Homily: Monday of the 3rd Week of Lent 2016 - God's Ordinary Activity

Jesus Rejected at Nazareth by Jeff Watkins

Naaman, the Syrian army commander afflicted with leprosy, was appalled at the suggestion that to cure his leprosy all he had to do was to bathe in the Jordan River.  That river?  It’s so ordinary!

Jesus, after forty days in the desert, comes back to his home town and is rejected by its citizens.  They knew him as a young boy.  Perhaps they had heard some story about him being lost in Jerusalem for three days while Mary and Joseph looked for him.  They saw him working with Joseph in his carpenter’s shop, how could He be a prophet, how could God be at work in Him!  God couldn’t possibly be that close!

Naaman wanted healing on his terms.  The people of Jesus’ home town wanted God on their terms.

One of the great difficulties that the very earliest Christians had was convincing their neighbors, accustomed to great religious spectacles, that baptism—just being washed with water—really did bring with it the promise of living forever.  “Washing in water?  Just ordinary water?” 

Look at our sacraments: water, bread, wine, oil, confessing past faults, a man and a woman making promises to each other—ordinary things.  For, the power of the sacraments comes not from the water or the oil, but from God.  God is so powerful he can work with ordinary things.

Sometimes our faith seems so ordinary.  I’ve talked to self-proclaimed atheists who claimed that they’d believe in God if He appeared to them in some great supernatural vision.  But when I tell them, God has appeared in ordinary flesh and begun His Church, they laugh.

Many fallen away Catholics claim they don’t go to Mass because it’s boring and ordinary.  They don’t read the bible because, well, that’s so ordinary.  I’ve also talked to Catholics whose family members have fallen away from the Church and have fallen into to some pretty deadly sins.  They looked at me with surprise and doubt when I suggested they pray a rosary for their children.  A rosary, how ordinary! 

So they don’t do anything, they don’t change anything about themselves because they want some magic formula.

Come to Mass, receive the Eucharist, go to confession, read the bible, pray the rosary, spend time in adoration before the blessed sacrament, learn the faith so you can talk about it coherently with non-believers.  It sounds so ordinary, but God works most often in the ordinary.

At this point in Lent you may be starting to be disillusioned with your Lenten penances, they might seem so ordinary now.  But I urge you to persevere, God is working through those Lenten practices.  He will bring about great conversion including your own, if you let him.  For the glory of God and salvation of souls.