28 June 2020
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
In the life of grace that Christ offers us, a sharp distinction between our giving and our receiving cannot be drawn. We already get hints of this in today’s first reading (2 Kgs 4), where a woman of influence generously receives Elisha into her home. In Matthew 10:40, Jesus declares “whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me” (Cf. Jn 13:20). Here the lines are blurred again: when we receive Jesus, are we receiving a gift or giving a gift? We could say that we are doing both, or better, we could simply realize that that is the wrong question. This reality of receiving/giving is so fundamental to the life of communion that Christ offers us that we ought not to limit ourselves to simply trying to receive/give ourselves, but rather we ought to encourage giving and receiving more broadly through the way we live our lives. Maybe, then, a virtuous desire not to be a burden on anyone else might actually deprive others of a gift that they could receive by ministering to our needs. “Give me to drink,” Jesus says to the Samaritan woman in John 4:7. Actually, there is no mention of whether she in fact gave Jesus water to drink. But she did receive him, in the way that she could, and that was a gift to her as well. The fact that she and her people do not adore God in the proper way (cf. Jn 4:19-23) is not of primary concern to Jesus. What is more important is that she enters into the communion of life, of receiving/giving, that Jesus reveals and is.
Let our evangelizing be good news, the good news of Jesus Christ, and nothing else. That good news cannot be reduced to propositional statements, as important as these are. It is also expressed through the communion of common life that we share with others, a life expressed in acts more than words. And the acts that have the power to save are the smallest ones: “whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because the little one is a disciple—amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward” (Mt 10:42).