If You Know What is Good for You

Homily for Friday of the Twenty-sixth Week in Ordinary Time

All human endeavors that have success as their desired outcome share some common traits. Among them are an honest awareness of one’s self and one’s shortcomings, as well as one’s strengths, and the humility and fortitude to stop, turn back, retrace one’s steps, and work on anything that needs fixing, improving, or even complete revamping.

Athletes do this. So do musicians, students, actors, tradespeople – the list could go on. In the midst of all of these groups are Christians whose very participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus depends on these habits, and more. The secular world calls it remediation. We Christians call it repenting.

In the first reading today from the Prophet Baruch, we hear the Jewish people who have been exiled to Babylon recalling their failures to listen to God and the prophets that God sent to them. They recount their failures such as the fact that some of them worshiped other gods. They realize that God’s decision to allow the Assyrian army to capture them and lead them into exile was the result of their sins. They are doing the exact same thing that we do when we go to confession. We examine our lives and ask God’s forgiveness. Repenting is not a new notion to God’s people. However, they struggled with repentance through every generation. While the exiles in Babylon demonstrate maturity and self-understanding, the towns in which Jesus is performing mighty deeds are failing in that capacity.

The words which Jesus speaks in the Gospel are addressed to his disciples, the seventy-two disciples that Jesus was sending out two by two. He tells them point blankly, “Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” He realizes that many will not listen to his disciples just as their ancestors had failed to listen to the prophets. He is preparing them for the rejection that he knows they will experience.

Jesus does not write them off. He scolds and warns them for their own sake. To put it in the terms that parents sometimes use with their children today, he is saying “If you know what’s good for you, you will obey.” He says the same thing to us today. Hopefully we are all aware of what is good for us; namely, the Gospel of Jesus Christ.