stubble or chaff, is used as fuel for baking the daily bread.

A couple of verses later, Malachi warns his audience, “Remember the law of Moses my servant, which I enjoined upon him at [Mt. Sinai], the statutes and ordinances for all Israel” (3:22).

All of us have come here in order to worship God thru the eternal sacrifice of our Lord Jesus and to renew our pledges of fidelity to God’s statutes and ordinances and to the truths of our faith taught to us by Jesus and his Church.  We acknowledge that this worship and this fidelity is what justifies us, enrolls us among the just, lets the healing rays of Christ’s warmth touch us and prep us for the day of his coming.

The day of the Lord is indeed coming.  Jesus promised to return, and we profess our belief in that every time we recite the Creed:  “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”  His coming and his judgment are most famously depicted on the wall of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican—a painting that cardinals face as they cast their votes in a papal election.

As Malachi warns, that judgment will not be a healing justification or purification for “the proud and all evildoers”; a judgment of condemnation for them.  Jesus speaks of that judgment in some of his parables and on other occasions.  We heard one of those parables on Sept. 29, the one about the rich man and poor Lazarus the beggar (Luke 16:19-31).  Not for nothing do we speak of hellfire, of eternal punishment for proud, unrepentant sinners.  It’s no joke, but more awful and unending than we can imagine—burning with hatred for everyone, including ourselves, everlasting remorse for all the wrong we’ve ever done deliberately, suffering pain in our hearts far worse that any physical pain we’ve ever known—and all thru our own fault, as we say in the Confiteor, thru our own choices.  Hell is eternal separation from God, for whom we were created, and so it is eternal frustration of our most ardent desire.  It is eternal separation from and a loathing for anyone we ever loved.

But God has sent us “the sun of justice with its healing rays,” so that we might turn away from our wrongdoing, our deliberate evil choices, our sins, and allow the mercy of our Lord Jesus to heal us and lead us into his own holiness and toward eternal life—as Jesus did, for example, in our gospel reading 2 weeks ago when he welcomed the tax collector Zacchaeus, dined with him, and stayed at his house (Luke 19:1-10).  As he said to the apostles at the Last Supper, he’s gone ahead of us “to prepare a place for you, and … I shall return to take you to myself” (John 14:2-3).