Homily for 12th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
12th Sunday of Ordinary Time

June 23, 2024
2 Cor 5: 14-17
The Fountains, Tuckahoe
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

“Christ indeed died for all” (2 Cor 5: 15).

A Garfield cartoon last summer (Aug. 10)—you all read Garfield, don’t you?—showed our feline character lying on his back, typically.  1st panel: “Maybe someday I’ll finally get what I deserve.”  2d panel: silence.  3d panel: “But I hope not.”

Garfield comics (jikos.cz)

St. Paul would agree with Garfield.  In today’s reading he voices our conviction that Christ’s death on the cross was a sacrifice that brought us forgiveness.  His death atoned for our sins.  All of us sinners were alienated from God, doomed to eternal separation from God—to an eternity of misery, self-loathing, and hatred for everyone.

Christ changed that.  He is saving us from what we deserve.  In the Garden of Eden, the Lord God told our 1st parents, “You shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Gen 2:17).  To know evil means to taste it, to experience it—to be guilty of sin.  But in Christ’s death “all have died” (5:14).  He died so that we might live.  For our sake he “died and was raised” (5:15).  Bonded to the human race by his birth as one of us and his experience of everything human except sin, he has captured all of humanity, won pardon for us, and brought us the promise of being raised with him.  “Whoever is in Christ is a new creation,” Paul remarks:  “the old things [our sins] have passed away; behold, new things have come” (5:17).

God the Father has “set [us] firm on the foundation of [his] love,” the prayer for today states.  Jesus Christ is that firm foundation.  Based on him, we “might no longer live for [ourselves] but for him” (5:15).  That is, we can turn away from our selfishness and give ourselves to him, to his way of living.  We can love all our brothers and sisters, all the children of God, instead of competing with them, shoving them aside, looking down on them.

Love like Christ’s makes us a new creation, close to God thru his Son Jesus.  Christ’s love demands of us a new way of living.  His love empowers in us a life of virtue:  of humility, purity, honesty, kindness, generosity, and prayer.  That’s what Jesus teaches us.  It’s the foundation of love already instilled in us by Baptism and reinforced by the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Holy Eucharist.

(by Ludolf Bakhuizen)

Our closeness to God thru Jesus means we’re traveling with Jesus—or he’s sailing along with us, as he did with the apostles.  We needn’t be afraid we’ll perish; be afraid that life’s troubles, pains, dangers, and temptations will sink us.  Instead, we put our faith in him (cf. Mark 4:40-41).  He died for us so that we might reach the shore we aim for, that we might live for him and with him forever.