13th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Sunday 26th June 2016

13th Sunday in Ordinary Time 

(Sunday 26th June 2016)

 

Christians, instead of arming themselves with swords, extend their hands in prayer – (Luke 9:51 – 62)

It is said that Abraham Lincoln was criticised by those around him for being too lenient and courteous to those who opposed him and proved themselves to be enemies to his cause.  His advisers reminded him that it was his duty, not only to oppose them, but to destroy them.  He replied to his critics: “Do I not destroy my enemy when I make him my friend?”

There was quite a history between the Jews and the Samaritans – none of it pleasant.  The two peoples were sworn enemies.   Samaritans were descendants of the Jews of the Northern Kingdom which ceased to exist centuries before Christ. They had intermarried with foreign settlers and had intermingled their faith with the faith and practices of those foreign peoples.  To the Jews they were considered as an impure people; and their opinion of Jews was not too favourable either.

The most direct route for Jesus to get from Galilee to Jerusalem is to go through Samaria – the land of the Samaritans.  Most Jews, on their way up to Jerusalem, skirted around Samaria so as to avoid the Samaritans.  Jesus’s messengers get a less than hospitable reception because the Samaritans (as the Samaritan woman at the well in John’s Gospel makes clear) refused to acknowledge Jerusalem as the legitimate place to worship God.  James and John feel the pinch of that rejection and in their zeal for the Lord and his Good News they wish to punish those people.  They have great zeal indeed – what they lack is mercy.

Jesus, however, will not permit that they call down fire from heaven to consume this nation.  He will indeed send fire upon them, but it will be the fire of the Holy Spirit.  The Samaritans will eventually come to accept the Gospel and in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapter 8, we see that it is John (along with Peter) who will pray over the Samaritans so that they receive the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.   They have shown themselves to be a people hostile to the Lord and his message, but Jesus is infinitely patient and he knows that they will come to believe; that they will someday accept his messengers and his Gospel.  They may well be enemies at this point in time, but they will be his friends when they come to faith in him.

There have always been, and always will be, enemies of the Gospel in our world.  The temptation might be for us to write them off or even wipe them out.  Jesus, however, shows us that the way of mercy is the better path.  We must be full of zeal for the glory of the Gospel, but we must also be messengers of mercy.  The world is conquered for Christ, not by force of arms, but by love and mercy and prayer.  As St. Athanasius puts it: “Christians, instead of arming themselves with swords, extend their hands in prayer.”

Fr. Philip Kemmy