Homily: October 20, 2024, Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time (High Priest )

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 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.”

This verse from today’s second reading is both beautiful and powerful. It tells us profoundly of the deep compassion of God for His people through the sacrificial priesthood of Christ.

Someone who has gone through suffering can surely better understand and empathize with the sufferings of others. When I minister to parishioners whose family members have passed on, I can feel their pain because I too have lost my beloved parents.

I know a couple who lost their beloved son unexpectedly while he was in college. It took them a long time to overcome the pain and sorrow of loss. Eventually, they started a ministry in their parish to help others who were also grieving the loss of loved ones. Their suffering enabled them to offer comfort, consolation and companionship to others in similar situations.

Our high priest Jesus Christ is not one who sits on the pedestal seat to judge us from on high, but through the incarnation, He came down from heaven and assumed the human condition with all its limitations and weaknesses. 

Thus, He can sympathize, empathize and identify with all our weaknesses and struggles. He alone experienced more in ways we can barely imagine. Few of us will ever suffer as much as He did. Jesus has experienced almost everything of what each of us would go through in this life.

Jesus experienced the loss of loved ones, He lived in exile, much like many of you who have had to leave your home countries. 

He was betrayed, violently beaten, criticized, ridiculed, bullied, lived in poverty, counted among criminals, unjustly accused, rejected, abandoned, tempted but never sinned.

Jesus endured all of this, for love of us. God, came as man, to go through all these with us and for us. In the first reading, we heard, “Through His suffering, my servant shall justify many, and their guilt He shall bear.”

There is a quote, “He came to pay a debt He did not owe, because we owed a debt we could not pay.”

He knows what it is like for us. He feels for us. He understands. He came to live among us, to be like us, so that finally, we can be like Him and live with Him.

So, as today’s reading encouraged, “Let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace for timely help.” None of us of too unworthy of God’s grace and mercy, we just have to want it and ask for it.

Whenever we suffer or go through hardships, let us look to the cross and know that our Lord has suffered it. May we be able to unite our difficulties with His torments and ask for the grace to bear our pains in life as He endured His agony on the cross.

Because He has shed His precious blood for us to the last drop, our sufferings on earth for His sake will not be in vain.

Like James and John, let us courageously drink the cup of suffering given to us now and look forward to the reward of sitting with Jesus in His Kingdom.

Amen.


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