13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

June 27, 2010

I Kg 19, 16.19-21
Gal 5, 1.13-18
Lk 9, 51-62

We have heard the gospel so often that we have become jaded to its unsettling character – the unfamiliar has become familiar. Accordingly, few of us seriously consider the fact that, being strangers to Hebrew culture, we fail to understand much of the gospel precisely because many of the events it speaks of only Jews can intimately understand.

Luke, a stranger himself to the culture, shares us his own puzzlement as he records some incidents that were and continue to be typical of Jesus’ people. For example, an apparently irreconcilable enmity existed then between Israel and its neighbors, especially on religious matters; that enmity continues even today. This is not the case with Filipino culture in the main. The ordinary Filipino is generally tolerant of other beliefs; fundamentalism has always been the exception. Luke’s point in this periscope is that Jesus was being un-Jewish or counter-cultural. Instead of engaging in a religious fight Jesus chooses to avoid the Samaritan provocation; instead of yielding to the temptation of religious righteousness Jesus in fact rebukes his disciples.

There are culturally interesting points in the other encounters. Filipinos tend to make their point in a circuitous manner, especially if they do not want to contradict their interlocutor unpleasantly. Jesus shows how one can be direct and still be kind: if you want to follow me, you have to be prepared for uncertainty and sacrifice. Too if there is anything at the level of the absolute for Filipinos it is family, and so it is instructive to see how for Jesus the kingdom of God and its pursuit will demand the sacrifice of family and its bonds. The Gospel can be foreign in more than the usual senses; it invites us to rethink the culturally normative.

Fr. Diony Miranda, SVD
USC, Cebu City
The Word in Other Words