HOMILY FOR TUESDAY OF THE 6TH WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME YEAR I.
THEME: GO INTO THE ARK!
BY: Benedict Agbo (Rev Fr).
* Gen 6: 5 – 10, Mk 8: 14 – 21.
People do not seem to be able to learn from history. We are still contributing to the river of evil and corruption that has its source in the fall of our 1st parents. Today’s 1st reading makes another anthropomorphic statement about God: That the Lord regretted making man. God cannot regret but he was disappointed with man’s use of his freedom in the perpetuation of evil. Remember that the generation of people we saw at the time were descendants of Adam and Eve, Cain, Seth and Noah. It was an inordinate mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly with a preponderance of the bad. God had to do a weeding.
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We are told that Noah was an exception. The story of Noah and his family is also the primitive story of God’s plan B of human redemption. Righteous people were warned to go into the Ark. The rest wallowed in their sins until the flood came. As Thomas Jefferson warned: ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom’. People are bound to perish when they are not vigilant.
Jesus harps on the same motif in today’s gospel. He cautioned his disciples to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Herodians. The leaven of the Pharisees were the meaningless traditions of men found in the name of religion – still found even in our Christian churches today. They were a hypocritical lot who honoured God with their lips but their hearts were far away from him. The Herodians had scant belief in God. God played little or no role in their lives. They were men who believed in their material wealth than in divine providence. They loved vicious pleasures than virtues. Remember how Herod was tripped by the immodest dressing and dancing of young Herodias’ daughter and wasted the life of the man of God, John the Baptist.
Today we are still faced with the hypocritical lives of many of our pastors and priests, the corruption of many of our politicians who waste our scarce resources with very exorbitant wages and allowance while the nation claims to be in recession. Do you still not understand? There is God O! He has an uncanny way of doing his mop up sanitary operation from time to time when corruption grows too wild from generation to generation. So, you better enter the Ark! It’s better you support the right party/the right Candidates in this election in order to bring good governance to Nigeria or we may destroy this country and not have another to live in. To all Nigerian Youths, I say HAPPY VALENTINE❤️ May God bless you today!
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