Reflection on Mass readings for July 13 (15th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Deuteronomy 30:10-14
Psalm 69:14, 17, 30-31, 33-34, 36, 37
Colossians 1:15-20
Luke 10:25-37
Sometimes when I read Old Testament stories of God’s chosen people, I behave like someone arguing with the cast of a horror movie. “Do not run upstairs!” becomes “Aaron, don’t you dare build that calf!” In both cases, I yell internally, “What are you thinking?”
Similarly, how often do we see our children, friends, siblings, or coworkers do something everyone knows is a bad idea?
Sometimes we warn them against doing something that’s clearly ill-advised. Don’t confront them at family dinner. Do not call your ex. Absolutely do not “reply all” to that email on a Friday afternoon.
Other times, we encourage them to do the thing that is clearly the best option. Yes, you should reach out and tell them how you feel. An apology is absolutely the right move. You definitely should ask a doctor about that.
From the outside looking in, often without the same emotional and historical baggage, it’s easy to see what should or shouldn’t be done in a given situation.
But when you transition from third to first person, things become muddier. We keep score of past hurts. We justify ourselves in our actions or inaction because of motivations and circumstances. We make simple things complicated, adding caveats, exclusions, and conditional clauses to the laws of the Lord.
The reality, however, is that God’s law is not difficult to understand. It’s rational, logical, and natural. It’s not hard to discover. It’s spoken plainly, written in stone and on our hearts.
His commands don’t hurt us. On the contrary, they are for our benefit, teaching us how to love God and one another. Our problem lies not in understanding, but in execution.
We must ask ourselves – is our difficulty in hearing the voice of the Lord? Or in heeding? Or both?
Our days are jam-packed with encounters. Between the hours of 8-10 a.m. today (in real life), I texted with seven people, fielded phone calls with three, and went to swim practice with dozens. I also spent some time in my virtual life: I checked social media, worked out with a recorded trainer, looked at memories, and played a few games of Words with Friends.
That is a lot of interaction – and with each comes internal and external voices, some noticeable, some subtle. Depending on our exposure, the voices can be like white noise, always present in the background.
They can also be a cacophony, staying at the forefront of our minds. In both cases, the inundation of encounters with our real and virtual worlds can be prohibitive to the silence required to hear the voice of Our Lord.
If we are creating space for prayer, and we have trained ourselves to be attentive to the movements of the Spirit, we still must heed the voice we hear in our hearts. Heeding implies a submission to a will not our own.
It requires that we recognize, unlike Adam and Eve in the Garden, that we are made to be rule followers, not rule makers. We must hear and heed.
In Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus shows us that the bridge between head, heart, and hands is found through encounter. Where the Old Testament tells us what we should do, the New Testament shows us how.
When the scholar of the law approached Jesus and asked the secret to eternal life, he was not ignorant of what the Lord commanded. Like us, where he stumbled was not in understanding, but execution.
This week at Holy Mass, let’s calm the voices of the world so that we might hear the voice of the Lord in Scripture, that he might train us to love as he does. Then, even more, let us heed that voice.
Cate Harmeyer worked 15 years in Catholic education and campus ministry. She and her husband, Dana, now oversee the education of their two daughters. Cate is a Notre Dame football fanatic, sourdough enthusiast, and loves spending time at the beach and in the mountains.