Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time
In the days of Saint Paul, Corinth was the truck-stop of the Eastern world. Just look at a map. The Isthmus of Corinth is a four mile strip of land that joins northern Greece to the Peloponnese, with the Ionian and Adriatic seas on either side of it. In fact, in Paul’s day, he would have walked a long stone-paved road along which they would drag small ships on rollers, from one sea to another.
That’s why Corinth was the center of banking and shipping and became a melting pot of Greeks, Romans, Jews, Syrians, Egyptians, sailors, merchants, slaves, and freedmen,
It was a booming port city, wealthy, cosmopolitan, and fiercely competitive. All of which meant that the city was what my grandmother would call “stuck-up,” and quite impressed with itself. Social rank, rhetorical polish, education, and patronage networks mattered enormously. To “be somebody” in Corinth meant being impressive: skilled in speech, connected, admired, and upwardly mobile.
And so, when Paul started a Church there, he noticed rather quickly that this one-upmanship started to creep into peoples behavior in church. Christians began aligning themselves behind different leaders—“I belong to Paul,” “I belong to Apollos,” “I belong to Cephas,” as if they were choosing to belong not so much to a Church as to a political party!
Which is why Paul begins this morning by reminding these stuck-up Corinthians that “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.” No, he tells them, God did not choose you because you were so big and powerful and impressive, but because you were little and weak and foolish. God chooses “the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, and those who count for little in the eyes of the world.”
Perhaps that’s why we love, Saint Thérèse or the Little Flower so much. She never preached to crowds. She never founded a movement. In fact, she never left her convent and by the standards of history, her life was so small that hardly anyone would have noticed at all.
She was born in an out of the way French town and entered a Carmelite convent as a fifteen year old kid. And the community she entered wasn’t all that impressive. It was a place of cold corridors, scratchy habits, sore knees, and women who often drove each other crazy. Thérèse was often sick. She was often misunderstood. She was often ignored. For years she scrubbed floors, folded laundry, and sat in the choir behind sisters who sang better and prayed longer than she did.
But discovered something that no one else noticed: that God is not impressed by how big and important you are. The only thing that matters to him is whether you are loving. “Do little things with great love,” became her motto. “Do little things with great love.”
Thérèse once wrote of a sister in her convent who used to drive her crazy. She was noisy, fussy, and always bumping into the young nun. So Thérèse decided to pray for the nun who drove her crazy, to smile at her and to hold her in her heart.
Later on, the noisy nun would write, “I always wondered why Thérèse liked me so much.” She had no idea it was an act of heroic charity.
Thérèse dies of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. No crowds. No headlines. But after her death, something astonishing happened. Her simple autobiography spread across the world like wildfire.
People began to pray to her. Conversions followed. Vocations were born. Hope returned to the despairing. Within twenty-eight years, the Church declared her a saint, and soon thereafter, a Doctor of the Church.
All because God choses “the foolish to shame the wise, the weak to shame the strong, and those who count for little in the eyes of the world” to teach us all.
