Last Updated on May 16, 2023 by GMC
12th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)
Jeremiah 20:10-13, Romans 5:12-15, Matthew 10:26-33
“Fear no one.”
Jeremiah stood alone in his views and was hated. The truth is unpopular but necessary like oxygen.
On the Cross, Jesus was deprived of earthly oxygen by asphyxiation, but when his mission was completed, he filled our humanity with the eternal oxygen of the Spirit of truth.
We need to access that Spirit in whose fire we were baptized. We need to truly live and breathe by dying with Christ. The Cross is still standing, not far away in Golgotha, but within our own hearts.
Stat crux dum volvitur orbis (The Cross stands still as the world is spinning). This motto of the Carthusian monks can help us face fear and uncertainty, for fear is like a spinning tornado. The Cross is like the eye of a tornado, which is “as still as death,” according to an eyewitness (Will Keller from Greensburg, Kansas).
“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32).
Silent, hidden prayer, like that of Mary standing at the foot of the Cross (Stabat Mater), unites us with Jesus, who takes us to the Father in the Spirit. Christ is the still and radiant Lodestar within and beyond the cosmos to which everything looks for its fulfillment.
This haiku poem distills the essence of living in union with the Stat Crux within:
Hidden Prayer
Silent, hidden force
Lures all things to the Lodestar,
Aligned with the Source.