Saturday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Today's Mass Readings
Today’s First Reading (1 Timothy 6:13-16) opens with an assignment: We are charged, before the Father and the Son, to follow the commandments and to wait for the Second Coming of our Lord. We are reminded that God “gives life to all things,” that Christ “gave testimony” to his executioner, and that the fullness of God’s glory will someday be “made manifest.”
Taken by itself, such advice could almost appear condescending. After all, obeying the commandments and waiting for Jesus seems to be about as good a description as any of what it means to practice the Christian way of life. And yet, when read in light of the Psalm for the day (Psalm 100:1-5), another theme seems to emerge, because today’s response repeatedly invites us to “come with joy into the presence of the Lord.” Such an exhortation should remind us that, even though we await the fullness of God’s manifestation in Christ’s Second Coming, we are already able to participate in his continued Presence. Of course, as Catholics we are most particularly aware of Christ’s continuing Presence through our participation in the Eucharist. At the same time, there are suggestions in all three of our readings for today of other methods in which God’s presence can be recognized.
Even as the First Reading comforts us with the assurance that God’s presence is yet to be manifest in its fullness, it nevertheless reminds us that God “gives life to all things.” In other words, although we wait for the fullness of God’s manifestation to us, we know that He is the source of all life and goodness. As such, there is a certain sense in which God’s presence can be felt in all of creation, in all the things that God creates. Furthermore, the fact that we are so strongly encouraged to live holy lives and “keep the commandments without stain or reproach” is clearly connected to our ability to recognize God’s presence. It is reminiscent of the Sermon on the Mount, when our Lord proclaims “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8). The implication is that living a holy life not only makes it possible for us “to come with joy into the presence of the Lord” but that it might be even more accurate to say that being holy allows us to recognize how thoroughly in God’s presence we always already are. As the Psalm reminds us, “he made us, his we are… for he is good, the LORD, whose kindness endures forever and his faithfulness to all generations.” God’s goodness is not conditional on the holiness of our lives, but our own ability to recognize this truth may be.
Another way that we see God’s presence manifest in today’s reading is in the Gospel message (Luke 8:4-15). “A large crowd” has gathered around Jesus; they are in the very Presence of God, although it seems very likely that almost none of them yet recognize just how amazing their situation is. Jesus, the Word made flesh, teaches them about the sowing of the Word… in words that they are unable to recognize. This may remind us of ourselves, of times when we might hear or read a passage of the Bible and be unable to discern the presence of the Spirit in those words. Or perhaps we hear the words and are temporarily uplifted, only to find that other troubles return to our minds within a few minutes and drive out whatever comfort we temporarily found in the scriptures. It would seem that all of us, at any time, could be any of the kinds of “ground” that Jesus mentions.
The assignment given by the First Reading, then, can be metaphorically described as cultivating ourselves to be the right kind of soil. We need to strive to live holy lives so that we can recognize, now, that all good things come from God. We need to continually discover the word that has been sown in us, to “embrace it with a generous and good heart,” and to seek to grow in faith even during those times when it seems most difficult to do so. Despite the myriad of reasons that life offers to distract us from it, we need to listen to the assignment of the First Reading so that we can more faithfully accept the invitation that the Second Reading offers, so that we may “come with joy into the presence of the Lord.”
Matthew Minix