21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Fr. Victor Feltes
In the 1993 comedy drama “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays a cynical Pittsburg weatherman assigned to cover the Groundhog Day festivities held in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. There he becomes trapped inside a mysterious time loop, reliving the same day over and over. At first he indulges in sensible pleasures, then he darkly despairs, but eventually he starts growing in wisdom and virtue until he becomes a man worthy of his good and beautiful TV producer, played by Andie MacDowell. Each day was the same, but over time they began to change him for the better. The same thing can be true with the formal prayers we say.
Though it is a very good thing for us to speak to our heavenly friends in our own words, offering traditional memorized or pre-written prayers is valuable as well. How do we know? Because God inspired and gave his to people an entire collection of such prayers known as The Book of Psalms. He knew these 150 prayers would be prayed over and over, in both the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, teaching us and transforming us in our relationship with him. And it is important that we strive to learn and grow, so that we may enter through the narrow gate of Jesus Christ and be saved. Daily prayer and weekly Mass are among the God-given disciplines which yield (in the words of the Letter to the Hebrews) “the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by [them].”
Now imagine if you were Almighty God and you wished to compose a tiny psalm for the human race. What would you write about? Whom would you feature and what themes would you highlight? In the responsorial psalm for today’s Holy Mass we see how God answered. Short prayers can be great prayers. Psalm 117 is just two verses, only four lines long, the shortest psalm in the Bible:
Praise the Lord, all you nations;
glorify him, all you peoples!
For steadfast is his kindness toward us,
and the fidelity of the Lord endures forever. Hallelujah!
In this psalm’s original context, God’s chosen people are calling out to the Gentiles, the nations beyond Israel, urging them to praise the Lord. The psalm begins and ends with appeals to praise the Lord for Hallelujah (or Alleluia) are Hebrew for “Praise the Lord!” Why should the God of Israel be praised, honored, celebrated, and loved? The psalm’s second half provides an answer: “For steadfast is his kindness toward us, and the fidelity of the Lord endures forever.” And God’s goodness, his real and steadfast love, endures for us in this age of the Church. As St. John writes in his first New Testament letter: “We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. … We love because he first loved us.”
And here’s a final lesson from this small psalm: Psalm 117 is evangelistic. It calls all everyone from everywhere to enter into full communion with God’s people and himself. Has anyone outside of your household become Catholic through your influence? It helps if we try. If we are called to produce a harvest “a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold,” then we could expect to have at least a handful of such people in our lifetime. Catholics sometimes feel intimidated at making invitations, thinking they lack the right words. But Psalm 117 show that the message can be simple: “You should to worship with us here, because Christ’s mercy and blessings in his Catholic Church have changed my life.” The Sunday morning classes for becoming Catholic called OCIA (formerly known as RCIA) are starting soon. Who could you invite to come along with you? Please help them enter Christ’s house through the narrow gate.
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