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Submission to
the blog of Dcn. Thomas Tortorella for the XIX Sunday in Ordinary Time
by Rev. Fr.
Arthur F. Rojas © All Rights Reserved ©
Although I find the common description
of life being a “journey” to be quite overused and stale because so
often the “journey” is emphasized over where we are going or whom
to become, it is true that the life of a Christian is one of migration. To
paraphrase from St. Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor of the Church, as he
elaborated in his Summa Theologica, God has sent man to Earth so that
man may return to God. The readings
for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Ordinary Form) also recall or
anticipate movement over time, space, and even preparing for our
accounting for ourselves to God at the end of our lives (the particular
judgment) or at the end of time (the Second Coming or the Final
Judgment).
Also worthy of our rumination over
the readings of today is the timing of the Feast of the Transfiguration,
which fell on Saturday, August 6th (yesterday). The Feast of the Transfiguration recalls
and celebrates over time and space the manifestation of the divine glory
within Jesus, Who is both God and man, a glimpse of which He allowed
his companions on Mount Tabor, as attested by Mt 17:1-8, Mk 9:2-8, and Lk
9:28-36, among other sources. Our
Lord too was preparing to move, to descend from Mount Tabor to Jerusalem,
where He would suffer His Passion and death on the Holy Cross. Moreover, the Transfiguration was meant to
infuse the memory of His disciples of an encounter with the divinity of
Christ, which exists with His humanity in His person so that Jesus Christ is
fully God and fully man (human in all ways except for sinning), as
reiterated to us by the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and as we further
profess in the Nicene Creed.
“For where your treasure is, there
also will your heart be.” (Lk 12:34) In
light of the readings of today and the feast of yesterday, where are you
going with your lifestyle in the here and now?
Do we carry out our daily lives knowing that, like the servants of
today’s Gospel, we shall owe God an accounting for our choices, priorities,
deeds, and words of our time here on Earth? Kyrie eleison!
“Brothers and sisters: Faith is the
realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen. Because of it the ancients were well
attested.” (Hb 11:1-2) At whatever
stage of life we are in and in our last days, can others around us
see in Whom or in what we first place our faith concretely in good
times and bad? For those who are lukewarm
in their Catholic faith or who say that they are “spiritual but not
religious”: that yellow light before God, that acknowledgment of a
“god” somewhere out there but without the trust to let Him truly become
first in our lives sooner or later must become a green light or a
red light before God. At the hour of
our death, when we have that final encounter with Christ, arguably He will
reflect back to us the choice that we have been making throughout our lives
to Him, More reason, therefore, at
least to seek His help to leave behind bad habits, indifference and
negligence, and the chains of our attachments to sinful ways to make a
“Passover” analogous to Wisdom 18:6, our first reading, to choose and live
in the freedom of the children of God, to choose and share the good, the
true, and the beautiful, to allow God to transform us as we seek His
grace and to bear fruits of His grace in our lives and to help others to do
likewise, and to show God by the end of our lives – whether it arrives
tonight or thirty years from now – that we truly belong to “the
people that the Lord has chosen to be His own.”
(Psalm 33, the responsorial psalm of today’s Mass in the Ordinary Form).
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