30th Sunday in Ordinary Time @ St. Apollinaris Church

HOMILY - 30TH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME
OCTOBER 22-23, 2016
4:30 PM (SAT), 10:30 AM (SUN) ORDINARY FORM MASSES

Restorative justice is an approach to jurisprudence that focuses on on the needs of both victims and offenders as well as involving the whole community. This differs from traditional – or adversarial – justice, where the focus is on what laws have been broken, who has committed the crime, and what is an appropriate punishment.

Restorative justice looks to allow anyone and everyone who may have been affected by the situation to discuss how the injustice has affected them and what should be done to repair the harm.
In restorative justice, the focus is on healing relationships, not on punishment.

Today is the 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time.

In today’s First Reading, we hear that God is a God of justice.

Because of our own familiarity with our the American justice system – whether through actual personal contact or through television or movies – we tend to think of justice as adversarial and based on punishment.

Yet, when the Bible speaks of justice, the Hebrew word is tsediq which is rendered in Greek as dikiasune. In the original languages, both of these words imply more of a restorative form of justice … that is, a restoration of the individual to right relationship with God, His Law, and His Holy People.

St. Paul, in the Second Letter to Timothy, speaks of his own right relationship with God, and his own focus – with his own execution looming in front of him – on Divine Justice as opposed to human justice.

In the Gospel, from the 18th chapter of St. Luke, Our Lord tells the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.

Tax collectors in the First Century were local agents of the Roman Empire – traitors to their own people. On top of this, most of them were also corrupt – demanding more than was appropriate in order to line their own pockets.

In the parable, Jesus tells us that it was the tax collector who went home justified, and not the Pharisee.

Of interest is how Our Lord explains that the Pharisee “spoke this prayer to himself” … that is, he was praying to himself … whereas the tax collector offered a humble prayer to God … fully recognizing his sinfulness.

It is imperative, in our own prayer life, that we first recognize our place before God. Knowing that He is God, and we are not. And as the God of Justice … of Righteousness … God desires us to be in right relationship to Him, and to Him alone … anything else and we are worshipping ourselves.

God’s justice seeks to restore us … to redeem us … to save us … from sin and its effects. While Hell may or may not be a place, the punishments come more from the eternal loss of any relationship with God – and by extension, the loss of everything that is good, true, or beautiful.

As we approach this altar to receive the Sacred Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ … let us humble ourselves before our God … the Father Almighty who has sent us His Son to restore our relationship to God and who has sent the Holy Spirit to form us anew through the Sacraments. Let us hear and act on the words of Christ at the end of today’s Gospel:

[that] whoever exalts himself will be humbled, / and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

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