Homily for Sunday, July 18, 2010

One of the more beautiful aspects about being Catholic is how fully we appreciate the Incarnation: we really mean it when we say that God became a human being.  This is called "an incarnational  interpretation of life."  Many other Christian denominations emphasize the one on one relationship Christians are called to have with the Lord.  While we also hold that aspect dear to our hearts, especially in Holy Communion, we have an equal emphasis on how we meet Christ in human relationships.

            Our unique Catholic take on things is that we meet Christ in our encounters with other human beings.  God became one of us; and though His gift of the Spirit, we continue to encounter Him in every human encounter we have.   “I see God in you” - is a thoroughly Catholic interpretation of our relationships.  Seeing Christ in others is how we look upon all the people in our lives, and for those growing in the Holy Spirit, we are especially to see God in the disadvantaged, poor and needy people who come across our path.

            Remember the Last Judgment scene in the 25^th Chapter of Matthew: when it’s all said and done, the issue will be the authenticity of how well we tended to Him when He was in need, in the persons we met in our lives who were hungry, thirsty, naked, sick or imprisoned.  It will be the Lord saying to us either, “you tended to Me," or "you didn’t tend to Me in My need.”

In our Genesis reading, it was God whom Abraham and Sarah encountered in their acts of hospitality to strangers who came by their tent by the oak tree at Mamre.  The Letter to the Hebrews, when encouraging everyone to have a sense of hospitality, reminds the readers: “Do not neglect hospitality, for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels.”

In today’s Gospel, we see an especially rich experience of encountering Christ in friendship. Martha and Mary were what we might call the best friends of Jesus.  He knew them through and through; and He felt so comfortable in their company that he would visit with them whenever in Jerusalem.  Remember that the night before Palm Sunday, He was at their home when Martha did all the preparing and Mary did a very beautiful thing for Jesus, using the costly aromatic nard to anoint the feet of Jesus and fill the house with the fragrance of the perfumed oil.  That story is in John, Chapter 12.  The text in John 12 actually says, “Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.  They gave a dinner for him there, and Martha served, while Lazarus was one of those reclining at table with him. Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair; the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.”

Those are important lines that help us understand today’s account about Martha and Mary, because it seems in today’s Gospel that Jesus is giving a rebuke to the hardworking Martha.

Jesus is not disrespecting the hard work of Martha, but He is tweaking her as He shows her (and us) that sometimes our efforts and chores and duties can make us so busy that we miss the very Lord in the midst of our lives, yes - in our relationships.

            Martha could have taken umbrage at Jesus’ words, but the text from John 12 shows us that something different happened to her.  The text says that, “they gave a dinner for them there.”   That means that it was put on by both Martha and Mary.  This helps us see that, instead of Martha’s being insulted and hurt and offended, Martha had undergone a conversion so that by the Saturday night before Good Friday, she was so free that she served the meal without complaint. 

And being the organizer she was, she probably told Mary to think up something very out of the ordinary to show Jesus how well loved He was.   

            So our lesson today is that whenever a relationship in our lives seems off kilter, look for God.  What might the Lord be showing us how we can change to live more fully?  And the very person who seems to be insulting us may be an incarnation of the Lord showing us where we can change, so as to become the beautiful work of art He is making us to be.