Tuesday in the Fifteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 14, 2020

The Feast of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha

Matthew 11:20-24

Jesus began to reproach the towns where most of his mighty deeds had been done, since they had not repented. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you. And as for you, Capernaum: ‘Will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to the netherworld.’  For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.”

Perhaps several hundred or even a thousand souls populated the towns of Bethsaida and Chorazin during our Lord’s lifetime.  The industry at the time depended heavily on olive trees and the fish in the nearby Sea of Galilee.  The inhabitants consisted mostly if not entirely of descendants of Gentiles who had converted to Judaism during the days of the Maccabees, less than two hundred years before. By contrast, Tyre and Sidon were large seaports, rich with the trade that passed through them.  Jesus underscores the unfathomable mercy of God by speaking of the miracles that he performed in those Jewish towns, rather than in those pagan cities, not to mention cities of the stature of Rome and Alexandria.  Jesus sanctifies the water with his footsteps near Bethsaida, of all places, and it is there that he heals a blind man.  So many were the miracles the Lord performed in his lifetime that the Evangelists hardly attempt to catalog them all and so we have no descriptions of those performed at Chorazin.  And still they refused to believe.  All that remains of them today are some ruins, and debate flares about even these.

The naturalist Stephen Jay Gould once remarked that he did not think that God existed because it did not make sense for an infinite God to have any interest in so small a thing as a human being.  A man with astute insights into life on earth, he either was unable or unwilling to understand God as love, infinitely loving.  God, for him, would have been a technician or a machine operator.  Perhaps it was the word “infinite” that perplexed him.  The word literally means “without limits”.  When physicists speak of infinity, they usually mean big places, big spaces.  But an infinite being is in all places equally at the same time.  Properly speaking, God is as much “in here” as he is “out there”.  It is really a matter of humility to know and to accept that God loves me.  This is why the greatest saints are the humblest, like the Virgin Mary, who called herself the merest “handmaiden” of the Lord.  

Little Bethsaida and Chorazin could have become handmaidens of the Lord as well by humbly accepting and returning his love, but they did not.  And while the Lord weeps over Jerusalem, he expresses his anger over these towns: “Woe to you!”

Let us pray for this humility, that we may “know the time of our visitation” and turn to him whole-heartedly.

Today we celebrate the feast of another of God’s handmaidens, the Lily of the Mohawks, who left the life of her tribe in order to give herself entirely to Jesus.  We ask for her intercession so that we may do likewise.