A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 8, n. 31)
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C – June 27, 2010 *
“Called for Freedom”
BIBLE READINGS
I Kgs 19:16b, 19-21 // Gal 5:1, 1 3-18 // Lk 9:51-62
(N.B. Series 8 of BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD: A LECTIO DIVINA APPROACH TO THE SUNDAY LITURGY includes a prayerful study of the Sunday liturgy of Year C from the perspective of the Second Reading. For reflections on the Sunday liturgy of Year C based on the Gospel reading, please scroll up to the “ARCHIVES” above and open Series 2. For reflections based on the Old Testament reading, open Series 5.)
I. BIBLICO-LITURGICAL REFLECTIONS
The Divine Master-Shepherd continues to teach and nourish us as we bask in the peaceful green pasture of the Church worship. Sunday after Sunday, we come in contact with the transforming power of the living Word and relish exceedingly the positive effect on our formative journey through the liturgical year.
In this 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we realize with greater awareness what discipleship means and its exceedingly high demands. It involves radical surrender to the will of God and obliges us not to hold anything back from God. This could be verified in today’s Old Testament reading (I Kgs 19:16b, 19-21) about the vocation and response of Elisha.
Graziano and Nancy Marcheshi remark: “A cloak represented the personality and privilege of its owner, so placing Elijah’s cloak on the shoulder signifies the younger man’s call and initiation into his prophetic mission. Elisha responds with exemplary eagerness, immediately leaving his oxen and running after Elijah … Elisha’s total surrender to God’s will is clearly demonstrated when he destroys his farming equipment and animals in order to offer sacrifice. Neither wealth nor family could deter Elisha from embracing God’s call to be Elijah’s helper and successor.”
This Sunday’s Gospel reading (Lk 9:51-62) delineates the requirements of Christian discipleship: total self-surrender to Jesus, without any other security for the future; absolute priority is given to the preaching of the Kingdom; resoluteness – no turning back. The biblical scholar Eugene Maly comments: “The requirements are radical indeed. But they can be summed up as absolute commitment to Jesus Christ. Such a commitment will entail hardships and heartbreaks, the impairment of friendships and relationships. The disciple knows that he or she is on a journey to a goal that Jesus himself has already attained.”
Christian discipleship is not all hardship or liability for it results in true liberation (cf. Gal 5:1, 13-18). Freedom is what we have for Christ has set us free! We are all called to freedom. Christian freedom, however, is not licentiousness, but a Spirit-animated condition that enables us to love and serve one another. This freedom in the Spirit leads us to live the perfection of God’s law: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Aelred Rosser explicates: “Christians agree to be intimately united with the person of Jesus and are therefore brought into a kind of freedom that cannot be understood apart from faith. It is the freedom to do what our best nature (our redeemed nature) is eager to do. The seemingly endless struggle for genuine freedom is part of the Christian life … The gift of salvation is precisely that – a gift. There are no strings attached. The accepting of gifts given in pure love does not create in the recipient an obligation to reciprocate. It creates an eagerness to respond with a like love. What could be more free than an eager response to love?”
The following article fascinates me (cf. “Order and Chaos” in POVERELLO NEWS, May 2010, p. 3-4). It illustrates the mystery of freedom that leads to perverted “freedom” and the consequent chaos and disorder it generates. More happily, the article also presents the resoluteness of the Poverello staff to pursue the freedom of loving and serving our brothers and sisters in great need.
Chaos is, for humans, an intolerable state. People who have lived in war-torn lands, characterized by wanton destruction and day-to-day unpredictability, often experience numerous mental and physical problems that result from the horrors they witness. Urban areas where crime and disorder are rampant create such a tremendous anxiety for residents that many exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Although chaos is intolerable, many people are nevertheless drawn toward it. Those whose lives lack purpose often prefer the constant excitement of crisis and chaos to divert their own attention from their own tedious and futile endeavors. For example, drug addicts seem to crave the madness that comes with their use of illegal substances. This is why sobriety, with its emphasis on order and responsibility, is such a hard sell with addicts.
At Poverello House, many of those we see are people in perpetual crisis. After dealing with them for a while, one starts to discern a pattern. When given a second or third chance at a new start, they inevitably seem to turn away and choose a course toward more chaos. The addict, after obtaining health, salvaging torn relationships, recovering financially and experiencing the spiritual peace that comes with sustained sobriety, will often opt to start dabbling in drugs again, with predictable results; the woman who is escaping domestic violence will cast herself back in the maelstrom of the destructive relationship, even after ample evidence that by doing so she is endangering herself and the lives of her children; a mentally ill person, after experiencing relief from his torment through psychiatric medications, stops taking them, and relapses into paranoia, delusional thinking, or hallucinations.
What motivates such people to steer a course toward chaos and despair? It would take an expert in mental and emotional pathology to adequately answer that question, but our experience at Poverello House gives us a perspective that might offer some insight.
Human nature is such that we all incline toward the familiar and comfortable. Most people, if given the choice between entering two rooms, one full of strangers, the other full of old acquaintances and good friends, would naturally choose the latter. The same gravitational pull of familiarity exists on the streets. Skid rows or jails are harsh, dirty, and dangerous, but for many, they represent communities that are comfortable and forgiving. Behaviors that would be deplored in other parts of town are ignored in such settings; people who have been rejected in other arenas of life can find acceptance, or at least tolerance, on the streets or while incarcerated. As hard to believe as it might be for someone unfamiliar with homelessness, street life for some is emotionally comfortable, because people grow accustomed to it.
There is a price to pay for that comfort or acceptance, however. When these people surround themselves with like-minded compatriots, who are willing to put up with their aberrant behavior, they receive little in the way of corrective criticism. With peer support for their self-destructive ways, they continue to create chaos in their lives. They stumble from crisis to crisis, and gradually come to depend on others to extricate them from their messes.
Dependency breeds contempt and rationalization, and so many homeless people we know are angry; they depend on Poverello and other organizations for their sustenance, but they also resent the fact that they are dependent. The anger fuels more hopelessness and depression, which prompts them to seek out the excitement of a crisis once again, completing the horrible cycle. The amazing thing is that this process is generally unconscious; the afflicted person can’t, or won’t, see what is happening to himself.
We once had a young man in our Resident Program who was in his mid-twenties, but had already been in thirteen drug rehab programs before he came to ours. He never finished our program, and was irate but manipulative while he was here. He began using heroin again the day he left the program. His pattern was set, and probably the rest of his life will be spent getting high on drugs, getting in trouble, and either going to jail or to yet another program. He had absolutely no insight into his condition.
Whether or not such people are hopeless is not for us at Poverello to determine. We need to set boundaries when we help them, because otherwise, they’ll burn out our staff and use up scarce resources; but help them we must, because that’s our mission and our role in the community. When their crises take them all the way down to the streets, Poverello is here to try to pick them up, and give them yet another opportunity to get it right.
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
Are we willing to imitate the decisiveness of Elisha’s response to his prophetic calling? Are we willing to sacrifice and/or utilize what we have in view of our ministry?
Are we resolute Christian disciples? Is our commitment to Jesus absolute? Are we willing to journey with him to Jerusalem?
Do we realize that Christ has set us free and that we are called to freedom? Do we understand the meaning and implications of Christian freedom? Do we live by the Spirit?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: Loving Father,
teach us the true meaning of Christian discipleship
and give us the grace to commit ourselves absolutely to Christ.
He calls us to a life of freedom.
By his passion, death and resurrection,
he has liberated us from the powers of evil and sin.
Let this gift of freedom be used wisely
to bring out the best in our redeemed nature.
Do not let us pervert this freedom with our false choices.
Help us to be truly free to love and serve one another.
Let the Holy Spirit direct our lives
that we may never give in to the destructive desires of fallen nature.
Lead us Father by your Spirit
to follow the paschal destiny of your Son
toward the fullness of life and love.
We love you and adore you.
We give you thanks and praise, now and forever.
Assembly: Amen.
IV. INTERIORIZATION OF THE WORD
The following is the bread of the living Word that will nourish us throughout the week. Please memorize it.
“You were called for freedom.” (Gal 5:13)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
ACTION PLAN: Pray that Christian disciples may render absolute commitment to the Lord Jesus who calls them to a life of loving service and gives them the gift of true freedom. By your life of wholeness and integrity, of generous charity and self-giving, especially to the poor and the needy, testify to the world about the beauty of Christian discipleship.
ACTION PLAN: That we may have the grace to live fully our call to freedom and Christian discipleship, make an effort to spend an hour in Eucharistic Adoration. Visit the PDDM WEB site (www.pddm.us) for the EUCHARISTIC ADORATION THROUGH THE LITURGICAL YEAR: A Weekly Pastoral Tool (Year C, vol. 6, # 31).
Prepared by Sr. Mary Margaret Tapang PDDM
PIAE DISCIPULAE DIVINI MAGISTRI
SISTER DISCIPLES OF THE DIVINE MASTER
60 Sunset Ave., Staten Island, NY 10314
Tel. (718) 494-8597 // (718) 761-2323
Website: WWW.PDDM.US