by Father Alonzo Cox
Just last month, we, as a diocesan community, said farewell to the active sisters of St. Mother Teresa of Kolkata’s Missionaries of Charity. We are still blessed to have the contemplative Missionary of Charity sisters here in the Diocese of Brooklyn. Personally, their departure was extremely emotional. They lived in the convent of my parish, where I serve as pastor. They were very much involved in the life of the parish. For over 30 years, the sisters, brought here by Mother Teresa herself, would serve the poorest of the poor, particularly abandoned and homeless women and their babies. As a seminarian, I was introduced to the Missionaries of Charity and worked at one of their large homeless shelters in the Bronx. When I arrived as pastor, I was given the responsibility of covering daily Mass at their convent two days a week. As the nuns prepared to leave the convent, the regional superior noticed that I was overcome with emotion during the farewell Mass. She took me aside afterward and said, “Father, thank you for all that you have done for us here, but now we are called to build up the kingdom of God in another vineyard.”
I am reminded of the charism and mission of the Missionaries of Charity as Jesus proclaims in this Sunday’s Gospel passage: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Our reflection on the beatitudes offers us an opportunity to consider how we, as witnesses of Jesus, are building up the kingdom of God here and now. Jesus gives us the beautiful litany of blessed: the poor, the grieving, the meek, the hungry, the clean of heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted. Each of them is destined for the kingdom that awaits them. The question that the Lord places before us today is, “How do we show them the kingdom of God in the here and now?” Just as the Missionaries of Charity are at service to the poorest of the poor, are we at service to our brothers and sisters who are poor in spirit, grieving, hungry, and those who are being persecuted?
The blessed ones whom Jesus calls are those destined to enjoy the kingdom that awaits them. But before we all get there, we, as disciples of Christ, are called to build up the kingdom here. In service to one another, Jesus calls us to a deep sense of humility, so that his light may shine through us. St. Paul tells us in today’s second reading from Corinthians that God chose the weak of the world to make them strong. No matter what our economic status may be, we are all poor, lowly sinners trying our best each day to follow the Lord closer to the kingdom that awaits us.
Our Lord reminds us that the blessed ones are the humble and the lowly. They are the faithful who, as we hear of in the prophet Zephaniah, pursue justice and who take refuge in the Lord. Each of our Scripture readings for Mass encourages us to see the reality of the blessings in our lives. All that we do must be for the building up of that kingdom Jesus talks about. It’s a kingdom that all of us as brothers and sisters in Christ are called to. We continue to see how the Lord lifts the humble, the meek, the poor, and the lowly as his chosen ones. He blesses those whom the world considers weak and makes them strong. It is our prayer that the Lord Jesus will grant us the strength and courage to be proclaimers of his word and to live lives rooted in service to our brothers and sisters, that all of us may enjoy the promise of the kingdom of God.
Father Alonzo Cox is pastor of St. Martin de Porres Parish, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and coordinator for the Vicariate of Black Catholic Concerns for the Diocese of Brooklyn.