YEAR C: HOMILY FOR THE 6TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
HOMILY THEME: ABSOLUTE TRUST IN GOD
BY: Fr. Cyril Unachukwu CCE
HOMILY: To trust is an attitude of a believing soul, and trusting in God opens our minds and hearts wider and wider to a deeper relationship with God and to cooperate with Him for the establishment of His Kingdom, for “He it is who operates, we can only cooperate with Him, He it is who produces, we can only reproduce His models.” A soul that trusts in God is an established soul! May God give us the grace to always be in a trusting relationship with Him; Amen.
Trust is a “firm belief in the reliability, truth, or ability of someone or something.” To trust is to establish a relationship with a reality in which we assent to the credibility of that reality. One could speak of trust in many fields, especially with respect to our inter-human relationships. With men and women, and of course with every other created thing, trust can sometimes be a very slippery thing, often wounded by betrayals and deceit making some to even lose hope in the possibility to trust. This is because being finite and limited, human beings and other creatures can fail; hence trusting in them is always open to insecurity and disappointment. This is why the First Reading (Jer 17:5-8) warns us today “a curse on the man who puts his trust in man, who relies on things of flesh, whose heart turns from the Lord.” This is truly the lot of the person who confers on another person the level of trust that should be for God. Only with God can one speak of absolute trust! To trust God means to accept and believe in His word and to accept with all gratitude His plans for us with the full knowledge of the fact that in His will is our peace. Our trust in God is based on the fact that God is always true to His word and He never fails. He is stable and absolutely dependable! Our trust in God leads us to put to practice what He has commanded us to do with the certitude of faith. Such a person is richly productive, spiritually, morally and materially; “he or she is like a tree by the waterside that thrusts its roots to the stream: when the heat comes it feels no alarm, its foliage stays green, it has no worries in a year of drought, and never ceases to bear fruit.” Our trust in God empowers us to thrust our being deeper and deeper into God from where comes the fulfilment of all of our true and credible heart desires. A trusting soul is a satisfied and happy soul for truly, “happy the man who has placed his trust in the Lord.”
The Gospel Reading (Lk 6:17, 20-26) is part of the Sermon on the Plain in Luke’s Gospel and His account of the Beatitudes. In the Beatitudes, we discover what the core of the Christian message is all about and how our Master wants us to live. In the Beatitudes we discover the clearest signs of those who trust in the Lord. Their lot is indeed happiness, eternal happiness! They are happy because their attitude of trust has fetched them an eternal possession of the Kingdom of God. They are satisfied and joyful because what seemed displeasing in the eyes of the world became the very things that made them pleasing before God. It only takes a soul that places her trust in God, and not in the riches and in the transient things of this world, to live the Beatitudes. It is this same trust that illumines us to live and work with our eyes fixed on our eternal inheritance by the power of the resurrection. Such a soul will surely glory in the light of the resurrection. The resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ is the climax of the mysteries of our faith in which God manifested Himself to us as supremely and absolutely trustworthy. Faith in the resurrection is the manifestation of our trust in God, the trust that we will also share in its merits for “if Christ has not been raised, we are still in our sins” (I Cor 15:12, 16-20).
May the grace of God continue to form and transform us to grow daily and steadily in our trust in Him and to be confident of the happy end in store for us when we traffic always with Him despite all odds; Amen.
Happy Sunday;
Fr Cyril UNACHUKWU CCE
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