Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time
On Thursday I had the pleasure of going up to Camp Leelanau with the seventh-graders from St. Thomas Aquinas School. I went to spend time with them and to offer Mass for them on Friday morning. One of the things they did while there was a ropes course. I was really impressed when they, while secured to a steel cable, had to jump from one platform to another, which was about 3-4 feet away. Oh, and did I mention that they were about 20 feet in the air?
Many of the students did jump, and really demonstrated to me an example of a very natural faith. The kids had to have faith that they were securely fastened to the steel cables, and that if they jumped, they would land on the other side safe and sound, or just dangle from the cable if they missed.
In the Gospel passage today, when the apostles ask for more faith, the Lord says that if they had just a small amount of faith, they could make a mulberry tree plant itself in the sea. The point here is not so much that Jesus is opening a landscaping company, but that faith allows the disciple of the Lord to do what seems impossible. The Lord is not advocating that, when we want to redecorate our yard, we make an act of faith, and then tell the maple tree to switch places with the oak tree in our front yard, or for the extra mound of dirt in the back yard to fill in the valley in our front yard, but to have faith in the work of the Lord: the salvation of our souls.
What stands in the way of that salvation is not a mulberry tree, but sin. Sin blocks the relationship that God wants to have with us by putting other, lesser goods higher than the will of God, which should be the greatest good that we’re pursuing. It leads us to think that, rather than being a servant, who should be waiting on the master, and making sure he is happy, doing only what we were obliged to do by our status as servant, that we are the master who should be waited on. It gives us a false view of reality.
Now, we probably all know this, both intellectually and by experience. And I’m sure that many of you have prayed that your temptations might cease. Your words probably echoed the sentiments of Habakkuk from our first reading: “How long, O LORD? I cry for help but you do not listen! I cry out to you…but you do not intervene. Why do you let me see ruin; why must I look at misery?” We may wonder why the Lord allows us to fall into the same, maybe major or grave, or minor sins.
Or course, it isn’t the Lord’s fault that we sin. When we sin we are exercising our free will. But the Lord doesn’t just leave us to ourselves. He gives us the great gift of the sacraments to assist us in making the Lord’s will our own, and choosing actions which are in accord with His will.
In baptism, when either our parents or we first ask for faith, the Lord answers our prayers. He gives us this gift of faith, to trust in the Lord and to overcome the obstacles of sin. That’s right: all of you have the grace to avoid all mortal sins by virtue of your baptism. And you have an even greater gift through Confirmation when the baptismal promises are reaffirmed and the gift of grace is increased. By your baptism, God gives you all the sufficient grace for avoiding mortal sins. He allows you to move the trees of sin which stand in the way of your holiness, into the abyss of the sea of darkness where sins belong. We can think of the graces of baptism and confirmation like a spring, welling up in a river. As long as we do not block the spring with the rocks of sin, then the waters will flow freely. But we must allow, by our freedom, to let those waters flow.
This teaching, that we all have the ability to remain free from mortal sin, may seem new to us. You might be asking yourself, ‘Well, if I have this gift, how come it hasn’t worked yet?’ The gift is not forced upon us. Like any other gift, it does not become ours if we do not receive it in freedom. ‘Well then, Fr. Anthony, how do I receive it?’
St. Paul tells us in the second reading: “stir into flame the gift of God that you have.” Of course, when talking to St. Timothy, St. Paul was talking about his ordination, when St. Paul laid hands on St. Timothy to impart to him the spring of graces of the Sacrament of Holy Order. But the same principle applies to our baptism and confirmation: we have that grace like hot embers, and all we must do is to stir that gift into flame by the fuel of our prayers to God, asking for His assistance to avoid sin and be faithful to the Gospel. Just as a loving father does not give a snake to his child asking for a fish, or a stone when his child asks for a piece of bread, so our Father, if we truly want to avoid major sins, will give us the grace to avoid those sins and remain faithful to him.
“God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather of power and love and self-control.” We have the ability to do great things because of our faith in God granted to us by baptism, and confirmed in confirmation. Let us remove the obstacles in our life that prevent that grace from flowing, so that we might enjoy forever the eternal banquet that Jesus has prepared for us, where He, the Master, will wait on us, the servants as a reward for our fidelity to Him on earth.
