Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time – Cycle C
Reflecting on Sirach 27: 4-7
What beautiful readings this week, and they couldn’t be timelier. Both the gospel and that funny section from Sirach uncover the deep truth about human nature: that which we spend time ruminating on will find its way out of our brains, into our hearts, and out of our mouths.
And then comes the backpedaling, the “I was on Ambien and don’t remember a thing” excuses, the endless attempts to retrieve words that, as St. Philip Neri demonstrated so effectively, are like feathers shaken from a pillow.
If that Sirach reading seems strange to you, you’re right. It’s only in the years where Lent is late that we get as far as the eighth or ninth Sundays in Ordinary Time. Since we switch from reading Matthew, Mark, and Luke over a three-year cycle, and that Sirach reading is chosen to harmonize with today’s reading from Luke, in order to hear that reading we have to be in Cycle C (so every three years) and have a late Lent.
But this gives me a chance to extol the book’s humor, its insight into human nature, its beautiful treatises on friendship, its savvy money advice, and, sadly, to warn about its dreadful comments about women.
You’ll enjoy it and wince at it, but you won’t be bored. We have the first-century Christians to thank for rescuing it from oblivion, and the Catholic Church for continuing to use it and copy it. By the way, the lectionary is the brilliant brainchild of Vatican II, and has been adapted by so many other Christian traditions that on most Sundays, all Christians who share the liturgical calendar hear the same readings. Don’t you love that?
How does your speech disclose the bent of your mind?
Kathy McGovern ©2019
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