Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 13, 2017, Year A

Fr. René J. Butler, M.S.

Provincial Superior, La Salette Missionaries of North America

Hartford, Connecticut

(Click here for today’s readings)

Let’s start today with an informal survey about Scripture. Of the following two prophecies from Isaiah, which one do you like better: “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you;” or: “Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil”?

Which of the following two verses from the Psalms do you prefer: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” or: “My only friend is darkness”?

What about the Gospels? “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest;” or: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword.”

You see the trend? It is the most natural thing in the world that our favorite Scripture texts are those that comfort and encourage. (My personal favorite is Jeremiah 31:3, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”) Nobody’s favorite is a verse of condemnation, and rarely even one of challenge. We know those things are there, we accept them and respect them, but we don’t go looking for them.

As we saw in our little survey, the prophets have good news and bad news. Today we encounter Elijah. He is a little different from other prophets. There is no “Book of Elijah.” His story is told in the two Books of Kings, in about 10 episodes. There are few “oracles” of the kind we find in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. He was more a doer than a speaker.

The prophet’s job description is given by Balaam in the Book of Numbers. The prophet is one “whose eye is true, ... one who hears what God says, and knows what the Most High knows, ...  who sees what the Almighty sees, in rapture and with eyes unveiled.” That’s why, in today’s reading, Elijah, although he knew that God certainly could be in the wind, or the earthquake, or the fire, recognized in this case that God was in the “tiny whispering sound”—a pleasant image, don’t you think?

The prophets couldn’t limit themselves to pleasant sayings, however, and were often looked on as troublemakers. This was certainly Elijah’s case, and he had powerful enemies.

Paul encountered a similar phenomenon. His preaching was met with unbelief by his own people. Every place he went he couldn’t wait to share with the Jews there the Good News that the Messiah had finally come in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Unfortunately, many of them took it as bad news. A crucified Messiah was a “stumbling block” to them, as Paul says earlier in this same letter to the Corinthians. Today we would say, a crucified Messiah “does not compute.”

From a very different perspective, it was good news for Peter that he had enough faith to get out of his boat and walk on the water with Jesus. He didn’t hesitate. The bad news was that he was a man of little faith, and allowed himself to be intimidated by the force of the wind, and down he went.

We can apply this easily enough to ourselves. With the Lord’s help maybe we have been able to deal with some major issue or overcome some serious temptation in our lives. Then, for whatever reason, our faith faltered, and we began to “sink.” Still, there’s some consolation in the fact that even “little faith” is true faith.

Only two persons in the Gospels are described as having great faith: not Apostles, not even disciples, but foreigners. We’ll meet one of them next week.

In the meantime, we can pray in the words we find in two other places in the Gospels. One is: “Increase our faith.” The other is: “Lord, I do believe; help my unbelief.”