After our senses are opened, the next step is to share with others our relationship with Jesus
People who have attended a baptism might recall the words we hear in the Gospel for the 23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time being used as a prayer over the person who is baptized. The baptismal ritual calls for a blessing of the senses. In our journey of faith and relationship with Jesus, our ears and mouth play an important part.
We come to faith, for the most part, by the words that we hear from those around us. We come to know the name of Jesus by hearing it come out of somebody else’s mouth. We also come to know the name of Jesus by reading about Him in the Scriptures. Most importantly, we see the examples set by others who profess faith in Jesus as either being hypocritical or faith-filled.
Once we have heard and seen those who profess to be disciples of Jesus, we then have the opportunity to use our voices to speak about Jesus and our own lives to set an example for others. The blessing given at baptism is meant to be an opening of our senses, so that we can both receive and give everything we have to Jesus and for others.
In Jesus’ time, He asked others not to speak about Him because of their misunderstanding of the job of the Messiah. His mission is to call the people of Israel, as well as all people back to God; not with an army of insurrectionists, but with a community of believers, committing their entire lives to the service of God and one another.
Jesus asked for time to become an example for others to follow rather than continuing in their misguided notion of how the Messiah would act. He asked His disciples to love their enemies, to forgive those who harmed them and to share with others, never expecting a return. That vision of a Messiah was very different from the one that many of them held.
Since it is our job to connect the Scriptures to our lives today, we need to examine how our senses may have been frozen in a false interpretation of how we should act in the world today as a disciple of Jesus.
A quick examination of our inner attitudes and thoughts might help us to see where we need our senses opened anew. Many of us might be affected by the current attitudes of cynicism or hopelessness that lead us to believe that power over other people is the way to bring about God’s kingdom. Are we willing to have our minds and hearts opened to the wisdom of God, as opposed to the wisdom of our current situation? We might have come to believe that as disciples of Jesus, our job is to get rid of a certain group of people so that our country or our neighborhoods might be purified. That would be acting contrary to the ways that Jesus lived His life. Do we welcome the stranger, visit the sick and imprisoned and take care of all who are in need?
The Gospel this weekend reminds us that this must be our ongoing personal purification. We pray that God might open our eyes, our ears, our mouths and all of our other senses so that we can first hear the Word of God and secondly put it into action. We pray that our hearts and minds might be more completely converted to the way of Jesus and that we can get rid of a worldly wisdom that uses Christianity as a power over other people. Jesus fought every attempt to make His way a political system or a military endeavor. He always calls the last to be first and the first to be last.
Father Donald Wester is retired and serves as lecturer of homiletics at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary.