Homily for Saturday of the Thirty-Third Week in Ordinary Time
By Fr. Williams Onyilo, CSSp
Readings: 1 Maccabees 6:1–13; Luke 20:27–40
Most times, people talk about defeating and winning over others, which is nice. However, as much as this may sound good, I feel that if we have never been defeated before, we may remain amateurs in our approach to the issues of life. From experience, I have learnt that being defeated or failing in our tasks helps us to be humble and to re-examine ourselves properly.
However, before I wrote my Senior Secondary Certificate Examination, I used to look at those who failed as charlatans or lazy people. I did not know that other factors-like missing scripts, sickness during the examination, bereavements, fear, unhappy examiners, or even some psychological and spiritual phenomena-could also make someone fail. For me, I think it happened because I refused to bribe the examiner, or perhaps my scripts got missing. Up till today, I can beat my chest and say I know what I wrote, but the result I got looked as if it came from another planet entirely.
Anyway, I learnt from that failure to be humble, to depend more on God my Creator instead of myself, and to empathize with those who fail when I meet them. In this way, I was able to move on with my life despite my shortcomings.
In the first reading of today, when Antiochus IV lost the war to the Jews, he re-examined his past, remembered how he desecrated the temple of God, and accepted the punishment that came upon him. Perhaps, before dying, he even advised his son never to desecrate any temple again.
At this point, I would like to ask: Have you ever failed in any aspect of life? If yes, did you learn anything from your failure? Did you appreciate the fact that failure made you wiser than you were before? And what would you say to those “amateurs” out there who feel that failure is the end of a person’s life?
I pray that the Holy Spirit, who used the disciples of Jesus Christ even after many of them failed to meet up to his expectations, will help us rise above failure and the “worldly shame” associated with it, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
