11 th Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 16, 2024 (Season B)
Peace be with you on this, our celebration of the 11 th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And today also, just happens to also be Father’s Day. Now for those of you who remember one of Good Shepherd’s pastors from not too long ago, there’s no doubt in my mind if he were standing up here right now, he’d tell us all, “this is just another one of those Hallmark holidays invented to make us buy stuff.” And unless you live in a cave with no TV, computer, or smart phone, you must certainly understand his opinion. In fact, the Catholic Church warns homilists to avoid speaking from the pulpit about secular holiday subjects. Regardless however, all of us who are alive should probably take some time today to reflect on the miracle of life and say, “thank you, happy Father’s Day,” and say a prayer for all our own worldly fathers, both living or deceased.
You know there’s a little story about our heavenly Father, I’ve told before but today especially, I think it deserves repeating. Hopefully, anyone who has sat here in Mass through the years, or reads the Bible, is at least somewhat familiar with the Biblical word Abba. Scholars tell us it is a more familiar Aramaic form of the ancient Hebrew word Father, and beyond that I personally, had never given it much thought until a business trip to Israel over 30 years ago. I was at a Mediterranean coastal beach near Tel Aviv and noticed a little girl running full speed through ankle deep water when she suddenly tripped and went face first into the sand and water. So, she comes up out of the shallow water on her hands and knees, sputtering and spitting, looks around, sees her dad on the beach, and then runs to him with her arms open wide, crying, “Abba, Abba, Abba!” My friends, since that day, some 30 years ago, on a beach in Israel, the word Abba has never really meant the same to me. You see, Jesus lived at a time when the Jewish people would not even whisper the sacred Hebrew name of God out loud. Today we pronounce that ancient holy name Yahweh but, after that simple event I witnessed in modern day Israel, I’ve realized Jesus wants us to literally call God – Daddy. In other words, we’re supposed to have an intimate, personal relationship with the unlimited creator of the universe. Now I think there’s something we should meditate on for a while.
OK today, in three of the four readings we hear about growing things. For those of you who are gardeners, perhaps you can relate a little better than most. Ezekiel, the Psalmist, and Jesus are all using the growth of plants, trees, and vines to teach us salvation messages. Ezekiel is ranked among the major prophets of the OT and in this reading, we just heard he is performing one of the two primary missions of OT prophets. Unlike a common modern misperception of what a prophet does, i.e. predict the future, that’s not one of their Biblical missions at all. God sent God’s prophets to Israel for two primary purposes. First, when the people strayed, the prophets tried to pull them back to the path of God’s covenant love. Second, when the people were suffering the prophets spoke words of comfort and hope in God’s eternal promise of covenant love. That second mission is what we find in Ezekiel’s words today.
The prophet and God’s people are in exile in Babylon. Jerusalem and their grand Temple have been destroyed. You see, in ancient times a nation’s gods were defeated by destroying their temples and statues. It was a way of proving my god is more powerful than your god. Now, if you imagine yourself in their place, as captive slaves, in a foreign land, with the destruction of Jerusalem fresh in their minds, you might feel their hopelessness. It’s now time for God’s prophet Ezekiel to speak words of hope. He speaks of the Lord planting “a tender shoot” on the “high and lofty mountain” of Israel. This is language of hope. Despite the profound loss of the Temple, Ezekiel reassures them, and us, of God’s undiminished power. He boldly declares God is neither defeated nor dead. God is alive and actively present among God’s people, capable of both humbling the mighty and exalting the humble.
The psalmist then gives us more words of hope with images of natural organic growth, “The just one shall flourish like the palm tree, like a cedar of Lebanon shall he grow. They that are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God.” And in the Gospel, Jesus compares “the kingdom of God” to a mustard seed growing into the largest of bushes.
So, how do we draw salvation messages from all these natural organic images? People of science might simply call human beings’ rational animals and that’s correct to a point. People of faith, however, will say the rational mind that makes us all human is spiritual, not physical. Our rational thinking minds are not physical objects like computers. The Church teaches we are body and spirit, body and soul, body and mind, and there is perhaps nothing that makes us more totally unique than our God given free will. Our ability to say yes or no. And what is the very best way to teach one of these unique rational human beings with a body and a soul? With images. Images are the first way we learned almost everything when we were young children, and in relation to God we are all very young children. Jesus’ favorite teaching images usually came from parables.
Natural living things like bushes, vines, and trees don’t grow by adding layers from the outside like bricks to a building. They grow from the inside and that’s how our souls grow and that’s how our bodies grow. Is it any wonder Jesus used natural organic growth as an image to eventually teach natural moral law. Unfortunately, from where I sit today however, I would say sadly our Western civilization is losing sight of what we used to call, “natural moral law”. We are starting to see ourselves as objects built from the outside, which we can manipulate and redesign as we please. Almost nothing in our Western cultural vocabulary is called “unnatural” anymore.
Right now, our Catholic Church is growing everywhere in the world except one place, here, in what we call modern Western civilization – Europe and North America. Friends, two things now distinguish our American culture from all others today: the decline of the Church and the decline of the family. Personally, I can take comfort in Jesus’ promise that the gates of hell would not prevail, but that promise was made to Jesus’ Church not a culture, not a civilization, and not a government.
As I said at the start, today is Father’s Day and a good day to say a prayer of thanks for the miracle of life, a prayer for our families, maybe a prayer for our country, and then ask Abba in heaven to bless our earthly dads.
