Sunday 27 June 2021
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
From a homily by Pope Paul VI
We proclaim Christ to the whole world
Not to preach the Gospel would be my undoing, for Christ himself sent me as his apostle and witness. The more remote, the more difficult the assignment, the more my love of God spurs me on. I am bound to proclaim that Jesus is Christ, the Son of the living God. Because of him we come to know the God we cannot see. He is the firstborn of all creation; in him all things find their being. Man’s teacher and redeemer, he was born for us, died for us, and for us he rose from the dead.
All things, all history converges in Christ. A man of sorrow and hope, he knows us and loves us. As our friend he stays by us throughout our lives; at the end of time he will come to be our judge; but we also know that he will be the complete fulfilment of our lives and our great happiness for all eternity.
I can never cease to speak of Christ for he is our truth and our light; he is the way, the truth and the life. He is our bread, our source of living water who allays our hunger and satisfies our thirst. He is our shepherd, our leader, our ideal, our comforter and our brother.
He is like us but more perfectly human, simple, poor, humble, and yet, while burdened with work, he is more patient. He spoke on our behalf; he worked miracles; and he founded a new kingdom: in it the poor are happy; peace is the foundation of a life in common; where the pure of heart and those who mourn are uplifted and comforted; the hungry find justice; sinners are forgiven; and all discover that they are brothers.
The image I present to you is the image of Jesus Christ. As Christians you share his name; he has already made most of you his own. So once again I repeat his name to you Christians and I proclaim to all men: Jesus Christ is the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, Lord of the new universe, the great hidden key to human history and the part we play in it. He is the mediator – the bridge, if you will – between heaven and earth. Above all he is the Son of man, more perfect than any man, being also the Son of God, eternal and infinite. He is the son of Mary his mother on earth, more blessed than any woman. She is also our mother in the spiritual communion of the mystical body.
Remember: it is Jesus Christ I preach day in and day out. His name I would see echo and re-echo for all time even to the ends of the earth.
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On this date in other years:
Saint Cyril of Alexandria, Bishop, Doctor
From a letter by Saint Cyril of Alexandria, bishop
Defender of the divine motherhood of the Virgin Mary
That anyone could doubt the right of the holy Virgin to be called the Mother of God fills me with astonishment. Surely she must be the Mother of God if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, and she gave birth to him! Our Lord’s disciples may not have used those exact words, but they delivered to us the belief those words enshrine, and this has also been taught us by the holy fathers.
In the third book of his work on the holy and consubstantial Trinity, our father Athanasius, of glorious memory, several times refers to the holy Virgin as “Mother of God.” I cannot resist quoting his own words: “As I have often told you, the distinctive mark of holy Scripture is that it was written to make a twofold declaration concerning our Saviour; namely, that he is and has always been God, since he is the Word, Radiance and Wisdom of the Father; and that for our sake in these latter days he took flesh from the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and became man.”
Again further on he says: “There have been many holy men, free from all sin. Jeremiah was sanctified in his mother’s womb, and John while still in the womb leaped for joy at the voice of Mary, the Mother of God.” Athanasius is a man we can trust, one who deserves our complete confidence, for he taught nothing contrary to the sacred books.
The divinely inspired Scriptures affirm that the Word of God was made flesh, that is to say, he was united to a human body endowed with a rational soul. He undertook to help the descendants of Abraham, fashioning a body for himself from a woman and sharing our flesh and blood, to enable us to see in him not only God, but also, by reason of this union, a man like ourselves.
It is held, therefore, that there are in Emmanuel two entities, divinity and humanity. Yet our Lord Jesus Christ is nonetheless one, the one true Son, both God and man; not a deified man on the same footing as those who share the divine nature by grace, but true God who for our sake appeared in human form. We are assured of this by Saint Paul’s declaration: When the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law and to enable us to be adopted as sons.
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In other parts of the world and other calendars:
Our Lady of Perpetual Succour
The icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in the church of St Alphonsus Liguori in Rome.
The Glories of Mary by St Alphonsus Mary de' Liguori
To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve
Truly unfortunate are we, poor children of Eve. Guilty before God of her fault, and condemned to the same penalty, we have to wander about in this valley of tears as exiles from our country, and to weep over our many afflictions of body and soul. But blessed is he who, in the midst of these sorrows, often turns to the comfortress of the world, to the refuge of the unfortunate, to the great Mother of God, and devoutly calls upon her and invokes her!
The holy Church carefully teaches us, “her children”, with what attention and confidence we should unceasingly have recourse to this loving protectress, and for this purpose commands a worship peculiar to Mary. This is what Mary desires. She wishes us always to seek her and invoke her aid, not as if she were begging of us these honours and marks of veneration (for they are in no way proportioned to her merit) but she desires them that, by such means, our confidence and devotion may be increased, and that, so, she may be able to give us greater succour and comfort. She, in the exercise of her mercy, knows not how to act differently from God: as he flies at once to the assistance of those who beg his aid, faithful to his promise, Ask, and you shall receive, so Mary, whenever she is invoked, is at once ready to assist him who prays to her. Nor should the multitude of our sins diminish our confidence that Mary will grant our petitions when we cast ourselves at her feet. She is the mother of mercy: but mercy would not be needed did none exist who require it. On this subject Richard of St Lawrence remarks that “as a good mother does not shrink from applying a remedy to her child infected with ulcers, however nauseous and revolting they may be, so also is our good mother unable to abandon us when we have recourse to her, that she may heal the wounds caused by our sins, however loathsome they may have rendered us”.
This good mother’s compassion is so great, and the love she bears us is such that she does not even wait for our prayers in order to assist us, but, as St Anselm says, she is beforehand with those who desire her protection. Her love for us is so tender, that in our wants she anticipates our prayers, and her mercy is more prompt to help us than we are to ask her aid. “And this arises,” adds Richard of St Victor, “from the fact that the heart of Mary is so filled with compassion for poor sinners, that she no sooner sees our miseries than she pours her tender mercies upon us. Nor is it possible for this benign queen to behold the want of any soul without immediately assisting it.”
Should there be anyone who doubts as to whether Mary will aid him if he has recourse to her, Innocent III thus reproves him: “Who is there that ever, when in the night of sin, had recourse to this sweet Lady without being relieved? Such a case certainly never did and never will occur.”
Let all, then, say with full confidence, in the words of that beautiful prayer addressed to the Mother of mercy, and commonly attributed to St Bernard: “Remember, O most loving virgin Mary, that it is a thing unheard of in any age that anyone had recourse to your protection and was left unaided.”
Copyright © 1996-2021 Universalis Publishing Limited: see www.universalis.com. Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. Text of the Psalms: Copyright © 1963, The Grail (England). Used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.