Pro-life
Preaching Hints
October 3 - Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
Hb 1:2-3; 2:2-4
2 Tm 1:6-8, 13-14
Lk 17:5-10
The
prophet Habakkuk expresses what many believers say in the face
of the culture of death: “How long, O Lord? I cry out to you,
‘Violence!’ but you do not intervene.”
The Lord says to
us what he said to Habakkuk. “The vision still has its time,
presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint.”
We
have even more reason than Habakkuk to have hope, because the
foundational event of the fulfillment of the vision has occurred
– the death and resurrection of Christ. We live now in the “in
between” time, when the kingdom of Christ has been inaugurated
on earth, but not yet brought to its full manifestation. The
power of sin and death – revealed in evils such as abortion –
has been destroyed at its roots. Yet we still struggle, in and
through Christ, to bring about a Culture of Life.
The
passage from Habakkuk concludes with the familiar line “The just
man shall live by faith.” It is that faith that the apostles, in
the Gospel passage, ask the Lord to increase. To “live by faith”
is not only to have our lives guided by faith. It means that
through faith we have life in the first place. Our faith rescues
us from the grip of death, from the kingdom of death, from the
covenant with death that is brought about by sin. As Paul
declares, “he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and
brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13).
That’s why he can write to Timothy in today’s second reading
that “The Spirit God has given us is no cowardly spirit.”
In other words, as we live in the world and fight for what
is right, we do not look at the world’s evils and the culture of
death and wonder how we are ever going to overcome them. Rather,
we look at them and renew our conviction that they have been
overcome in Christ. We stand before these evils in a stance of
victory and say, “You no longer have any place here! Your
kingdom has been overcome! Therefore we will work with courage
to change this world and to apply the victory of life that has
already been won!”Back
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