{"id":1590,"date":"2018-10-27T10:41:52","date_gmt":"2018-10-27T10:41:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/?p=1590"},"modified":"2018-10-27T10:41:52","modified_gmt":"2018-10-27T10:41:52","slug":"homily-week-29-06-yr-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/2018\/10\/27\/homily-week-29-06-yr-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"HOMILY WEEK 29 06 – Yr II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Repent and Believe; Surrender and Grow<\/em><\/p>\n

(Eph 4:7-16; Ps 122; k 13:1-9)<\/p>\n

******************************************<\/p>\n

\u201cRepent and believe\u201d is the first message Jesus preached. \u201cSurrender and grow\u201d is a message emerging from today\u2019s readings echoing that primary teaching of Jesus.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s liturgy invites us to be ready to \u201crepent\u201d, to surrender our will to God and \u201cbelieve\u201d, to grow into Christlikeness.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, <\/em>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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"

St Ignatius of Loyola<\/p><\/div>\n

In fact, that is what Paul is teaching in the first reading \u2013 having repented and surrendered our lives to Christ, we are now to, day by day, enter into a process of transformation, divinization, theosis<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

The Eucharist begins with repentance through the penitential rite that opens us up to receive God\u2019s unconditional love as forgiveness, then through Word and Sacrament, leads us to a deeper experience of God\u2019s transformative, healing power.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Repent and Believe; Surrender and Grow (Eph 4:7-16; Ps 122; k 13:1-9) ****************************************** \u201cRepent and believe\u201d is the first message Jesus preached. \u201cSurrender and grow\u201d is a message emerging from today\u2019s readings echoing that primary teaching of Jesus. Today\u2019s liturgy invites us to be ready to \u201crepent\u201d, to surrender our will to God and \u201cbelieve\u201d, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ordinary-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1592,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590\/revisions\/1592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archbishopsylvainlavoie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}