After the great feasts of Easter, Ascension and Pentecost, which with Holy Week highlight the key mysteries of our salvation, we had three complementary feasts to round out our sense of the saving God: Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart. They express the mystery and wonder of God beyond our comprehension, who is still close to us and bound to us in love. Today’s readings continue that theme: a God who is utterly concerned and seeking what works for our good.
The Old Testament passage from Exodus is put in terms of Israel’s covenant with God, a somewhat legal sounding relationship where God tells his people to stay close to him — much as a mother or father would tell a child to hold my hand while we cross the street.” I don’t want harm to come to you.” But even if expressed in legal terms of “listening to my voice and keeping my covenant,” there is God’s reaching out to Israel. They will be “dearer to me that all other people, … a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” There’s a closeness and valuing. And not simply to leave non-Israelites out. Remember that Israel was ultimately intended to be ‘light of the nations,’ priest-mediators through whom God would reach out to everyone, a vocation that would, by many, be squandered except for Jesus and his Jewish disciples.
Romans pushes even more deeply how much God reaches out to us. Beginning with how “the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us,” there follows today’s reading which spells out how not even our sinfulness and unworthiness can get in the way of God’s desire to give us life. “Greater love no one has,” Jesus tells us, “than to lay down his life for friends . . . and you are my friends.” But Romans fills out the picture: sinful friends, whom nobody would die for except a loving Lord, who saves us by his death and life, his cross and resurrection. So we can now boast of this God who through Christ brings us back to himself.
The gospel too points in the same direction. Jesus goes about curing every disease and illness, Matthew says, and then today’s reading: “because his heart was moved with pity for them, because they were troubled and abandoned like sheep without a shepherd.” Then he reminds us what ministry in the Church is meant to be: not privilege or power, but labor to let all share God’s harvest. Ordinary people like Peter, James, John, etc., are called to embody God’s concern
and care for people starting with Israel (since God remains faithful to his promises to them), but ultimately to “all nations.” Certainly, a theme that Pope Francis has urged over and over- inclusiveness, leaving nobody out of the picture.
So let us give thanks that this is the way God is constantly inviting us to share grace upon grace, concerned about us, not casting us off when we go astray but reaching out more lovingly to bring us home. And as we “boast” in this Lord, we want to be reminded of our vocations to be extensions of God’s love and kindness wherever we find ourselves. “Without cost you have received,” Jesus tells his apostles; “without cost you are to give.” Let us continue to be very much aware of what we have received, and ever more ready to be givers and sharers of that same love and concern that the Lord extends to us.
Homily delivered by Fr. William (Bill) Abbott, SJ
17 June 2023
Anticipated Sunday Mass
Cenacle Retreat House