Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Reflection: Lonely hot peppers
By SISTER MARY McGLONE
My favorite toy of late is a teleidoscope, a kaleidoscope that reflects your surroundings. It helps me see things in a beautifully different light and that’s precisely what we need when we listen to Jesus.
Jesus taught in koans, traditional anecdotes or riddles that unveil the inadequacy of logical reasoning when it comes to the most important matters in life.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that they are the salt of the Earth. Scholars go round and round analyzing what makes salt insipid, but Jesus wasn’t focusing on salt, but on mission. Scripture scholar Douglas Hare explains that the salt metaphor would have sounded as strange to Jesus’ disciples as it does to us. Hare suggests that we’d get the message better if we said something like: “Get to it, you can be the hot peppers of the Earth!”
Now that’s one to ponder.
Jesus’ statement, “You are the light of the world,” brazenly refocused a common description of God and applied it to the disciples. Of course, God is the true light, but God needs flesh and blood disciples to be the windows through which the light shines or the mirrors reflecting it into new places.
Jesus’ teaching was hardly new. Isaiah taught the same thing. According to Isaiah, being a light for the nations has nothing to do with attending church, listening to homilies or interpreting Scripture. The light Isaiah talks about shines in the faces of givers and receivers, people who share bread, shelter the oppressed and homeless, and clothe the naked. Eating or living together creates greater community. When someone receives the clothes of another, they’re bound together in a new way. They mirror each other such that they can no longer ignore one another.
Right now in the United States, people who identify with others’ needs might feel like lonely hot peppers in big pots of bland beans. Such people are all around us. Remember Judge Hannah Dugan who made authorities burn with anger when she whisked Eduardo Flores-Ruiz out a side door of a Milwaukee courtroom to avoid ICE agents? Of course, the FBI arrested her.
She exemplifies the reality of the cross: Those who act in the name of God will share the fate of the poor.
What does this have to do with us? Pope Leo XIV delivered a message for the World Day of Migrants and Refugees in October. Rather than simply defend them, he spotlighted them, calling them evangelizers who risk everything to find a better life.
Leo said, “In a world darkened by war and injustice, even when all seems lost, migrants and refugees stand as messengers of hope. Their courage and tenacity bear heroic testimony to a faith that sees beyond what our eyes can see and gives them the strength to defy death.”
In this message, Leo warned that “sedentarization,” poses a serious danger to the church today. The word may sound peculiar; unfortunately, the reality is not. Common parlance might call it couch-potatoism. Sedentarists watch the news, observing and maybe feeling bad about what happens to “them,” then they change the channel, forgetting that they are us and we are them and all of us are God’s.
In November, the U.S. bishops issued a statement decrying the U.S. government’s treatment of migrants. They talked about how saddened they are by the state of contemporary debate in the U.S., the vilification of immigrants, conditions in detention, and by seeing parents afraid to take children to school.
How are we called to be hot peppers in society? Surely, we don’t lack for situations begging for the spice of the Gospel. Our bishops lamented ways in which U.S. laws are destroying communion among us and thwarting the exercise of the compassion of Jesus. They exhort us to “advocate for a meaningful reform of our nation’s immigration laws and procedures.”
Today, we witness wars, nations invading less powerful neighbors, leaders of nations with excess food allowing starvation in poorer countries. Common rhetoric villainizes the vulnerable while media makes it all seem ordinary. We’re advancing rapidly in our spiritual sedentarization. Meanwhile, subtle but powerful forces are dosing us with spiritual Novocain. This is how evil works, slow cooking the church into pots of bland beans.
The remedy? We need to let our vision get mixed up so that we see differently. In his apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te, Leo tells us that hearing the cry of the poor is the way into the heart of God. Listening primarily to our friends and peers reinforces our blind spots and reinforces lifeless visions of our Christian mission.
People familiar with the suffering that comes from injustice can be our teleidoscopes, scrambling our placid viewpoints and adding hot peppers to a church in mission. Isn’t it time to let the Gospel spice up our lives?
Reading 1
(Isaiah 58: 7-10)
Thus says the LORD:
Share your bread with the hungry,
shelter the oppressed and the homeless;
clothe the naked when you see them,
and do not turn your back on your own.
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn,
and your wound shall quickly be healed;
your vindication shall go before you,
and the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer,
you shall cry for help, and he will say: Here I am!
If you remove from your midst
oppression, false accusation and malicious speech;
if you bestow your bread on the hungry
and satisfy the afflicted;
then light shall rise for you in the darkness,
and the gloom shall become for you like midday.
Responsorial Psalm
(Psalm 112: 4-9)
R. The just man is a light in darkness to the upright.
Light shines through the darkness for the upright;
he is gracious and merciful and just.
Well for the man who is gracious and lends,
who conducts his affairs with justice.
R. The just man is a light in darkness to the upright.
He shall never be moved;
the just one shall be in everlasting remembrance.
An evil report he shall not fear;
his heart is firm, trusting in the LORD.
R. The just man is a light in darkness to the upright.
His heart is steadfast; he shall not fear.
Lavishly he gives to the poor;
His justice shall endure forever;
his horn shall be exalted in glory.
R. The just man is a light in darkness to the upright.
Reading 2
(1 Corinthians 2: 1-5)
When I came to you, brothers and sisters,
proclaiming the mystery of God,
I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you
except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling,
and my message and my proclamation
were not with persuasive words of wisdom,
but with a demonstration of Spirit and power,
so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom
but on the power of God.
Gospel
(Matthew 5: 13-16)
Jesus said to his disciples:
“You are the salt of the Earth.
But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned?
It is no longer good for anything
but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the light of the world.
A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden.
Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket;
it is set on a lampstand,
where it gives light to all in the house.
Just so, your light must shine before others,
that they may see your good deeds
and glorify your heavenly Father.”