Lec
# 76- 6th Sun of OT- Feb 16, 2014- Fr. Bresowar
My
brothers and sisters in Christ, it is always good to be here to celebrate this
Eucharistic feast with you each weak.
There
is nothing better that we can do with our free choice, then to choose to come
here and worship the Lord together as one family. It’s the most important thing
that we do and it is where Heaven and Earth meet and we order ourselves most
especially to God. God is King, and we are his subjects and he promises that if
we choose him, he will never abandon us. Yet he gives us a choice.
Maybe
the greatest gift God gave man, besides Himself, was the ability to make a
choice for ourselves as to if we want to follow Him or not.
It
tells us something about God that he gives us a choice. It tell us that we, who
are made in the image of likeness of God, must be, as He is, free to love.
God
is Love, and in order for us to become as He is, then we must have the capacity
to order our free will to Him.
The
first line of the first reading of today’s scripture says this,
If
you choose, you can keep the commandments, and in doing so you will be saved.
Blessed are they who follow the law, the responsorial psalm reminds us.
God
gives us choice. He doesn’t force us to obey him, rather he asks us to. Why?
Does
God want everyone to be miserable? Quite the opposite, God knows what will make
us happy better than we do, which is why he says that certain behaviors simply
cannot lead us to happiness, and that certain attitudes can impede us from
being fulfilled.
Yet
even so, many people choose not to trust God, and rather, trust themselves and
their own judgment. The wonderful thing about this is that they have a choice
to do so; the sad thing about this is that these choices do have consequences.
Jesus, in the Gospel today is reminding
his disciples of the wisdom of doing it God’s way verses the way of the world.
He
didn’t come to do away with the law. Some people believe because Jesus is love,
then therefore all we need to do is accept him as a decision that we make in
our conscience and therefore our actions don’t matter anymore.
Jesus
says, “I haven’t come to do away with God’s law, but rather, I have come to
fulfill it.”
He
is reminding us that he is the new law, and in a way, this takes it up a notch.
“If
you look at a woman with lust, you’ve already committed adultery in your heart.”
“Do
no swear at all,” he says. “not by heaven,;
nor by the earth, nor by Jerusalem, Do not
swear by your head.”
Just don’t do it.
Be perfect, as your heavenly Father
is perfect.
So, it’s not that Jesus has come to
take away the commandments, but rather, to call us to perfection.
He knows we have the capacity to be
better. He knows we can do it, and he going to help us. He does help us, by
feeding us with his very life in the Eucharist. By pardoning our sins in the
sacrament of confession and by giving us the grace necessary to persevere and
to keep going amidst our earthly trials and sufferings.
God knows what is best for us, and
he knows what makes us happy.
The world and the spirit of the
evil one wants us to decide for ourselves what makes us happy. But it’s a lie.
The father of lies has been lying since the beginning trying to convince men
and women that they know better than God.
And since the beginning, men and
women, have been learning the hard way that they do not.
Life happens, things happen,
circumstances happen, and we cannot control the past. We cannot control the
future either. We cannot control other people and how they will or will not
choose to follow the new fulfillment of the law, Jesus Christ. But we CAN
control our own choices.
Happiness is contingent on choosing
to trust Jesus Christ and to follow him though the teaching ministry of his
Apostles and their successors, our bishops.
This is nothing new in terms of
news, and yet we constantly must be reminded of it because Satan is always
trying to get us to forget it.
It’s okay to be Catholic. It’s okay
to not bend to every societal pressure to accept certain behaviors as normal.
It’s okay to follow God over society. We shouldn’t be ashamed to do so.
After all, in the end, there is a
standard by which all generations will give an account of their lives, and it
won’t be the standard of today’s culture. It will be the standard of the cross
of Jesus Christ.
“No greater love is this, then to
lay down your life for your friends.” “If you would be worthy of me,” our Lord
says, “deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.”
And remember if you are hated by
the world for doing so, remember, it hated me first. Blessed are you who are
not ashamed of me.
If the world had known of the
wisdom of Jesus Christ, they would never had killed him. St. Paul reminds us of
this in his letter to the Corinthians.
He says, What eye has not seen,
and ear has not heard,
and what has not entered the human
heart,
what God has prepared for those who
love him,
This is what the Spirit teaches us
when we actively choose to follow Jesus against the pressure of our culture. No
one needs me to explain this to them, it becomes evident more and more as the
Spirit of God makes it clearer to us the more we choose to follow Him.
Despite what has happened or will
happen, we always have a choice.
Love is worth it. Jesus is Love.
Let us follow him, and never be ashamed.
