Water at the Beginning and at the End

Homily for Thursday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time

Everybody knows about the parting of the Red Sea. Most of us can conjure up images of the depiction of this epic moment in the history of Israel. The episode makes for good theater.

The story we hear today from the book of Joshua isn’t nearly as dramatic, but it is no less important. It is also a pivotal moment in the history of Israel. It is at this moment that this people goes from being a nomadic tribe that wanders the earth to a nation united in their completion of the final passage to a land of their own.

It is here that they would begin their generations of vacillating faithfulness to and rebelliousness from the Lord. Their descendants would receive judges, kings, prophets and heroic leaders from God. Many of them would meet their deaths proclaimed God’s word to them, recalling them back to God and forcing them to see their defections. It is from the offspring of these people that the Messiah would come.

God had indeed chosen this people to be the people who would produce Jesus who would teach them of the reign of God. In Jesus, they would learn of God’s mercy and forgiveness. Jesus would teach them that to be God’s people, they too had to be people of mercy and forgiveness. As they had benefitted from it over the year, they would be ask to extend it to others.

The parting of the Red Sea is dramatic and exciting theater. The parting of the River Jordan acts as a bookend that brackets the forty year sojourn in the desert, a sojourn that ends as it began. Our lives begin in the saving bath of baptism. When our bodies are brought to the Church for burial, the first action of that rite is to sprinkle it with that baptismal bath. We too begin and end our lives with God with holy water.

To be worthy of the gift that is Jesus, God in our midst, we must also forgive one another from our hearts. It is what God asks of a people who are peculiarly God’s own.

Fr. Lawrence Jagdfeld, O.F.M., Administrator