Thursday – 8th Week in Ordinary Time – A

My dear friends, today's readings once again touch our hearts. The first reading from Saint Peter's first Epistle. He writes, “Beloved, like newborn infants long for pure spiritual milk, so that through it you may grow into salvation. For you have tasted that the Lord is good.”

So right away Peter is appealing to our known experience with God. We have experienced so many graces and benefits and blessings, one after the other, and we have seen how profoundly good that is with a goodness that is so different from the other kinds of goodness that might come to us in an earthly, physical sense. Sometimes they're intertwined. But of course, even in thanking the Lord for the earthly goods we receive, we're turning that into a spiritual experience.

And so Saint Peter reminds us to look at things with a spiritual vision, right? To look with the eyes of faith, at our lives, at our circumstances, even at our difficulties.

And then he goes on and he says, “Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings, but chosen and precious in the sight of God. And like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

So he's beckoning us, inviting us, proposing Christ to us, to go to him who is the creator of all things, the son of the Eternal Father, the giver of life, the one who sends us the Holy Spirit to Jesus.

And then he speaks about the universal priesthood. He says, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may announce the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.”

Right when we're in darkness, we cannot see. But when we come into the light of God, all things become clearer.

Now, what is a priest by definition? if you look up the definition of a priest, you will find that in the simplest of terms he is, or she is one who offers sacrifice. Right. So there were priestesses in the ancient world who would also offer sacrifices.

Now I'm not getting into the polemic over male or female ordination. Obviously, the Lord chose males to be his ministerial priests, but universal priesthood means that all of us, men and women alike, are already priests in the sense that every time we offer up, as Saint Peter here says, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices.

So every time we offer a spiritual sacrifice, we are exercising our universal priesthood.

So what might be a spiritual sacrifice? Well, let's say somebody gets you upset. Your spouse, your husband, your wife. And instead of snapping at them, instead of getting angry, instead of getting into another argument, right. We bite our tongue. We maintain our silence and our interior peace. And any pain that we might feel, we offer that to God. There you go. That is a spiritual, profound, and very authentic sacrifice in the eyes of the Lord.

So Peter is drawing very heavily in this quote “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” from the Old Testament, especially from the language used by God about Israel in the book of Exodus and the prophets. For example, in Exodus 19, verse six, he says, “You shall be to me a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” Peter essentially takes the titles once applied to Israel at Sinai, and now he applies them to the church.

And he also echoes several other prophetic texts, especially Isaiah chapter 43. “My chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself, that they might declare my praise.” Or Isaiah 42. “I will lead the blind in a way they do not know. I will turn darkness into light before them.”

These are important passages because immediately after this quote, Saint Peter reminds the early Christian converts “once you were no people, but now you are God's people. You had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”

And then once again, he beckons us to engage in our spiritual warfare. He says, “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and sojourners, to keep away from worldly desires that wage war against the soul.”

My brothers and sisters, all of us are being called out of darkness into his wonderful light.

And in today's gospel, we see a very beautiful and profound reminder of how important it is to see things with spiritual eyes, with the eyes of faith.