When I prepare for my homilies and first look at the readings for a Sunday, I try to see a common theme in them. Sometimes the theme is very direct and evident. Other times the theme is more subtle and challenging to find. If a common theme is contained in the readings today, I would identify it as being welcoming and hospitable.
Before I even became Catholic, one of the American Catholics I admired most was Dorothy Day. I had heard about her when I was a college student at Wake Forest, since she passed away in the freshman year of college. She was a journalist who very much lived in the secular world, with organized religion playing a very little role in her life before her conversion to Catholicism. She was searching for something in her life, finding the Catholic faith through he friendship with a religious sister who lived near her home. Back in 1933, with her friend Peter Maurin, she started the Catholic Worker Movement and their houses of hospitality, modeled after the way the monasteries would welcome visitors and strangers in the Middles Ages. All were welcome to these houses of hospitality, especially the poor, the downtrodden, the outcasts. Since it was in the middle of the Great Depression, those who needed to be welcomed were vast. Today, many decades after their founding, there are more than 175 Catholic Worker Houses operating. Day once said: “Those who do not see the face of Christ in the poor, are atheists” who do not receive the entirety of Christ’s Good News. She also said: "If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."
In our first reading, a reward is promised to the Shunamite woman who welcomed and gave hospitality to the prophet Elijah. Her hospitality foreshadows the promise in today’s Gospel, for those who “receives (or welcomes) a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward.” What a wonderful welcome this Shunamite woman made for Elisha in her humble abode: a small room on the roof of the house, with a bed, a table, a chair, even a lamp. This humble, generous gesture of hospitality, offered simply out of respect for a man of God and with no thought of a reward whatever, grants her, in fact, a wonderful reward: next year, she and her husband, who were childless up to this point, would receive the gift of new life in a child born to them. Elisha tells her that next year “you will hold a son in your arms”. So too, today’s Gospel tells us that even so simple a gift as a cup of cold water will not go unnoticed by the Lord.
The idea of a warm welcome is only part of today’s Gospel message. Jesus gives us a challenging instruction, warning that “anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me”. This challenge reflects the situation of believers for whom the threat of persecution was very real in the days of the Early Church. In cases where some family members were Christian and some were not, the choice between “preferring” mother or father to allegiance to Christ faced such believers in their daily reality. We only have to look at what is in the newspapers or on the TV to see that this was not simply a challenge for those first Christians. We see a lot of religious persecution throughout the world today and even a backlash against Christianity in our own country. So, at first glance, some of these phrases in the Gospel reading may seem enigmatic, but delving into them, they are certainly relevant to our modern reality.
In our diocesan goals, the term “intentional disciple” is used a lot. So, what exactly is an intentional disciple? It is one who listens and learns from Jesus, our teacher, and then chooses to follow the teacher and apply what he teaches. An intentional disciples intends to practice what is taught. Paul’s message to the followers of Jesus in Rome in the 2nd Reading stresses the radical change we receive in the waters of baptism: a “death” to our old existence, a death to selfishness and sin. As baptized disciples of Christ, we are made new creations who live in the light of Christ’s resurrection. As disciples of Christ, we can truly be intentional disciples, in union with Christ, in union with Christ’s love, embodying the values of his Good News.
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