Remembering

Homily for Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

In our first reading for today’s Eucharistic Liturgy, God instructs Moses about the annual liturgical calendar which determine the way God’s People are to celebrate the various feasts of the year. As in our liturgical calendar, these events are all centered on remembering. Just as our calendar revolves around the most important observance of our faith, the calendar of our Jewish brothers and sisters revolves around their most important observance; namely, the observance of Passover.

The second feast day in the Jewish calendar occurs fifty days after Passover and is called Pentecost, a name that we also use when we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus. Just as we hold a day of Thanksgiving after the harvest has been brought in, the Jews celebrated the feast of booths or tents or tabernacles, remembering God’s abundant care for that agricultural nation. By building temporary structures in their fields and living in them for a time, they also remember the forty-year sojourn in the desert and give thanks for the land of milk and honey which God has set aside for them. It is clear that the act of remembering what God has done for them is central to their worship just as it is central to our worship as we remember what God has done for us through his son, Jesus.

While remembering the past is central to our liturgy, the Gospel text reminds us that there is also a negative side to the act of remembering. When Jesus returns to his hometown, they remember who Jesus was and take offense at the fact that he has changed. While the people of Capernaum were astonished by Jesus’s teaching with authority, the people of Nazareth are offended by the fact that a man that they remember as a the son of a carpenter is now presuming to teach them. They were not interested in being instructed so much as they wanted to see the various wonders for which he was reputed in other places. They wanted to control Jesus by their memories of him. They were unwilling to let him grow into something other than the man they knew as a boy. This can become a problem for us as well as we tend to look upon those people we have known in our youth without allowing them to have grown and acquired new knowledge.

Faith demands that we set aside our own ideas and accept things which are beyond our understanding. The Church calls us to remember the wonderful things that God has done for us while at the same time accepting the various mysteries of our faith which are beyond our human knowledge. In our prayer of thanksgiving today, we embrace through faith the fact that Jesus remains with us in this most Blessed Sacrament.