Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year C Jer 1:4-5, 17-19; Ps 71: 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 15, 17; 1 Cor 12:31-13:13 OR 1 Cor 13:4-13; Lk 4:21-30
Last Saturday, we were asked by the Church to mark a day of prayer and penance for the restoration of the full protection of life and for the harm caused by abortion in our country. Like many other issues in our country, the right to life has become so politicized that many have stopped listening to any voice other than that in their own heads.
The Scriptures for the fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time offers us an invitation to meditate on the dignity of life and to whom life – every life – belongs. The words of Jeremiah are powerful for Jeremiah and for each one of us: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you.” God was calling Jeremiah to understand his vocation, not simply as what he was called to do in life, but rather as the very source of his existence in the God who loved him into existence.
Each one of us can read ourselves in the place of Jeremiah if we allow ourselves to enter deeply into this word of God. Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I dedicated you. God formed and dedicated each of us for a specific call, a specific way of serving him, a specific way of loving him. It was for that purpose that he brought us into existence.
If that is true for each of us, and it is, it is also true of every soul ever created. God foreknew and has brought into existence every soul, every human being, for a specific purpose. Therefore, no human life can truly belong entirely to another, not even to ourselves. Every life has as its very source in the generosity of a loving God. As human beings, we participate in that process of creation, but we are not its source.
The tragedy of abortion, the tragedy of claiming the right to end a life in the womb, is that this life foreknown and dedicated by God is never allowed to fulfill the purpose for which he or she was created. Although this life can never be taken from the love of God, he or she can be prevented from fulfilling the plan that God set for this person in the world and for the sake of the world.
Jeremiah fulfilled his vocation in calling the people of Israel to repentance and preparing a people to receive the Messiah when he came. In the Gospel, Jesus is reflecting on the reading from Isaiah about the coming of the Messiah and announcing that this prophecy was now fulfilled in the hearing of those in the synagogue in Nazareth and by all of us down through the centuries. Jesus is proclaiming his vocation, the very purpose for which God the Father brought him into the world.
Each of us is also called to listen to the voice of God to understand and act upon the vocation given to us. It is the purpose for which each of us is brought into this world. But if this is true of us, it is also true of the unborn and all those whose lives have been lost through abortion.
No matter what our political thinking, allow the word of God to at least challenge our hearts with the loss of so many who were known by God before he brought them into existence. Remember that each human soul that has ever existed has been dedicated to him. Remember that every soul who ever existed was and is given a vocation for the sake of all people and for the sake of the world, and that the world is impoverished in that so many millions have been prevented from fulfilling that vocation.
Although we have been asked to spend a day for prayer and penance, maybe our readings this week are calling us to extend our prayer and penance for so deep a tragedy.
Msgr. Timothy Keeney is pastor of Incarnation, Charlottesville.