Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time-St. Pius X
Apparently phrases that I have heard used and have used myself are now a bit dated. I was shopping with a friend at Home Depot, and we couldn’t find everything we needed. But he had found one of the things he needed. So he was wondering out loud if he should buy the part at Home Depot, or put it back and hope that the next hardware shop had it. I said, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” and he looked at me like I was speaking in a foreign language. At the same time, a Vietnam vet was walking by and said that he hadn’t heard that phrase in a long time. Perhaps it is a bit old.
Now this isn’t like other local boys. In my home town, people know what I was like before I was a priest. I wasn’t bad, in fact, I tended to behave myself quite well, as you might have guessed. But one could understand how the neighbors might sometimes not give a local boy his due, as they know his faults and failings. But Jesus didn’t have faults or failings. They couldn’t point to some scandal as the excuse why they shouldn’t listen to Him. But still, they lacked faith, and so Jesus was not able to do many miracles there, which probably only added to the sense that He wasn’t all that special.
In our first reading, God warns the prophet Ezekiel that, though God will send Ezekiel with a message he needs to speak, the Israelites will not listen, because their hearts are obstinate. They do not want to hear what God has to say. But, God does promise that they will know that a prophet has been among them, even though they won’t listen.
I think we often have this perception that if there are holy people around us, people whom God is sending, then we will listen to them and believe. But the entire Bible is proof that, more often than not, people do not listen to God’s messengers. They find some excuse not to listen. It could be that they are too close to the messenger, or that their hearts are stubborn and hard, or that it’s not the message that they think God wants to send to them. And so they close their ears and hearts to the Word of God, which is actually what will bring lasting happiness.
We can sometimes do this when we read the Bible. We read the parts that we like, that are what we want to hear, but then we reject the parts that are hard, or that we don’t think sound right. We all love hearing that God loves us. We love hearing about Jesus forgiving the woman caught in adultery, or healing the lepers, or curing the man born blind. But then when we get to the part about only marrying once or else a person commits adultery; or the part about turning away from sin and being faithful to the Gospel; or the part where Jesus says the way is narrow that leads to salvation, and few find it; or the part where Jesus establishes His Church with the apostles exercising authority over it, we do all sorts of mental gymnastics to excuse why we don’t have to listen to that part or why it doesn’t mean what it clearly says. St. Augustine once wrote, “If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe in, but yourself.” And faith in self does not lead to salvation or heaven.
Even more than we do it in the Bible, we do it with the way God continues to speak authoritatively in His Church. We like it when Pope Francis talks about loving, caring for the poor, and not judging, but when he talks about marriage being only between one man and one woman for life, or that the diaconate, priesthood, and episcopate are reserved for men, we write him off. The same could be said when the Church teaches about how artificial contraception is wrong, or that people are the gender that they are born with, or that abortion is wrong and we should not support those who support abortion. We decide that we know better than the Mystical Body of Christ. And yet, the Church, when speaking on faith or morals, does speak with the voice and the authority of God, since Jesus Himself said to His Apostles, “‘He who hears you, hears me. And he who rejects you, rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects Him who sent me.’”
Does this mean that we should not be familiar with Jesus, because we’ll hold Him in contempt? I would suggest the opposite. The more we draw closer to Jesus, the more we hear God speaking through Him, and the more that we come to love His word, even when it’s difficult. As we come to know Jesus better, we understand the wisdom that He shares with us, even when it goes against our culture or our mindset. Be open to the word that God speaks through His Word and His Church. Do not rebel against God’s prophets!
