Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, July 4, 2021 – Ezekiel 2:2-5; 2 Corinthians 12:7-10; Mark 6:1-6

It’s been a long time since July 4th fell on a Sunday. It’s almost ten years. And that’s important for us to know because, ordinarily when we celebrate the Fourth of July, it’s on a weekday, and we have a special Mass just for that day. When the fathers of the Second Vatican Council were preparing the changes in the liturgy, they decided that every nationality be able to have some Masses exclusive to its own culture and its own nation. And so, the American bishops were invited to write special prayers, a special Mass for July 4th. Ordinarily we celebrate that Mass and we invite people to come. Part of that Mass is always a large selection of readings from which to choose. And so, naturally, you look for those readings that have a sort of uplift to them because, after all, it’s our national holiday, we want to be happy. And yet, here we are, on July 4th, stuck with the readings for the Sunday because, in our liturgical forms, Sunday, the Lord’s Day, always takes precedence over all except the most important feast days. This August we’ll have the feast of the Assumption of Mary, which will take the place of Sunday, but that’s very, very rare.

And so we wind up this Sunday with three readings that don’t fit our mood. I asked you to listen, and see what you could figure out was the common thread going through all the readings. That is, what we would call in the 1960s, a downer. They’re very depressing. We’re going to look at each one of them and see what it’s all about.

The first reading, from the book of Ezekiel, does not tell us, today, what’s really going on. If you opened the whole book of Ezekiel and read it, you’ll find out what’s going on. Ezekiel came from a priestly family. Which means that his career path had already been set for him in childhood. Until his entire region of Israel was conquered by a foreign army, and almost all the educated people, himself included, were taken off into exile. Many of them were cruelly treated and executed. Those who were left alive lived basically as slaves, as exiles in a strange land. And so he could no longer fulfill his vocational choice. And yet, one day God singles him out, and God says, “You’re going to be My prophet now. And you know what? You’re going to fail at it. People are not going to like you. And you’re not going to be able to get much done because these are stiff-necked people.”

What does he mean by that? He means that the Israelite people themselves believe that the reason why they were conquered and sent to exile is because their leadership had made a very unwise treaty with a foreign nation in order to protect themselves from another foreign nation. In the Torah, you are forbidden from having close contact with people who did not believe in Yahweh God. And so they had broken God’s law in order to protect themselves, and the exact opposite happened. So Ezekiel is in for a bad career, trouble ahead.

Now we turn to the second reading. And St. Paul talks about his weakness. His weakness. He doesn’t tell us what it is. But, in the book of Galatians, there’s a very strong suggestion that he had eye trouble. And it was one of those recurring eye infections that makes the eye all red and pussy, and so on and so forth. And so, he was not nice to look at quite frequently. And, because his eye was runny, some people would think he was unclean and not have anything to do with him. And he had to go through his whole ministry with this affliction. That’s what it seems to be.

The other conjectures that scholars have made about his weakness is that maybe he had epilepsy. How he was constantly afflicted with petite mal seizures. And he would be in the midst of talking and suddenly go into a seizure and then it would go away again. It’s pretty disturbing to an audience, if you’re speaking to an audience. And some people think maybe he had either a stutter or Tourette’s Syndrome. But whatever it is that he had, it was pretty debilitating.

Here he talks about the fact that God says to him, “My grace is sufficient for you. [It’s sort of a mark of your own pride and self-centeredness that you want to get rid of this because it’s an aggravation to you and a hindrance to your public speaking.]”

Then we get to the gospel. And the gospel is all about a standoff. Now here you have Jesus, in Mark’s gospel, up to this point He’s done several tremendous miracles, including the amazing calming of the sea. After this story, He’s going to do the most amazing of all the miracles, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. But here He is where He grew up. And everybody knows Him in this little town, and He knows everybody in this little town. And what does Mark tell us? “They were astonished at Him.” They were astonished. Because they couldn’t get over the fact that they knew Him when. Even though they had heard about the great things He had done, and were impressed by His teaching. And then Mark says the most amazing thing. He says, “And Jesus was amazed at them.”

Now that’s not exactly the way it should be translated. In the Greek, the word ‘astonished’ and the word ‘amazed’ were different words. But, when St. Jerome went to translate the Greek bible into Latin, almost sixteen centuries ago, he used the same Latin word for the attitude of the people and the attitude of Jesus. So, they were astonished at Jesus, and Jesus was astonished at them. That has become the norm for understanding what’s going on here. That there was a standoff between Jesus and this crowd. As a result, nothing could be accomplished, because they were doubtful and He was angry. They were both astonished at each other.

One thing you have to know about Mark’s gospel is that it was the earliest gospel written. When it was written, it ended in a very peculiar way. The women go to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning. They find it empty, they go into the tomb, and there’s no body there, just an angelic presence who says, “He’s not here. He’s been raised.” And then Mark says, “And they left the tomb half overjoyed and half fearful. And because of their great fear, they said nothing to anybody.” End of story.

Now, the early Christians were so disturbed by that ending that, in the late 80s, after Matthew and Luke had written their gospels, they took little bits of Matthew and Luke’s resurrection stories, and pasted them into Mark’s gospel in order that it would have a happy ending. Because we like happy endings, don’t we? I mean isn’t that what Christianity is all about? He died, He rose. Happy ending. And yet Mark’s gospel did not have a happy ending. It had an ending with a big question mark hanging over it.

Right now we don’t see our way to a happy ending in many different parts of our lives. Both in our civic life, in our church life, and probably in our private lives. We are experiencing a number of things - defeat, fear, illness, confrontation, doubt, anger. They are all there some place. And we think there should be a happy ending. But notice what God, what the Lord says, to Paul. Paul tells us in our second reading, “In my weakness, He said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you.’” Notice the word. It’s just enough to get by. Sometimes that’s all there is in our faith life. That’s all there is in our relationship with God. That’s all that grace can do for us, is get us by. My grace is sufficient for you.