Tuesday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time
On this first day of the month of June, we are in the 9th Week of Ordinary Time. Sunday brought us the celebration of the Most Holy Trinity and yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now, however, we have just an ordinary day where we return to counting the weeks of our time walking with the Lord. Today we have a snippet of the Second Letter of St. Peter. This excerpt is eschatological; in other words, it is concerned with the end of earth. This is often a theme of early Christian writers; Paul as well as Peter. And when we look back, we might be tempted to think they were mistaken. They thought the end of the world was coming, and coming soon, and... it has been 2000 years.
But this interpretation misses the point of what Peter is saying. For one thing, we never know when we will die and face our judgment. Moreover, Peter’s letter communicates an important part of our Christian tradition: the earth is not our final end. We are called to heaven, and all of this life is a pilgrimage to that goal. It is so easy to get distracted from this ultimate calling. We like to think that the world is not ending anytime soon and that we won’t face our own deaths anytime soon. And so it is easy for us to put off change, to leave holiness as a task for tomorrow.
Peter, however, exhorted his flock, and exhorts us today NOT to deceive ourselves that change can wait. Instead, we are to be on our guard, to be ready, to wait for God patiently, to be stable, to shun sin. We must grow in grace daily, coming to a more intimate knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
That same Jesus Christ is featured in today’s gospel reading from Mark in a controversial passage. What exactly does Jesus mean here? Again, we could be distracted from the point if we concentrate too much on what it means to “repay to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” The more important emphasis is that we must repay to God what is God’s.
What is God’s? Everything – the created world in which we live, the resources we’ve been given, our intellects, emotions, our bodies and souls – all of these belong to God. When we think of repaying God, we must realize that we owe him everything, our very being. In the words of Catholic singer/songwriter Danielle Rose, God deserves to receive ALL of our love, and not just the little bit that we want to give to him. Everything that we do each day can and should be offered to God in loving prayer. This is how repay God for his goodness to us.
Of course, we are likely to fail sometimes along the way. Most of the saints failed at one point or another, and we would be deceiving ourselves to think that the road to heaven is an easy path. But we must not give up, and we must not procrastinate in growing in the grace of God. Ordinary time is a time for us to concentrate on our daily lives as Christians – the joys, the sufferings, the difficulties, the gifts of God. As we walk this Ninth Week of Ordinary Time, we must remember that our journey ends in heaven, and that makes all the difference for the way we choose to walk the way on earth. God deserves to receive all of our love, and we are capable of giving it all to him if we rely on the grace he offers to us. We may sometimes fail, but we can always begin again.
Today, take some time to reflect on one area of your morality and spirituality to which you need to be more attentive – it could be concentration in prayer or giving up a bad habit. Don’t procrastinate! Begin to change today, and if you fail today, begin again tomorrow!
- Maria Morrow