10th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Cycle
C
June
5, 2016 4:00 and 6:00pm
Saint Margaret Parish,
Bel Air
Readings: I
Kings 17.17-24
Galatians
1.11-19
Luke
7.11-17
Imagine a Society…
This
afternoon, for just a minute, let’s try to imagine, just imagine a society
where women have no rights.
Imagine
that women cannot have a house titled to their name. Imagine that they cannot have a bank account
or pension or social security 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, 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.
Now
this sounds crazy, very patriarchal and very unjust to us. But that’s the way it was in the society of
Jesus’ day.
Restoring Both to Life
And this
is the context for today’s gospel.
A young
man has died – and catch what the passage says – he was the only son of a
widowed mother. So this woman has lost
her husband, and now loses her son, her only son.
The
result is that she is also losing everything she had to live on. She too is as good as dead.
Jesus recognizes
this and so he exerts his divine power.
He miraculously 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 and spiritually – we would say, holistically. And Jesus’ example forms the basis of our human
life ethic.
Our ethic is a
holistic respect for human life. We see it
as a gift from God, in fact, even as a participation in God’s life.
So to respect
human life means that we do whatever we can to care for the life of all human
beings. Our ethic is that sweeping.
Application of Life Ethic
For example, we respect
the life of an unborn child. We respect this
as human life, the life of an unborn person.
Our ethic moves us
to provide shelter for the homeless and food for the hungry. It moves us to devise ways to give persons
trapped in poverty a chance – through education or job training or
whatever.
Our ethic calls us
to assure effective access to health care for every person because you and I
and everyone need it. It calls us to
respect the life even of one who has taken the life of another.
And it calls us to
be very careful in judging whether warfare is justified and, if so, what kind
of military action is justified. Even this
is part of our human life ethic.
A Conclusion
I suppose it can
be challenging to live 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 just one life issue as if the others do not
matter as much.
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.
