Twenty Ninth Sunday Homily in Ordinary Time Year C

TWENTY-NINTH SUNDAY HOMILY IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR C

Ex 17:8-13      2Tim3:14-4:2     Lk18:1-8

Persistence, Especially in Prayer

The Place of Scripture in the’ Christian Life; Seeking Justice; Pray and Act.

1st Reading – Exodus 17:8-13

⁸ In those days, Amalek came and waged war against Israel.

⁹ Moses, therefore, said to Joshua, “Pick out certain men, and tomorrow go out and engage Amalek in battle. I will be standing on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hand.”

¹⁰ So Joshua did as Moses told him: he engaged Amalek in battle after Moses had climbed to the top of the hill with Aaron and Hur.

¹¹ As long as Moses kept his hands raised up, Israel had the better of the fight, but when he let his hands rest, Amalek had the better of the fight.

¹² Moses’ hands, however, grew tired; so they put a rock in place for him to sit on. Meanwhile Aaron and Hur supported his hands, one on one side and one on the other, so that his hands remained steady till sunset.

¹³ And Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.

Responsorial Psalm – Psalms 121:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8

R. (cf. 2) Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

¹ I lift up my eyes toward the mountains;
whence shall help come to me?
² My help is from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
R. Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

³ May he not suffer your foot to slip;
may he slumber not who guards you:
⁴ indeed he neither slumbers nor sleeps,
the guardian of Israel.
R. Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

⁵ The LORD is your guardian; the LORD is your shade;
he is beside you at your right hand.
⁶ The sun shall not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
R. Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

 

 

⁷ The LORD will guard you from all evil;
he will guard your life.
⁸ The LORD will guard your coming and your going,
both now and forever.
R. Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

2nd Reading – 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2

Beloved:
¹⁴ Remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it,

¹⁵ and that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures, which are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

¹⁶ All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness,

¹⁷ so that one who belongs to God may be competent, equipped for every good work.

¹ I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingly power:

² proclaim the word; be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient; convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching.

Alleluia – Hebrews 4:12

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
¹² The word of God is living and effective,
discerning reflections and thoughts of the heart.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel – Luke 18:1-8

¹ Jesus told his disciples a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary.

² He said, “There was a judge in a certain town who neither feared God nor respected any human being.

³ And a widow in that town used to come to him and say, ‘Render a just decision for me against my adversary.’

⁴ For a long time, the judge was unwilling, but eventually, he thought, ‘While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being,

⁵ because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.’”

⁶ The Lord said, “Pay attention to what the dishonest judge says.

⁷ Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them?

⁸ I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Homily

One of the most adaptable words in the English language is “persistent”. When flies or bees or ants are persistent during a Summer picnic, we call them pesty. When children are persistent in wanting something, we consider them bold. But when politicians are persistent in pursuing the electorate, we call them astute. And when business people are persistent in following up sales prospects, we admire their tenacity. Today’s liturgy connects persistence with religion, especially in our prayers of petition.

In today’s Gospel, our Lord tells one of the stories that shows his sense of humour — the story of the unjust judge and the forlorn widow. The judge was the typification of the person of influence whom one would be reluctant to antagonize, and the widow the stock Older Covenant typification of the vulnerable and helpless. She is fragile in body but strong in faith.

In our idiom, we might picture her as a little old lady in tennis shoes, weighing less than ninety pounds, speaking perhaps with a high pitched and cracking voice. The original Greek suggests that the violence that the unjust judge feared was a black eye. Jesus makes the point that the only thing that will move this judge is persistence. And if this can happen with a widow before an unjust judge, how much more with the poor in spirit before the all just God!

St Luke is famous for his widow stories. The reason is that the widow of that time and place was more to be pitied than most widows of any time. She was considered in many ways to be still married to her husband. If he died without leaving children, she was expected to marry his brother, if there was one, in order to bring forth children to carry on her husband’s name. She was in no way provided for financially. She was left defenseless to fend for herself, without the possibility of finding work and completely at the mercy of friends and relatives.

Today, widows at the death of their husbands have rights — such as her husband’s will and social security programmes. Nevertheless, immediately after her husband dies life for her is a black pit of loneliness. She wants to die too (and some countries accommodate that wish). She feels vulnerable, unattractive, and unloved. She misses the friend she could say everything to, misses the buddy who was really in her corner. The more she was in love with her husband, the greater her sadness now. The Church still gives widows an honoured place, and with good reason.

Widows don’t like to be called widows, because of the possible connotation of a lady in a long black dress who has retired from the world. If she goes out and laughs in a restaurant, people look at her as the Merry Widow, which makes things even worse. The statement of many widows is, “You don’t ever get over the loss of your husband. You survive it.”

Sad to say, projections from census data‘ of some countries suggest that nearly 80 per cent of all married women can expect to survive their husbands by about 16 years. Underlying those projections are two trends. Women live longer than men (7 years on average), and men tend to marry women younger than themselves.

In Jesus’ story, the only weapon the widow had against the judge’s injustice was persistence. That is a virtue all of us should have. Years ago in Illinois, a young man with six months’ schooling to his credit ran for an office in the legislature. As might have been expected, he was beaten. Next, he entered business but failed at that, too, and spent the next 17 years paying the debts of his worthless partner. He fell in love with a charming lady and became engaged — and she died. He, had a nervous breakdown. He ran for Congress and was defeated. He then tried to obtain an appointment to the US. Land Office, but didn’t succeed. He became a candidate for the Vice—Presidency and lost. Two years later he was defeated for Senator. He ran for office once more and was elected. The man’s name was Abraham Lincoln. And it took Winston Churchill three years to get through the eighth grade, because he couldn’t pass English — of all things! Ironically, he was asked many years later to give the commencement address at Oxford University. His now famous speech consisted of only three words: “Never give up!”

Today’s First Reading backs up the Gospel’s urgings of persistence with the story of the first military activity of the newly—freed Hebrew people — the Israelites against the Amalekites. A nomadic tribe, the Amalekites dwelt in the Negeb in the desert between Sinai and Canaan. In the battle, the perhaps fanciful story had it that, as long as Moses prayed with his arms outstretched, the Israelites were victorious. When he became tired and let down his arms, the Israelites began to lose. So Moses’ assistants Aaron and Hur held up his tired arms until victory was assured.

The Hebrew Scriptures always emphasize, though, that we don’t win battles only by our own force of weapons. As the refrain of today’s Responsorial Psalm says, our help is from the Lord. To this day, Rephidim, the place where today’s event happened, is sacred to Jewish memory.

Today’s portion of the second letter to Timothy reminds us of another dimension of our prayers — that they be other-directed. We should live and pray wholeheartedly for what we think we want. But we should at the same time pray and act not that our will predominate, but that “God’s will be done”— leaving it to God to differentiate between what we want and what we need.

What does it mean to do God’s will? St Cyprian (Treatise on the Lord is Prayer) put it this way. “Humility in our daily lives, an unwavering faith, a moral sense of modesty in conversation, justice in acts, mercy in deed, discipline, refusal to harm others, a readiness to suffer harm, peaceableness with our brothers, a whole—hearted love of the Lord, loving in him What is of the Father, fearing him because he is God, preferring nothing to him who preferred nothing to us, clinging tenaciously to his love, standing by his cross with loyalty and courage whenever there is any conflict involving his honour and his name, manifesting in our speech the constancy of our profession and under torture confidence for the fight, and in dying the endurance for which we will be crowned — this is what it means to… do the will of the Father.”

When and if we are in doubt about what is God’s will and what is our own, today’s portion of the letter advises Timothy to go, for one, to his teachers — in his case, principally his mother and grandmother. The home is the first School of faith. The letter emphasizes also the usefulness of the inspired word of God in the Scriptures. When the letter speaks of Scripture being good for revealing God’s wisdom, for salvation, for teaching, for training in holiness, and for helping to correct ourselves, it is speaking of the Jewish Scriptures, for the New Testament hadn’t yet been collected. How much more does this advice apply now that we have the New Testament as well! Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Jesus!

We wonder. How long must any current Moses hold up his weary arms until the people of God will prevail? When will God vindicate His elect? Not long yet, says Jesus in the Gospel. But he promised that a long, long time ago. Can we still believe it? The truth is that the promise was fulfilled when Jesus, sharing the lot of pleading humanity, was crucified and rose from the dead. Jesus’ resurrection vindicated all sin and evil, and even death. The decisive battle in any war may have already occurred in a relatively early stage of the war, and yet the war still continues. Although the decisive effect of that battle is perhaps not recognized by all, it nevertheless already means victory. In the ministry of Jesus the decisive battle has been fought and won, Satan has fallen and the power of the evil spirits is broken. Yet the battle still goes on.

So we always gather in our assembly on Sunday to strengthen our faith, to remember God’s judgment, to hear it again spoken in all its power, and to encourage one another to live in accord with that judgment. That requires perseverance.

A little-known man who exemplified that is John Harrison (1693-1776). Until the eighteenth century sailors navigated by following parallels of latitude and roughly estimating distance travelled east or west. Ships routinely missed their destinations. In 1714, England’s Parliament offered a large reward to anyone who provided a “practicable and useful” means of determining longitude.

Most astronomers believed the answer lay in the sky, but Harrison, a clock maker, imagined a mechanical solution — a clock that would keep precise time at sea. By knowing the exact times at the Greenwich meridian and at a ship’s position, one could find longitude by calculating the time difference. However, most scientists, including Isaac Newton, discounted Harrison’s idea. Harrison persisted. He spent decades — decades! — of his brilliant life through skepticism and ridicule, working on a timepiece. Even after completing his timepiece, an instrument we now call a chronometer, in 1759, he underwent a long series of unfair trials and demonstrations. Ultimately he triumphed.

Starting right now, let us make a firm commitment to persevere in those areas of our lives Where perseverance is most needed — relationships, family, faith, self—esteem, work, prayer. But let us temper our perseverance with the petition that, after all is said and done, “May God’s will, and not mine, be done!”