Posted on 18 June 2024

Sunday June 16 2024
11th Sunday During the Year – Year B

1st reading: Ezekiel 17, 22-24
Psalm: 91 (92), 2-3, 13-14, 15-16
2th reading: 2 Corinthians 5, 6-10
Gospel: Mark 4, 26-34

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“We walk in faith, not in clear vision”. Faith anticipates vision. Faith is always linked to a word, to a promise: it is about believing someone and believing something that someone has said. 

I am talking here first of all about the human experience... When someone promises me something, says to me: “I will bring you this tomorrow”, if I have confidence in him, I know that tomorrow I will have between my hands what he promised me. And once I have the object in my hands, the faith disappears. I no longer have to believe that the person will bring me something: I see, and I can do with what I have received. 

It is the same with the Lord: we walk in faith, not in clear vision. And we could even say that the more we progress in faith, the less clearly we see. This faith is made of trust: trust in the one who announces, trust in the one who promises.

In the Martin family, there is great trust in God. When we read the letters of Saint Zélie, Thérèse's mother, we are impressed by the confidence she has throughout her life, in the way God is good. And when she goes through multiple trials, starting with the death of four of her children, her confidence in God and in the goodness of God is unshakeable. This confidence does not eliminate the pain, nor the tears, nor the affliction, but it allows us to continue the journey in this assurance that God is there, that he loves us and that he does all things well. 

In the beautiful days of the Pascal time of 1896, Thérèse will enter this night, this darkness. She who had always had the thought of Heaven before her eyes, this “beautiful Heaven” of which she often speaks, she for whom it was obvious that there was a beautiful Heaven awaiting us, now it disappears. And when we read Manuscript C where she recounts this ordeal, we are impressed by the terms she uses. Not only does she no longer see the beautiful Sky, but what has become obvious to her is that there is nothing left. It is hope that is attacked, but Thérèse continues to cling to Jesus. And after recounting this ordeal in Manuscript C, she writes:

My beloved Mother, I perhaps seem to you to exaggerate my ordeal, in fact if you judge from the feelings that I express in the little poems that I composed this year, I must seem to you to be a soul filled with consolations and for which the veil of faith was almost torn, and yet... it is no longer a veil for me, it is a wall which rises to the heavens and covers the starry firmament... When I sing the happiness of Heaven, the eternal possession of God, I feel no joy, because I just sing what I want to believe.

Ms C 7v°

Doctor of the Church, Thérèse encourages us to persevere in the faith; but what nourishes his faith? What nourishes his faith is what the Gospel addresses: the seed that is thrown into the ground.

The verse from the Alleluia that we heard already interprets the parable for us by taking up other words of Jesus: “The seed is the Word of God, the sower is Christ, he who finds him abides forever. » 

It is about welcoming the Word of God into us. It is a matter of letting it be sown in us, as it is a matter of sowing it for us. If this seed can bear fruit in our hearts, it can bear fruit in the heart of every man. It is therefore a question of cooperating in the work of the sower by also beginning to sow the Word of God. 

And the two parables that we hear this Sunday tell us the power that is within the very word of God. The Letter to the Hebrews will tell us “that the word of God is effective, sharper than a two-edged sword, that it penetrates to the joints of marrow and bone, and that it lays everything bare” (Heb 4,12:4). The word of God is powerful, provided it is received so that it can bear fruit. And we have in mind the parable of the sower which opens this chapter XNUMX of which we read the end, the parable of the sower, which tells us how the word of God can be choked or can be prevented from growing. It is a question of welcoming it with faith, that is to say with confidence in the one who speaks, and that we take seriously what is said to us...

In a letter to Céline, a letter quite surprising because of the freedom with which Thérèse interprets Holy Scripture, letter 165 which dates from July 1894, Thérèse writes this:

[Jesus] said with ineffable tenderness: “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my Father will love him and we will come to him and make our home in him. » Keeping the word of Jesus is the only condition of our happiness, the proof of our love for Him. But what is this word?… It seems to me that the word of Jesus is Himself… He Jesus, the Word, the Word of God!… [ ]


Jesus teaches us that He is the way, the truth, the life. So we know what is the Word that we must keep; like Pilate we will not ask Jesus: “What is Truth?” » We possess it, the Truth. We keep Jesus in our hearts!…

LT 165 to Céline July 7, 1894

The first thing is therefore to keep this word, to keep it by heart. Hence the importance of reading and rereading, not just in small fleeting missals or on screens, of reading in a real book, the Bible, of reading the Word of God. Not first to understand everything that is written: first to memorize it; it is the Holy Spirit who will make us understand it at the right time. 

This Word of God requires trust, faith on our part: that we dare to believe what Jesus says, and that what we believe has consequences on our way of being, of living, of acting, so that we can please God as we heard in the second reading. “Our ambition is to please the Lord. » And it is not possible here to quote Thérèse on this question of pleasing the Lord because she talks about it in almost every line. But I quote other words from Thérèse about the Word of God and its importance. It is in the Yellow Notebook, these notes that her sister, mother Agnès, took on the fly while listening to Thérèse in her last months:

“May the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God remain perpetually in our mouth and in our hearts. » If we are struggling with an unpleasant soul, let us not be discouraged, let us never leave it. Let us always have “the sword of the spirit” in our mouths to rebuke her from her wrongs; let us not let things go to preserve our rest; let us always fight even without hope of winning the battle. What does success matter? What the good Lord asks of us is not to stop at the fatigue of the struggle, it is not to become discouraged by saying: “Too bad! there is nothing to be gained from it, it must be abandoned. " Oh ! that’s cowardice; you must do your duty to the end.

(CJ April 6, 2)

In saying this, Thérèse thinks of her role as quasi-mistress of novices. But we can hear this word in relation to ourselves because we can sometimes be tempted to give up and say: too bad, what the Lord is asking of me, I can't do it... I'll give up. 

Now, it is not a question of doing what God says, it is a question of what God says being done in us, with the consent of our freedom. The prayer of the Virgin Mary at the Annunciation is not to say: I have understood everything, Lord, I will do what is necessary. She says : “Be it done to me according to your word. »

In Thérèse, we constantly see that she contemplates the work of God and never her own. 

Finally, on August 9, Thérèse returned to this theme and said:

I am not a warrior who fought with earthly weapons, but with “the sword of the spirit which is the word of God”. So illness could not defeat me, and just yesterday evening I used my sword with a novice. I said it: I will die with weapons in my hands.

(CJ August 9, 1)

Well, may we let ourselves be encouraged by Thérèse to dare to put our faith very seriously in Jesus, to believe what is promised to us, to believe that God really acts in us, to believe that, without us understanding it, the Word of God bears fruit. 

May we learn from Thérèse, and allow ourselves to be encouraged by her, to meditate on the word of God, to let it work on our hearts so that we can already here on earth please God and experience his joy. 

Amen