July 27 2020
Monday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time
Reading 1 JER 13: 1-11
The LORD said to me: Go buy yourself a linen loincloth;
wear it on your loins, but do not put it in water.
I bought the loincloth, as the LORD commanded, and put it on.
A second time the word of the LORD came to me thus:
Take the loincloth which you bought and are wearing,
and go now to the Parath;
there hide it in a cleft of the rock.
Obedient to the LORD’s command, I went to the Parath
and buried the loincloth.
After a long interval, the LORD said to me:
Go now to the Parath and fetch the loincloth
which I told you to hide there.
Again I went to the Parath, sought out and took the loincloth
from the place where I had hid it.
But it was rotted, good for nothing!
Then the message came to me from the LORD:
Thus says the LORD:
So also I will allow the pride of Judah to rot,
the great pride of Jerusalem.
This wicked people who refuse to obey my words,
who walk in the stubbornness of their hearts,
and follow strange gods to serve and adore them,
shall be like this loincloth which is good for nothing.
For, as close as the loincloth clings to a man’s loins,
so had I made the whole house of Israel
and the whole house of Judah cling to me, says the LORD;
to be my people, my renown, my praise, my beauty.
But they did not listen.
Responsorial Psalm DEUTERONOMY 32:18-19,20, 21
R. (see 18a) You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you,
You forgot the God who gave you birth.
When the LORD saw this, he was filled with loathing
and anger toward his sons and daughters.
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
“I will hide my face from them,” he said,
“and see what will then become of them.
What a fickle race they are,
sons with no loyalty in them!”
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
“Since they have provoked me with their ‘no-god’
and angered me with their vain idols,
I will provoke them with a ‘no-people’;
with a foolish nation I will anger them.”
R. You have forgotten God who gave you birth.
Alleluia JAS 1:18
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Father willed to give us birth by the word of truth
that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 13:31-35
Jesus proposed a parable to the crowds.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that a person took and sowed in a field.
It is the smallest of all the seeds,
yet when full-grown it is the largest of plants.
It becomes a large bush,
and the ‘birds of the sky come and dwell in its branches.’”
He spoke to them another parable.
“The Kingdom of heaven is like yeast
that a woman took and mixed with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch was leavened.”
All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables.
He spoke to them only in parables,
to fulfill what had been said through the prophet:
I will open my mouth in parables,
I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation
of the world.
Catechism of the Catholic Church
55 This revelation was not broken off by our first parents’ sin. “After the fall, (God) buoyed them up with the hope of salvation, by promising redemption; and he has never ceased to show his solicitude for the human race. For he wishes to give eternal life to all those who seek salvation by patience in well-doing.”
“For greater things you were born.” (Ven. Mother Luisita)
MONDAY, JULY 27TH Mt. 13:31-35 “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed…”
Living in Faith… by St. Claude de la Colombiere
First make an act of faith in God’s Providence. Meditate well on the truth that God’s continual care extends not only to all things in general but to each particular thing, and especially to ourselves, our souls and bodies, and everything that concerns us. Nothing escapes His loving watchfulness – our work, our daily needs, our health as well as our infirmities, our life and our death, even the smallest hair on our head which cannot fall without His permission.
After this act of faith, make an act of hope. Excite in yourself a firm trust that God will provide for all you need, will direct and protect you with more than a Father’s love and vigilance, and guide you in such a way that, whatever happens, if you submit to Him everything will turn out for your happiness and advantage, even the things that may seem quite the opposite.
To these two an act of charity should be added. Show your deep love and attachment for Divine Providence as a child shows for its mother by taking refuge in her arms. Say how highly you esteem all His intentions, however hidden they may be, in the knowledge that they spring from an infinite wisdom which cannot make a mistake, and supreme goodness which can wish only the perfection of His creatures. Determine that this feeling will have a practical result in making you ready to speak out in defense of Providence whenever you hear it denied or criticized.
Let us then trust ourselves entirely to God and His Providence and leave Him complete power to order our lives, turning to Him lovingly in every need and awaiting His help without anxiety. Leave everything to Him and He will provide us with everything, at the time and in the place and in the manner best suited. He will lead us on the way to that happiness and peace of mind for which we are destined in this life as a foretaste of the everlasting happiness we have been promised.
St. Claude de la Colombiere (+1682) was a French Jesuit priest and spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.
CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH on FAITH:
Believing in God, the only One, and loving him with all our being has enormous consequences for our whole life.
223 It means coming to know God’s greatness and majesty : “Behold, God is great, and we know him not.”46 Therefore, we must “serve God first”.47
224 It means living in thanksgiving : if God is the only One, everything we are and have comes from him : “What have you that you did not receive?”48 “What shall I render to the LORD for all his bounty to me?”49
225 It means knowing the unity and true dignity of all men : everyone is made in the image and likeness of God.50
226 It means making good use of created things : faith in God, the only One, leads us to use everything that is not God only insofar as it brings us closer to him, and to detach ourselves from it insofar as it turns us away from him :
My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you.
My Lord and my God, give me everything that brings me closer to you.
My Lord and my God, detach me from myself to give my all to you.51
227 It means trusting God in every circumstance, even in adversity. A prayer of St. Teresa of Jesus wonderfully expresses this trust :
Let nothing trouble you / Let nothing frighten you
Everything passes / God never changes
Patience / Obtains all
Whoever has God / Wants for nothing
God alone is enough.52
IN BRIEF
228 “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD. . .” (Dt 6:4; Mk 12:29). “The supreme being must be unique, without equal. . . If God is not one, he is not God” (Tertullian, Adv. Marc., 1, 3, 5: PL 2, 274).
229 Faith in God leads us to turn to him alone as our first origin and our ultimate goal, and neither to prefer anything to him nor to substitute anything for him.
230 Even when he reveals himself, God remains a mystery beyond words: “If you understood him, it would not be God” (St. Augustine, Sermo 52, 6, 16: PL 38, 360 and Sermo 117, 3, 5: PL 38, 663).
231 The God of our faith has revealed himself as HE WHO IS; and he has made himself known as “abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Ex 34:6). God’s very being is Truth and Love.
End Catechism of the Catholic Church
Excerpt from Lumen Fidei (The Light of Faith)… Pope Francis’ First Encyclical…
In faith, Christ is not simply the one in whom we believe, the supreme manifestation of God’s love; He is also the one with whom we are united precisely in order to believe. Faith does not merely gaze at Jesus, but sees things as Jesus Himself sees them, with His own eyes: it is a participation in His way of seeing,
St. John brings out the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus for our faith. In addition to “believing that” what Jesus tells us is true, John also speaks of “believing” Jesus and “believing in” Jesus.
We “believe” Jesus when we accept His word, His testimony, because He is truthful. We “believe in” Jesus when we personally welcome Him into our lives and journey toward Him, clinging to Him in love, and following in His footsteps along the way.
To enable us to know, accept, and follow Him, the Son of God took on our flesh. Christian faith is faith in the Incarnation of the Word and His bodily Resurrection; it is faith in a God who is so close to us that He entered our human history.
St. Paul has left us a description of the life of faith. In accepting the gift of faith, believers become a new creation; they receive a new being; as God’s children, they are now “sons in the Son.” The phrase “Abba, Father,” so characteristic of Jesus’ own experience, now becomes the core of the Christian experience. The life of faith as a filial existence, is the acknowledgement of a primordial and radical gift that upholds our lives.
We see this clearly in St. Paul’s question to the Corinthians: “What do you have that you did not receive?” Paul rejects the attitude of those who would consider themselves justified before God on the basis of their own works. Such people, even when they obey the commandments and do good works, are centered on themselves. They fail to realize that goodness comes from God.
Salvation by faith means recognizing the primacy of God’s gift. As St. Paul puts it, “By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing: it is the gift of God.” Faith’s new way of seeing things is centered on Christ. Faith in Christ brings salvation because in Him our lives become radically open to a love that precedes us, a love that transforms us from within, acting in us and through us.
Faith knows that God has drawn close to us, that Christ has been given to us as a great gift that inwardly transforms us, dwells within us, and thus bestows on us the light that illumines the origin and the end of life.
We come to see the difference, then, that faith makes for us. Those who believe are transformed by the love to which they have opened their hearts in faith. By their openness to this offer of primordial love, their lives are enlarged and expanded. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). “May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith” (Eph. 3:17).
The self-awareness of the believer now expands because of the presence of Another; it now lives in this Other and thus, in this love, life takes on a whole new breadth. Here we see the Holy Spirit at work. The Christian can see with the eyes of Jesus and share in His mind, His filial disposition, because he or she shares in His love, which is the Spirit.
In this way, the life of the believer becomes an ecclesial existence, a life lived in the Church. Those who believe come to see themselves in the light of the faith they profess: Christ is the mirror in which they find their own image fully realized. And just as Christ gathers to Himself all those who believe and makes them His body, so the Christian comes to see himself or herself as a member of this body, in an essential relationship with all other believers.
The image of a body brings out the vital union of Christ with believers and of believers among themselves. Christians are “one” but in a way that does not make them lose their individuality; in service to others, they come into their own in the highest degree.
Faith is necessarily ecclesial; it is professed from within the Body of Christ as a concrete communion of believers. It is against this ecclesial backdrop that faith opens the individual Christian toward all others.
Christ’s word, by virtue of its power at work in the heart of the Christian, becomes a response, a spoken word, a profession of faith. Faith is not a private matter, a completely individualistic notion or a personal opinion: it comes from hearing, and it is meant to find expression in words and to be proclaimed. For “how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without a preacher?” (Rom. 10:14).
End of Reflection on Lumen Fidei by Pope Francis
