FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - JULY 6, 2025

FOURTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

The goal of every Christian is to live like Christ, yet Christ’s public life was defined by his suffering. This Christian identity is so daunting that even Christ’s closest followers abandoned him at his time of greatest need because they were afraid of the suffering that came with faithfulness. The great hope of our faith, though, is the redemption of resurrection. Those who fled came back, those who sought comfort eventually rejoiced in their suffering, and those who died were raised to new life. If Christ came to you and offered you the chance to suffer alongside him, would you take it?

READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE

If the goal of the Christian life is to be like our Lord, then we ought to expect a life of suffering. This is the one thing that every single saint has in common, but it also unites us in the present state of the Church, regardless of how faithful or pious we might be. Historically, some figures of Christianity have united themselves so perfectly to Christ that their interior life has been sanctified by the love of the Christian faith. Even so, Christ has deemed these few figures worthy of bearing the marks of his suffering on their own bodies in a phenomenon called stigmata. In stigmata, these holy men and women might have the wounds of the nails pierced through the flesh of the hands and feet, the holes from the crown of thorns on their head, or the lashes of his scourging on their back. Accompanying these visible marks, though, is the physical pain of them, as well. If we were to ask anyone in the Church today if they wouldchoose to bear the stigmata, most Christians would say no out of fear of the pain it requires. But if we are not pained, if we do not suffer, we cannot live like Christ. In this Sunday’s epistle, Paul tells the Galatians that he bears the marks of Jesus on his body, just as stigmatists bear the wounds of the passion on theirs. This word “mark” is stigma in Greek, and Paul uses the word stigmata (στίγματα) to refer to his wounds. However, most scholars do not assume that Paul had stigmata, but rather bore marks of his faithfulness to Christ on his body through the physical suffering he incurred as his Apostle. He was tortured, shipwrecked, imprisoned, and eventually beheaded all because he went from town to town preaching the gospel. His interior life was sanctified in his newfound faith, even at the point of his martyrdom, which is why the suffering he took on became bodily. But Paul’s suffering, just as Christ’s, was not centralized in the corporeal; the real suffering was that which led to their deaths–they became a stigma to those around them, rejected for preaching the truth, denied for living out their lives in love.