A Lectio Divina Approach to the Sunday Liturgy
BREAKING THE BREAD OF THE WORD (Series 8, n. 45)
27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C – October 3, 2010 *
“Faith and Love in Christ Jesus”
BIBLE READINGS
Hab 1:2-3; 2:2-4 // II Tm 1:6-8, 13-14 // Lk 17:5-10
(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
As we continue our pilgrimage through the liturgical year, the word of God exhorts us to remain “in the faith and love that are ours in union with Christ Jesus” (cf. II Tm 1:13b). An essential element of Christian discipleship is faith, which is a commitment of the entire person to Jesus. It is expressed in deep loyalty to God and loving service of others. This Sunday’s liturgy invites the worshipping community to delve into the marvelous meaning of faith - God’s gratuitous gift and our personal response to his saving love.
In the Old Testament reading (Hab 1:2-3; 2:2-4), the prophet Habakkuk decried the silence of God who seemed indifferent to the violence and misery afflicting the chosen people. The loving God responded to his frantic cry with a vision of deliverance and a firm assurance that “the just one, because of his faith, shall live”. True faith is patient, steadfast and enduring. It enables the poor and the afflicted to cling to God with perseverance and to trust patiently in his unfailing saving power.
Aelred Rosser remarks: “The poetry of Habakkuk will find a place in the heart of every believer who faces the challenge of discipleship head-on. The ills of the world seem sometimes to be completely beyond a cure … Enduring faith – that is what is counseled here … It is not easy to apply faith when real, personal, and senseless tragedy becomes an all-consuming force in our lives. The strongest among us can be rendered to helplessness; that’s when we hear Habakkuk’s cry escape our lips: Why? Why? And that’s when we hear the response: The vision will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it. (…) That’s why our faith must be a living, growing, developing part of us. It cannot be shelved until we need it, for then we will discover that it has grown weak and flabby from disuse and will not sustain us.”
The Gospel reading (Lk 17:5-10) depicts the tremendous power of faith and how intimately linked it is with service. Service is a limpid expression of the Christian faith we profess. Faithful service can work miracles in today’s fragmented society that longs for healing and yearns for life-giving hope. Our little “faith” – seemingly insignificant – can move mountains of discouragement and uproot structuralized evils. The force is supernatural. The power of faith is not from human strength, but from God himself. Of ourselves we can do nothing, but with God we can do all. Serving faith is thus a signature of Christian discipleship.
In the Second Reading (II Tm 1:6-8, 13-14), Saint Paul underlines the obligations of Christian faith. Paul was martyred at Rome in the year 67. His second letter to Timothy represented his last will and testament. Paul exhorts the young pastor Timothy to exercise serving faith. The “gift of God” that Timothy received at ordination implies dutiful service to the faith community. Paul reminds Timothy that the divine gift received through “imposition of hands” needs to be continually exercised and rekindled for the common good. Timothy is likewise called to an enduring faith. Timothy needs to give witness to our Lord. He must endure sufferings for the Gospel with the strength that comes from God.
Harold Buetow comments: “Faith is never definitively acquired; it must ceaselessly be reanimated … Today’s advice to Timothy begins by reminding him – and us – to stir into flame the gifts God had given. Because Timothy is young and heresies and other dangers great, he must keep his courage high. He is given a version of the message of Habakkuk: Bear hardships for the sake of the Good News, relying on the power of God. In your efforts, be strong, in order to have the power to cope; be loving, especially for the sake of those with whom you will deal; and be wise – with saintliness keeping control in the face of temptations to panic. (…) Faith, the greatest force in the world, is the richest deposit possible, and the most sacred of trusts. Paul had entrusted his work and his life to God. While a criminal in a Roman jail, treated at best indifferently by his barbarous keepers, he did not change his faith, or his loyalty and steadfastness to God’s plans for him. Why? Because it was inconceivable to him that God, whom he had come to know intimately, would let him down. God’s message to Habakkuk and Paul and the apostles is just as important to us now as ever in history.”
The following inspiring article illustrates what it means to remain “in the faith and love that are ours in union with Christ Jesus” and how a Christian disciple could exercise a serving faith and an enduring faith in today’s world (cf. David Aquije, “The Bicycle Disciple” in MARYKNOLL, April 2010, p. 24-31). Fr. McCahill manifests his faith and shares this wonderful gift as he serves the sick poor in Bangladesh.
The day Maryknoll Father Robert McCahill arrived in Narail it was raining. The thin, 72-year old priest was physically exhausted and tired of looking for the place where he could begin a new phase of mission. Narail “was kind of miserable”, says the missioner who for more than 35 years has been living in different villages of Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population of 150 million in a land the size of Iowa. Narail, a small, underdeveloped village without infrastructure in the southeast of the country, seemed to the missioner like “a good place to make a mark of Christianity, not for the purpose of conversion but simply for the idea of showing what a Christian is and does.”
McCahill was one of five Maryknoll priests who arrived in Bangladesh in 1975 to begin a ministry of Christian witness. For eight years, the missioners lived together, forming a Christian fraternity in Tangail, near Dhaka, the capital. Afterward, McCahill focused his mission on traveling to the interior of the country to help people, particularly children, who were in urgent need of medical assistance. Finding a place to begin his next stay can take McCahill months of research. He has his own criteria: the place should be poor, have no other foreigners or Christians and some of the people must be willing to allow him free use of a small piece of land where he can build his own shack.
A disciple of our times, McCahill arrives alone – with only a bag with a change of clothing and the essential elements to celebrate his own Mass – in any community where he might live for the next three years. There he sits in any tea shop – “tea stalls” he calls them – where men generally congregate to drink cha, sweet tea with milk that is the national drink, the way coffee is in the United States. Noting the presence of a foreigner, the rustic shop quickly fills up with people and McCahill responds honestly to all their questions. “I am Brother Bob, a Christian missionary”, the priest from Goshen, Indiana, tells them. “I am here to serve seriously sick people who are poor.” In the predominantly Muslim nation with a large Hindu minority, the questions that McCahill receives are many: has he come to convert, how does he finance the help he offers and why had he no family? He responds that the medical help he offers depends completely on the financial donations of his extended family and not on an organization; that his purpose is to live among people who are not Christian and treat them with love, respect and brotherhood; and that his family is all of humanity. McCahill describes the three years that he lives in each town this way: “The first year many are suspicious of me. The second year trust begins to build. The third year people’s affection is felt. They say, ‘He said he only came to do good and that is what he does’.”
In Narail, a short while before finishing his three years, McCahill continues getting up very early in the morning to dedicate time for prayer and meditation before beginning his mission work. This morning in October, he leaves his shack of jute-stick walls, a dirt floor and a corrugated roof and mounts his bicycle that will carry him over windy dirt roads through the beautiful countryside of Bangladesh’s fertile farmland, where ironically millions of people live in extreme poverty. The missioner pedals some miles to the next village of Bolorampur, where he visits Mehenaz, a 3-year-old girl who suffers from cerebral palsy as a result of a poorly handled delivery by a midwife in the village. Mehenaz’ grandmother brings the girl out of her hut and puts a mat on the ground. The missioner squats down in the style of the Bangladeshis and observes and assists the grandmother with the recommended physical therapy for the child. The girl’s mother isn’t there and McCahill is happy that someone else in the family has learned the exercises.
Afterward, amid the songs of wild birds and the smell of burning firewood, McCahill again mounts his bicycle and pedals several more miles to the village of Buramara. In Buramara, McCahill visits Liza, a 2-year-old who suffered serious burns on her left arm before her first birthday. The burns were so grave that her entire hand was fused to her forearm. McCahill was able to take the girl to a hospital in Dhaka where surgeons separated her hand from the forearm. Liza wears a brace so that the hand stays straight. The missioner explains that the child needs another surgery to straighten out two fingers that are bent. Liza cries easily and McCahill thinks it is because she is still in pain, but he tries to console her and make her laugh.
That is McCahill’s ministry. He mounts his bicycle and rides miles to his destination. It doesn’t matter if the roads are full of mud during the monsoon season in this tropical Asian land, east of India, on the Bay of Bengal. He arrives in a village and looks to help people who would otherwise be disabled and burdened for a lifetime by their physical conditions. With a small camera he takes photos of their conditions: cerebral palsy, burns, muscular dystrophy, cleft lips, hernias, tumors and broken bones caused by accidents. Every week he goes to Dhaka, traveling the same as the poor, in the old buses that are part of the complicated and dangerous Bengali transportation system. At a hospital in the capital, McCahill shows the photos to doctors who make their provisional diagnosis. With this information the missioner arranges for free treatment at one of the government hospitals in the city and eventually makes the eight- or nine-hour trip again with the children and their parents. “Not a great expense”, McCahill says. “I afford them their tickets. I usually provide the medicine. It’s not a matter of money; it’s a matter of love, the heart.”
Because he lives in a poor and predominantly Muslim country, McCahill relies on only a modest budget that comes from donations by his extended family for his ministry. “If I had lots of funds at hand to use, and lived apart (in a parish), people’s attitude to me would differ”, he says, adding the people would be tempted to wheedle money out of him. “People here understand I’m using more money for their needs than I use for my own needs. No one can look at my life of service and say ‘he can only do that because he’s a rich American’.” For that reason McCahill shares the donations he receives through Maryknoll with other Christian communities that serve the poor in Bangladesh, especially communities of apostolic Sisters.
His is a life of service that he says began on Oct. 31, 1956. He was 19 years old and was interested in a career in political science. But that day as he was returning home from Seattle University, where he was studying, “I received – I can’t even describe it – an attraction to God like I had never felt before nor have needed since. The motivation I received in that moment was sufficient to keep me for life, as long as I continue to remember it.”
For years, McCahill has described his mission in a journal that he types every month on an antique Olivetti typewriter and shares with friends and family. “My mission”, he says, “is to show the love of Christ, the love of God for all people of all faiths; to be with them as a brother, to establish brotherhood by being a brother to them.”
II. POINTS FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE HEART
Is our faith strong enough to endure trials and difficulties? Does our faith give us enough integrity to trust in God’s promise: “The just one, because of his faith, shall live”?
Do we believe that serving faith is a power to move mountains and generate life-giving miracles in today’s world?
Do we endeavor to rekindle the gift of faith we have received at baptism and when ordained for a special service to the faith community? Do we endeavor to remain “in the faith and love that are ours in union with Christ Jesus”?
III. PRAYING WITH THE WORD
Leader: O gracious God,
faith is your gift – your offer of eternal life.
Thank you for your goodness!
Faith is likewise our response to your saving love.
We turn to you and seek your face.
You are our benevolent Father and our redeeming God.
Let our faith response
be marked with strength of hope
and service of love.
May our Christian discipleship
be known for its serving and enduring faith.
Help us to touch a world anguishing for the Good News.
Grant us the spirit of compassion.
Let us embrace tenderly the poor and the suffering.
Enkindle our faith.
Through this spiritual power,
may the whole world and the entire universe
burn with infinite love
flowing from the heart of the Crucified Savior.
We adore you and give you 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.
“Remain in the faith and love that are ours in union with Christ Jesus.” (cf. II Tm 1:13b)
V. TOWARDS LIFE TRANSFORMATION
ACTION PLAN: Pray that our Christian discipleship may be an authentic sign of an enduring and serving faith. Through your good deeds and humble service on behalf of the poor and marginalized and through your witness of peaceful joy, enable the people in today’s world to experience the beauty and saving grace of the Christian faith.
ACTION PLAN: That we may experience more intensely the beauty and dignity of our Christian faith; 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, # 45).
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