Homily for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy to the church of the Thessalonians
in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
grace to you and peace.
We give thanks to God always for all of you,
remembering you in our prayers,
unceasingly calling to mind your work of faith and labor of love
and endurance in hope of our Lord Jesus Christ,
before our God and Father,
knowing, brothers and sisters loved by God,
how you were chosen.
For our gospel did not come to you in word alone,
but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with much conviction.-1 Thessalonians 1:1-5b
Although this Sunday’s Gospel lesson might suggest a homily that touches on the current election and its deeply troubled cultural context, this will not be the theme—with all due respect to our Caesars in the state and the scribes and Pharisees in the media. Rather, let’s leave them for a moment and fix our attention on (believe it or not) some who are more important, namely God and his holy ones.
The theme is the constant and powerful reality of our union with God in the Blessed Trinity and with our fellow believers by the force of efficacious grace and persevering prayer. This theme will tell us how to be at peace in this life and happy in the life to come, and it’s all included in the practice of the daily rosary.
The greatest of theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas (greatest not because he had all kinds of new ideas, but because he understood fully that treasure he had received) arranged the whole of his teaching according to one simple truth: just as God makes each and every thing come out from himself, so he draws each and every thing back to himself. This fundamental fact is the model of all events whatsoever—be they in the world of spirits, men, or matter.
Everything comes forth from God and returns to him according to its nature, yes, but for God all this happens at once, or suddenly. The very act whereby he makes everyone and everything come forth is the same very act whereby he makes everyone and everything come back to himself. When in our own lives we get a hint of this, we are delighted at his designs and presence.
For us, things happen over time, in a process, and so growing and coming to completion seem like a relatively long experience. The events and struggles and course of our lives, from infancy to old age, seem long and drawn out. And for beings that are just material, there are eons of time before God fulfills it all and makes a “new heaven and a new earth” at the end of the ages.
Yet for God it is all a matter of an instant, indeed, less than an instant. For him, as the scriptures say, “a thousand years are as a day.” But for us, before we enter in to the single blessed instant of eternal life, there is this life, and even perhaps the duration of purgatory.
How can we lay hold of God’s perspective? How can we rise above the long, labored process of earthly life to the place where we come forth from God and return to him all at once, and find our delight—like little babies who love to be surprised by the sudden, all-at-once going and coming of a game of peek-a-boo?
The answer is prayer. Notice how in today’s reading from the first epistle to the Thessalonians there is a going and coming from the mystery of the Holy Trinity, through the prayers of Paul, that includes his hearers and their needs. He and they are wrapped up in the mystery of God and the power of his Holy Spirit.
The easiest, best daily way to get into the going-out and returning of ourselves and of those for whom we pray is to pray the holy rosary. This is not just a matter of words, but, as St. Paul says, it is accomplished “in power and the Holy Spirit.”
We do not have to wait to become great saints or mystics to step into this daily tide of God’s life and designs for our lives. The mysteries of Christ—joyful, light-filled, sorrowful, and glorious—give us access to the things of God and heaven to which we are tending.
This daily discipline of prayer will gradually change and deepen our perspective on life. Our trials and challenges, our various needs met and unmet for the moment, are inserted into the one perfect life of the Son of God made man for our salvation, and the company of his mother and all his holy ones.
The hidden history of souls is like one great chain of the rosary, each moment linked to the power of God and his Spirit like the beads we use to pray.
Why should we allow our lives to go on unenlightened by the mysteries in which we believe? So much grace and power can be ours if we will only give ourselves generously to the work of prayer. Five decades, ten, fifteen, twenty are short indeed in comparison to the eternity of bliss we hope to enjoy by meditating on the mysteries of the holy rosary.
When we reach heaven, then, we will be like the little ones to whom it is given to enter the kingdom, and we will experience the delight of that sudden peek of his face. This face we will recognize as the one we were gazing upon without realizing it as he drew us back to himself by this marvelous bond of the beads, and then the time we spent in prayer will seem short indeed.