Fifth Sunday Ordinary Time
February 7, 2021 •
There are two types of hope. Hope for an earthly remedy, and hope for a spiritual remedy. Now, that doesn't mean you can't have both. You can have both, but one must always be superior to the other, otherwise you will never find peace in this life of drudgery.
Listen to the example that Job gave. He says: "I'm having a restless night and I just wish the morning would come."
But what happens when your hope is in the morning? The night seems to drag on. ... Job is saying that it's your perception. Because your hope in in the dawn, the night seems to to take forever. ...
Whenever we place our hope in an earthly remedy, one: it seems to take forever to get it, and two: when it comes, it never fully satisfies. So the dawn comes but you're still exhausted because you didn't get good sleep. Then the whole rest of the day is even more difficult than the day before.
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If your hope ends there, if you don't have a higher hope, a spiritual hope, it ultimately will never satisfy you. Why?
Everyone who was cured in the Gospel still ultimately died. Even Lazarus dies eventually after being brought back from the dead. You can only avoid pain and suffering so long. It always catches up with us. ... This desire for an earthly remedy is perfectly natural because things were not created to be this way.
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Sin is the real enemy here. So for each one of us, if our greatest hope and desire is not the overcoming of sin and His ability to forgive it, we'll never find happiness in this world.
Jb 7:1-4, 6-7; Ps 147:1-2, 3-4, 5-6; 1 Cor 9:16-19, 22-23; Mk 1:29-39
Homily begins at 19:02