YEAR B: HOMILY FOR SATURDAY OF THE 18TH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME (1)
YEAR B: HOMILY FOR SATURDAY OF THE 18TH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
HOMILY THEME: YOUR FAITH CAN MOVE MOUNTAINS
BY: Fr. Benny Tuazon
(Mt. 17:14-20) Saturday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
In today’s Gospel Jesus teaches the disciples on the importance of faith no matter how little. Confronted with the healing of a lunatic, they could not effect the healing. They were helpless. Jesus told them that it was not about the absence of God’s healing power nor the lack of it but their faith instead. Thus, He told them, that if they have a faith even as small as that of the mustard seed, even mountains can be told to move from one place to another.
Either you have it or you don’t. More specifically, either you recognize it or ignore it. God had gifted us with the potentials of faith. It is not something that we produce from our toils. Our task is to make that gift of faith grow and bear fruit. Once we recognize it, we ought to appreciate it. We thank God for the gift and wonder at its potentials. The crucial, critical, and hardest part is to use it. Living faith is entrusting fully ourselves to God’s Word. Being in faith is forgetting ourselves and submitting our will, mind, and memory to the Lord. In other words, to be a man or woman of faith, is to believe in the impossible and to be God’s faithful child. My own faith was tested when the church I was assigned to was burned barely a month after I arrived and a week after my installation. I was overwhelmed by the task I was faced with. The fund raising, the design, construction, and meetings to monitor the building. At the same time, I had my ministry to fullfil too. It was a great opportunity of faith. Together with the faithful community of the parish, we relied on God. Also, we called on our patron to intercede for us. There were a lot of difficulties and challenges. There were many who did not believe we will build the church we agreed to build.
There were those who criticized us. Some had even abandoned us. But we kept our faith. We believed that God and His saint will always be with us. He did! After three years, the church was built. Thanks be to God and to our patron. While God had given us many things, what we have are still not enough. No matter how intelligent, rich, powerful, and popular we are, we can never be separated from God. On our own, life will be limited. We can only do so much. It will be foolish to think we can live without God, much more not to believe in Him. Jesus tells us to have faith no matter how small. Having faith, that is, to live it, would be enough for us to move mountains. It means we walk with God in everything and nothing is impossible.
