21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
Joshua 24: 1-2a, 15-17, 18b; Eph 5: 21-32; Jn 6: 60-69
By Deacon Larry Brockman
We can do great things together! If we believe, do God’s will, and stick together, than we really can. But first, we have to have faith. And faith means believing in things that we cannot prove. It means accepting the mysteries of our faith like the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and God’s natural law.
Today’s Gospel is all about believing and faith. Jesus has been telling His followers that He will give them his flesh and blood, the bread of life; and that all who eat His flesh and drink His blood will have eternal life. Today we hear that many of His followers found that too hard to believe. So, they turned their backs on Jesus, and left.
Contrast that with the Joshua story. After a long period of time as the successor to Moses, Joshua had led the people into the promised land; had defeated their enemies; and established the Israeli people on the land. Joshua knew that they needed the Lord to survive, even if they were about to be prosperous. Joshua was challenging them to renew their belief in the Lord and to follow His commandments. The people of Joshua’s time might have regarded Joshua’s success as their own. After all, they had defeated the Philistines and Amorites and all the rest. It might have just been considered a human success story. But Joshua and the Israeli people knew otherwise. All the tribes were gathered together and asked to make a commitment to the Lord at Shechem. They did; they reaffirmed their commitment to believe in the Lord; his power as the one and only God; and to follow His Commandments. Even though they had not seen the miracles of the Exodus for themselves, they experienced it in their hearts, because their parents had handed the story on, and the faith. They had not personally seen the plagues; the parting of the Red Sea; the manna in the desert and it’s power to save them; but they believed; they had real Faith; because the Exodus experience was made close to them by their parents, close enough that trust in their God was written into their hearts. It was the Faith of their fathers.
Why did so many of the followers of Jesus leave and not believe? Notice that Jesus called his close disciples together and asked them if they were going to leave as well. But they said they did believe. They accepted Jesus on His word. You see, these close disciples knew Jesus very intimately, and that was the difference. They experienced Jesus and his personal piety daily; they saw all his miracles, and they heard all of His teaching; and so even though His teaching was hard, they trusted in the person, Jesus, who had written His law into their hearts.
The Eucharist is, and always will be, a mystery. We believe it because we believe in Jesus, just like the Apostles believed in the person of Jesus. Likewise, we must accept other mysteries of our faith. It will be easier to do if our experience of God’s love is written on our hearts, like it was on the people of Joshua’s time and on Jesus close disciples. That is the key to believing- knowing the Lord Jesus in our hearts.
In today’s world, we find it very hard to accept things on faith that we cannot prove. Secular society tells us to question everything- and that includes church authority, church teachings, and church traditions. But God wants us to believe in His authority, His Gospel, and the Natural law that He gave us. And believing in it means believing in mysteries of faith.
One of the primary mysteries of our faith, in my opinion, is the family. God created us in His image and likeness- and He created the family in His image and likeness as well. Paul tells us what that means. Wives need to defer to their husbands; husbands need to love their wives; the two become one; and the result is children, the primary purpose of marriage. Paul is not talking about blind submissiveness and the world’s kind of love. Rather, he is referring to a partnership that joins two people together in Christian love, with the Father leading the family. And that model of marriage is important so that the Children learn what a Christian family is all about..They need to take that into their hearts and pass it on to their children. Nowadays, the sanctity of this central mystery of our faith, Christian marriage, is under attack. Easy divorce; alternate family life styles; gay marriage; abortion, contraception and sterilization for convenience- all of these are contrary to one of the mysteries of our faith. The traditional Christian marriage; and they are contrary to God’s natural law. And yet they are all fast becoming accepted as accepted norms in our secular society. Our challenge today is to know the Lord in our hearts, so that we can preserve the most important values in our Christian society- belief in God, the value of life, and our primary role in society; and to enter into Christian marriages and bring up our children with our values. Together, we can do it. And we have an opportunity to do it together.
In the last election 54% of all Catholics voted for the present administration. For the last 4 years that administration has fought against religious liberty, the definition of marriage between a man and a woman, and the sanctity of life. In this election, Catholics must preserve Christian values at all costs. Or else we betray our faith. The choice is yours.