6/18/2023 - 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time

On the Feast of Corpus Christi, we proudly took Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament through the streets of Tappan. I appreciate the fact there were many who joined the procession in prayer, worship, and witness to the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. I thank Ernest Rispoli and the Knights of Columbus for all the preparations they made to make this event a very meaningful expression of our faith. I also thank the Orangetown authorities and the Police Department for their assistance.

This weekend’s scriptures remind us of the fact that many times we can be so caught up in our own sufferings and not see what is really happening. The people of Israel as they endured the rigors of the wilderness, they forgot that their God carried them on ‘eagle’s wings’ during their escape from Egypt. Later on, to keep alive this miracle of the ‘eagle’s wings’ experience the Seder ritual was introduced involving a retelling of the story of their liberation from slavery in ancient Egypt, taken from the Book of Exodus (Shemot) in the Jewish Torah (our Old Testament).

Another facet of the lesson of this Sunday that we are celebrating is an invitation to look at the deeper meanings of history, both the history of salvation and our own personal history of walking with God. So often, we get caught up only in our present situation and don’t become aware of where God is leading us. Always God is leading us to encounter His divine presence.

In Matthew’s Gospel today, Jesus asks the apostles to preach. They are to go only to the Jewish people and to proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand as a first step. For us, this Kingdom may not mean very much. For the Jewish people of the time of Jesus, it probably meant that the Messiah would come to liberate them from the Roman shackles and a golden age of prosperity would ensue like that of King David’s forty years.

Jesus taught through parables and stories that the Kingdom is the presence of God in the world. The Kingdom is truly present in you and in me when we are following God and trying to be faithful to God’s word. The Kingdom is present within us. And when we join with others who are also faithful to the Word of God, then the Kingdom becomes present within the believing community. This believing community brings God’s compassion to the needy world. Jesus used two images to describe the common people of those days, namely, sheep without a shepherd and an abundant harvest in need of workers. The Pharisees saw the common people as chaff to be destroyed and burned up.  But Jesus saw them as a harvest to be reaped and saved through us, His disciples.

Our calling is to be healers in the modern world. People can be sick in body as well as in mind. As Christians sharing Jesus’ mission, we can bring healing and wholeness to people with whom we come into contact.  Although we cannot raise the dead, we can help people to recover interest and a zest for living.  Cleansing the lepers means rehabilitating and bringing back fully into our communities all those who are marginalized, rejected, despised and living on the fringes of society.   In our day, demons act through all those suffocating and enslaving forces which manipulate and restrict our freedom to live in truth and love.  They include many elements of our contemporary society: the pressures to conform to what is in vogue in attire or attitude, attractive tendencies to hedonism, extreme individualism, greed, addictions, and violence of all kinds.  Our abortion/euthanasia/divorce/litigation culture of death is simply one of the symptoms and effects of all this.  We must start by casting out these demons from our own hearts first before helping others to true liberation to become inmates of the Kingdom of God.

Fr Tom Kunnel, C.O.