YEAR II: HOMILY FOR WEDNESDAY OF THE 2ND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME (1)

In the war against addiction to any bad habit, the victim ought to be sincere with the desire of breaking through the bad habit and experiencing freedom

YEAR II: HOMILY FOR WEDNESDAY OF THE 2ND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME 

HOMILY THEME: 

BY: Fr. Ben Agbo 

 

HOMILY: * 1 Sam 17 : 32 – 51, Mk 3 : 1 -6.

Neglecting the enemy, over confidence and under confidence are negative indices of fighting. Fighting is a psycho spiritual game ; very dangerous and delicate. Today’s 1st reading is a story of the fight between the Philistine’s strongest warrior, Goliath and Israel’s small boy, David. The most interesting aspect of this fight is the one that took place at the psycho spiritual realm. When Goliath tried to intimidate David, he swallowed the threat and released a higher one : ‘You come to me with a sword and with a spear and a javelin ; but I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts…This day I will deliver you into my hand and I will strike you down and cut off your head’. Chai! What gave this boy this kind of confidence? But he mearnt what he said. These were no empty verbal threats. He believed in the power of God. He has encountered this power with lions in the forest and he was cork sure that the strength of Goliath can never surpass that of lions whom God had helped him overcome in the past. On the other hand, Goliath neglected David and did not look at his hand to see that what he was holding was a primitive riffle that could blow off his head before he gets near. He went ahead to curse David by the name of his gods while David cursed him by the name of Yahweh God of hosts.

Another interesting part of this story is that David did not wait to play defensive in that fight. As soon as the battle line was drawn, he swiftly changed position and took the 1st offensive step targeting the head of the Philistine with a stone. Gbua! And the giant was fallen!

Lesson :

  1. Whenever it becomes inevitable that you have to fight, the 1st thing you need is a psychospiritual power / courage against your enemy. And the best place to collect this is from God himself not any lower spirits.

  2. Never take your enemy for granted even if he is a “small boy” or “poor man” and you think you are a “big boy” or “rich man”. ‘E lelia nwa ite o gbanyuo oku’ is a proverb our people use in articulating this point. Most giants who have fallen were slaughtered by the weak. Many rich men who have been died today were killed by the poor. Many learned men/ women who are destroyed today are messed up by nonentities.

In our country Nigeria, as we can see today, the weakest tribe ( the Fulani) is the one holding the rest of us to ransom. I have learnt this theory about “nature’s compensation” many years back – that nature has an uncanny way of standing on the part of the weak whenever the strong and the wicked is aggressively out to oppress them. “And when fate surmons” says John Driden, “monarchs must obey”. May God bless you today!

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