10th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Cycle
C
June
9, 2013 5:30pm, 7:30 and 9:00am Masses
Saint Margaret Parish, Bel Air
Imagine a Society…
This
afternoon, let’s allow our imagination to flow for just a minute.
Imagine
a society where women have no rights.
Imagine that they can own no property.
Imagine
that women cannot have a house titled to their name. Imagine that they cannot have a bank account
or pension or any finances in their name.
Now imagine
that a woman in that society is married and her husband dies. The house and any money that she and her
husband had are no longer hers.
Instead,
they go to her husband’s closest male relative.
So if this woman and her husband have a son, all the assets go to him.
If they
do not have a son or if they have a son and he also dies, the house and whatever
they have go to some other male relative of the husband – maybe his brother or
nephew. The woman is left penniless.
She is
completely at the mercy of others. Now
that’s the way it was in the society of Jesus’ day.
Restoring Both to Life
And this
is why today’s gospel is so very poignant.
A young
man has died – the only son of a widowed mother. It’s sad enough for this woman to lose her
son – her only son.
But she
is also losing everything else and Jesus knows that she too is as good as
dead. So Jesus exerts his divine power
and restores the young man to life.
And in
doing that, he actually restores this woman to life. He makes life possible for her again and in
this way he restores both of them to life.
Jesus Cherishes Life
This story shows
Jesus’ consistent approach.
Jesus cherishes
human life. He heals and restores to
life.
He sustains human
life – physically, emotionally, spiritually – we would say, holistically. And Jesus’ example forms the basis of our
Catholic teaching.
Our ethic is a
holistic respect for human life. We see
human life as a gift from God, in fact, even as a participation in God’s life
because it comes from God.
So to respect
human life means that we do whatever we can to preserve, to care for, to
enhance, to sustain, and to protect the life of all human beings. Our ethic is that sweeping.
Application of Life Ethic
No wonder that we
are so clear about the life of an unborn child.
We see this as human life, the life of an unborn person.
Whenever I baptize
a baby, I think of this. This human
life, this little person was so carefully formed and nourished in its mother’s
womb just weeks and months ago.
Our Catholic ethic
on life also moves us to provide shelter for the homeless and food for the
hungry. It moves us to figure out ways
to break the death cycle of poverty.
Our ethic urges us
to devise ways to give persons trapped in poverty a chance – through education
or job training or whatever. It urges us
to provide effective access to health care because you and I and everyone need
this.
Our ethic calls us
to respect the life even of one who has taken the life of another. And it calls us to respect the life even of
those we call enemies.
Our just war
teaching calls us to look at the number of soldiers and civilians – of our
enemy – who will be lost in war. This
too is part of our human life ethic.
A Conclusion
So, our Catholic
ethic is holistic.
It extends to the
human life of all persons. I suppose for
this reason it is difficult to live and embrace this fully.
So, we work at it
and do our best. I do believe that one
caution is worth noting.
We make a mistake
if we focus on just one area of life. We
make a mistake when we single out one life issue to the exclusion of the
rest.
When we do this,
we actually reduce our positive ethic of life – and it is a positive ethic. We reduce it to an anti-abortion or
anti-poverty or anti-war ethic and this ends up having a negative effect on
every aspect of our ethic.
Jesus in the
gospel restores life to both persons – the son and the widowed mother. We too are to care for the life of all who
are before us today.
