Homily for the
4th Sunday of Ordinary
Time
Jan. 30, 2022
Jer 1: 4-5, 17-19
Luke 4: 21-30
St. Joseph Church, New Rochelle, N.Y.
“Before I formed you
in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the
nations I appointed you” (Jer 1: 5).
Some of the Old Testament prophets were reluctant to take up the vocation that the Lord had given them. The most reluctant probably was Jeremiah, whom God called as a young man, around 628 B.C., to speak to Israel, and to the Gentile nations as well. The message he was to deliver was that Israel must repent of their sins and, because of their sins, must submit to foreign rule. Jeremiah preached for 40 years until sometime after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.
His unpleasant message wasn’t well received. Jeremiah suffered rejection, persecution,
physical assaults, and degradation. He
needed a lot of encouragement from God, and such encouragement is what we hear
in our 1st reading.
The Lord reminds Jeremiah that he had called
him to his vocation even before he was conceived in his mother’s womb; he was
called, chosen by God, even before he was born, appointed for his mission.
God goes on to assure Jeremiah that he’ll
always remain with him and will empower him to withstand his opponents. “They will fight against you but not prevail
over you, for I am with you to deliver you, says the Lord” (1:19).
This reading is paired with the gospel reading in which Jesus’ own fellow Nazarenes reject him and try to kill him. They don’t, but as we know, Jesus’ enemies later will do so—and God will deliver him from the grave.
God gives a vocation to every Christian. Our 1st, most fundamental, calling is to be
followers of Jesus. We’re called to be
disciples, to be Christians. That is our
vocation. We are to be his witnesses
before the whole world. God has had us
in mind and destined us to be his children, joined to his Son, from
eternity—before we were conceived, before we were born, before we knew who we
are.
God knows us inside out: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew
you.” He selected us; he chose us; in a
favorite liturgical and biblical word, he elected us: to receive his love, to be graced with a
relationship with his Son Jesus, to belong to his own household forever.
Even if we don’t have to pronounce loud
denunciations of the evil around us—and it’s impossible not to see an abundance
of evil around us—it’s still a challenge to live a faithful Christian
life. We can easily get discouraged,
like Jeremiah. We can become less
willing to be seen publicly as followers of Jesus.
1st, it’s often hard to make a good moral
choice, just because we’re weak and inclined toward selfishness.
2d, there can be a lot of family and other
social pressure to make bad choices, immoral choices. It’s really easy to go along to get along; to
do what everyone around us seems to be doing.
It’s tax season, and we may be tempted to lie
about our income or our expenses because so many others do or because the rich
have so many loopholes. That’s
dishonest. It’s lying.
Once upon a time if a young person (or
anyone) wanted pornography, he had to make a effort to find it. Now it’s all over the internet. An unbelievable number of people of both
sexes are addicted to it even tho it seriously damages one’s ability to relate
to real human beings—spouses included.
It’s hard to put that aside and strive to be clean of heart, as Jesus
teaches.
The mass media relentlessly promote abortion,
regardless that it’s a biological fact that abortion butchers a defenseless
human being, regardless of how making human life disposable has degraded
society. We don’t have a problem with
guns on our streets—right here down our street![1]—as
much as we have a problem with using violence to get what we want and to see
other people as objects in our way, not as human beings.
We can get discouraged by the evil around us
and by social pressure to relax our moral standards—our fidelity to what Jesus
teaches, to what the Church teaches us about right and wrong. That’s when we need to remember Jeremiah,
whom the Lord “made a fortified city.”
The Lord has given us fortitude—strength, courage, guts—as a gift of the
Holy Spirit so that we might continue to pursue what is right, so that we might
be faithful to the calling that God has given us. Furthermore, the Lord reminds us constantly
that he loves us, and therefore he will remain with us to deliver us—to
“deliver us from evil,” as we pray so often; to deliver us, instead, to eternal
life as he delivered Jesus of Nazareth.
[1]
On Jan. 25, a 16-year-old shot dead another 16-year-old 2 blocks from the
church: New
Rochelle shooting of teenager leaves neighborhood heartbroken (lohud.com)
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