Year A / Ordinary Time / Week 3 / Sunday (Sunday of the Word of God)
Readings: Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13 / Psalm: 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10 (R/v Mt 5.3) ) / 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 / Matthew 5:1-12a
Readings: Zephaniah 2:3; 3:12-13 / Psalm: 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10 (R/v Mt 5.3) ) / 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 / Matthew 5:1-12a
“Seek the Lord” (Zephaniah 2.3)
Our readings begin with these words. They call us to look for the Lord. We know we must, today and always. For when we do, our whole being and all our life are centered on God. When we focus elsewhere, other things distract us from God. We begin to make compromises with our Christian life. If we carry on compromising, we drift further away from God.
Jesus himself tells us so. “No one can serve two masters,” he teaches, “for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other” (Matthew 6.24). Hence, Jesus’s repeated calls in the Gospels that we strive to seek God and live in his ways.
Today’s two readings, the psalm, and the Gospel all come together to give a definition of how to seek the Lord. By seeking justice and righteousness, by seeking peace, by seeking humility. These ways enable us to live our Christian vocation to love God and love neighbour.
Notice the readings do not offer instructions like a step by step guide for us to follow rigidly to get to God and to live regimentally in his ways. Instead, Jesus elaborates God’s call to His way of living. This is what his sermon on the Beatitudes is about.
When we hear the Beatitudes, many of us would not count ourselves among the poor in spirit, the meek, the merciful and so forth. Nor do we tend to see ourselves as blessed.
Jesus challenges us to think otherwise as he teaches the Beatitudes. He celebrates them as the blessedness we have; this is a quality of who we are as God’s creation. He also offers the Beatitudes as the blueprint for how we are to live – like him.
Reflecting on the Beatitudes, my New Testament teacher, Fr Tom Stegman, a Jesuit, invited us to think of them as a painting of Jesus’s qualities. When Jesus calls us to embrace and live them in everyday life, Jesus is calling us to become like him. This is how we share family resemblance with Jesus, Tom emphasised.
To live like Jesus and share family resemblance with him means we walk through life in his steps, see the world's opportunities and challenges with his eyes and love everyone with his heart. Consider this. Jesus the Word of God became Flesh to save us and “in flesh” lived amongst us. When we make the Beatitudes our way of life and become like Jesus, we participate in the process of how we give birth and life to Him in our lives. What flesh do we put on? The love of Jesus as St Paul teaches we must put on over all virtues and that binds them in perfect unity (Colossians 3.14). This is how we become like Jesus and we live like him – with his love.
“They will know we are Christian by our love, by our love,” is a hymn we used to sing in Church. We hear its echo when Zephaniah proclaims God’s promise of planting a people whose lives would reveal His loving presence. This is the remnant of Israel who shun sinful ways to live in God’s ways. Instead of telling everybody not to tell lies or how to act toward each other, God works through this remnant to show them how to live justly with God’s love. We are this remnant in today’s world. Our task is to carry forth God’s plan for establishing a just reign for everyone.
Christians need to do this because the world is far from perfect or just, far from recognising the common dignity everyone has as God’s children. In a perfect world, people would treat each other decently. A perfect world would be at peace, and justice would prevail.
Sadly, our world is imperfect. We see leadership going usually to the bold. How then will the gentle lead? We see injustice around us every day. How then will those who hunger for justice be satisfied? We know many who mourn because they suffer so much. Where then is comfort for the mourning?
To them and for their hope, God chooses us. We are – if we are honest to admit – oftentimes the foolish, weak, lowly and sinful he has redeemed and still repeatedly forgives. He chooses us to shame and humble, teach and convert the wise, the powerful, the high and mighty, even the self-righteous and the holier-than-thous in church. He does this in order that they will encounter Jesus’s message that God saves because he loves them too.
The Good News is that God needs us, Jesus’s disciples, to help him bring his saving love to all peoples – not with a set of dos and don'ts but with our very lives. By living the Beatitudes like Jesus did, we can do two things for anyone seeking God. First, we help others to discover their blessedness as God’s own. Second, we enable them to encounter God’s presence in this world that sadly lacks enough mercy and compassion, hope and love, forgiveness and salvation. All of us have had both these experiences at different times in our lives. Every time God does this for us, His love touches us unexpectedly yet ever profoundly. We come to know who we are – always his, never forgotten, no matter our struggle with sinfulness.
Now, Jesus is asking us to partner him and help others experience the same goodness God wants to give gratuitously. Maybe when they know God’s saving love, through the lives we live and share, they will sing with the psalmist, “happy the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Shall we do this for everyone?
Preached at Church of the Sacred Heart, Singapore
photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash
Preached at Church of the Sacred Heart, Singapore
photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash
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