Show Notes
Abraham Lincoln quoted this week's gospel in one of his speeches, and it still applies today: a house divided cannot stand.
Gospel:Mk 3:20-35
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you.
A reading from the holy gospel according to Mark.
[00:00:31] Speaker A: Glory to you.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Jesus came home with his disciples again. The crowd gathered, making it impossible for them even to eat.
When his relatives heard of this, they set out to seize him, for they said, he is out of his mind.
The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said, he is possessed by Beelzebul and by the prince of demons. He drives out demons, summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables.
How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
And if Satan rises up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand.
That is the end of him.
But no one can enter a strong man's house to plunder his property. Unless he first ties up the strong man.
Then he can plunder the house.
Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them.
But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.
For they had said, he has an unclean spirit.
His mother and his brothers arrived standing outside. They sent word to him and called him.
A crowd seated around him told him, your mother and your brothers and your sisters are outside asking for you.
But he said to them in reply, who are my mother and my brothers?
And looking around at those seated in the circle, he said, here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. The gospel of the Lord.
[00:02:55] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: On June 16, 1858, just about 166 years ago, Abraham Lincoln got up in the Illinois statehouse and delivered what is probably his second most famous speech.
And in that, he quoted today's gospel, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
And he was referring to the bubbling cauldron that was our country's original sin and how we dealt with slavery. And he said, the nation would not be able to exist with half the states holding slaves and half not. It would have to become one or the other.
And he was truly prophetic in that for less than a handful of years later, the civil war began in order to resolve that issue as one of its primary questions.
Well, that same understanding, a house divided against itself cannot stand is also a pretty accurate understanding of the christian church in the world, and that we must always make it our priority to be a people that reconciles and heals rather than separates and divides.
And it is easy to point fingers at others. And it's oftentimes a lot harder to point a finger at ourselves.
So I'm going to take the hard line.
I'm going to point a finger at us as Catholics.
And if anybody tries to quote what I'm about to say, I'll deny I said it.
Just want to say that right off the bat.
But my critique, and I realize my critiques aren't always perfect, although as close as you'll probably ever see, is that we would be better off as a church. We would be more reconciling, we would be more uniting.
If at least on some occasions, rather than trying to give an answer to absolutely every question that humanity has, we would simply say, we don't know.
We can't possibly understand absolutely everything about God. And rather than trying to give clear black and white answers on everything, we said, we don't know. And we said, if you want to find the answer that is rooted in Christ, there's only one way to do that. And that is to say that the motivation we have is 100% beyond any shadow of a doubt, written in an unconditional, loving way.
And if we are willing to do that, I would also be willing to wager that we won't make mistakes.
Because it's only when we act with unconditional love that we are truly acting with the presence of Christ, a part of who we are.
And that while we can't go backwards and change things, perhaps we can still do that going forward.
We can be willing to say that we don't have every answer, but that the answers are found in Christ's love.
And I want to say to all of you, or at least 99.995% of you, you all do that really well.
You all tend to show the love of Christ in your hearts, and that's the way the world has changed.
But we never ever can forget that. That's the only way we can keep our house united, by uniting in Christ's love and showing that love to one another.
