Our readings this Sunday, when taken together and digested a bit, paint a very clear picture for us, of some of the key points of what we need to understand about what is important in the way we follow our Lord. One of the things that I think many of us who ponder the will of our Lord don’t always fully appreciate, is the elegant simplicity of what is core to His message to each one of us. There is nothing complicated about it, and to be honest, it truly is actually summed up quite well in the two commandments that He acknowledged as the greatest, and foundational for all the rest – Love the Lord your God and love one another as yourselves. It really is true that if we accomplish this, we will be well on our way to being united with Him in purpose and deed.

In our first reading, Moses enjoins on the people the necessity of keeping the Lords commands and paints a rather florid description of how these are neither elusive, nor far from us. In point of fact, he tells the people that they are in plain sight if they will merely look to the laws that God had given them. The message, I think, is that we do not need to complicate things and search high and low if we will simply take to heart that which has already been given us in sacred scripture. The instructions are there, we simply need to pay attention and embrace what He has given us in his word, something that I think we often do when we are in our more contemplative moments.

The difficulty, I think, arises not so much in the understanding of what is expected of us, but rather in the execution. I doubt this is a surprise to most of us because it’s easy to hear what is expected of us, and nod our heads in agreement, and in all likelihood truly mean that acknowledgement at the time. Where things seem to get a bit stickier, is when we confront all of the other expectations and obligations that are part of our lives and find ourselves feeling like we have a valid rationale to “de-prioritize” what is expected of us by our Lord in light of all the competing priorities we encounter. In the narrative about the good Samaritan, this fellow was riding along minding his own business, and in all likelihood with an important errand to accomplish (just like us), when out of the blue he encounters someone in need, dire need, of assistance. This person had already been passed by, by others who were also busily engaged – a priest and a Levite, who were the movers and shakers of the day back then, more or less the equivalent of lawyers and politicians of today in terms of upward mobility, both of whom passed him by in favor of carrying on with their seemingly more important tasks. What they failed to realize, was their true task, the one that was given by God as being far more important than any professional or secular concerns. They let the world, and its priorities, take precedence. The Samaritan on the other hand, who would have been considered unworthy of even being acknowledged by the priest or the Levite, saw something very different. He was looking not with vision clouded by worldliness, but instead very humbly with eyes of love and compassion that gave him true clarity into what God would have him do. There was no hesitation, he left the comfort of his mount (got out of the air-conditioned car in today’s parlance) and went over and picked up the man who had been beaten and cared for him by binding up his wounds with his own hands, and after that found him a place of shelter and paid for his stay there to allow him further time to get well. He did all these things not because of trying to impress anyone watching – it frankly wouldn’t have mattered even if they were watching, because as a Samaritan there was literally nothing, he could ever have done to win them over or gain their respect or approval. No, he did this more or less in secret, and sought only to follow what he knew was right in the sight of God. This is the key, to keep ourselves humble enough each day to keep our vision clear and be able to see through those same eyes of love and compassion what needs to be done. It need not be anything as dramatic as binding up the wounds of someone who has been beaten up, it could well be as simple as seeing someone whose tire has gone flat and lending a hand, or who is struggling to move their grocery cart through a crowded parking lot on a hot day and assisting a bit. When we take the time to step outside our own little world of seemingly important priorities and humble ourselves a bit as we then step toward a situation that is one of need by one of Gods other creations in His image, we show love for them, and through them for the one in who made each of us. Not so hard after all, and not a thing mysterious or remote about it.

In our Gospel reading today we hear of those seventy-two followers whom our Lord commissioned to go out and be laborers for the harvest, they preached His word, they cured those who were ill, and drove out demons from those afflicted. Even when their efforts were rejected, they used that lack of acceptance as an opportunity, by shaking the dust from their feet in testimony against those who rejected the teachings of Christ which they proclaimed. They were sent out into a sometimes-hostile world to do Jesus’ work, and to bring hope to those who were awaiting Him. With all these efforts taking place, the fruits of this did not escape our Lords notice, He saw “Satan fall like lightning from the sky”, and those from whom the effort had been put forth, were told to rejoice because their names had been recorded in heaven. If there is a life goal for each one of us, it should be for our names to be similarly written in heaven because of our efforts and obedience. To still go out, each one of us, and labor for Gods purpose, and to in this way draw closer to Christ.

In our second reading, Saint Paul addresses the Galatians and imparts to them a perspective that is the one that if we live by it, will allow each one of us to do our Lords work, and to then draw close to Him – we must each be crucified in Christ, and in doing so, to withdraw from the world in the sense that we no longer abide by its standards and goals, but instead we actively reject much of what we are told is important by worldly standards, and focus on what is important by heavenly standards. The world is focused on the purely physical, but when we are crucified in Christ, our physical selves take a radical back seat to the other half of our makeup, the spirit, and in doing so, there comes an equally radical shift in our conscious thoughts. We die to self with this crucifixion, we instead draw closer to Christ, by embracing the same call that He made to Saint Peter – “You, follow me”. 

When we withdraw the way, I have been describing, this does not mean that we draw back from the rest of humanity. No, very much the opposite, we instead embrace our brothers and sisters in Christ in a whole new way, and we are even more active in our efforts to reach out to all of them. We become spiritual extroverts in our efforts, and in doing so, we will then naturally become worldly introverts. We will reject the allure of material pursuits and the covetousness that so often accompanies it, and instead seek the things that do not decay in their value and substance, but rather appreciate in value and form with each step closer to heaven. The societal obsession with “stuff” becomes unpalatable to us and is replaced with an appetite for water and spirit, peace and love, closeness to humanity the creations of our Lord in His image, and so for our Lord himself. Our Amazon accounts may perhaps suffer a bit, which is probably a good thing, but that which is recorded in heaven will show a new worth for each of us.

The thing is, even with our pursuit of the things of heaven, we will also still experience a profound new worth here on earth, a worth that is evident to others and will hopefully attract them if they can see past the worldly glare, and that will bring peace to us in a way that we will find of the greatest value. The same peace that was given and remained with those who were willing to embrace it, when the seventy-two who were laboring for our Lord sent it upon them, will come to those now who accept it, and to those who today answer that same call to labor for our Lord.

In the Gospel today, we hear of how our Lord fed the five thousand, and did so in a miraculous way, by multiplying a very small and finite resource, to create something that was capable of sustaining far more than what it should have been able to. He took a very few fish and loaves of bread, basic earthly sustenance suitable for perhaps a few persons if they were frugal and manifested it in such a way as to sustain a multitude. This was in some respects a foretelling of what was to come, for He was to give us a gift of sustenance that no one could possibly have imagined at that point.

Our human form needs food and drink in order to survive and to remain strong, we take in the nourishment that this world provides to feed our physical bodies, yet this is only half the equation. Our selves are more than physical beings, we are also beings of spirit, and our spiritual selves require a nourishment that can only come from our Lord Jesus Christ. We need to receive his body and blood in order to have that life within us, a life in the spirit. Our Lord was very explicit about this, so much so, that many of his original followers could not handle the message – “If you do not eat my flesh, and drink my blood, you do not have life within you”. This plain language in a rather graphic manner, especially if you consider the specific language used in the original Greek. This was a message to us that would be of the utmost importance to a proper understanding of the Eucharist but would also be a difficult message for us to understand even to this day. When we receive what appears to be the bread and the wine in the Eucharist we celebrate each Sunday, it is far more than what Melchizedek could provide Abram. What we receive now in the appearance of bread and wine, is the actual body and blood of Christ, so that we may indeed have life within us. This was instituted by Jesus himself at the last supper and was commanded that it be continued by His disciples. To this day, through the unbroken apostolic succession that is unique to the Catholic Church, we continue to celebrate the Eucharist as He commanded, with the full understanding, that just as He said – we are consuming his flesh and blood, so that we have the true body and blood of Christ in its divinity within ourselves, and so are in as close a physical as well as spiritual union as is possible in this life with our Lord. With His body within us, we are strengthened to take on the spiritual challenges that we are faced with.

I think that this is perhaps more important now than it ever has been because we are constantly challenged by a world that wants to negate, and trivialize God, as Creator, Redeemer, and Savior. It is world that seeks its own ends, and leaves no room for our Lord, it pushes Him out at every turn, and tries to indoctrinate as many as possible into this way of thinking. It is only through the Eucharist that we will have the strength to push back against this, and to maintain our footing upon the rock that is our Church foundation. We could not hope to go out and to work or play for very long without taking in nourishment, and these are comparatively trivial undertakings compared to the battle of maintaining our spiritual selves against the onslaught of worldly influence that we are exposed to each day. We need to take our Lord at His word, and to truly recognize the need we have for the spiritual food that can only come from His most holy body and blood.

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity, and what is perhaps one of the most foundational (and, at the same time, difficult to grasp) mysteries of our Faith. It is foundational because it describes the very being of our God, and it is difficult to grasp because we have such limited capacity to grasp the triune nature of our God since it is so fundamentally different from our own.

We worship one God, He who is without any of the limitations of the fabric of this universe as we understand it. He is present everywhere at once, He is without limit to his power, He is eternal and does not see time in the linear and limited fashion that we as mortal beings do, and He is love incarnate in the perfection of its form, presentation, and purity. Lastly, He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all. He exists as one God who is fully manifested in each of these three persons of the Trinity, all at once, and all equal. As I said at the beginning, this can be difficult for us to grasp. Each of us is one person, one presence, one mindset, encapsulated in one body for the duration of our short lives. We move through space and time within the limitations of a physical existence, and yet, our nature is not merely relegated to this kind of existence. Our spiritual selves are actually beyond that. Just as Jesus spoke of the nature of the movement of the wind when speaking with Nicodemus about life in the Spirit, and to demonstrate the difference in perceptions, so we too can perceive things beyond our physical form and have a chance to come to an understanding that would be impossible for a purely physical being.

Our Father has always existed as a father for us and has worked for and within us through His Spirit, and through the intervention of His Son. His Son is completely begotten of Him, and so shares His nature perfectly, and yet was willing to take our form for a while to allow us to better understand Him who is our God. He knew full well that for us to truly become intimate with Him we needed to be able to get that close in our full physical selves, and then by virtue of His guidance and the Spirit be able to grasp the words of the Son and take them to heart. What is more, the Son came to give all of Himself in a way that could only be accomplished through a physical presence, because the nature of the perfect sacrifice of the Lamb, could only be accomplished by His dying on the cross in a physical body that suffered and died in the perfect unity to our own way of suffering and death in our physical bodies. The key difference is that while He suffered and died with us in perfect unity, He then moved beyond that on the third day, because there was no way that death could continue to grasp at His true nature. His death was there only because He allowed it to happen, and His resurrection was the conclusion of that event that then allows each of us to hope, because of our more significant presence as beings who are also of spirit, and so can be raised through this part of ourselves and be brought back to life in the eternal, in a more glorified form than we can grasp in our present state.

Our God comes to us in perfection of form depending upon our needs. He is made known to us in the Father when we need the guiding hand of a parent, as the Son when we need to be close to and hold the hand of our Brother as we become more familiar with Him and learn from Him, and He is present with us each day of our lives through His spirit working within us, and providing us with knowledge and wisdom if we are open to hearing it. He is with us perfectly in the ways that are needed to allow us to move through a life with the complete freedom and dignity of a truly free will, and yet not without the love that is always felt toward us.

I think that sometimes we make things more difficult than they need to be, this is true not only of our everyday lives and how we approach some of the challenges that inevitably come, but also in our faith lives and how we approach our relationship with Jesus. In our first reading, it is apparent that some of those who were trying to bring about conversion, were placing undue burden upon those they were trying to convert. The issue of circumcision as a requirement of salvation through Christ is discussed, and in the end the debate requires the intervention of the Apostles and elders to quell the dissention that this teaching created. I have no doubt that based on their experience under Mosaic law, the intentions of those who presented this as a requirement were likely good, they simply had not fully grasped the transformation that had taken place through Christ, and the subsequent fulfillment which rendered much of this no longer necessary.  Our Lord’s commands that we are to follow are remarkably straight forward and can be summed up with the two commands that He acknowledged as the greatest. Love God and love one another. All else is predicated on these two basic commands, and if we follow these, we will be doing well.

With respect to how to go about following our Lords commands, we are not without direct help throughout our lives if we will only allow it. God has given us the gift of the Spirit to guide us in our lives, and to work within each of us to always draw us closer to Him. I think that most of us have experienced that little voice within us when we come to a crossroads where we must make a moral choice. We may try to sometimes tell ourselves that the choices are not that simple and come up with a myriad of excuses why we need to consider more than just the obvious moral guidance that comes from the Holy Spirit. I see this so often in what politicians who claim to be Catholic say when trying to skirt around an issue of a moral choice, usually because they do not want to lose part of their constituency that might take exception to them following what they actually know to be morally correct. It happens in our daily lives as well, and when we find ourselves stumbling in conversation about a moral question or trying to justify to ourselves that the choice is not as clear as just following God’s word, we are kidding ourselves. The God of the universe has yet to encounter a problem, dilemma or issue that is beyond His understanding, and that is not covered in His perfect commands. Period. The only lack of clarity to any of these situations is that which we inject because we are arrogant enough to think that the choices, we deal with are somehow beyond His teaching. He gave us His Holy Spirit to guide us, and to free us from undue burden of figuring these choices out solely of our own accord – all we need to do is listen, acknowledge our Lords wisdom, and follow His word. There is literally nothing more to it than that. If we love God, we then innately trust Him, and if we love one another who were each created in His image, then we seek to do what is right for each other, with our focus placed on the good of our brothers and sisters, even before our own. That is the example that Jesus left us, and it is as relevant today, as it was the day He gave us his Spirit for our sakes.

Podcast Link

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-mwm8v-1230371

In our first reading we hear of the Apostles being taken before the high priest and the Jewish elders and questioned for speaking out in Jesus’ name. They were ultimately admonished for this and ordered not to do so anymore. However, before that order was given, Peter had the opportunity to speak out to these leaders and boldly proclaim what they had done in their ignorance, and that there was no way in the sight of God, he and the other Apostles could but continue to speak out in Jesus’ name. These were incredibly bold words for a mere fisherman to speak out to these leaders, yet they could not deny any of what was said. The truth needed to be said, and Peter was willing to lay all concern for self aside to proclaim this truth.

In our Gospel reading today we hear of how our Lord addressed Peter specifically asking him three times if he loved Him (this is interesting, as he had denied knowing him three times when he was questioned at the high priest’s house before Jesus’ crucifixion?), and after having heard Peters response those three times that he indeed loved him, He commissioned Peter to take care of His flock, and ultimately to follow him in the path of crucifixion. Peter did indeed do all these things, as leader of the early Church, and as our first Pope. He did indeed become the rock upon which the early Church was built, and he ultimately chose the path of suffering that our Lord had foretold. He made the choice to give all for the sake of Christ.

We are similarly commissioned to give all for the sake of Christ, and to speak out just as boldly in His name. There are many who do not yet know Jesus, or if they do, they do not know Him well enough, and we are charged with helping them in this. Just as in our second reading we hear of how every creature in heaven and earth cried out and acknowledged our Lords deserving all honors, we need to recognize that every person we encounter needs to know Christ, and at the very least be able to make the decision for themselves as to whether they wish to follow Him. If they do not know Him, and we have not bothered to tell them of Him, we are at severe fault, and we are not doing what our Lord expects of each and every one of us. The commission to Peter, and to all of the twelve, indeed extends to each of us as well.

It is not an easy calling, to be commissioned to proclaim Gods word, and I think this is as true today in our world that is so caught up in its own agenda focused on self-gratification, as it was in the days of the Apostles, when there were many who rejected Christ because they could not stand to embrace the truths that He manifested. There is great fear in those who do not want to look to ultimate truth but would rather create their own version of truth that is more comfortable for them, and does not require them to either change, or to accept God’s teaching. Accepting our Lords teaching is often not an easy thing, because there is so much within us, and in our society that proclaims our own self-interests as the only needed truth. Yet, we should inherently know, that there is no way for self-formulated, or even societally formulated agendas to be a reliable truth, because they are invariably rooted in personal selfishness, or self-serving agendas that others in society have created to pander to others to win them over. We need to be as watchful now, against this type of corruptive human influence as they were in the days of the early Church when there was so much out to destroy it. Our Lord has entrusted us with His Church here on earth, and with the task of calling all people to himself. The responsibility is an awesome one, and we need to humbly implore His help each day to guide us in this. We are not without hope though, because as part of God’s family we have a strong Father to guide us, and His Son to love and be an advocate for us. We have a strong family tree to lean against, and learn from, and we have each of our brothers and sisters in Christ to help us along. We are not alone, and like anything else, when we have the support of our family, we can do far more than we even think that we are capable of. This is especially true, I think, when we do this out of love for our Father.

Readings Podcast Link

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-5t39q-121491f

Homily Podcast Link

https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-v9qst-12149fc