HOMILY OF TUESDAY OF THE SIXTH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME
Memorial of Saints Cyril, monk, and Methodius, Bishop
Genesis 6:5-8,7:1-5,10, Mark 8:14-21
THEME: BEWARE OF DECEIT
‘Keep your eyes open; be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.”
No one can live in a vacuum. And as the saying goes, no man is an island. As Christians, we will definitely find ourselves in what I likened to what St Augustine called the city of God and man. Man’s City consist of sinful nature that pulls man away from God, and God’s City refers to the life of grace that draws man to heaven.
God’s city embodies the church which is a symbol of God’s kingdom on earth. We ought to illuminate the world as light and not negatively be influenced by the world. When Jesus gave the warning against the yeast of the Pharisees and yeast of Herod, he intentionally exhorts us as his disciples to shun every religious hypocrisy and ungodly influence of the world. We coexist in a world ladened with the emergence of government policies capable of squashing religious values.
The church faces series of internalised decay from the onset, ranging from fanaticism to disunity, thus, caution needs to be taken lest the association between the church and the world depletes our sacredness. Secularism must be kept in its place, and it must not be permitted to sweep our Christian values away. In like manner, gross religiosity must not becloud our sense of reasoning lest we end up merely upholding human rules as God’s injunctions, thereby stiffening the truth meant to set us free.
The disciples misunderstood Jesus’s instruction in terms of physical bread. This depicts how materialistic they were. They had not been able to process their experiences with Jesus, how he fed the five thousand. They could not recognise the Lord in their midst.
When we lose the consciousness of god’s presence, we may not help but cling to the mundane.
May the Lord reveal himself to us more and more, so we wouldn’t become victims of all sorts of deception. Amen.
St Cyril and Methodius
Cyril (born Constantine, 826–869) and Methodius (815–885) were two brothers and Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries. For their work evangelizing the Slavs, they are known as the “Apostles to the Slavs”.
They are credited with devising the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet used to transcribe Old Church Slavonic. After their deaths, their pupils continued their missionary work among other Slavs. Both brothers are venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as saints with the title of “equal-to-apostles”. In 1880, Pope Leo XIII introduced their feast into the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1980, the first Slav pope, Pope John Paul II declared them co-patron saints of Europe, together with Benedict of Nursia [Wikipedia.org]
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