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10th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) 06-08-08

Scripture Readings
First Hosea 6:3-6
Second Romans 4:18-25
Gospel Matthew 9:9-13

Prepared by: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P.

1. Subject Matter
• How God uses our affliction/resistance/sin to draw us to himself
• Trusting in the promises/the effective Word of God
• Following Christ

2. Exegetical Notes
• “In their affliction, people will say: ‘Let us strive to know the Lord’” – “God does not wait until
man has ceased to be unjust in order to love him; he loves him already in his unjustness…. If
God does not wait for us to be just in order to love us, it is because his love is, precisely, the
only force that can make us just…. The love of God reveals itself as the great, the unique
power which is truly creative; the supreme creation of God is discovered to be this new heart
which God wishes to place in man…. The purest souls of Israel…will be the first to realize
this life of humility in faith, of which the Gospel Beatitudes are only the final achievement.
And this is a very special kind of humility, founded as it is on a feeling of the nothingness of
sinful man in which is mingled no bitterness, no despair. It is, in fact, the assurance that God
has taken this same nothing into his merciful and all-powerful hands, to draw from it a new
creation which reveals him.” (Louis Bouyer)
• “Abraham…did not weaken in faith…did not doubt God’s promise…. He…was fully
convinced that what God had promised he was also able to do” – “Abraham is our father, and
his faith is the ‘type’ of Christian faith…. Though Abraham had so many human motives for
despairing of ever having a posterity, he believed, in virtue of the confident hope that the
divine promise inspired in him. He took God at his word and believed in the creative power of
God to do what seemed impossible…. Abraham’s faith is the pattern for Christian faith,
because its object is the same: belief in God who makes the dead live.” (Joseph Fitzmyer)
• “Matthew got up and followed him” – “Jesus’ authoritative Word, which calms the storm
(8:26) and pronounces forgiveness (9:2), also compels human response…. Jesus’ powerful
Word creates discipleship. The story should not be psychologized; nor should the reader
speculate about previous contact between Jesus and Matthew, on the basis of which he was
‘ready’ to follow. The point is the Jesus’ call is effective. People do not volunteer to be
disciples.” (NIB)

3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church


• CCC 2100: Outward sacrifice, to be genuine, must be the expression of spiritual sacrifice:
"The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit. . . . " The prophets of the Old Covenant
often denounced sacrifices that were not from the heart or not coupled with love of neighbor.
Jesus recalls the words of the prophet Hosea: "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice." The only
perfect sacrifice is the one that Christ offered on the cross as a total offering to the Father's
love and for our salvation. By uniting ourselves with his sacrifice we can make our lives a
sacrifice to God.
• CCC 27: The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God
and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth
and happiness he never stops searching for the dignity of man rests above all on the fact that
he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to
man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists it is because God has created him
through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully
according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.
• CCC 1431: Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a
conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance
toward the evil actions we have committed. At the same time it entails the desire and
resolution to change one's life, with hope in God's mercy and trust in the help of his grace.
This conversion of heart is accompanied by a salutary pain and sadness which the Fathers
called animi cruciatus (affliction of spirit) and compunctio cordis (repentance of heart).
• CCC 706: Against all human hope, God promises descendants to Abraham, as the fruit of
faith and of the power of the Holy Spirit. In Abraham's progeny all the nations of the earth will
be blessed. This progeny will be Christ himself, in whom the outpouring of the Holy Spirit will
"gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad."
• CCC 52: God, who "dwells in unapproachable light", wants to communicate his own divine
life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son.
By revealing himself God wishes to make them capable of responding to him, and of knowing
him and of loving him far beyond their own natural capacity.

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities


• St. John Chrysostom: “Why is it then that nothing is said of the rest of the Apostles how or
when they were called, but only of Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Matthew? Because
these were in the most alien and lowly stations, for nothing can he more disreputable than
the office of Publican, nothing more abject than that of fisherman.”
• St. Bede the Venerable: “Jesus made a just man of a publican, a disciple of a tax collector.
As he progressively increased in grace, Jesus promoted him from the ordinary group of
disciples to the rank of apostle, and not only committed to him the ministry of preaching, but
also that of writing a gospel, so that he who had ceased to he an administrator of terrestrial
business matters might start to be an administrator of heavenly currency. Doubtlessly the
reason why heavenly providence arranged for this to happen was so that neither the
enormity of one's wicked deeds nor their great number should dissuade anyone from hoping
for pardon.”
• St. Ambrose: “How was the cure of the sick man Matthew effected? In three ways. First,
Christ bound him in fetters; second, he applied a caustic to the wound; third, he did away
with all the rottenness. Hence, Matthew, says: ‘I am bound with the nails of faith and the soft
shackles of love. Jesus, take away the rottenness of my sins while you keep me bound with
the fetters of love. Cut away any rot you find in me!’ So much for the first way. ‘I shall hold
every commandment of yours as an applied caustic, and if the caustic commandment burns,
it will be burning away the corruption of the flesh lest the contagious poison spread; and if the
remedy stings, it still removes the poison of the wound.’ So much for the second way. ‘Come
quickly, Lord, cut into the various secret, hidden passions, open the wound quickly lest the
noxious fluid spread, cleanse all that is fetid with a pilgrim bath.’ So much for the third way.”
• Bl. Jacobus de Voragine: “Granted, therefore, that Saul, David and Matthew were sinners,
their repentance so pleased the Lord that he not only forgave their sins but heaped his gifts
upon them in greater abundance. He made the cruelest persecutor the most faithful
preacher, the adulterer and homicide a prophet and singer of Psalms, the covetous seeker of
profit an apostle and evangelist. Therefore the sayings and writings of these three men are
recited to us so frequently so that no one who might wish to be converted would despair of
pardon, when he sees that such great sinners were also so great in grace.”
• Andre Louf, O.S.C.O.: “‘Follow me’” a person can only permanently attach himself to Jesus
out of love…. Regardless of who we are and what our spiritual experience is, we always lack
something needed to follow Jesus closely. Or perhaps we always possess something
superfluous which distances us from his intimate love…. When the time comes, however, he
will teach us to be detached with an enormous gentleness which only his grace can filter into
our heart.”
• Pope John Paul II: “The human will—or rather the human heart—impels man to be ‘for
others,’ to have generous relationships with others. It is in this that the essential structure of
personal and human existence consists. Man exists not merely ‘in the world,’ not merely ‘in
himself;’ he exists ‘in relationship,’ ‘in self-giving.’ Only through disinterested giving of himself
can man attain to full discovery of himself…. Without relationship and without self-giving, the
whole of human existence on earth loses its meaning.”
• Luigi Giussani: “Matthew, the tax collector…was considered a public sinner because he
served the Roman economic power. Jesus simply said to him as he passed by: ‘Come!’ And,
recognized, taken hold of, accepted, he left everything, and followed him.”
• Luigi Giussani: “What must we do with our freedom? The same thing we have to do with
faith…. How does one learn to be educated in freedom, so that freedom truly becomes the
force in our life?... By follow: by following the companionship in which the Lord, who calls us,
has placed us. Following, nothing is more intelligent than following…. Following who is before
you means asking: ‘How can you live this? How does one live this?” Understand that here,
the principal accent is one desire…. It’s the desire to live that makes you ask: ‘How do you
manage to do it, how do you fulfill what you understand?’”
5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars
• An example of following Christ, not weakening in faith, and striving to know the Lord amidst
personal afflictions: “A devout woman of Roman birth, Tetta by name, who dwelt in St
Savior's parish, was very much devoted to St Dominic. She had but one son, and he still a
child and dangerously ill. While St Dominic was one day preaching in St Mark's church in
Rome, this woman, in her eagerness to hear the word of God from his lips, left her sick boy
at home and went to the church where the saint was preaching. On her return after the
sermon she found the child dead. Stricken to the very heart with silent grief, and putting all
her trust in God's power and St Dominic's merits, she took up her dead son in her arms and
carried him to St Sixtus, where the saint was then staying with the brethren. Now, whereas
the house was being got ready for the sisters, anyone who chose could walk in, the workmen
being still all about the place, so she walked straight in and found him standing at the door of
the chapter-house, as if waiting on purpose. Seeing him, she laid her son down at his feet,
and then going on her knees entreated him to give her back her child. Then St Dominic,
touched by her great grief, withdrew a short distance and prayed for a few minutes. After his
prayer he rose, and going over to the boy made the sign of the cross over him, then taking
him by the hand he raised him up alive and well and gave him back sound to his mother,
forbidding her to say a word about it to anyone.”
• The experience/testimony of Venerable Charles de Foucauld: “You made me experience a
melancholic emptiness, a sadness that I never felt at other times. It would come back to me
every evening when I was alone in my rooms; it kept me silent and depressed during our so-
called celebrations: I would organize them, but when the time came, I went through them in
silence, disgust, and infinite boredom. You gave me the ill-defined unrest that marks an
unquiet conscience which, though it may be wholly asleep, is not completely dead. I never
felt that sadness, that distress, that restlessness apart from those times. It was undoubtedly a
gift from you, O God. How far off I was in my doubting! How good you are!….And having
cleansed the filth from my soul and entrusted it to your angels, you, O God, planned to
reenter it yourself—for even after having received so many graces, it still did not
acknowledge you…Then you breathed into it a taste for virtue, the virtue of the pagans: you
let me search through the works of the pagan philosophers, and I found nothing there but
emptiness and disgust. Next you let me glance at a few pages of a Christian book, and you
made me conscious of its warmth and beauty. You made me realize that I might find there, if
not truth (for I did not believe that men can know truth), at least the elements of virtue, and
you inspired me to look for instruction in a virtue completely pagan in Christian books. Thus
you brought to me an awareness of the mysteries of religion.”

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI

• “God’s approach to his people is presented with the language of conjugal love, while Israel’s
infidelity, its idolatry, is designated as adultery and prostitution. In the New Testament, God
radicalizes his love until he becomes himself, through his Son, flesh of our flesh, authentic
man. Thus, God’s union with man has assumed its supreme, irreversible and definitive form.
And in this way, the definitive form of human love is also drawn, that reciprocal ‘yes’ that
cannot be revoked. It does not alienate man, but liberates him from the alienations of history
to return him to the truth of creation…. Christ’s grace is not superimposed from outside of
man’s nature, it does not violate it, but liberates and restores it, by raising it beyond its
frontiers.”
• “God has come to meet man. He has shown him his face, opened up his heart to him…. The
great and central task of the Church today is, as it ever was, to show people this path and to
offer a pilgrim fellowship in walking it. We know God, not simply with our understanding, but
also with our will and with our heart. Therefore the knowledge of God, the knowledge of
Christ, is a path that demands the involvement of the whole of our being.”
• “Abraham, the father of faith, is by his faith the rock that holds back chaos, the onrushing
primordial flood of destruction, and thus sustains creation. Simon, the first to confess Jesus
as the Christ and the first witness of the Resurrection, now becomes by virtue of his
Abrahamic faith, which is renewed in Christ, the rock that stands against the impure tide of
unbelief and its destruction of man.”
• “What should be said therefore of the temptation, which is very strong nowadays, to feel that
we are self-sufficient to the point that we become closed to God’s mysterious plan for each of
us? The love of the Father, which is revealed in the person of Christ, puts this question to us.
In order to respond to the call of God and start on our journey, it is not necessary to be
already perfect…. Weaknesses and human limitations do not present an obstacle, as long as
they help make us more aware of the fact that we are in need of the redeeming grace of
Christ.”
• “Christ draws us into his life, into the act of eternal love by which he gives himself up to the
Father, so that we are made over into the Father’s possession with him and that through this
very act Jesus Christ himself is bestowed upon us. Thus the Eucharist is a sacrifice: being
given up to God in Jesus Christ and thereby at the same time having the gift of his love
bestowed on us, for Christ is both the giver and gift. Through him, and with him, and in him
we celebrate the Eucharist.”

7. Other Considerations
• On Caravaggio’s famous painting “The Calling of Matthew:” “X-rays suggest that the clumsy
figure of Saint Peter, almost totally covering the slender youth playing the part of Jesus, may
have been added at a later stage for dogmatic reasons, illustrating how the Catholic Church
intermediates salvation. The genius of this painting lies in the contrast between how an
everyday scene from the streets of Rome is combined with the biblical calling of Jesus and
Peter thereby giving new force to the message of the gospel: to leave the worldly goods to
live a life in poverty and piety. A couple of details should be noted: The hand of Jesus is an
echo of the hand of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, whereas the hand of Peter is
like the hand of God himself. This likeness may or may not be coincidental, but if intended it
must be meant to refer to the human nature of Jesus as well as the divine nature of the
Church.” http://home.worldonline.dk/lfmat/Contarellifiles/contarellibottomeng.htm

Recommended Resources

Benedict XVI, Pope. Benedictus. Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006.


Biblia Clerus: http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerus/index_eng.html

Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach—Cycle A. Huntington: Our Sunday


Visitor, 2001.

Hahn, Scott:
http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/homilyhelps/homilyhelps.cfm.

Martin, Francis: http://www.hasnehmedia.com/homilies.shtml

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