We come to our third and final prophet for this week in our first reading today: Joel. The Church, this week, is having us consider the “messages of God” from many different mouthpieces! Today God, through Joel, is rousing activity at the temple itself. He is telling the priests to get into their fasting attire (sackcloth) and to weep loudly! He tells them to proclaim a fast throughout the land because the day! the day of the Lord, is near! Blow the trumpet, sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all who dwell in the land tremble for the day of the Lord is coming!
It will be a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and somberness spreading over the mountains and the people! It will be unlike any other day!
The responsorial refrain summarizes it for us: The Lord will judge the world with justice! We can add: just as he promised he would from time immemorial!
But the good news in all of this is that for us who are baptized into Christ Jesus - baptized into his life, death and resurrection - that day need not be so terrifying after all. For if we live with the Lord Jesus, if we allow him to live his life in us and through us on behalf of others and their well-being - if we believe that in fact the power of the Holy Spirit did raise him from the dead at the bidding of God the Father - then we shall have nothing to fear on that great and ominous day!
It was getting to be common knowledge, in the gospel passage today, that Jesus has a unique and extraordinary power over nature, over the physical world, over the spiritual world. He could cure disease. He could also drive out demons and evil spirits. To explain this unusual ability the people were saying that he must be in league with the devil himself - to which Jesus simply replied that it would be contradictory for an evil power to cast out an evil power! “A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand!” And so, he tells the objectors that, however, if it truly by the finger of God that I drive out the demons (the finger of God being the Holy Spirit), then the Kingdom of God has come upon you.
This argument no doubt convinced some, but not others.
Jesus warns, though, that even when, through prayer and fasting, unclean spirits are driven out - the place where they were driven from must be constantly guarded by prayer, and the many aids that would come later when the Church would exist! Constant prayer, and the use of the Sacraments, especially Eucharist and Penance are the ideal ways to keep our spiritual house not only clean, but filled with the Spirit of God - the Holy Spirit!
Today we pray that when the final day comes - whenever that might be - that the spiritual houses of our hearts will be brimming over with the joy, hope and peace that are part and parcel of the presence of the Holy Spirit deep within us - because we kept sweeping our houses our whole lives long!
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