Tuesday January 24, 2006 (Audio) Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Third Week in Ordinary Time
Reading (2 Samuel 6:12b-15,
17-19) Gospel (St. Mark 3:31-35)
In the Gospel reading today, Our Lord asks that great question: Who are
My mother and My brothers? And He says, Whoever does the Will of God is
mother and brother and sister to Me. This being the case, we first have to understand
that it is not a put-down to Our Lady, as some would try to suggest. There is
no one who did the Will of God more perfectly than Our Lady. Consequently, if
the one who does the Will of God is mother and brother and sister to the Lord,
Our Lady primarily is not only mother in the physical sense, but she is also
mother in this extended sense that Our Lord is speaking about, that is, in the
discipleship in union with Him. Our Lady is pre-eminent in both senses in that
way, and in no way is this any kind of put-down to her. But it also tells us
something about our own selves. The Lord makes very clear that it is those who
do the Will of His Father. It is not for those who simply want to say they
believe, but they have to act upon the belief. It is not enough, once again,
just to sit back and have this generic idea of Who He is; we have to act on
what it is that we believe.
When we look at what that means, of course, it means first and foremost
that we have to pray. How can we claim even to be Christian, let alone
Catholic, if we do not pray? So that is number one. We cannot know Jesus and we
cannot know His Will if we are not in union with Him and if we are not seeking
to know. How can we do His Will if we do not even know what it is? It requires
first that we have to pray. Secondly, it requires that we have to seek Him
wholeheartedly.
Look at what David did in the first reading. He desired to honor and
glorify God so much and he was so filled with that desire for God that as the
ark was being transferred from the house of Obededom to the temple, he
sacrificed an ox every six steps that the priests made with the ark. He gave
the people the raisin cakes and the meat and so on, and he also was dancing
before the ark. Now I am not going to recommend that anybody come before the
tabernacle and dance, but it is a matter not of what the body is doing at that
point, but what is in the heart. So often we drag ourselves before the Lord and
it is pretty evident that we really do not want to be there, but David, on the
other hand, wanted desperately to be in the presence of the Lord. That is the
kind of example we can look at. How much do we really want Jesus? How much do
we really want to be with Him?
The other thing we need to be so careful of is that most of us will
say, “Yes, I want to be with Jesus” – but only to a certain degree. We refuse
to open our hearts fully to Him because we are afraid or because we are
attached to too many things. We know fully well that if we let Him in any
further, He is going to say, “You need to get rid of a few things that are
cluttering things up. You need to get rid of the selfishness.” Most of us do
not want to do that. So we need to be detached from our own selves, and we need
to be detached from everything that is not Christ.
Then we need to strive to be obedient. If we are going to do God’s
Will, it has to be the way He wants things done. It cannot be our own way of
doing things; it cannot be our decision as to what and how and when. Rather it
is when the Lord tells us that this is what He wants done, and then we do it.
We have to do it when He wants and how He wants. That, again, is not easy for
us because we all know the Lord is going to ask of us things that are very
difficult, things that sometimes are pretty humiliating, things that perhaps
are going to put us in a bad light with others, things that are going to cause
people to think we have lost or marbles, or whatever it might be. The Lord is
going to ask us simply to do His Will, no matter what it happens to be. The
question is: Are we willing to do it?
If we want that kind of union with Christ, if we want that kind of
closeness with Our Lord that He speaks of in the Gospel – to be close enough to
be called mother and brother and sister to Him – these are the things that are
required, to do the Will of God. To do the Will of God means that we have to
know the Will of God. To know the Will of God means that we have to know God,
Whose Will we are striving to know. That means we need to strive for that union
with Him, to open our heart, to seek to serve Him, to know Him, to love Him, to
give everything we have because we know that God wants only what is the very
best. As long as we are striving to do God’s Will, that is where we will find
fulfillment for our own selves; but far more importantly, we will find that
union with Christ, to be mother and brother and sister to Him.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.