Pro-life Preaching Hints

August 23 – 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jos 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b
Eph 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32
Jn 6:60-69

The apostles “have come to believe and are convinced” that Jesus is the Son of God. Therefore, even if they don’t understand his words about “eating his flesh and drinking his blood,” they know he is trustworthy. There is, indeed, no evidence here that these words made any more sense to Peter and the other apostles than they did to the ones who turned away. But as St. Thomas Aquinas would write centuries later in the hymn “Adoro Te Devote,” “What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do. Truth himself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true.”

Faith is not totally blind. It begins with “motives of credibility.” In other words, we have solid reasons for believing the One we believe – we don’t just trust anyone who comes along and says he has a message from God. But once we have those solid reasons, then the trust we place in that person leads us to knowledge that reason alone could never reach.
The Church, moreover, does not reject “freedom of choice,” properly understood. God demands that we choose, as Joshua told the people (First reading) and as the hearers of Jesus did. Yet when we choose for God, those choices have corollaries and consequences. Choosing God in fact means choosing life.

We choose again each day, as we renew our fundamental choice to serve God, to believe Christ, to live as his Gospel teaches. God’s Word does not propose “maybes” to us, but certainties, by which we then find the strength to do what Paul describes in the second reading: to give ourselves away for each other. He speaks of a mutual subordination and self-giving love of husband to wife. The Word by no means degrades women, but rather sees them as a symbol of the Church herself, the bride of Christ. All the Lord’s disciples are called to the self-giving love that he lived.
 

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