Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 94

"Fear no one.
Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed,
nor secret that will not be known.
What I say to you in the darkness, speak in the light;
what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops.

Everyone who has heard the story of Jesus, whether they believe in him or not, whether they like him or not, remember his fearlessness. Saint Mark recorded how he met opposition almost as soon as he began his ministry. If the crowds were in thrall of One who spoke with such authority, rebuked demons, and healed the sick, the authorities accused him of blasphemy and began to plot against him as soon as he appeared. Saint Luke says that when the time came to leave Galilee, he resolutely set his face for Jerusalem, knowing full well what would happen upon his arrival in the Holy City. He spoke of it several times but his bewildered disciples could not believe what they were hearing. Why would anyone so eagerly approach certain death? 

After his resurrection, we realized he was a man born to die. Now everyone is born to die; we know that. But it comes as a surprise to many of us, and a grave disappointment to all of us. We are, and should be, afraid of death; and yet Jesus was not because he had pondered the words of Isaiah, and his cryptic songs of the Suffering Servant : 

He was spurned and avoided by men,

a man of suffering, knowing pain,

Like one from whom you turn your face,

spurned, and we held him in no esteem.

We cannot know when he first heard those words. Perhaps he heard them as a child in the synagogue; or Joseph read them to him. Perhaps he listened to Jewish elders discuss what Isaiah meant, and who this Suffering Servant might be. Would he be a prophet like Moses or Elijah? Was he the anonyous author in Babylonian exile? Or maybe he was the Jewish people in general. 

But the boy Jesus heard Isaiah’s words about a suffering servant and knew in his bones what they meant: 

Yet it was our pain that he bore,

our sufferings he endured.

We thought of him as stricken,

struck down by God and afflicted,

But he was pierced for our sins,

crushed for our iniquity.

He bore the punishment that makes us whole,

by his wounds we were healed. 

He was not just a boy who thinks he will be a hero someday. Jesus had a preternatural knowledge, call it an intuition, an assurance in the Holy Spirit, that Isaiah was writing about him. If he told his Mother about it, she must have listened, remembered the Angel Gabriel, and wondered with him. 

The gospels begin with the Lord’s baptism.They give us prefaces about his origins and birth, but the real story begins with his baptism in the Jordan River, and the words Jesus heard and understood, “This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased.”

Saint Paul would call him the new Adam, Saint John would call him the Son of God, but there in the Jordan Jesus remembered Isaac, the beloved son of Abraham, and Sarah's first born son. He was the new Isaac. born to be sacrificed as an offering of peace, atonement, and the world's reconciliation to God. His sacrificial death would prove the Father’s love for the Earth and all its peoples, even as the near-death of Isaac had proven Abraham’s singleminded devotion to God. 

From the day of his baptism, Jesus would not fear death. In one of the Batman movies, the hero is told, “Any man who does not fear death, has no hope." But Jesus knew what he hoped for. He neither feared death nor defied it. Rather, by his obedience to the Father and his sacrifice on Calvary, he would destroy death forever. 

Death wants to tell us, “You have no hope.” And many people, having no faith in God, live in dread of dying. With their medicines, surgeries, therapies, health foods, purges, and fitness exercises, they would forestall death forever. But it is conquered only by those who fear the Lord.

The fear of the Lord is not like the fear of snakes or high places. Those fears come naturally without much education. But we have to learn the fear of the Lord. We teach it to our children and practice it daily with our reverence for God and the things of God. We practice that fear when we recognize the dignity of every human being. Just as we’re afraid to enter a Church without some sign of reverence like a genuflection, bow, or sign of the cross; we fear insulting weak, vulnerable, or helpless people because God favors them over the powerful, wealthy, and secure. 

The prophet Jeremiah had spoken of that Holy Fear:

I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me always, for their own good and the good of their children after them.

With them I will make an everlasting covenant, never to cease doing good to them; I will put fear of me in their hearts so that they never turn away from me. I will take delight in doing good to them: I will plant them firmly in this land, with all my heart and soul. Jeremiah 32: 39

Our fear of God is devotion to God. He comes to us in the humblest of forms – in the unpretentious appearance of a wafer of bread and a drop of wine. As Saint Francis said of the Most Blessed Sacrament, “Behold the humility of God!” We reconfirm out fear of God daily by, “psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and playing to the Lord in [our] hearts.” God comes to us also in the helplessness of the confused, bewildered, and the poor. 

In today’s gospel Jesus says, “Nothing is concealed that will not be revealed, nor secret that will not be known.” Those who fear God as Jesus does have no secrets, and nothing to be discovered by their enemies. Our enemies are God’s enemies and we know who must win that contest!

So we go about the business of speaking the truth, consoling those who mourn, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked. We can do that and more because Those who fear God fear no one else.