7th Sunday After Pentecost
St. Alphonsus Church, Baltimore
July 16, 2023
The Liturgical Year and the Solar Year
I need not tell you that we have reached the middle of summer. The burning heat of the sun reminds us that the sun has reached its apex. These warm summer days are also days when crops are growing in fields and fruit is ripening on vines and trees. These are days when we begin to look for fresh fruit and produce at roadside stands, when the seeds planted in the spring and the plants that sprouted, come to maturity.
The Church’s sacred year unfolds God’s mysterious plan of salvation, just as the solar year unfolds its seasons of planting, growth, and harvest. In this Sunday’s sacred liturgy, the 7th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a remarkable coincidence, one might say, between the Church’s sacred year and the solar year. Just as we are able to read the times and seasons of nature, so too the Church, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, invites us to read the Scriptures, so as to learn and grasp the spiritual season in which we find ourselves and what that might mean for us, our families, and our parish.
Lent and Easter: A New Springtime
Although we think of Lent as a penitential season rather than as a joyful season, it is indeed a season of hope, a serious season with its own reasons for joy. For just as the earth is emerges from the depths of winter, as the days grow longer and the earth’s waters run anew, so too, under the guiding hand of Providence, the Church enters into a new season of light, warmth, and fecundity.
During Lent, our souls is cultivated yet again by prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The soil into which the seed of God’s Word was implanted at baptism is tilled. It is purified, enriched, and watered by the tears of the crucified Savior. As we undergo a forty-day penitential season, we strive wholly in God’s grace to pull out the weeds of malice, to uproot sinful habits and attitudes, and focus our hearts on Christ our Redeemer, seeking not only to imitate him but indeed to participate more deeply in his Mystery. For some, Lent is a time of preparing for Baptism, a time of intense preparation for that great moment of new life, when they are born anew of water and the Holy Spirit and inserted into the death and resurrection of Christ our Savior. For most of us, Lent is a time of preparation to renew our baptismal promises, when we reject Satan and sin and to live in Christ as God’s adopted sons and daughters. All of this reaches its climax during Holy Week and Easter when, the Church, the Bride of Christ, enters most solemnly into the passion, death, and resurrection of her Lord, standing as it were, with Mary and John, beneath the Cross of Christ.
The Church rejoices as she re-lives the mystery of the resurrection, experiences the wonderment of the Apostles, listens attentively to the instructions of the Risen Lord, rejoices in the power given her to forgive sin, gazes into the heavens as the Christ ascends and awaits the coming of the Holy Spirit. It is as if each year the Church herself is born anew and we along with the Church. Thus, the springtime of the Church!
The Ripening of the Fruit
Looking back on what we have seen and heard, we can say with the Blessed Virgin Mary, “The Lord has done great things for us, we are glad indeed!” And indeed, the Lord has done great things for us, year in and year out, for he has grafted us onto himself, the Vine, the Tree of Life, and now, through the sacramental life of the Church, his life flows into our souls, collectively and individually.
Like a wise farmer or like the owner of a vineyard or an orchard, the Lord now roams through the field of his Church to see if the fruit is ripening on the trees his hand has planted, his blood has watered, his spirit has fertilized. The Lord is looking into our hearts, yours and mine, to see if the fruit is good, characteristic of a tree that is sound, or if the fruit is rotten, characteristic of a tree that is in decay. Indeed, the reading from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans invites us to remember that in Baptism we were planted as precious fruit trees in the Lord’s Garden. We were to be servants of God and not of iniquity – for iniquity, St. Paul tells us, yields only the bitter fruit of discord and spiritual death. Now that we are set free from sin by the death and resurrection of Christ, Paul urges us to bear the good fruit of sanctification, leading to everlasting life.
What If…?
What if, amid the solemnities of the sacred liturgy, any of us were to discern that we are not bearing the good fruit of the Gospel? What if we find that our prayer has been perfunctory, or that we have been absorbed too much in the affairs of this world, or that we have been presumptuous or ungrateful for all the Lord has done for us? Or that spiritual lethargy has overtaken us during “these lazy, hazy days of summer”?
In a church where once Bl. Francis Seelos heard confessions, the answer is obvious. Let us allow the Lord to inspect the tree he planted by examining our consciences and by making a good unburdening confession of our sins, and by not failing to engage in prayer, spiritual reading, and mortification. In these ways, we open our hearts again to the life-giving Vine to feed and nourish our souls, so that they will indeed produce the good fruit, the fruits of the Holy Spirit, the fruits of the Sanctifier, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control.” Then, as the Sun of Justice shines down upon us, the Father will rejoice to see in us a harvest of holiness. May God bless us and keep us always in his love!