Homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time

January 14, 2024
Saint Philip the Apostle Parish
Flower Mound, Texas

1 Samuel 3:3b-10, 19
Psalm 40:2, 4, 7-8, 8-9, 10
1 Corinthians 6:13c-15a, 17-20
John 1:35-42

Last Monday, the Church invited us to reflect on the sacrament of Baptism as we celebrated the end of the Christmas season with the Baptism of the Lord. This weekend we begin Ordinary Time. The Church offers us these readings for reflection on vocation and service. Vocation and service follow sacramentally from Baptism through Confirmation and the Eucharist and in the sacraments of service, Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders, as the ordinary means by which Christ offers us His Grace.

The sacrament of Baptism wipes us clean of all sin, including original sin. It makes us a member of Christ’s Catholic Church and it imbues within us the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity. These are virtues that enable us to live the life of divine love. These virtues are uniquely Christian. They are the gift of Grace. A person cannot live them or develop them without the sacramental grace of Baptism.

The temptations against these virtues of the Christian life include three contemporary attitudes that we see addressed in the readings that today’s Liturgy offers us. These three contemporary attitudes dominate us in our society and even in the Church, and they take us away from the joyful life of the Gospel and the life of Grace. These three attitudes are: mere curiosity, fear, and indifference. The only remedy for these attitudes is the life of grace lived in faith, hope, and charity.

In the today’s Gospel, John the Baptist indicates to two of his followers that Jesus is the Lamb of God. This curious pair follows Jesus from a safe distance until He turns to them and inquires directly of them: “What are you looking for?” The curiosity that the two are experiencing is not enough for them to arrive at a decision, so Jesus asks them the very direct question, “What are you looking for?”  Jesus’ direct question spoken to them puts an end to their curiosity. Either they will decide to answer the question, or they will become fearful and indifferent and walk away. They receive faith and they respond, “Where are you staying?”  Or in other translations, “Where do you abide?”  They are looking to be with Him. Jesus responds, “Come and see.”  Jesus calls them. Andrew, one of the two, tells his brother Simon that they have found the Messiah, and brings him to Jesus.

Faith involves a commitment to the truth and a life lived honestly and with integrity. Without grace, we can settle for the mediocrity of the world that only evokes curiosity and cynicism. Through faith we can know the fullness of the truth revealed to us in Christ about God and human beings. Faith generates confident witness through decisive action whereas the curiosity of the world prompts a person only to take on the distant vantage point of the spectator and the critic. Without faith, curiosity will drive us more deeply into fear.

The first reading tells a story about the prophet Samuel as a youth. When he was a baby, Samuel was dedicated to God by his mother, and was entrusted to a priest of the Temple, Eli, at the sanctuary of Shiloh. The verse immediately preceding the initial verse from our first reading tells us that at this time in the life of Israel “the word of the Lord was scarce and vision infrequent.” The priests of the temple, including Eli, had become afraid and distant from the Lord because of the misconduct of his sons within the structure of temple worship. Nevertheless, God will not be thwarted by the limitations of human beings. Samuel receives a vision and hears his name called but he is unsure of its meaning and of its source. The vision and call frightened him, so he runs to Eli asking if it is Eli who has called him. After the third awakening, Eli realizes that it might be the Lord who is calling Samuel with special plans for the youth. So, Eli instructs Samuel to respond by saying: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Eli has the responsibility to encourage Samuel to listen and to answer God’s call, just as each of us have that responsibility to encourage younger people to discern their vocations to married life, religious life, or priesthood.

The perseverance of Samuel rekindles the hope of Eli in the power of the Lord. The perseverance in prayer demonstrated by Samuel strengthens his hope in God and God’s plan for him and his willingness to answer the Lord’s call to be His prophet. This perseverance in prayer brings hope that overcomes the fear that otherwise would dominate Eli and Samuel. Hope has as its object confidence in God’s power to overcome on our behalf any obstacle that we are powerless to overcome through our own efforts. Hope draws us into God’s plan for salvation that involves our belonging and participation but does not revolve around us.

The attitude of fear drives the sense of hopelessness and polarization that dominates our society and even in parts of the Church. Fear subtly thrusts self-interest into our vision’s focus and thereby threatens us with a false sense of the inevitability of the conquest of the world by sin. It is too frequently this sense of fear that compels some men and women to run from marriage because of the fear of fidelity, the fear of a permanent commitment, and the fear of the sacrifices needed to raise children — and so they avoid marriage altogether and settle either for cohabitation or for a marriage of physical proximity but without reciprocal love and care.

Likewise, some men are afraid of the call to serve God as a Catholic priest — and so spend their lives running away from the possibility of a priestly vocation because they consider it only from a distance as a curiosity, and apart from the intimate presence of Christ who invites us to “come and see” where He abides. They refuse to trust because they reject the decision to hope and instead, they capitulate and settle for fear. They refuse to answer the question of Jesus put to the two disciples: “What are you looking for?”

If we are steeped in curiosity and fear, we cannot arrive at true charity and love. The only place where we can be driven is the inevitability of indifference to the needs and sufferings of other people as well as to our responsibility to love and to worship God. So much of what plagues and harms us today are the fears that we experience that have made us become preoccupied with ourselves and indifferent to the poor and to the sick among us. This indifference becomes a way of brutish survival instead of the fullness of life that God offers us in charity. Jesus on the Cross shows us the fullness of charity and the path to eternal life that is love. The compassion of Christ is the sole motive that we have to save us from the dark isolation of indifference. In the words of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: “to love another person is to see the face of God.”

We are faced with the same tempting attitudes that we see God overcome in the readings of today’s liturgy: mere curiosity, fear, and indifference. Even more so, we receive the fullness of grace that heals us from these maladies and transforms them through the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. This grace is received initially in the sacrament of Baptism, strengthened in Confirmation, and nourished through our faithful reception of the Eucharist. It is the only path for our true and lasting happiness and joy that enables us to pray with the psalmist the prayer we made earlier: “Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.”