Homily for Monday, 8 July 2019

Readings of the day: Genesis 28:11-22a; Psalm 91:1-2, 3-4, 14-15ab; Matthew 9:18-26

Monday of the 14th week in Ordinary Time

This homily was given at the Kateri House Women's Residence Chapel of St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

Might many of us have difficulty thinking, if we want to think at all, about Lent from the midst of Ordinary Time in which we are presently? Yet do we remember what the minister says to us when we receive ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday? Usually at this point we hear, “Repent and believe in the Good News.” But an older tradition, which some may still use in administering the ashes, is to say, “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”

These words spoken by the minister of the ashes on Ash Wednesday hearkens back to Genesis 3, when God says to Adam, who has just eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”

Our first reading today, also from Genesis, gives us another perspective on what it means for us to be dust. In the context of God’s words to Adam after Adam has committed the first human sin, “Remember that you are dust and unto dust you shall return” has a gloomy sense to it. Is to consider ourselves dust, more broadly, not a somewhat gloomy, underappreciated view of our dignity as human beings?

Unlike Adam, in today’s reading from much farther on in Genesis, Jacob has not sinned. In fact, he has received a vision, communication of the height of love between God and humankind, represented by “the angels of God… ascending and descending upon” a ladder stretching between heaven and earth.

Despite not having sinned and despite having received this magnificent vision of the communication of divine love between God and us, God still goes on to remind Jacob that not only he but his descendants are and “shall be like the dust of the earth.” Why would God identify Jacob and his descendants with something as gloomy as dust?

Clearly, in our reading today, this is meant as a compliment, even a blessing of Jacob by God: Jacob’s “offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and… shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south.” In this sense, God’s words to Jacob are more reminiscent of God’s first blessing to Adam and Eve, and God’s command to them to “multiply” and “fill the earth,” than of God’s gloomy reminder to Adam after he has sinned that he is “dust, and unto dust [he] shall return.”

But, even as God blesses Jacob and, by association, blesses us, may we be reminded that we are dust in both senses of the term: We are blessed and even commanded to “spread abroad”; “multiply”; “fill the earth” according to our fundamental God-given human dignity, yet God reminds us at the same time to acknowledge and live our own finiteness and mortality as beings on this earth. God invites us to acknowledge and to live the finiteness of all of creation, and to care for God’s creation accordingly in this life, our transition stage from present finiteness to the infinity of eternal life.