Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi
October 4, 2017
Neh 2:1-8, Ps 137, Lk 9:57-62
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following points were attempted in the homily:
- Yesterday, Jesus “fixed his face toward Jerusalem,” toward Golgotha, toward the fulfillment of his Messianic mission. Everything for the rest of St. Luke’s Gospel needs to be interpreted within that context. And as he was heading there, he met three different people, two of whom volunteered to follow him and one whom Jesus directly called. But to all of them, Jesus described what it would mean to follow him. What he taught them is crucial for us to know in order for us to follow Christ faithfully and help others to become his true disciples.
- In the first vocation story, a man runs up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus had come into the world to make disciples and many would refuse to follow him, so we would have expected for him to respond with joy. Instead he replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus wanted him to know the cost of discipleship, especially at a time in which messianic expectations had hyped up the Jews to think that the Messiah would kick out the Romans and set up a political administration in which there would be plenty of patronage. Jesus wanted him to know that to follow him wherever he went meant to follow someone who was basically homeless, to follow him meant to value him more than one’s own home and one’s own bed, to follow him meant that you wouldn’t even have what foxes and birds take for granted. We, too, need to ponder the radical nature of God’s call. Are we willing to follow Jesus wherever he goes? If he asks us, like God asked Abraham, to leave our own native place at 75 and go to a place he would eventually show us, would we follow him, or would we value our home, our bed, our old habits more than we do the Lord?
- The second scene involves a man to him Jesus said, “Follow me!” But this man replied, “Lord, let me go first to bury my father.” When we hear this, we can presume that the person’s dad had just died and he just wanted to go home for the funeral and then return immediately. The text doesn’t say that, however. What’s much more likely was that the man’s father was very much alive and might live for decades still. What the man was likely communicating was, “Jesus, I’d like to follow you, but my father comes first. As soon as I’ve fulfilled all of my obligations to him, then I’ll be free to come and follow.” Jesus’ reply was strong: “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” As Jesus would say a little later at the raising of Lazarus, he is the Resurrection and the Life and everyone who lives and believes in him will never die, even if he dies (Jn 11:25-26). For us to become alive in the most important sense of all, we need to be in a living relationship to him. If we’re not following him, if we’re not allowing his life to reign within us, we’re dead, even if all our corporeal vital signs are health. He was calling this man to come fully alive and seeking to give him a participation in the Resurrection. He was giving him a choice between life and death, living and dying even while breathing, and encouraging him to let those who are “dead,” who don’t have this relationship, bury their confrères. Most often Jesus doesn’t call us to make a strict break between him and our family members. He calls us, after all, to honor our father and mother. He calls the family to be an image of the Church and the communion of persons who is God. Burying the dead is and will always remain a spiritual work of mercy. But at the same time he is reminding us that he needs to come first, so that our family life will become the life of the living rather than the walking dead. Our vocation is to a new type of familial life that will last forever and Jesus wants us to seize it, as he called this man in the Gospel.
- The third vocation scene is another one that involves the family. After being summoned by Jesus, this person replied, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” This was almost identical to what Elisha had said to Elijah and Elijah gave him permission. Jesus, who could see what was in the heart of the one with whom he was speaking, grasped what the request symbolized. The person simply was oblivious to the greatness of the request he had received to follow Jesus. As we prayed in the Alleluia verse, God wants to help us, like he helped St. Paul, to recognize that everything else is “rubbish” compared to the unsurpassable worth of “knowing Christ Jesus” and being found in him. The young man was giving a condition on following Jesus, was placing human respect, human courtesy, and family above the call to follow Jesus. Very likely Jesus also suspected that this man’s family members might have objected to his leaving them behind to follow Jesus fully. So Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.” He was saying, “Don’t look to what you’re leaving,” but rather, “Look ahead to what you’re gaining, to the work you’re called to do with me.”
- These vocational stories illumine not only our own biographies and those of every Christian but in a particular way the calling of the saint whom the Church celebrates today, the great St. Francis of Assisi. He is someone who for the first 25 years rejected for the most part what the Lord was asking, who said “yes” through baptism but really wanted to be about everything else other than setting his hand to the plow and looking forward. In his own Testament at the end of his life, regarded the first 25 years of his life as a time when he was “in sin,” living a care-free life in which he was head of the fraternity, or as his friends called him, the “king of feasts.” But the Lord never stopped calling him, and he called him through four great stages. When Pope Benedict went to Assisi in 1207, he pondered the four stages of Francis’ conversion. Insofar as Christ “came to call sinners,” we can see this calling to metanoia and holiness as a summary of Francis’ whole life and a light on our own.
- The first stage of his renewed calling happened through charity and compassion, and it took place when he was riding his horse outside the city and met a leper who came out from a leper colony to ask him for an alm. Francis dropped him something and sped away, not being able to stand the sight and smell of the leper and also phobic about catching the disease. But a short distance away he was pierced to the heart by his lack of genuine love. He turned around, sped to the leper, dismounted, and then embrace him and kiss the lands he wouldn’t touch earlier when dropping coins. It was a conversion to charity. “After 25 years of a mediocre life full of dreams, spent in the pursuit of worldly pleasures and success,” Pope Benedict described, Francis “opened himself to grace, came to his senses and gradually recognized Christ as the ideal of his life.” Each of us is called to open our senses in a similar way to find Christ in disguise.
- The second vocational stage of conversion and holiness happened in the Church of St. Damian on the slope of Assisi. As Francis was praying in front of the Crucifix in the run down Church, Jesus spoke to him from the Cross and summoned him, “Francis, rebuild my Church which you can see is falling into ruin.” Francis, at first, took the Lord literally and, selling some of his father’s precious fabrics, with the proceeds began to reconstruct the dilapidated house of God. But the Lord had a far bigger building project in mind. Later Pope Innocent III had a dream in which he saw Francis, whom he would meet for the first time the following day, holding up the Cathedral of St. John Lateran, the Pope’s principal Church, a sign that the renovation project God had in mind was the Church as a whole, which is not built of marble, wood, bricks and glass, but men, women, boys and girls, living stones built on Christ the cornerstone. That’s the building project Francis would undertake for God, one living stone at a time, beginning with his Franciscan brothers, and then the Poor Clares, and then the lay Franciscans, and through them in the Church as a whole. St. Clare would run away from home at 18 to “live according to the manner of the holy Gospel,” and that type of evangelical living is precisely what the Lord was asking for, what Francis would eventually inspire. That was the second stage of his calling. Each of us is called in a similar way to participate in that constant renovation project which is the Church. In today’s first reading, we have the first of two days from the Book of Nehemiah and we see how great Nehemiah’s longing was to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and the Temple. God planted that desire in him, just like he planted the desire in Francis, and wants to replant it in us.
- The third stage of his calling happened in the courtyard of the bishop’s residence after Francis’ Father had denounced him to the bishop for stealing his fabrics to sell them to rebuilt the Church. What Pietro Bernardone was really hoping for was far more than the restitution of his sold property, but the restitution of his son whom he thought was losing his mind seeking to unite himself to Christ in radical poverty, chastity and obedience. When Pietro told Bishop Guido what his son had done, Francis readily confessed, promised to return the money, but then grasped that the clothes he was wearing were also the fruit of his father’s generosity. So he stripped naked in the bishop’s courtyard, gave the clothes back to his Father, and then said he was finally able to live fully dependent on the generosity of his Father in heaven to whom he prayed, “Padre nostro, che sei nei coeli,” “Our Father, who art in heaven.” That was the third stage, to take Jesus’ words seriously that just as the Father takes care of the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky, so he will always care for our food, drink, clothing and housing. He was to live totally by God’s providence and mercy. We, too, are called to respond to our identity as beloved sons and daughters of God and live in accordance with that dignity.
- And the fourth and final stage of his vocation happened when the Lord appeared to him once more from a Crucifix, a Crucifix in LaVerna, two years before he died, and from his wounds pierced Francis’ hands, feet and side with his Sacred stigmata, so that Francis could bear in his own flesh Christ’s wounds. This was the culmination, so to speak, of his journey of conversion and holiness, which was, as Pope Benedict said in 2007, a “daily effort to put on Christ.” This itinerary culminated with the appearance of the stigmata, which enabled him to experience fully what St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Before he had received the visible wounds of Christ in his body, Pope Benedict stressed, Francis had received the wounds of Christ on his heart. He had been touched by the way his own sins had offended the Lord and had been moved with the same love for God and others that pierced Christ’s heart. This was his total conversion to Christ, “to the point that he sought to be ‘transformed’ into him, becoming his total image.” The Lord calls us, too, to become other Christ’s.
- Responding to the call to conversion and holiness, to allow the dead to bury the dead and to live for Christ, to set our hand to the plow and not look back, to follow the Lord to where he has no place to lay his head, is the chief lesson of Francis’ life. It was the call to love Christ above all. As Pope Benedict said in the Basilica of St. Francis in 2007, “Today, everything here speaks of conversion. … Speaking of conversion means going to the heart of the Christian message, and at the same time to the roots of human existence. … Since the time when the faces of lepers, loved through love of God, made him understand in a certain way the mystery of kenosis (cf. Phil 2: 7) – the humbling of God in the flesh of the Son of Man -, from the time when the voice of the Crucifix in San Damiano put in his heart the program for his life, ‘Go, Francis, repair my house’ (2 Cel I, 6, 10), his journey was none other than the daily effort to put on Christ. … My dear brothers and sisters, what was the life of the converted Francis if not a great act of love? This is revealed by his passionate prayers, rich in contemplation and praise, his tender embrace of the Divine Child at Greccio, his contemplation of the Passion at La Verna, his living ‘according to the form of the Holy Gospel’ (2 Test. 14), his choice of poverty and his quest for Christ in the faces of the poor. This was his conversion to Christ, to the point that he sought to be ‘transformed’ into him, becoming his total image; and this explains his typical way of life by virtue of which he appears to us to be so modern. … May Francis of Assisi obtain the grace of an authentic and full conversion to the love of Christ!” That’s a prayer to help us respond fully to our Christian calling!
- Each of us is called to “relive the interior journey of Francis.” Each of us is called to hear the Lord’s voice to repair his Church, parts of whose living stones in every generation “falling into ruins” through sin. Each of us is called to let Christ fully come alive in us through being “crucified with Christ,” which means denying ourselves, picking up whatever hardships or crosses we are given, and following Christ (see Mt 16:24). Each of us is called, in short, to offer our lives in love for God and for others. “In a word,” Pope Benedict summarized, “Francis was truly in love with Jesus.” That love for Jesus shone throughout his converted life and still shines 800 years later. It is a love that was so strong as to rebuild the Church. It is a love that is still powerful enough to rebuild the Church in our time, if we are able to experience that love through a conversion as profound as Francis’. To strengthen us in this continued assimilation of the life of Christ, Jesus is going to do something even greater for us than he did for Francis in the cave of LaVerna. We’re not just going to receive in our flesh his sacred stigmata, but we’re going to receive within his whole body, blood, soul and divinity, something that will help us from the inside to live a converted life, to live according to the manner of the Holy Gospel, so that others, in seeing our response to Christ’s perpetual call to repent and believe, might with us account everything else as rubbish compared to knowing Christ our Lord!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 NEH 2:1-8
In the month Nisan of the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes,
when the wine was in my charge,
I took some and offered it to the king.
As I had never before been sad in his presence,
the king asked me, “Why do you look sad?
If you are not sick, you must be sad at heart.”
Though I was seized with great fear, I answered the king:
“May the king live forever!
How could I not look sad
when the city where my ancestors are buried lies in ruins,
and its gates have been eaten out by fire?”
The king asked me, “What is it, then, that you wish?”
I prayed to the God of heaven and then answered the king:
“If it please the king,
and if your servant is deserving of your favor,
send me to Judah, to the city of my ancestors’ graves,
to rebuild it.”
Then the king, and the queen seated beside him,
asked me how long my journey would take
and when I would return.
I set a date that was acceptable to him,
and the king agreed that I might go.
I asked the king further: “If it please the king,
let letters be given to me for the governors
of West-of-Euphrates,
that they may afford me safe-conduct until I arrive in Judah;
also a letter for Asaph, the keeper of the royal park,
that he may give me wood for timbering the gates
of the temple-citadel and for the city wall
and the house that I shall occupy.”
The king granted my requests,
for the favoring hand of my God was upon me.
Responsorial Psalm PS 137:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
R. (6ab) Let my tongue be silenced if I ever forget you!
By the streams of Babylon
we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the aspens of that land
we hung up our harps.
R. Let my tongue be silenced if I ever forget you!
Though there our captors asked of us
the lyrics of our songs,
And our despoilers urged us to be joyous:
“Sing for us the songs of Zion!”
R. Let my tongue be silenced if I ever forget you!
How could we sing a song of the LORD
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand be forgotten!
R. Let my tongue be silenced if I ever forget you!
May my tongue cleave to my palate
if I remember you not,
If I place not Jerusalem
ahead of my joy.
R. Let my tongue be silenced if I ever forget you!
Alleluia PHIL 3:8-9
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I consider all things so much rubbish
that I may gain Christ and be found in him.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 9:57-62
As Jesus and his disciples were proceeding
on their journey, someone said to him,
“I will follow you wherever you go.”
Jesus answered him,
“Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests,
but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.”
And to another he said, “Follow me.”
But he replied, “Lord, let me go first and bury my father.”
But he answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead.
But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.”
And another said, “I will follow you, Lord,
but first let me say farewell to my family at home.”
Jesus answered him, “No one who sets a hand to the plow
and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.”
