Archive for June 17, 2023

Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Posted: June 17, 2023 by CatholicJules in Sunday Reflections
Tags: ,
0

Kingdom of Priests: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings:

Exodus 19:2–6

Psalm 100:1–2, 3, 5

Romans 5:6–11

Matthew 9:36–10:8

The words God speaks to Israel in today’s First Reading are intended for us as well.

The Church is the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises to Israel—a kingdom of priests and a holy nation (see Deuteronomy 26:19; Isaiah 62:12).

In the Church, we have been gathered as the new “Israel of God” (see Galatians 6:16). He has made us His own people, the flock He tends, as we sing in today’s Psalm.

Moses was Israel’s first shepherd (see Exodus 3:1). With the Promised Land in view, he prayed that God would raise up a successor so that God’s people would not be left as sheep without a shepherd (see Numbers 27:17).

These same words are used in today’s Gospel to describe Jesus’ pity for the crowds, who are “troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.”

Israel’s shepherds—the Pharisees and scribes—had abandoned and misled the people through their hypocrisy and spiritual blindness (see Matthew 23:1–36; Jeremiah 50:6).

But God had long before promised that He Himself would come and save His sheep—searching over the whole earth where they had been scattered “for lack of a shepherd” (see Ezekiel 34:1–24).

Jesus is the new Moses and new David promised by the prophets, a divine shepherd-king sent to restore God’s priestly kingdom (see John 10:11).

As Moses commissioned Joshua as his successor, so we see Jesus today giving the Twelve His powers and authority (see Matthew 9:35; 10:1). In God’s plan, they are to seek out the lost sheep of Israel first and then bring all nations into the fold (see Acts 13:46; Romans 1:16).

Together we have been saved and reconciled to God, as we hear in today’s Epistle. As He delivered Israel, He has also made us a kingdom of priests in the Church (see Revelation 1:6).

So we come in this Mass to serve Him with gladness, to praise His kindness, which endures forever.

On Today’s Gospel

Posted: June 17, 2023 by CatholicJules in Personal Thoughts & Reflections
Tags:
0

How blessed are we to have a loving Father in Heaven who is slow to anger, compassionate and kind to all His children. So loved He the world that He gave us His only begotten Son so that the world might be reconciled unto to Him.

We have a beautiful sacrament given to us by Jesus to that we might know we are forgiven and set free through His powerful grace in the Sacrament of reconciliation. Yet how many of us go regularly to be forgiven by Jesus Himself in this Holy Sacrament. A disciple of Christ knows that without proper reconciliation with the Lord our God, we cannot serve Him as we ought to neither can we truly be free to love our brethren the way we should. That is fully through His love and a grace filled life!

Let us pray for the intercession of our Blessed Mother who in today’s Gospel, shows us that upset as she was with Jesus worrying her and Joseph. She was slow to anger, compassionate and kind. She carried the heart of God our Heavenly Father with her. And dwelled in His love remembering His goodness in her life.

Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us…Amen

_________

First reading

2 Corinthians 5:14-21 ·

From now onwards we do not judge anyone by the standards of the flesh

The love of Christ overwhelms us when we reflect that if one man has died for all, then all men should be dead; and the reason he died for all was so that living men should live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised to life for them.

    From now onwards, therefore, we do not judge anyone by the standards of the flesh. Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now. And for anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God’s work. It was God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the work of handing on this reconciliation. In other words, God in Christ was reconciling the world to himself, not holding men’s faults against them, and he has entrusted to us the news that they are reconciled. So we are ambassadors for Christ; it is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s name is: be reconciled to God. For our sake God made the sinless one into sin, so that in him we might become the goodness of God.

Gospel

Luke 2:41-51

Mary stored up all these things in her heart

Every year the parents of Jesus used to go to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up for the feast as usual. When they were on their way home after the feast, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem without his parents knowing it. They assumed he was with the caravan, and it was only after a day’s journey that they went to look for him among their relations and acquaintances. When they failed to find him they went back to Jerusalem looking for him everywhere.

    Three days later, they found him in the Temple, sitting among the doctors, listening to them, and asking them questions; and all those who heard him were astounded at his intelligence and his replies. They were overcome when they saw him, and his mother said to him, ‘My child, why have you done this to us? See how worried your father and I have been, looking for you.’

    ‘Why were you looking for me?’ he replied. ‘Did you not know that I must be busy with my Father’s affairs?’ But they did not understand what he meant.

    He then went down with them and came to Nazareth and lived under their authority. His mother stored up all these things in her heart.