20260625 Thursday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time

[그리움하나]

(2 Kgs 24:8–17 / Mt 7:1–29): Building a House upon Rock

When you come forward to this altar to celebrate Mass, what intention, what longing do you carry in the depths of your heart as you stand before the Lord? Perhaps there is a petition you have been waiting to bring before Him — or perhaps you have come to discern His will, and to seek the right response to offer in return.

As a priest, every time I kneel before the Lord, I offer a prayer. I ask that no human failing, no wandering of the mind — like clouds drifting across the sky — would obscure His radiant light or hinder me from hearing His holy and wise voice. I pray that whatever prayer is raised here may be clear and transparent, seen and heard without obstruction. And I fold my hands before the living God, asking that my own life, too, may not be trapped behind the title of "priest" or any human name — that I may not be tempted by the vanity of hollow authority or pride that would veil Him from others — but that I may be made full simply by praying for those who come here seeking Him.

And yet, I do not think this struggle belongs to me alone.

Have you ever come home after a long day at work, having stretched the truth to seem more capable than you are — and felt, in the quiet of the night, a hollow emptiness in your chest? Have you ever spoken a careless word to a family member or a neighbor, only to carry the weight of it long afterward? All of us, in ways large and small, find ourselves pulled between the words we say and the lives we actually live. We already know in our bones how hollow life becomes when it is not filled with a love that is poor in spirit and full of mercy.

Today's First Reading from the Second Book of Kings shows us, in devastating clarity, where that hollowness leads when it runs its full course in history.

"Only the lowliest of the people of the land were left."

The scene of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, carrying off all the treasures of the house of the LORD and breaking up all the gold utensils that Solomon had provided — deporting the king, his officials, and skilled workers into captivity — is not simply a story of political defeat. Israel had long listened to the word of the Lord. But they had stopped at listening. Even as the prophets warned them again and again, in their actual lives they trusted the alliances and powers of this world more than they trusted God. A people who heard the word and did not live it eventually arrived at the ruin of exile. The treasures of a temple built with such splendor, carried off to a foreign land — that is the final end of a house built upon sand. 

It is precisely this that the Lord addresses in today's Gospel:

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven." (Mt 7:21) 

And the parable that follows — the house built on rock and the house built on sand — is not simply about the life to come. It is about where, in this very moment, we place the full weight of our lives. Rain will fall. Floods will rise. Winds will blow — there is no escaping them. Illness comes. Relationships are shaken. Unexpected loss arrives at the door. Whether our lives collapse or hold firm in those moments depends, above all, on how faithfully we have actually lived the Word before them.

Empty words — empty speech — lead only to one outcome: a growing distance from God. Life loses its fragrance the moment we become intoxicated by fine-sounding words or the illusion that we have become something great. Even when we manage to appear fine on the surface, we may in truth be quietly making ourselves more and more alone — a quiet, sad foolishness. And hollow speech, in the end, can only carry us further from Him.

So then, what does it truly mean to build a house upon rock?

It is not something grand or extraordinary. It is this: that a single word we speak today might become a word that soothes someone's wound. That we are willing to ask for forgiveness first. That we seek peace within the small, everyday relationships of our lives. This is what it means to act on the Word. To hold one another's wounds with a poor and pure heart, to build — deep in the soul — a home of the Lord's love that will not collapse: this is the true intention of the prayer we are called to offer in this Mass.

Please pray for me, as well. And I will pray for you.

I, too, am a deeply imperfect person. I do not want to wear these vestments as though they were a credential I have earned. I believe rather that it is only when I truly live the love of the Lord that the meaning held within this garment will be revealed as His fragrance. And I know it to be a gift of grace — offered to me in mercy for that one purpose alone.

As each of us walks out of this Mass today and returns to our own place in the world, may every step we take be a step in the building of a house upon rock.

Amen.