by Father James Rodriguez
If you channel-surf just about any Sunday morning before heading out for Mass, you are likely to come across any number of televised religious services.
You’ll notice the energetic music and large quantities of people swaying along or listening to the animated preaching. Often the preaching turns to what is known as the “prosperity gospel,” a mostly well-intentioned but ultimately incorrect understanding of the benefits of following Christ.
One can understand its appeal: Who wouldn’t like to land that dream job or life-changing wealth?
While it is true that a positive and trusting outlook can help us be more aware of God’s blessings in our lives, the prosperity he promises, as in today’s first reading from Isaiah, is worth infinitely more. Better still, it’s available to all, rich or poor, and it’s waiting for you at your nearest Catholic Church.
“Lo, I will spread prosperity over Jerusalem like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing torrent.”
In the midst of Isaiah’s promises today we hear those beautiful and hopeful words, but we don’t stop at the literal sense of Scripture. Read on and look deeper: God immediately likens Himself to a doting mother, and Jerusalem — that is, the promised place of sweet encounter with the Lord — as a weaned child. This tender nourishment was promised hundreds of years before the Last Supper where it is fulfilled.
We are given to drink not mother’s milk but the Savior’s blood which was shed to set us free, and in the Eucharist we feast our eyes on the One who feeds us.
Read on:
“When you see this, your heart shall rejoice …” If you’re like me you feel it too, that emotionally fraught moment just before we say, “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof.”
At his word, at every Mass, our souls can be healed.
Reveling in that fact, we cry out with joy with the psalmist, and with St. Paul we continue to ponder the great mystery of Christ’s redemptive and renewing love. Paul suffered with and for this love, “bearing the marks of Jesus on my body.” Indeed, Paul’s many hardships for the Gospel are well documented throughout his letters, but like his Savior, he was able to forge ahead.
We’re willing to suffer much for the things we love (ask any Knicks fan), though these things pale in comparison to the supreme love of our heavenly Father. How much more, then, should we be willing to suffer the mockery and ridicule of our often backward culture? Why should we
expect to be loved by a world that crucified the One who preached nothing but love?
Up to now, I’ve spoken about what we receive, but Mass ends with the command to go out on mission, like the disciples in today’s Gospel. These
72 were inspired not merely to preach but to win souls for Christ, to liberate people from the literal demons that tormented them and the figurative ones as well — the materialism that continues to plague us, among other things.
These disciples, and the disciples they made along the way, discovered true prosperity, a spiritual wealth that grows the more you give it away. Their names were written in heaven because they were, in a sense, already there as friends of Christ. So too are you and I every time we gaze upon the Blessed Sacrament and worthily approach him who nourishes us like the most loving of mothers.
Here we are fed, here we grow, and here we receive our marching orders: to proclaim the kingdom of God.
Readings for the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time
Isaiah 66:10-14c
Galatians 6:14-18
Luke 10:1-12, 17-20 or
Luke 10:1-9
Father James Rodriguez is the pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church in Rockaway Beach.