The Qualities of a Christian Disciple and Christian Leader, 4th Friday (I), February 8, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Josephine Bakhita
February 8, 2019
Heb 13:1-8, Ps 27, Mk 6:14-29

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


The following points were attempted in the homily: 
    • Today, as we come to the penultimate lesson of the Letter to the Hebrews on which we’ve been pondering for the last four weeks, the author helps us to ponder the characteristics of a Christian who keeps his eyes firmly fixed on Jesus and of a Christian leader who guides people to Jesus. These are lessons we see very much on display in the life and death of St. John the Baptist from today’s Gospel and in St. Josephine Bakhita, the saint whom the Church remembers today.
    • The first reading highlights five qualities that the sacred author appealed to Christians to excel in even in the midst of the persecution they were enduring. The first was brotherly love. Christians are always to be distinguished first and foremost by the love that we have together, which is likewise a sign that God sent Jesus and loves us just as much as he loves Jesus (Jn 17). Jesus calls us to love one another as he has loved us (Jn 15) and to care and feed each other out of love for him (Jn 21). When we keep our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus the guide and perfecter of our faith, we see him in others and love him in others. The second is hospitality. Not only do we sometimes “entertain angels,” but we welcome Christ himself, who identifies with every stranger we take in. Third is a particular care for those in prison, just as Jesus himself was imprisoned and called us to visit him in the disguise of anyone imprisoned (Mt 25). The first Christians were steadfast in caring for those who had been imprisoned on account of the faith, on account of their poverty, or other reasons. They sought to “redeem” or buy back the freedom of those in slavery or in debt. They risked their lives for those in prison, identifying themselves as Christians during times of persecution. But our care for those in these circumstances is always supposed to be excellent. Fourth, Christians were distinguished by their purity, for the pure of heart see God in others. That’s why the author tells them to honor marriage and never let the marriage bed be defiled but adultery or immorality. Christ the Bridegroom teaches us how to love faithfully and we should never commit adultery in the covenant of love with him by adulterous or sinful sexual thoughts or deeds. Lastly, we’re called to be grateful and content with God in our life, rather than love money and seek to place our faith, hope and love in mammon. As we’ve focused on earlier in this Letter, we Christians permit even the plundering of our property because we have a better possession, namely God. When we’re firmly fixed on Christ as our pearl of great price, we’re not overly attached to the stuff of this world. Those are the qualities that the author wants us to focus on.
    • With regard to Christian leaders, he focuses on three attributes. The first is that they speak the word of God. The second is that the teach us how to live and die well. The third is that they instruct us by their example of faith in all circumstances, knowing Christ is always the same regardless of changing times and worldly values, and so our fidelity must similarly be the “same yesterday, today and forever.”
    • When we look at the life of St. John the Baptist, we see someone who was the greatest of all the prophets speaking the word of God. He showed us to live what he was preaching, namely to repent and believe, to make straight the paths of the Lord, and to follow him when at last he indicated him as the Lamb of God. He showed us how to die in fidelity to the Lord until the end. His faith has always been placed forward for us to imitate, so that, like him, we might point out the Lord, allow him to increase as we decrease, with gratitude that even though we’re not worthy to untie his sandals, he has made us worth of so much more. We see moreover that he himself was imprisoned, that he sought to help Herod and Herodias honor the marriage bed and keep it undefiled, that he was unattached to money and material benefits but to the truth, that he trusted in God has his helper, his light, his salvation, his life’s refuge.
    • Today we’re celebrating the feast of a woman who similarly demonstrated many of these lessons, who excelled in love even when she had received a lifetime of the lack of it, she was hospitable even when she was beaten and rejected, she was mindful of other slaves after her liberation, who was pure and betrothed herself to Christ, who took the vow of poverty free of love of money, who spoke the Word of God, who died in the holiest of ways amid suffering, and whose faith every Christian is called to emulated. St. Josephine Bakhita was born in the Darfur region of Sudan about 1869 (there were no records and no one knew for sure). When he was only 7, she was kidnapped by Arab Muslim bandits, forced to convert to Islam, and then sold into slavery on five different occasions. As was the custom with Sudanese slaveowners at the time, she was repeatedly beaten as a little girl even if she was prompt in doing what was asked. On one occasion, one or her masters showed up with flour, salt and razor blades to brand her. With the flour, the owner sketched on the black skin of her breasts, belly and arms 114 intricate designs and then with the razor blades cut into her skin according to those patterns. While she was bleeding and in enormous pain, the master then poured salt into the wounds so that they would never heal and she would always be branded. To those wounds were added another 40 indelible scars over the course of her enslavement. Eventually she was sold to the Italian consul in Khartoum. This was the first time she wasn’t beaten when she was told to do things. When the political situation destabilized, the consul needed to leave the country and he took Bakhita — a name that means “fortunate,” given to her by one of her owners, because she couldn’t remember the name her parents had given her, so great was the trauma of her capture and her beatings — with him. He gave her to the service of friends having arrived back in Italy, where she helped to raise a baby as a nanny. When this family was preparing to return to the Sudan after the political situation had improved, they entrusted Bakhita and the little girl to the care of the Canossian Sisters in town.
    • It was there that Bakhita was really exposed to Christianity for the first time. Her reaction to seeing a bloody Italian crucifix was unforgettable. She recognized that the one whom Christians adored as Lord and Master understood her pain, because he had been lacerated in his scourging just as severely as she had been repeatedly whipped and then sliced up with razor blades. When the family returned from the Sudan to take Bakhita and their daughter with them to Africa, Bakhita refused. A lawsuit followed that both under Italian law and a Sudanese liberation of slaves found her to be free and insofar as she was now over 18, she could stay. She was baptized with the name Josephine Margaret and Confirmed, made her first Communion from the hands of the future St. Pius X, and was eventually accepted as a Canossian Sister, where she served for the next 44 years as a cook, sacristan and portress. She was always so grateful for the teaching of her new true Parón or Master and always sought not only to live according to that wisdom by to pass it on to others. Even though she had never received much education, the school girls used to line up at the door of the school just for her to pat them on the head. When people would ask her how she was doing, particularly in times of severe illness and pain, she’d simply respond with a smile, “As the Master desires.”
    • Pope Benedict wrote about her as as an example of hope-filled persevering faith in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi. “The example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around 1869… in Darfur in Sudan. …She was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying ‘masters’ who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of ‘master’—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name ‘paron’ for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a ‘paron’ above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme ‘Paron,’ before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father’s right hand.’ Now she had ‘hope’ —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: ‘I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.’ Through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed,’ no longer a slave, but a free child of God. … Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her ‘Paron.’ On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter’s lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had ‘redeemed’ her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.” She wanted to help others to learn to live by faith too.
  • The great source of fraternal love, the most important hospitality, the deepest liberation, the greatest marital covenant of all, the greatest treasure, we find in the Holy Mass. This is where we hear the Word of God spoken to us, where we consider with hope the end of life, where we seek to grow in a faith that others can imitate. This is where we meet and become one with our Light and Salvation, our Parón, the one who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, the Lamb of God whom John the Baptist continues to point out. This is where we learn how to live “as the Master desires.”
The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1 Heb 13:1-8

Let brotherly love continue.
Do not neglect hospitality,
for through it some have unknowingly entertained angels.
Be mindful of prisoners as if sharing their imprisonment,
and of the ill-treated as of yourselves,
for you also are in the body.
Let marriage be honored among all
and the marriage bed be kept undefiled,
for God will judge the immoral and adulterers.
Let your life be free from love of money
but be content with what you have,
for he has said, I will never forsake you or abandon you.
Thus we may say with confidence:
The Lord is my helper,
and I will not be afraid.
What can anyone do to me
?
Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you.
Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Responsorial Psalm Ps 27:1, 3, 5, 8b-9abc

R. (1a) The Lord is my light and my salvation.
The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom should I fear?
The LORD is my life’s refuge;
of whom should I be afraid?
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
Though an army encamp against me,
my heart will not fear;
Though war be waged upon me,
even then will I trust.
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
For he will hide me in his abode
in the day of trouble;
He will conceal me in the shelter of his tent,
he will set me high upon a rock.
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
Your presence, O LORD, I seek.
Hide not your face from me;
do not in anger repel your servant.
You are my helper: cast me not off.
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.

Alleluia See Lk 8:15

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are they who have kept the word with a generous heart,
and yield a harvest through perseverance.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel Mk 6:14-29

King Herod heard about Jesus, for his fame had become widespread,
and people were saying,
“John the Baptist has been raised from the dead;
That is why mighty powers are at work in him.”
Others were saying, “He is Elijah”;
still others, “He is a prophet like any of the prophets.”
But when Herod learned of it, he said,
“It is John whom I beheaded. He has been raised up.”
Herod was the one who had John arrested and bound in prison
on account of Herodias,
the wife of his brother Philip, whom he had married.
John had said to Herod,
“It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”
Herodias harbored a grudge against him
and wanted to kill him but was unable to do so.
Herod feared John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man,
and kept him in custody.
When he heard him speak he was very much perplexed,
yet he liked to listen to him.
Herodias had an opportunity one day when Herod, on his birthday,
gave a banquet for his courtiers, his military officers,
and the leading men of Galilee.
His own daughter came in and performed a dance
that delighted Herod and his guests.
The king said to the girl,
“Ask of me whatever you wish and I will grant it to you.”
He even swore many things to her,
“I will grant you whatever you ask of me,
even to half of my kingdom.”
She went out and said to her mother,
“What shall I ask for?”
Her mother replied, “The head of John the Baptist.”
The girl hurried back to the king’s presence and made her request,
“I want you to give me at once on a platter
the head of John the Baptist.”
The king was deeply distressed,
but because of his oaths and the guests
he did not wish to break his word to her.
So he promptly dispatched an executioner
with orders to bring back his head.
He went off and beheaded him in the prison.
He brought in the head on a platter
and gave it to the girl.
The girl in turn gave it to her mother.
When his disciples heard about it,
they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.
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