Fattening Our Hearts or Salting Them with Fire, Seventh Thursday (II), May 19, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
May 19, 2016
Jas 5:1-6, Ps 49, Mk 9:41-50

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we continue our devotional Octave of Pentecost, today we can focus together on how the Holy Spirit seeks to help us to live a coherent life, putting to death in us life according to the flesh, according to the spirit of this world, and living according to the Holy Spirit which is the spirit of divine love and mercy. Today’s readings illustrate for us the coherent Christian life of the Holy Spirit versus the incoherent and ultimately destructive life of the flesh.
• In the Gospel today Jesus speaks to us powerfully the correspondence that’s supposed to exist between what we believe and how we behave. This is a coherence that’s supposed to be found in not just the big things of our life but the little things. He begins by saying that anyone who gives a cup of cold water to another because of the person’s relationship to Christ will surely not lose his reward. Christian coherence doesn’t involve  fidelity onlywhen threatened with martyrdom, but fidelity in looking out with the eyes and the heart to care for the needs of anyone who is thirsty, aware that Christ identifies with everyone who is thirsty and longs to say to us, “When I was thirsty, you gave me to drink.”
• That coherence is in sharp contract to St. James’ letter to the first Christians in today’s epistle. They were supposed to be living with the poverty of spirit with which Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount — which was our Responsorial Psalm today — but they were living according to the flesh and setting their hearts on mammon. St. James speaks of the selfish hoarding of possessions while others are in need. He said that many of the early Christians addressed in his letter were preparing themselves for slaughter by “killing the righteous one.” He was essentially calling them Christ-murderers by their failure to use the blessings God had given them for others.
• There were three main sources of wealth in the ancient world. Today it would be in houses and land, but in the ancient world it was mainly food (stored corn and grained), clothing (especially luxurious garments made by hand, not by machine) and precious metals everyone valued (gold and silver). St. James told the Christians who were hoarding the material blessings God had given them that none of this wealth would last, but not only would it be corroded, but they would be corroded because of their grasping on to it. “Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries. Your wealth [corn and grain] has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten, your gold and silver have corroded, and that corrosion will be a testimony against you; it will devour your flesh like a fire.” How does grain rot away? By being stored too long in a grain bin when others are starving. How do clothes get eaten by moths? By remaining in closets and chests while others don’t have adequate clothes to wear. How do gold and silver corrode? They really don’t, which is why St. James’ image is so powerful: he says it corrodes almost like flesh-eating bacteria when all the oils in our hand eat it away by our never giving it to others, for example, when we, as St. James says, withhold wages from day workers who needed their money to survive and support their families. He declares that while “you have lived on earth in luxury and pleasure, you have fattened your hearts for the day of slaughter.” He says that such a lifestyle is similar to do to ourselves what ranchers do to fatten the calves that are going to be destined for the slaughter house: we’re preparing ourselves for eternal death. We make ourselves spiritually obese. And the end result is that by such behavior “you have murdered the righteous one” who “offers you no resistance.” That righteous one is Christ, who identifies with all those who suffered as a result of omission or commission.
• Our response to these powerful words must be brutal and forthright. Jesus in the Gospel today tells us first, about sin, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. … And if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off.  … And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” The reason is because “it is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands [or two feet or two eyes] to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.” At first this seems savage but it’s basic human wisdom. We frequently read about stories of people who self-amputate when trapped because unless they do, they’ll die.  That’s the decision any of us who is sane would make, that when it comes down to a choice between life and limb, between dying with both arms or continuing to live with one — when there’s no longer any choice to continue living with both arms — then we would choose life over limb. Jesus is telling us to live spiritually by the same wisdom. If there’s something leading us to sin, we need to be brutal in surgically excising it from our life. Jesus isn’t really talking about literal physical amputations here — lest anyone misinterpret what he’s saying — but spiritual amputations. And he says it’s a matter of life and death.
• To return to St. James’ words today, the apostle is saying, “If your grain and corn bins are leading you to the slaughtered, be brutal and rip the food out of the bins and give it away. If your clothing is causing you to sin, share it with the poor who have no fabrics at all not to mention finely embroidered ones. If your gold and your silver is rotting away your flesh, put it into the hands of those who could use it to survive, especially those who have earned it. Better for you to enter into life with smaller grain bins, smaller closets, and little money left than as a rich man to be slaughtered for the worms in Gehenna. Jesus said in the Gospel that it is easier for a camel to fit through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. It’s not that he can’t fit, but his possessions can’t fit, and if he continues to hold on to his possessions, he’ll never be able to make it. He must give them away in charity to those who need them, and there are so many who do. Pope Francis said very powerfully in his catechesis yesterday in St. Peter’s Square that unless our hearts are open to others they are not truly opened to God; if they’re closed to our neighbor, they’re likewise closed to God. That’s why St. James is so focused on the charity we give to others, because unless we’re using the things with which God has blessed us for others, we’ll be shutting ourselves off to God by making of those things idols.
• But Jesus builds on this teaching in the Gospel. He says that the coherence of a Christian life is crucially important to teach others the way to God. Speaking about scandal with very graphic language, he says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” It’s bad enough that we sin, but Jesus says it’s infinitely worse when we lead others to sin, especially those with a child-like faith who look with love to Jesus and expect us to represent Him and live what he asks of us. One of the most frightening ways people were put to death in the ancient world was by drowning them. Their hands would be tied behind their back securely and a rope would be tied around their neck and attached to heavy weights — occasionally a millstone — and they would be drawn like an anchor straight to the bottom of the river or lake or sea. Jesus was saying that having that happen to you would be better than what will happen to those who cause scandal. Jesus is infinitely merciful with individual sinners who with repentance approach him for forgiveness, but here he can’t be more brutal in describing how severe he is, and he wants us to be, with conduct that leads to sin and scandal, because it not only will lead us to death but it’s also spiritually homicidal.
• After hearing these frankly frightening words, how should we respond. Jesus tells us at the end of today’s Gospel.  “Keep salt in yourselves,” he states, “and you will have peace with one another.” The principal purpose of salt in the ancient world was as a preservative, to keep things from being corrupted. Rather than grasping onto things and wealth, rather than treasuring the things of the world in our hearts, we need to keep our heart salted, preserved from that type of idolatry. He reminds us that our salt can lose its flavor and be fit for nothing, so he wants us to constantly be pouring preservative salt on our heart. And he teaches us that “everyone will be salted with fire.” That’s an allusion to Old Covenant sacrifices when the lamb or ox or other animal, after it had been slaughtered in the temple, would be salted before it would be put on the fire and offered to God. We need regularly to be salting ourselves for that sacrifice and the more we do, the more we will give ourselves and our things in sacrifice to others. For us during the devotional Octave of Pentecost, we know that the “fire” with which God salts us is the Holy Spirit! And the Holy Spirit wants us to respond in little ways, one cup of cold water out of a compassionate heart to others at a time.
• As we come here to offer our bodies as a holy and acceptable sacrifice to God, our spiritual worship (Rom 12:1-2), to offer our Spirit-salted hearts and souls, we know that Jesus wants to convert us here so that we may, with him, go out and offer our body and blood, our grain, our clothes, our money for the salvation of others. That’s the type of transformation he always seeks to bring about. He seeks to bring us into total communion, total coherence, with his own life.

The readings for this Mass were: