Daily word, 08 Nov 19

Friday, 31^st Week of the Year (08 Nov 2019)

Rm 15. 14-21; Ps 98; Lk 16. 1-8

Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J., Full Spiritual Exercises

Urgently Rising

Jesus felt an urgency to complete his mission:  I have a baptism to be baptized with, and I am wholly absorbed by it until it is completed!¹ St. Paul felt his mission was urgent. He expressed it earlier in Romans: our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.² His urgent sense made him “a pioneer preacher pushing on to new”³ regions with one mission: I have always made it my aim to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named.

Paul truly aimed to make Christ known; yet the initiative was Christ’s. Christ encountered Paul when Paul least expected; indeed, Paul did not expect Christ. Christ’s graciousness Paul would always remember; graciousness from which he would always live:  I no longer live, but Christ lives in me…[Christ] the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.⁴ At once Paul knew also that Christ did not limit his love. Paul proclaimed, Christ is in you…his Spirit dwells in you⁵; and your life is hidden with Christ in God.⁶

The same eternal, triune Mystery, Christ, God, Spirit, has encountered each of us. We did not make the encounter happen nor expect the way Eternal Mystery encountered us. The Eternal urgently desired you come here and let yourself be encountered. The Eternal’s life given us presses us on to a new frontier: to engage the life we have received and will continue to receive. Christ lives in us, with us, for us.⁷ Hold onto that, keep hearing St. Paul’s emphatic urging. The enemy of our human nature tempts us all to discount it, to disbelieve it, to discard it. Banish the enemy quickly, and hear the truth you have encountered and inhabit the truth. Divine truth does not deceive.

St. Ignatius guided us to welcome truth and counter the enemy of our human nature; he helped us inhabit the truth, to let it shape us and to know it with our hearts and minds. In her pioneering way Dorothy Sayers used radio and drama to help people encounter Jesus and hear Jesus afresh. In one of her dramas her character Persona voiced Christ. Hearing her Christ-voice address us may help us reawaken to Christ alive in us and always for us and feel Christian urgency anew.

Come then, and take again your own sweet will

  that once was buried in the spicy grave

With Me, and now is risen with Me, more sweet

  than myrrh and cassia; come, receive again

All your desires, but better than your dreams,

All your lost loves, but lovelier than you knew,

All your fond hopes, but higher than your hearts

  could dare to frame them; all your City of God

  built by your faith, but nobler than you planned.

Instead of your justice, you shall have charity;

Instead of your happiness, you shall have joy; 

Instead of your peace the emulous exchange of   

  love, and I will give you the morning star.

Rise up, My mother Mary and come away, Rise up, My daughter Eve and My sweet son Adam, Rise up, My city, rise up, My church, My bride!

For the time of your singing has come, and My  

   bright angels

Unwinter hosannas in the perpetual spring; 

So enter my Father’s house…

Where the endless Now is one with the moment’s measure,

The truth with the image, the City with the  King.⁸

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1. I am constrained is in various English translations. Jesus’ constraint was not physical but that pressing urge to complete what was begun.
2. Romans 13.11. 
3. A.T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament, Accordance electronic ed. (Altamonte Springs: OakTree Software, 2001), paragraph 4967.
4. Galatians 2.20.
5. Romans 8.10…11.
6. Col 3.3.
7. Romans 8.31.
8. Dorothy Sayers, her 1946 play, The Just Vengeance, London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd, 1959), p. 350-51.

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Wiki-images by Dietmar Rabich Window in Fira, Santorini, Greece CC BY-SA 4.0