Father Rick Bolte's Homily

C: Thirty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time            2007-11-11

What do you think of the mother in the story from Maccabees?  She has seven sons and encourages them to persevere in their faith even as she sees them tortured and put to death.  Would you encourage your children or grandchildren to give their life for our faith?  Things that we consider important we work hard to pass on to our children.  We want them to eat healthy.  We want them to develop habits that keep them from picking up unnecessary infections.  We want them to go to school, do their homework, and get the best grades they can.  We want them to participate in various extracurricular activities and give their best in those efforts.  We often bend over backwards to make sure our children have these and even will have our children angry with us as we insist on some of these even when they don’t want to cooperate.

Where does faith fit into these priorities for us and/or our children?  Faith is not merely about following rules and coming to church.  It’s much more about what is inside us.  Hopefully we are all aware of the goodness that resides in our hearts; it’s part of our being in the image and likeness of God.  Do we not recognize, when we stop to think about it, that there’s nothing more important in our lives than being true to who we are?  How much would we resist someone trying to tell us what values we had to live by?  How much would we endure to be free to do what our hearts desire?

Too often we live life on the surface, not particularly attentive to our purpose or direction.  We get caught up in issues of health, school, and various forms of success for our children and for ourselves.  Issues of faith and its practice are easily compromised.  Does it really matter if you miss Mass one week or even two?  If you seldom go to church but still pray sometimes, isn’t that enough?  We think in terms of what we have to do or what God would punish us for.  We miss the point.

The practice of our faith is the celebration and expression of our lives and relationship with God and one another.  If we are not trying to live out our faith during the week, we have nothing to celebrate.  If we haven’t been aware of the goodness in our hearts that we didn’t live according to, why would we need God’s mercy and others to help us experience that?  The mother in our first reading knows the value of living the faith with one’s whole life.  She knows it is better for her sons to be tortured and die than to give up who they are to save their physical lives.  We celebrate the lives of martyrs in the church to remind ourselves that there is something so valuable in life that life looses meaning without it.