A Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: 2 Kings 4:8-11, 14-16a Romans 6:3-4, 8-11 Matthew 10:37-42
First, another reference to a cup of cold water and then a question. This drink is found in Helmut Walser Smith’s Germany: A Nation in its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000 (2020).
The trains were known as Judenzüge: “Jewish trains.” Between 1942 and 1944, some two thousand trains transported well over two million Jews to death camps—a small number compared with the total passenger traffic of the German Reichsbahn in these years. Yet from testimonies of peasant and Jewish survivors, we know that people in villages abutting the rails heard screams of the thirsty, doomed passengers as they passed on their way to the extermination camps. When the trains stopped—which happened often given the confusion of transport, death traffic, as well as ordinary freight and passenger trains—a market for water sometimes came into being, as Jews trapped in cattle cars paid Poles and Ukrainians for sips of water. In the Polish town of Szczebrzeszyn, a young woman exchanged her wedding ring for a cup of water for her child.
In 2 Kings, “a woman of influence” provided food and water to Elisha because he was a prophet, because his words, his ministry, meant something to her. Evidently, God had blessed her through him. In the second scene, only the Jewish mother’s degree of devotion surprises us, not that she considered her child to be a blessing worth the sacrifice of her wedding ring.
Here's the question: Who needs your cup of cold water? Who are the blessings in your life? Children, parents, friends, lovers, neighbors: the folk who sustain you, make you feel at home in this old world?
When you love others, it should be evident in the time you seek to spend with them, in the kindnesses you show to them, in the sacrifices you make for them.
Once you have identified them, there are two additional questions. Do they know it, and how do you show it? Are they aware that God blesses you through them? Have you said as much to them? Is it evident in your care for them, as clear and convincing as a cup of cold water?
Love lives to show itself, to pour itself out. When you love others, it should be evident in the time you seek to spend with them, in the kindnesses you show to them, in the sacrifices you make for them. Most of all, in your desire to see them flourish in this life and in the life to come.
Parents might presume that their care and concern is evident. Some would proudly assert that they have never missed any of their children’s school or sporting events. Good enough but remember that God gave them to you to bring them home, with you, to him. Can you claim that your children have never missed Sunday Mass in your company? Care cannot only be a concern of today. It always looks ahead, all the way to heaven, in carrying its charges.
Care for those who are blessings to us is more than a moral virtue. It is an expression of the Christ who dwells within us. Who is Jesus but the Father’s manifestation of care and concern for us? So, to express our love for others is to imitate the very person and mission of Jesus.
Who needs your cup of cold water? Jesus says, whether it is given to a prophet or a little one, it will not go without its reward. In this life, caring for our loved ones should be its own reward. And how we care for them here determines the reward the next life will bring for them and for us.
