Breaking Open the Word - 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B — June 13th, 2021
Welcome back to Ordinary Time! This warm and sunny month of June, when every member of the plant kingdom seems to be bursting with life, is the perfect time to ponder Our Lord’s parables about the mysterious and rapid growth of the Kingdom.
We began our Scripture sharing with this Sunday’s first reading, the image of redeemed Israel as a majestic cedar tree. One Sister highlighted the final lines, where the LORD declares that He will “bring low the high tree, life high the lowly tree, wither up the green tree, and make the withered tree bloom.” This motif of God reversing fortunes, turning human logic “on its head,” can be found throughout the Old Testament. It reaches its climax in Christ, “who, though He was rich, became poor so that by His poverty [we] might become rich.” Our Lady’s Magnificat is a particularly eloquent New Testament expression of this Divine “method”: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He has sent away empty.” We may be tempted to regard this as mean or arbitrary on God’s part. After all, what did the “green tree” do to deserve being withered? Does God not want us to flourish and succeed? Sister suggested that the contrary is true – it is actually an act of God’s infinite mercy to humble us when we begin to rely too much on ourselves. He does not cast us from our self-made thrones simply to leave us in misery; rather, He does this so that we can become one of the lowly whom He raises high. The Lord wants our happiness and glory with all His Heart, but He knows that we as creatures can only achieve this fulfillment on His terms. Thank God that He loves us too much to allow us to be content with our poor counterfeits of true joy!
We then moved on to the Gospel, focusing particularly on the famous parable of the mustard seed. As Dr. Brant Pitre points out, this little story is more shocking and thought-provoking than we often consider it to be. While the ancient prophets always referred to God’s kingdom in majestic terms (as in today’s First Reading), Jesus declares that the Kingdom will resemble something far less glorious. The mustard plant that Our Lord references is more like a giant weed that tends to take over wherever it grows, and while it is certainly “the largest of shrubs,” it is hardly impressive when compared with a “cedar of Lebanon”! So what could Jesus mean by this unusual choice of metaphor? Perhaps He is showing us the mysterious reality that the Church Militant will always appear “rough around the edges.” Until she comes to the end of her sojourn on earth, the Church will be made of both saints and sinners, the fervent and the lax, the heroic and the cowardly. The same truth is presented in the parable of the wheat and the tares – in His mysterious Providence, God chooses to allow good and evil to exist side-by-side in this present age. And yet, as one Sister remarked, a field of yellow mustard looks quite beautiful when seen as a whole; in the same way, the Church as a whole is still the spotless Bride of Christ even in spite of the imperfections of her members!
“I would rather die for Christ than rule the whole earth.” — St. Ignatius of Antioch
We finished our discussion with the second reading, in which St. Paul expresses his confidence that death, for a Christian, is truly a homecoming. A Sister shared how she always finds this and similar passages in the letters of Paul inspiring: if we remain faithful to Christ, then we live in a constant “win-win situation,” where the worst that could happen to us (death) is actually the best that could happen to us! This astounding paradox was at the heart of the heroic witness of the early Christian martyrs. Roman authorities were baffled by these people who went to their deaths singing for joy, these followers of a strange new religion that seemed to thrive on persecution. St. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to martyrdom, wrote to the Church at Rome that he actually desired this fate, and that he would consider it a tragedy if his life were to be spared! At the heart of these naturally inexplicable attitudes is precisely what St. Paul describes today: “We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
But what about the rest of us, most of whom will not be called to give witness unto the shedding of our blood? We are still called to “die daily,” as the Apostle describes elsewhere, so that we can be truly prepared for the homecoming that will take place on the day of our physical death. St. Paul of the Cross particularly urged his spiritual children to strive for “mystical death to all that is not God” – that is, a profound attitude of detachment from earthly goods. Yet this is not a morbid and depressing state, as the lives of the Saints show. Rather, it is the key to true joy, as we place our priorities in the right order and make God and His Will – the source of our lasting peace – the center of our lives.