Repent and Believe; Surrender and Grow
(Eph 4:7-16; Ps 122; k 13:1-9)
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“Repent and believe” is the first message Jesus preached. “Surrender and grow” is a message emerging from today’s readings echoing that primary teaching of Jesus.
Today’s liturgy invites us to be ready to “repent”, to surrender our will to God and “believe”, to grow into Christlikeness.
The gospel touches on the mystery of evil and suffering as the disciples bring up the matter of local tragedies and wonder how they might be related to the reality of personal sin. Rabbi Kuschner’s book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, addresses that issue. Suffering and evil remain a mystery, something that God allows to happen, but the one thing we know for sure is God always turns everything bad that happens to the good for those who love God. God specializes in drawing good out of evil, and that is probably the best answer to the mystery of evil and suffering in our world.
For his part, Jesus dispenses any connection with sin, but uses those incidents to teach the importance of repentance. To repent in the biblical sense is to be open to change, to put on our highest mind, to be the best person we can possibly be. Ignatius of Loyola can serve as an example of repentance. His long recovery from a shattered leg wound led him to want to be like the saints who gave themselves completely to God. He proceeded to go to Montserrat, give his clothes to a poor man, place his weapons before the Blessed Virgin Mary, and kept vigil all night as a ritual of giving his liberty, memory, understanding and entire will to God. And from that moment on, like St. Paul, he never looked back but kept his eyes fixed on Jesus and becoming like him.
St Ignatius of Loyola
In fact, that is what Paul is teaching in the first reading – having repented and surrendered our lives to Christ, we are now to, day by day, enter into a process of transformation, divinization, theosis, growing into Christ-likeness. We have been given gifts for building up the Body of Christ, and are to grow into Christ who is head of the Body. An example might be the ninety-year old man who was not ready to die at the age of eighty because he was still trying to manage and control his life and everything in it. However, after a stroke from which he never fully recovered, and the loss of his wife which also deeply affected him, plus other physical ailments, he was able to ask for help and was much more mellow. He had matured through his suffering, was more Christ-like and now ready to die. As Richard Rohr would put it, only transformed people, transform people.
The Eucharist begins with repentance through the penitential rite that opens us up to receive God’s unconditional love as forgiveness, then through Word and Sacrament, leads us to a deeper experience of God’s transformative, healing power.
May our celebration help us to genuinely repent and surrender, and grow into greater and greater Christlikeness, as did both St Paul and St Ignatius.
The readings and homilies is pretty straight forward as to what we suppose to do be closer to God . Once we have committed many sins and faults that is against God. We are to go through reconcilation and confess our sins to the priest which is God hearing our faults . He will say a prayer to God ask him to forgive our sins. We might say the Act of contrition during the confession and ask us to go in peace. We are to pray to God and repent afterwards. We are to repent by doing things and try to change our behavior and surrender ourselves to God. Then, we are to surrender our entire self to God and Jesus Christ so he heal us and save us from any evil spirits tempting us. This is a way to build an intimate relationship with God by experiencing his unconditional love for us and understand his teachings and passion. We are chosen to be his disciples to go out and spread the word of God. Amen.
We are to forgive ourselves by letting go of the past mistakes and forgive other people; so we can walk this new path. Let us surrender ourselves to Jesus himself. Amen.
Thanks again for the homily and messages we need to hear in our daily lives. It is up to us if you believe and surrender ourselves to this God. He will lead us to a better life that is full of joy and happiness. Gracias ! Des Coloures! Bishop Sylvain . Take care