Homily for 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
6th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Feb. 16, 2025
1 Cor 15: 12, 16-20
Luke 6: 17, 20-26                       
Jer 17: 5-8
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx

by Murillo

“Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15: 20).

In the 15th chapter of 1 Corinthians, St. Paul defends and comments on our fundamental belief in Christ’s resurrection.  In the verses we heard this morning/afternoon, he calls Christ the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”  The firstfruits were the 1st parts of a harvest or a shearing—grain, wine, oil, and wool—that devotees presented to God as a holy sacrifice, a token of gratitude for the whole harvest or flock.  Jesus, risen from the dead, is the 1st of God’s harvest of redeemed people who will be raised from the earth on the Last Day.

Note also that Paul speaks of “those who have fallen asleep.”  This is an expression of deep Christian faith.  The dead are only “asleep,” not totally kaput, lost forever.  Our word cemetery comes from a Greek word, koimeterion, that means a sleeping place or dormitory.

Thus Christ’s resurrection is our hope that death is no more than a deep sleep.  Yesterday morning, we buried a Salesian brother in our cemetery in Goshen, N.Y.  In the cemetery is a large marble crucifix; on its granite base is a Latin inscription that means,  “Here rest in Christ’s peace members of the Salesian Congregation, awaiting the resurrection.”  God will awaken all Christ’s faithful for eternal life.  The Letter to the Hebrews twice calls Jesus our leader—or in one translation, our “pioneer”—our pioneer in salvation (2:10), our pioneer in faith (12:2).  Like colonial settlers following Daniel Boone into Kentucky, where Jesus has gone, we shall follow.

Since we have this hope, this confidence, in our Savior Jesus Christ, we can listen to his teaching in St. Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, the “stretch of level ground” where he preaches in today’s gospel.  (It’s Luke’s equivalent of St. Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.)  Jesus instructs “a great crowd of his disciples” assembled from all over the Holy Land:  “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you and insult you, and denounce your name as evil on account of the Son of Man.  Rejoice and leap for joy on that day!  Behold, your reward will be great in heaven.” (Luke 6:22-23).  Not for this life only do we hope in Christ (cf. 1 Cor 15:19), but for immortality, for the life of Jesus’ resurrection.

Jeremiah had a similar hope:  “Blessed in the man who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord.  He’s like a tree planted beside the waters that stretches out its roots to the stream” (17:7-8).  That hope sustained Jeremiah when he was persecuted by the powerful who didn’t want to hear him preach about being faithful to God.  It’s the hope that sustains tens of thousands of Christians today when they face criticism, discrimination, persecution, and even death because of their faith in such places as Nigeria, Pakistan, India, and China.  It’s our hope in this country, too, when we advocate for public policies and practices that respect human life, that restrain our impulses for pleasure, or that attack the dignity of all people regardless of their age, race, color, or country of origin.  It’s often unpopular to stand with the Gospel of Jesus.  It often flies in the face of what a government wants or what we see on social media or hear from Hollywood.

A note about our belief in the resurrection.  Quoting the Letter to the Hebrews again, we read “it’s appointed for human beings to die once, and after that comes judgment” (9:27).  Some Eastern religions believe in reincarnation, and that’s become popular with some people also in our culture.  You keep coming back to life in some form, a higher or lower form of life.  If you’ve been really bad, you could return as an insect; if you’ve been so-so, you might become a bear, a horse, or a dog; if you’ve been really good, you could return as a princess or a billionaire.  You keep coming back until you get life right and then achieve nirvana, a final spiritual peace, a liberation from pain and suffering.  That’s not a biblical way of faith; it’s not Christian.  An old Catholic mantra speaks of the 4 last things:  death, judgment, heaven, and hell.  There are no do-overs.  We follow our Lord Jesus in this life, and with him we enter eternal life; or we ignore his way of living and choose a different fate for eternity.  The wicked “stand in a lava waste, a salt and empty earth,” Jeremiah says (17:6).  That would be one way of describing hell.  In one of Jesus’ parables, he describes a man lost because he’d ignored the poor and now is “anguished in flames” (Luke 16:24).  In another parable, the Great Judge on the Last Day sends those who ignored the poor “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt 25:41).  Our choices matter; our actions matter.  We need to get our lives right the 1st time; it’s the only time.

The Gospel of Jesus tells us often not to be afraid—not of human powers nor of the powers of hell.  Our Lord Jesus “has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep,” of those who walk with him, who follow his lead.