Jesus was very clear about the cost of discipleship. It might entail family division, persecution, and even death.

He didn’t mince words when he talked about the hardships his followers would face. And yet, at the same time he says, “Do not be afraid.”

Isn’t this a bit of a contradiction? Does it seem odd that Jesus warns us about future difficulties but then tells us not to worry? However, the key to understanding this Sunday’s Gospel reading lies in what Jesus means by “fear.” First, Jesus is telling us that we should not fear our enemies in this world. We needn’t have the kind of stomach churning, heart-pounding fear that comes from being terrified of the persecutions we may face. God the Father knows us even down to the hairs on our head, and he will be with us to help us face whatever sufferings we might encounter.

In today's Gospel, the Lord encourages us, instead of fearing persecution, to have instead a healthy fear of the Lord—which is the fear or awe that a person might have in the presence of a good, noble, and magnificent king. That kind of fear empowers us to live out the Christian life in a heroic, unfearful manner. By trusting in such a good God who will be with    us in whatever obstacles we might face, we are free to be bold in our witness to the Gospel. Now while it’s true that some Christians may be asked to give up their lives as a result of following Jesus, for most of us our call to heroism will consist of the daily sacrifices that ordinary life calls for. The sacrifice of forgoing gossip, of enduring insults, of being misunderstood, of holding our tongues and our tempers.

While today's Gospel might seem foreboding, we have nothing to fear. Even the worst thing that could happen--death--has been conquered by Christ's  Resurrection.

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The first words of our First Reading can be quite chilling. “Terror” is a word with which we have become all too familiar, and the prophet Jeremiah suffered the threat of it from his own people for having prophesied to them about their infidelities and sins. As a consequence, he is considered not only a prophet of the Babylonian exile, which was the punishment that God exacted for the infidelities and sins on the part of his people, but also prophet of the suffering Saviour.

Many of Jeremiah’s words are employed in the Lenten season to express the inner turmoil of Christ himself as he approached and underwent his Passion and Death. But his words extend, too, to Christ’s Resurrection, which we can see reflected in the final portion of this text, which launches into a brief and energetic song of praise to God for vindicating the poor one and saving him from death.

As we have so often seen in the Lectionary, this theme of the suffering prophet will be echoed in the texts that follow, showing that God has arranged history so that his lessons of wisdom are repeated or echoed throughout that history. We might be reminded of the old educational maxim that “repetition is the mother of learning.” This week we see Jeremiah , then Paul, and finally our Lord Jesus reinforce the importance of his saving work and to convince us of his love. We are all slow learners of this lesson, and so it bears repeating.

 

 

St. Paul teaches the Church in Rome that Jesus, and the great gift he gives us, is best understood in the light of the loss of the gift of grace that we suffered in Adam. He tells us that Adam is a "type" of Jesus; that is, he serves as a prophetic reflection of the Christ to come.  How so? Didn’t Adam sin and pass the effects of his sin, to us? While Adam deprived us of original justice, the harmony between himself, Eve, and the rest of creation, through his sin, his likeness to Christ is not in his sin. Rather, the effects of both Adam's and Jesus's acts had universal effects for the human race. Adam, as the first man and father of all, passed the guilt of original sin to us all, as a kind of genetic defect. Jesus, who also only had God as his Father, grants us a new sonship: not the naturaland fallen sonship that we gain from Adam but a new share in a supernatural sonship, his own Sonship, which is untainted by any such defect.

 

 

Our passage from chapter 10 of the Gospel of Matthew falls after Matthew presents Jesus first as prophetic teacher in the Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7) and then as a miracle worker (chapters 6-9). This reading shows us Jesus sharing his own authority and mission with the Twelve Disciples. What this tells us is that just as figures like Adam and Jeremiah speak through their lives and actions of the coming of Jesus, those of us on the other side of his coming who are sent into the world in his name to continue his mission express that same principle of repetition or echoing of the divine message. Being true to that mission, even with all the trials it will bring, unites us vitally with Christ, both now and in Heaven. The Catechism, quoting St. John Eudes, tells us:

We must continue to accomplish in ourselves the stages of Jesus’ life and his mysteries and often beg him to perfect and realize them in us and in his whole Church.... For it is the plan of the Son of God to make us and the whole Church partake in his mysteries and to extend them to and continue them in us and in his whole Church. This is his plan for fulfilling his mysteries in us.194 (CCC 521) All of history has been prepared by God to grant us this wonderful place in his plan: to manifest him by fearlessly taking up the prophetic mantle ourselves.

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MEDITATION:

Normally we think of a sparrow falling to the ground as meaning it has died, but the word used here can also be translated to mean “light upon” the ground. Jesus may be saying that not only does the Father know when each sparrow dies, but he also knows each time that it lands upon the ground. Such an intimate knowledge of creation is intended to give us great comfort that God indeed is with us in every moment of our lives.

The word “cent” is the translation of a Greek word for a coin that was worth 1/16 of a denarius, the average laborer’s daily wage. In a parallel passage, Luke writes, “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” (Luke 12:6-7; RSV: 2CE). One would assume that if two sparrows cost one cent, then four should cost two pennies, but sparrows were so worthless, a fifth was thrown in by the merchant if a person spent two cents.

 

 

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Opening the Word offers prayers and insights for the Sunday Scriptural lessons. Watch the video presentation that accompanies this reflection FREE at   Formed.org.