Dear Reader, if you receive these homilettes by email, you may find the service stopped in July. As I understand an instruction from Google, its Burnfeeder program will no longer support the service. You can always find the homilettes on the blog site: https://cbmdominicanpreacher.blogspot.com/ . Perhaps if you send me your email address, I could send the homilettes in a mass email. You may send your email address to cmeleop@yahoo.com. I am also pchecking into other options like changing my blogging service. cm
Wednesday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time
(Genesis 41:55-57.42:5-7a.17-24a; Matthew 10:1-7)
Jesus sends his twelve disciples to preach, “The Kingdom of heaven
is at hand.” What is this “Kingdom of
heaven” if not God’s mercy and love shared among the people? The first reading today gives a foreshadow of
its splendor.
Joseph is showing himself to be a shrewd economic
minister. He has stored the excess from
the crops in the seven years of plenty.
Now he rations it out to bring the people through seven years of
scarcity. No one will have to
starve. Just as noteworthy, Joseph shows
compassion on those who treated him so cruelly many years before. If his tears mean anything, they indicate his
forgiveness of his brothers who sold him into slavery. The Kingdom of heaven, full of kindness and
forgiveness, is glimpsed in this encounter.
It is hard to forgive, but it seems harder for many of us
today to recognize that we have done wrong.
We often claim our rights while forgetting our responsibilities. We can criticize others while overlooking our
own faults. Jesus wants us to wake up to
our duplicity and repent of our sins. In
the Kingdom, we don’t need to worry about repercussions. There may be some, but in time all will be
well. Indeed, in the Kingdom all will be
very well.
