27 SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME – CYCLE C – 2022 

The theme of the celebration seems to be “faith”   

Ø  Faith so full of trust that allows us to  present to  God our complains and supplications   

Ø  Faith so strong as the strength needed to uproot a strong tree    

Ø  Faith so full of novelty as it would be to plant a tree in the sea  

Ø  Faith so simple that discovers the presence of the God that is behind all reality.  

BOOK OF THE  PROPHET  HABAKKUK

Ø  The name of this prophet is unique in the Bible, it might come from the name of a plant “basil” 

Ø  We  know neither his origin, nor his family, nor his hometown

Ø  The three chapter of this book are difficult to understand. 

Ø  The content is a proclamation received during a vision  

Ø  The prophet does not understand, he suffers for the social situation of his people and asks God for an explanation 

Ø  The time of its composition is between   606 a.C  and the Babylonian exile 587 a.C

Ø  The message seems to be, we must abandon the traditional way to understand the retribution from God.  We must understand the intervention of God in our human history in a different way. 

FIRST READING  Habakkuk 1:2-3;2:2-4

ü  The prophet complains because he asks help from God, and it seems that God does not listen 

ü  Why do I have to see violence and destruction?   

ü  The answer from God is to tell the prophet to write the vision  

ü  “If it delays, wait for it, because it will certainly come, without delay.”

ü  We have this same reading in the Liturgy of the Hours one of the days of Advent.  

ü  The reading ends saying “the just will live by his faith” 

ü  To know that He will certainly come, fills our heart with hope and enkindles in it the fire of love. 

ü  In addition, certainly, the Lord has come, and He continues to come into our life and He is present in our history; sometimes we complain, like the prophet, because we do not realize that He is already here.    

Salmo 95, 1-2. 6-7. 8-9

 R.  If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Come, let us sing joyfully to the LORD;
let us acclaim the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us joyfully sing psalms to him.
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Come, let us bow down in worship;
let us kneel before the LORD who made us.
For he is our God,
and we are the people he shepherds, the flock he guides.
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Oh, that today you would hear his voice:
“Harden not your hearts as at Meribah,
as in the day of Massah in the desert,
Where your fathers tempted me;
they tested me though they had seen my works.”
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts. 

v  The psalmist invites us  

o   To praise God and sing to the Lord, our Rock

o   To adore God, we are his flock, he is our shepherd

o   To listen to God, to open our hearts to his voice    

 

GOSPEL  Lk 17:5-10

Ø    This Reading has two parts.   

Ø  In the first part the Apostles ask Jesus to increase their faith   

Ø  Maybe when they heard the mission that Jesus wanted to entrust to them, they realized that the traditional faith, still childlike, would not help them. 

Ø  Thus, their petition, sometimes we do the same petition to the Lord. 

Ø  It does not mean that we do not have faith, but that our faith is still the faith of the First Communion Catechesis, or the faith taught to us by our grand-mother, but that we have not made it our own yet, thus, it does not help us. 

Ø  Jesus gives them a surprising answer, that we do not have to take it literally but try to understand the deep meaning of this answer for our faith and our life.  

Ø  It seems that with this comparison He wants to tell them that they need:  

o   A faith as strong as the strength needed to uproot a mulberry tree, a strong tree, difficult to uproot  

o   A faith able to accept and propose the novelty, as it would be a novelty to plant a tree in the sea. 

Ø  I copy below a fragment from a book of José Antonio Pagola, it has helped me a lot, and I want to share it with you. (it is my own translation from Spanish)  

The theologian  Karl Rahner said, this “abandonment” proper of faith is the “maximum audacity of man.”  A tiny particle of the cosmos (universe) dares to enter into a relationship with the “incomprehensible and foundational wholeness of the universe,”   and it does it, trusting absolutely in His power and in His love. As Christians we have to be more aware of the audacity of daring  to trust in the mystery of God. 

The original message of Jesus is precisely, to invite the human being to trust unconditionally in the unfathomable Mystery, which is at the origin of everything.    This is what we hear in his proclamation “do not fear… trust in God…. call Him Abbá, loving Father. He takes care  of you. Even the hairs of your head are counted. Have faith in God.”  (PAGOLA, José Antonio. El camino Abierto por Jesús – 3 Lucas, p. 261. 2012)

 

 

SECOND READING  2Tm 1,6-8;13-14

ü  Rekindle the gifts you received with the imposition of my hands. Return to your first love. Let all of us return to our first love, the first time we open our life to welcome the Lord.  

ü  God does not want us to be cowards but daring, motivated by love and not by fear 

ü  Do not be ashamed to witness to Jesus.  Let us not be ashamed to profess our faith by our life, by the way we live.  

ü  Carry the hard work allotted to you.  What work?  The proclamation of the Gospel with words and  deeds. 

ü  Keep the treasure, which is in you, and in all of us, with the help of the Holy Spirit.  

ü  What treasure? The faith we have received at our Baptism, and which we need to make it grow, with the friendship and intimacy with Jesus in our prayer and in our life. 

 CLARETIAN CORNER 

3.2.    A New Religious Order...”

 

-          Although it may seem so at first sight, the mission entrusted to her does not consist in a concrete work. It is true that, in both the Old and New Testaments, the task entrusted to the one called is sometimes a very concrete thing; vr. gr. Gideon’s war against the Midianites, although it also has a salvific impact on the whole People of Israel (Jc.7). But in the case of the Mother Foundress the mission that God entrusts to her from the first moment has a totalizing, universalizing dimension. She is entrusted with the mission of founding a "new Religious Order;”  but  not new     in doctrine but in practice" (Aut. 7). However, this "new Order" must be a paradigm or model of a universal situation of salvation for the Church:

... Our Lord deigned to teach me with great pleasure the manner in which He wanted to be served by this ungrateful creature; and it was in this way that He laid before me, the keeping of His Most Holy Law and Evangelical Counsels, and told me He wanted me to keep them with all perfection (Aut.3).

It is not a concrete work but a universal salvific mission; for "to keep the Most Holy Law and Evangelical Counsels" is to put the Church in a universal salvific situation, because, in fact, the reality of the Church at that time was not adapted to the demands of the Gospel:

...and he told me with great sorrow that he had no one in his House to keep them, so much that all the Religious Orders had degenerated in the guard of his holy laws and that therefore he allowed their destruction with great pain (Aut. 3).

Therefore, the task entrusted to her is not to innovate anything in the Religious Life, but to return to the exact fulfillment of the Most Holy Law of God and the Evangelical Counsels. The "new Order", "new not in doctrine but in practice" is oriented to this. In practice, in a twofold direction:

- Realizing in the Order itself the exact fulfillment of the Most Holy Law of the Lord and Evangelical Counsels   in qll its perfection (Aim and Goal)   

-          - Teaching  the Law of God and Evangelical Counsels, "seeking the conversion of the whole world"; and "the sanctification of all persons consecrated to the service of God" (Aim and Goal) 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ALVAREZ GOMEZ, Jesús, cmf.  Visión Inicial. 1991

PARIS, María Antonia. Autobiografía en Escritos Introducciones y comentarios por Juan Manuel Lozano,  

PAGOLA, José Antonio. El camino Abierto por Jesús – 3 Lucas, p. 261. 2012