Since the AFC and NFC Championship games are being played this weekend, I could ask you: “who’s going to play in the Super Bowl two weeks from now?” However, for a number of reasons, I think I should avoid asking that one. Instead, I have another football question that might have a scriptural answer – at least according to Saint Paul. My question is this: “Who is the most important player on a football team?” Is it someone who plays on the line or in the backfield? Is a quarterback more important than a kicker?
As I said, Saint Paul would probably have his own way of looking at the question. After all, Saint Paul was an avid sports fan – although he was more into track than he was football. Saint Paul did a lot of talking about running and winning laurel crowns. But if football were around some two-thousand years ago, and the Corinthians were playing the Philippians, perhaps Paul would have written: “Now the team is not one member, it is many. If the place-kicker should say, “because I am not a quarterback I do not belong to the team,” would he no longer belong to the team? If the right guard should say, “because I am not a center I do not belong to the team,” would he then no longer belong to the team? If the team were all tacklers, who would throw long touchdown passes? If the team were all passers, what would happen to our defense? As it is, the team owner, the general manager, and the coach have set each player on the team in the place they wanted him to be.”
And Paul might continue: “We honor the players we consider less honorable by clothing them with larger shoulder pads and harder helmets. Furthermore, if one player suffers, all the players suffer with him; if one player scores the winning touchdown, all players receive Super Bowl rings.”
I really think this is what Paul meant when he wrote: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit.” Paul continues to remind us that we, you and I, are members of that one body and that Jesus the Christ is the head of this body.
Today is an especially good day to be reminded of this. During this past week, from January 18 through Monday, January 25th, millions of Christians around the world have been participating in this year’s “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.” On Monday evening there will be a concluding service at Sacred Heart Co-Cathedral that celebrates the desire for all of us to be, truly, one body.
However, regardless of how we as Catholic Christians might publically celebrate this desire to be ecumenically one body, it is important that each one of us recognizes what it means to be, in fact, part of the one body of Christ. And how are we to do this?
Perhaps the words found in today’s Gospel reading may give us a clue. In a way, it’s a strange reading. The first lines are from the opening of Luke’s gospel, when he sets out his reason for writing it: to present to Theophilus – a name that means “one who loves God” – to present to Theophilus, an account of what has been said about Jesus so that his reader can believe more strongly in this person, called the Christ, the Anointed One of God.
But then, after these opening lines, today’s reading jumps from the first chapter of Luke’s gospel to the fourth chapter, when Jesus returns from the temptations in the desert and – empowered by the Holy Spirit – begins his public ministry.
We hear how Jesus, thought to be the son of a carpenter, entered the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. And there, in a synagogue where he had heard the scriptures of his people and, no doubt, as a young, Jewish man, had read them aloud countless times before, he now reads a passage from Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” And then Jesus, this so-called carpenter’s son, said: “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Now we come to the real question for us today: just what does this passage have to do with us? Do we hear it only as an event in the life of Jesus? Or do we see glimmers of how it might apply to us?
Can each one of us say:
● The spirt of the Lord is upon me.
● The spirt of the Lord has anointed me with my baptism and my confirmation.
● The spirit of the Lord sends me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
● The spirit of the Lord sends me to proclaim liberty to those held captive.
● The spirit of the Lord sends me to help others see, to remove the darkness of night and let in the light of day.
Or perhaps each one of us says:
● Not me! I’m not that kind of person.
● I can’t work in a soup kitchen or in a housing project.
● I can’t suddenly go to a foreign country to help in its reconstruction.
● I’m not able to counsel a young, pregnant girl.
● I don’t know how to teach a class in religion.
● I can’t stop people around me from telling racial jokes.
● I don’t know how to help heal a broken heart, a wounded soul.
● I cannot preach. I cannot teach.
● I cannot do what others seem to do so easily.
But the spirit of God – the love of God and of Jesus the Christ – does not ask us to do what we cannot do. Instead, the spirit calls us to do what each one of us can do. The spirit does not ask a foot to do the work of a hand nor an eye to function as an ear.
Indeed, in the words of Saint Paul:
● Some of us are apostles, sent out to proclaim and work for the kingdom.
● Some are prophets, sent to remind others, through our words and actions, what God calls us to do.
● Some are teachers who attend to the minds of those in our care.
● Some are healers who attend to the bodies of those in our care.
● Some are administrators who attend to the social needs of those in our care.
All of us are called: not to do everything, but rather to give from those talents and skills that have been given to each of us. To give what we can give and not to be trapped into trying to give what we do not possess. Yes, through our Christian baptism, each of us is to proclaim that this is, indeed, a year acceptable to the Lord. Each one of us is called, in our individual, unique ways, to act as true members of the one body of Christ.
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time; January 24, 2010
Neh 8:2-4, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Cor 12:12-30; Lk 1:1-4; 4:14-21