(Seventeenth Sunday of the Year (C): This homily was given on July 24, 2022 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I. by Fr. Raymond Suriani. Read Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138:1-8; Colossians 2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Seventeenth Sunday 2022]
In one English translation of the
Bible, the word “if” appears 1,595 times.
(I know that because I checked in a concordance, not because I counted
them out myself.)
In today’s first reading, for example, “if” appears no less than 10 times: God says it 3 times, and Abraham says it 7 times as he intercedes for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The fact that this word is so prevalent in the Bible indicates that God has made certain things in life conditional. That is to say, they will only happen if we do what needs to be done to make them happen. “You will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God will bless you,’ Moses said to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 31, ‘IF you obey [his] commandments and [walk] in his ways. . . “
Jesus said, “Your heavenly Father will forgive you your sins—IF you forgive the faults of others.”
Those are just two of the 1,500+ possible examples that I could share with you today.
But actually the number is much higher than that, because there are many verses in the Bible where the word “if” is not explicitly stated, but is clearly implied. We see this phenomenon in today’s Gospel text from Luke 11. In that passage, Jesus says, “Ask and you shall receive; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened to you.” The word “if” does not explicitly appear anywhere in that verse, but it is implied 3 times! The message of Jesus is: “You will receive, but only IF you ask (and keep asking); you will find only IF you seek; and it will be opened to you only IF you knock.”
And finally we have the “implicit ifs” which stand behind the “explicit ifs” and can be added to the explicit Biblical ifs and the implied Biblical ifs that I just mentioned. (I trust you could follow that line of reasoning!)
What do I mean? Well, take a look—once more—at today’s first reading. As I said a few moments ago, the word “if” appears there explicitly 10 times. But behind all those explicit ifs is a very big implied if, and it comes from the mouth of God himself: “If you, Abraham, intercede for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, I will honor your prayer and bestow an extra measure of my mercy upon them.” Abraham understood that “if” very well, which is why he kept the conversation with God going until he got the Lord down to 10.
Fr. Ray, what’s the point of this “iffy” information?
Well, it’s really rather simple: So often we wonder why more good things don’t happen in this world. And, in the process, we can be very quick to point the finger at God, as if it’s his fault!—“God, why don’t you do something about all this?!”
But the truth is: in many cases, the fault is clearly our own! We have failed to ask (and we have failed to ask persistently). We have failed to seek; we have failed to knock; we have failed to reach out to those in need; we have failed to elect enough pro-life people to office; we have failed to share our faith with others to help lead them to conversion; we have failed to forgive; we have failed in 1,001 other ways.
In 1 Corinthians 3:9, St. Paul calls us “God’s co-workers.” This means that certain good things will not happen to us or to our world, unless we cooperate with God’s grace and do what needs to be done to make them happen! In other words, we must capitalize on the conditional. Since life is full of so many “ifs,” we must resolve to take advantage of as many of them as we can.
One person who took advantage of a crucial “if” in her life was Joyce Smith—a woman I spoke about in my homily this past Mother’s Day. Her story was the subject of the 2019 movie, Breakthrough. Joyce is the mother of John Smith, who, on January 19, 2015, fell through the ice on a frozen lake near his home in St. Charles, Missouri. (He was 14-years-old when this happened.) By the time the first responders located John and pulled him out of the icy water, he wasn’t breathing, had no pulse, and had been without oxygen for a full 15 minutes. They immediately started CPR and took him to the local hospital, where doctors and medical personnel continued to work on him feverishly for 43 more minutes—with no response. The medical team finally gave up, and called in Joyce, John’s adoptive mother, so that she could pay her final respects to her son before they officially declared him dead.
But Joyce Smith was not ready to give up hope for her son’s recovery! And so she began to pray over his lifeless body—in a loud voice that could be heard throughout the emergency room of the hospital. She doesn’t remember her entire prayer that day, but she does recall saying these words to God: “Please send your Holy Spirit to save my son!”
She asked—and she kept asking!
Suddenly, without any further
medical intervention, the boy’s heart monitor began to register a pulse—which
put him on the road to what has become a full and complete recovery.
The first doctor who treated John
that day in the emergency room said it perfectly in his medical report. He wrote: “Patient
dead. Mother prayed. Patient came back to life.”
“Ask and you will receive; seek and you will
find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” If Joyce Smith did not ask; if she did not
seek; if she did not knock—and if she did not do these things perseveringly—in
all likelihood she would have lost her son.
In this terribly dark and tragic situation,
she capitalized on the conditional—and she received a great blessing in the
process. May the Lord help us to do the
very same thing in our lives.
