Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2024

Title

Living for the Goal

Outline

Christianity has been critiqued for its future orientation

The argument is that Christianity is about pie in the sky by and by used to keep the masses subdued.

Our texts today may seem to fit that picture, but only until one realizes that God is outside of space and time and that it is only to communicate with us the He must use temporal language to guide us in moving towards ultimate goals rather than settling for transient and ephemeral ones.

The point of Ezekiel is that it is God who sovereignly rescues the people

The people had depended on politics and syncretism and had ended up in exile with no hope. God says through Ezekiel, “I in my grace will take you from the nations and plant you again in a honorable place and the nations shall come to you.” Christians see Jesus as The Branch, exalted on high, who gathers not just Israel, fulfilling Israel’s history, but the nations as well. It is a work of God, not of humans or of politics or of any other thing we worship.

Jesus pictures God’s rule as triumphing both within and beyond time.

The kingdom is one person in Jesus, a relative handful of disciples as he ministers (crowds listened but disciples committed). How depressing to commit one’s life to that. Ah yes, but think of seed sown in the field. There is little immediate result. It is only in the harvest that one realizes how fruitful it is. Or take the individual example of the mustard seed. Small, but black mustard can grow to 8 feet, and the birds, a reference to the nations can make it their home.

Jesus always spoke in parables or proverbs or metaphors or images (mashalim in Hebrew) so his words were true but hidden unless you hung around him until “the penny drops.”

Finally we come to Paul who speaks of his hope as a time-bound human

In the chapter before he had spoken of his sufferings due to his ministry, of his body’s wasting away. Well, if that is all there is, why go on? Get a healthier lifestyle.

Now he gives you his answer: he is courageous (a virtue) because our not yet transformed and therefore earth bound and time bound body cannot directly experience the Lord, who is the source of the really real. We live by trust in him, by faith, which transcends reason, is greater than reason, not by this-age, this-world experience (sight).

So death is not something fearful, but the freedom to be with him (who will in the resurrection transform the body also). And because our hope is to be with him we try to please him now. We do that because he will reward us for what we did in this world. Paul’s focus is on reward, but he knows that some will receive the reward of their evil.

So [Brothers and] Sisters we need to focus on ultimate reality

Everything you have, use, or see, even your body itself is transient. It will pass away. It is not ultimate. The one exception is that our bodies will be transformed and raised to fit the world of ultimate reality.

God is ultimate reality, not a being but being itself, and he is not impersonal, but personal, and in fact he is love. We met him in Jesus, for Jesus was God joined to a human person. There we could see and experience him. But now we live by trust in him for only our spiritual part can experience him and its eyesight is clouded in this age. But we serve Jesus now for the time will come when our bodies are transformed and our spirits see clearly and we are joined in a love union to God and he rewards us for all we did for his sake here.

That is not pie in the sky, but rather living in the light of the really real, ultimate reality. And that is really living even in the midst of suffering.