Our Response to God’s Goodness!

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Ez 17:22-24; 2 Cor 5:6-10; Mk 4:26-34

The eleventh Sunday invites us to reflect on the goodness of God and our response to it. 

The Gospel sets the tone for other readings. 

Jesus explains the Kingdom of God through parables on seeds. In both instances, we find Jesus attributing the growth of seeds to the powerful work of God. The growth that is witnessed outwardly points to the inwardness of God’s doing. Because God’s doing surpasses human understanding, we can only become thankful witnesses toward an act of God’s grace. Hence, it is not as if the seeds grow into mighty trees without a cause, but without a cause proceeding from us. In the parables, Jesus establishes God as the efficient cause. 

The first reading too explains God’s doing, especially as it concerns the restoration of the kingdom of Israel. God will plant a cedar tree on the high and lofty mountains, and it will grow into a majestic tree under which birds of every kind shall find shelter. The metaphor of the mighty cedar tree symbolizes the eternal and powerful kingdom that God will establish in Christ. The birds finding shelter under the tree indicates the certain and eternal protection coming from God and a supply of everything necessary. As in the Gospel, here too we glimpse into the greatness of God’s doing. 

In the second reading, St. Paul invites us to find hope in unseen things. The verse ‘we walk by faith, not by sight’ captures the truth of his statement. Secondly, Paul also reminds us of God’s doing when he talks of our present bodies that God will replace with resurrected bodies prepared for eternity. As such, though our physical nature keeps us separated from Jesus, we will be with the Lord in eternity. Hence, Paul instructs us that the surety of eternity should motivate us to live for Christ today, even when it is hard. 

The readings of today invite us to reflect on three themes. 

God’s Goodness: We are called to remember and be thankful for the goodness of God in our lives. Oftentimes, we want to assert ourselves, forgetting that it is in God that we live, move, and have our being. Recognizing God’s goodness is not self-effacing behaviour. Rather, it is an invitation to proceed from the awareness that we have been blessed by God more abundantly than we even know. St. Augustine said, ‘God is more anxious to bestow His blessings on us than we are to receive them.’ Realization of God’s blessings and our awareness of them make us grateful and help us lead meaningful lives. 

Human Vulnerability: Though we are blessed in many ways, it takes real wisdom to understand that, as humans, we are limited and vulnerable. Therefore, we should inherit the wisdom attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, who prayed, ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ True wisdom lies in knowing what is only possible with God and what we are capable of. If we can know and understand where God’s grace begins and where our human strength ends, such humility will guide us to greatness. 

Our Response: Though we recognize God’s omnipotence and our limitations, we are called to respond to God’s initiatives in ways we can. In this sense, our response becomes a responsibility that we can never skip. Faith is not a one-way relationship. In what is a Divine-human encounter, faith blooms when we freely and willingly respond to God’s initiatives. The lives of Jesus and saints demonstrate that by cooperating with God, we can turn our ordinary existence into an extraordinary witness. 

Faith is best experienced as our responsible response to God’s goodness toward us. 

Fr. Dhinakaran Savariyar