Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

Perhaps you have had the experience of putting a dollar bill into a vending machine, only to have it spew it back out. The sale is void. The bill is creased and crumpled and must be smoothed in order to purchase the soda or chips. So, what do you do? You take the bill and you rub it along the side of the machine working out the kinks and bending back the dog-eared corners. It might even take several attempts until – joy of joys! – it is approved. With perseverance, you did not accept a void sale.

Isaiah’s prophecy says God sent his word to us and it too will not return void until it accomplishes its goal. For Christians, this has two layers of meaning. There is first the Eternal Word, the Second Person of the Trinity who became flesh in Jesus Christ. He is also the one who spreads the Father’s word to us. Our faith teaches that Christ accomplished our redemption from sin and victory over death. In our baptism, we received forgiveness and the pledge of resurrection. And yet, we know that we continue to sin, that we experience failures. Christ pays the debt and returns to the Father; we seem void.

Baptism makes you a child of God, a member of the Church, and removes sin. Yet, after baptism that word of God that is Jesus and also His teaching must grow in you. This is the capax Dei, the capacity to receive as a son or daughter the gracious life of God. You have it but you need to grow in making it bear fruit. This is why the Parable of the Sower is about God’s reckless love. He scatters fistfuls of seed willy-nilly on all sorts of ground. The saints tell us this is because God gives time for stony paths, brambles, and rubble to increase their capacity to become good soil.

How do we grow in the capacity for God? St. Paul tells us it is by suffering. When the Israelites first followed God, they thought obeying His word would make all good for them in this world. What they found was that often-bad things happened to good people. Is God’s word a failure, or were they? The books of Job and Tobit were the theological solution to this problem: God sometimes lets us enter into suffering in order to mature. His relationship sustains us through the sufferings of now, because everyone will go through suffering, but not everyone can come to joy. Indeed, Jesus experienced this on the Cross to demonstrate God’s greatest gifts surpass the worst of earthly sufferings.

The capax Dei is what makes the end for God’s word possible. Suffering aided by grace is the means to expanding this capacity. May the mind of Christ allow us to experience the glory to be revealed.

Question: When you look back on your life, is there a time of particular hardship in which you now see was a way in which God was opening you up to greater joy and holiness?

Reflection by Fr. Pachomius Meade, OSB