A Tale of Two Nazareths, One of Life and One of Death, 4th Wednesday (I), February 6, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Manhattan
Monthly Young Adult Mass
Wednesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Paul Miki and Companions
February 6, 2019
Heb 12:4-7.11-15, Ps 103, Mk 6:1-6

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The text that guided tonight’s homily is below: 

Two Nazareths

Tonight’s Gospel is St. Mark’s version of what Catholics around the world have pondered the last two Sundays with the help of St. Luke: Jesus’ appearance in his hometown synagogue where he announced that he was the fulfillment of all of Isaiah’s prophecies about the long-awaited Messiah.

Nazareth is a tale of two towns.

On the one hand, it’s a place of most important welcoming of all time. When the Archangel Gabriel came there three decades earlier to a virgin named Mary, betrothed to a man named Joseph of the House of David, and asked her whether she was willing to become the mother of the Son of God, she replied, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” and by the power of the Holy Spirit, on behalf of the human race, she welcome God into her womb with faith-filled love. It’s also the place where, months later, after Mary had returned from helping her cousin Elizabeth and Joseph had seen her very much pregnant, he, with the help of the angel of the Lord who appeared to him to assist him to overcome his fear, welcomed both her and Jesus growing within her, into his home and life. Nazareth is first a place of loving welcome.

But it’s also, as we see in the Gospel, a place of harsh and even homicidal rejection. After initially marveling at the gracious words that came from Jesus’ mouth, Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes began to take offense at him. The future apostle Nathaniel, also known as Bartholomew, once wondered aloud whether anything good could come from Nazareth. Those in the Synagogue likely shared that sentiment, because they refused to accept that one they numbered among their own could be the fulfillment of their messianic hopes. They thought they knew him. They knew the names of his mother, presumed father and various members of his extended family. They knew his trade and likely had pieces of furniture he had made. There was no way, they thought, he could be who he claimed to be. In a series of reactions that would later be recapitulated in Jerusalem, when the mobs would pass from crying out, “Hosanna to the Son of David,” to “Crucify Him!,” within the span of a few days, these good Nazarenes — people who went to the synagogue religiously on the Sabbath — passed in just a few minutes from praising Jesus and being filled with amazement, to doubts, to taking offense at him, to trying to kill him. In a heartbeat, they went from praying in the synagogue to trying to murder their guest preacher. Jesus came unto his own, as St. John tells us, but his own did not accept him. He came as the light, but they preferred the darkness. Jesus summarized their reaction by saying “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.” The prophet is often rejected by those who should be the first to accept him. And to reject the prophet is to reject the One who sent the prophet.

Nazareth is a tale of two towns, one of loving welcome to God and to those he gives, and another of the rejection of God and those he sends in his name. It’s a town in which some say “Let it be done according to your word” and where people do as the angel of the Lord commands, and in which others say, “My will be done,” and do the opposite of what the messengers of God ask. It’s a place where we see some of the greatest examples of faith in human history and where God worked one of the greatest of his miracles at the incarnation, and where that same Incarnate one would later be amazed at the lack of faith and unable because of it to perform many mighty deeds.

The Modern Nazareth

The world in every age is like Nazareth. New York in 2019 is like Nazareth. When Jesus took on our humanity, he entered our world and made it his home. Even more so, by his saving work in the Sacraments by the power of the Holy Spirit, he has come to abide not just with us but within us, to dwell inside of us, to take on our flesh as we become one flesh with him, most powerfully in the Holy Eucharist. The biggest question of our life is whether we welcome, embrace and love him, or whether we ignore, reject, or even seek to snuff him out.

Tonight’s Mass takes place at the conclusion of a novena by the Young Adults of the Archdiocese of New York in reparation to Divine Mercy for the evil and execrable actions that took place on January 22nd at the State House in Albany, where the legislature passed, and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed, the Reproductive Health Act. On that day, the 46th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, as faithful Catholics in the United States were observing a day of prayer and penance in reparation for the nearly 60,000,000 children who have legally been killed in the womb sincethat judicial travesty, Governor Cuomo was hosting a jovial celebration in Albany. Governor Cuomo, baptized Catholic soon after he left the womb in 1957 and recipient of sixteen years of Catholic education at St. Gerard Majella Elementary School and Archbishop Malloy High School in Queens and Fordham University in the Bronx, gave his signature to this abortion expansion bill and thereby made abortion legal in the State of New York up to the moment of birth for any reason, eliminated the conscience rights of health care professionals not to participate in abortions, made it possible for abortions to be performed by those who are not doctors, and permitted that babies who survive abortion and are born alive can be left to die without any life-saving medical assistance. And Governor Cuomo didn’t want to keep his joy to himself and the legislators and abortion activists around him in the State Capital: he also signed an executive order requiring that the One World Trade Center’s 408-foot spire and three other state landmarks be lit in pink. He desecrated a monument rising from the ashes of the deaths of 2,831 at the World Trade Center — including 11 children who were victims of the terrorists while still in their mother’s wombs — into a festive symbol for a practice that since Roe has taken the lives of a daily average of 3,574 innocent children in their mother’s wombs.

So we are here in reparation, offering to God the Father his dearly beloved Son’s body, blood, soul and divinity, in expiation for the evil done by those we have elected into office, for the evil of abortion, and for all the sins, including ours, that have fostered the culture of death so much on display in the State House on in pink on the World Trade Center. We are here to pray for the conversion of our culture, especially all of those who work in the blood-soaked business of abortion and those who manipulate legislatures and the courts to promote it. We are here to pray for those women being tempted toward taking the life of their children in the womb and for those who made them pregnant, their family members and others who might be pushing them toward abortion. We are here to pray for those who have suffered abortions, that they may come to receive the healing mercy of God that we invoked before Mass in the Chaplet and so many received in the Sacrament of Penance. We are here to pray that the State of New York, which Governor Cuomo wants to be the abortion capital of the country, will become one day, and one day soon, through God’s grace and our cooperation, the pro-life capital of our land.

Whenever a child is conceived, the drama of Nazareth is replayed. Jesus was emphatic in the Gospel that “whoever receives a little child in my name receives me” and “whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.” He wanted us to recognize that he identifies with every person, especially every child, and particularly the least and littlest of his brothers and sisters in the womb. Regardless of the circumstances of conception, however unplanned it may have been, there is the opportunity to respond like Mary or like those in the Synagogue, to receive or reject, to love or spurn, to allow to live or seek to put to death. Many in our Nazareth, so many executives, legislators, judges, voters and citizens, think that the violent rejection of a child in the womb — at the same stage of life Jesus once was in Mary’s womb, as you and I were once in within our Mother’s — is a reason for celebration. We do reparation for them tonight, praying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” But it’s not enough for us to pray. Faith without works is dead. And so we’re called to work to help our fellow modern Nazarenes to know what they doing and to help them on the exodus from darkness to light, from fear to love, from death to life.

Pope Francis’ Exhortation 

Last Saturday, Pope Francis welcomed to the Vatican leaders of the Italian pro-life movement the day before Italy’s annual pro-life day. He spoke about the type of work we’re all called to do. He said, “The defense of life is not carried out in only one way, or with one gesture, but it’s done in a multiplicity of actions, attentions, and initiatives; nor does it concern some persons or certain professional realms, but it involves every citizen and the complex web of social relations.” Catholics in a particular way, he said, are called to “be leaven to spread a style and practices of reception and respect for life in the whole ‘dough’ of society, [which] must always be a jealous and firm custodian of life.”

While stating that “to take care of life demands doing so during the whole of life, up to the end … [and in] all conditions of life, health, education, work opportunities,” he nevertheless underlined that “the defense of life has its fulcrum in the reception of the one generated and who is still protected in the maternal womb, enveloped in the mother’s womb as in one loving embrace that unites them.” We cannot promote and protect life, he said, without first defending the life of the unborn. Sometimes Catholics argue for a seamless garment of life issues, but the Holy Father is stressing that there can be no seamless garment if there’s no child to be covered by that garment as the child grows from conception to natural death.

Pope Francis emphasized what abortion does to any culture that permits it, and to any permit that commits it. “To extinguish life voluntarily in its budding is … a betrayal of … the covenant that binds the generations among themselves, a covenant that enables us to look ahead with hope.  … If life itself, however, is violated in its beginning, what remains is no longer the grateful and amazed reception of the gift, but rather a cold calculation of how much we have and what we can get rid of. Life is reduced to a good of consumption, to be used for ourselves and for others, or discarded. How tragic this vision is, unfortunately, widespread and rooted, and how much suffering it causes the weakest of our brothers and sisters!,” he lamented.

He then turned to the political dimension of the pro-life movement. He thanked those present for their “attachment to the Catholic faith and to the Church, which renders you explicit and courageous witnesses of the Lord Jesus.” That thanks extends to every faithful Catholic pro-lifer across the modern Nazareth. But he also praised them for what he called the “secular nature with which you present yourselves and operate, a secular nature founded on the truth of the good of life, which is a human and civil value and, as such, calls to be recognized by all persons of good will, of whatever religion or creed they belong.” Pro-life convictions, though fortified by faith, aren’t in the least sectarian, he stressed. They flow also from reason about the nature of the child in the womb — at the same age and with the same humanity every one of us once was — and the basic principle of ethics that the intentional slaughter of innocent human beings is always wrong.

Debunking one of the most common tropes of pro-abortion propaganda, that a woman can do whatever she wants to her body and that a child growing within is de facto hers to let live or die, he declared that the children whose lives are threatened by abortion are not the property of the mother, but are “are children of the whole society, and their killing at such an enormous rate, with the endorsement of the States, is a grave problem that undermines the foundations of justice and compromises the right solution to any other human and social question.”They are the children of the whole society. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, no matter how small. And when we fail to care for them, and stand on the sidelines as their lives are being ended with industrial precision by Planned Parenthood and a legion of Kermit Gosnells, we do in fact weaken the foundation for justice and human and social relations.

For that reason Pope Francis finished his remarks by making a special appeal to those in public office, “so that, regardless of the each one’s faith convictions, they will place as the cornerstone of the common good the defense of the life of those that are about to be born and make their entrance in society.” The defense of life is the cornerstone of the common good. What happened in Albany on January 22, 2019, what happened at the Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, subverts the foundations of common life and culture. If we want to get to the bottom of why society is so divided, we need to recognize that it’s above all because Nazareth is divided with regard to whether we should welcome or kill the life of those made in God’s image and likeness in the womb. We’re never going to make our culture familial if we’re offing members of the family. We’re never going to have true community when some are fighting to save lives and others are fighting to end them. We’re never going to have a community of mutual respect for each other’s dignity when those who are bigger, stronger, older, more politically connected have the right to end the life of those who are smaller, more vulnerable, younger and without a voice, when people’s dignity and rights are dependent on someone else’s deciding whether they’re wanted or not.

The Triumph of Life over Death

As discouraging as what happened in Albany is, as disheartening as the remarks of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam and Delegate Kathy Tran were last week, we shouldn’t lose sight, as Vice President Pence likes he say, life is winning in America. It is. You can’t look at the hundreds of thousands of young faces for the March for Life in Washington without seeing the great pro-life comeback. You can’t note the scores of legislative victories across the country, restricting the practice of abortion, and not be buoyed. You can’t acknowledge how pro-lifers have been winning the arguments of science now for decades without seeing the trend that the abortion question will be decided not on lies, not on propaganda, but on the raw question of whether some people have the right to murder a class of innocent human beings. That’s why there’s desperation in Albany, and in Richmond, and in Boston and Providence, as they fear that Roe will finally and justly be overturned. Life is winning.

But the contest is far from over. Just because life is winning, it doesn’t mean victory doesn’t need to be earned, or will be easy. Many of those who oppose life are ruthless and we can’t forget, as St. Paul reminds us, that our struggle is not just with“flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness” (Eph 6:12). In fact, we have a huge struggle in front of us, an urgent one, as urgent as every child silently screaming for help from the womb. It’s going to be long battle for which we’re going to need perseverance and the capacity to rise above the challenges and sufferings. Today in the first reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, the sacred author prepares us for that struggle. The whole Letter to the Hebrews was written to the first Christians after the persecution of Nero and before the persecution of Domitian, to show them, and through them us, that just as Christ was perfected through his suffering, so through our trials we will become conformed to him and come to salvation. Sufferings and challenges and even persecutions aren’t signs that we’re losing, but they’re the fire through which we must pass to come to victory. That’s why the sacred author today tells us, “Endure your trials as ‘discipline,’ as the school that makes us true disciples of Jesus the Master. He challenges us to strengthen our drooping hands and weak knees and make straight the paths for our feed. He summons us to resist sin — including we should add sins of omission with regard to getting involved in the defense of life — to the point of shedding blood. He calls us to strive for peace with everyone, which doesn’t mean running away from conflict and the fight, but in fact fighting to help people receive and live by the peace through the forgiveness of sins Christ has brought into the world. For 46 years we have been enduring the trials to transform the culture of death into a culture of life. We have no idea of how long the struggle will be. But through it all, we should know that this discipline is making us more and more like Christ, who came into our Nazareth so that we might have life and have it to the full (Jn 10:10).

The Heroism Needed … and Possible

To inspire us for this challenge, today we have the extraordinary story of the first wave of Japanese martyrs, the first 26 of approximately 35,000 Japanese Christians who gave their lives for Christ between 1597-1639. They were practically all neophytes, with Christianity having been brought to Japan by St. Francis Xavier only in 1549, 48 years before. With 30 years there were already 200,000 Christians. After the first wave of persecution when their Churches were burned down, they made another 100,000 converts. And yet they learned the faith in such a way that they would endure the most sadistic tortures imaginable for the One who had given his life so that they might have life 1500 years before. They were crucified, decapitated, flayed alive, dismembered, stoned, poisoned with hellish toxins, impaled, forcibly drowned or abandoned in ocean depths, boiled in oil, burned alive, tossed into an active volcano, or — what was considered the most painful of all — hung by the ankles in a pit with weights hanging from one’s upper jaw, so that for three days they would be both excruciatingly distended and gradually asphyxiated. When in 1597, the imperial minister Toyotomi Hideyoski began to fear that recently arrived missionaries from the Philippines were actually Spanish insurgents seeking to overthrow Japan, he responded by sentencing these 26 Catholics — 3 native Jesuits including Paul Miki, 17 lay Catholics including children and six Franciscan missionaries — to death by crucifixion. They were marched an unbelievable 600 miles to Nagasaki — the distance between New York City and Grand Rapids, or Indianapolis, or Colombia South Carolina —  suffering so many indignities and tortures along the way to try to frighten any Japanese from seeking to convert to Christianity. But while the Japanese authorities were trying to use this death march as an advertisement against becoming Christian and an incentive to apostasy, these 26 were using it as propaganda fidei, showing the joy that comes from our faith as we endure trials as discipline. Even in the midst of torture, they sang a Te Deum to God. When they were being crucified, when they could have been crying out in pain, they were crying out for God to have mercy on those putting them to death and to use their death to help convert them and their people.

How did such holy audacity become so routine among the youngest generations of Japanese Catholics? How could they in their first century of Christianity grow, rather than shrink, when they suffered more for their faith than any people in the history of the Church? It was because, from the beginning, they knew the cost of discipleship and never sought to water it down. Christ called them to love as he had loved them, and so they were willing to be crucified just as Christ was. They believed in his promises, not just that if others hated him they would hate them as well but also that if the lost their lives for his sake they would gain them anew forever. It was also because priests would explicitly prepare parents, and parents their children, for martyrdom. That preparation began with prayer. Kids learned that when they made the Sign of the Cross, they were expressing their unity with Christ on the Cross and preparing themselves to pick up their crosses and follow him first to death and then to resurrection. They understood that the Eucharist was not just a liturgical rite, but a true participation in Christ’s passion, death and risen triumph over death. When they prayed the mysteries of the Rosary, they saw that before they could share in the glorious mysteries, they first needed to enter into the sorrowful ones. The preparation extended to practical instruction as well. Mothers trained their kids how to be faithful at the supreme hour. They taught them that when they were praying the Hail Mary they should always remember that Mary will be with them, praying for them at the hour of their death, even if their parents should die before. They taught them how to uncover their necks, fold their hands and look to heaven, as well as how to say, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” and how to pray for their executioners’ conversion. They breast-fed them the stories of the heroic deaths of the apostles, the early Christian martyrs, and the Japanese martyrs before of them, and inspired them to strive for similar greatness.

There are incredible stories from the annals of their martyrdom. When a samurai convert, Simon Takeda, was decapitated, his wife, Agnes, picked up her beloved husband’s head and held it tenderly to her breast. Such a gesture, the chroniclers tell us, moved even the executioners to tears. But the tears did not last long. Later in the day Agnes and her baby were crucified, alongside Simon’s mother, Joan, who died on the Cross preaching about the love of God. Another mother, Tecla Hashimoto, pregnant with her seventh child, was crucified together with her three year-old daughter, Luisa. A pile of wood at the bottom of their joint cross was set on fire to increase their agony, as her other children were suffering the same fate nearby. “Lord Jesus,” she prayed aloud, “receive these children.” When her eldest daughter cried out that she could no longer see her on account of the flames engulfing them, Tecla answered joyfully, “Don’t worry! In a little while you will see everything clearly!” The accounts of the martyrdom of children are the most moving of all. After watching his father be beheaded, five year-old Peter Hatori ran over to his father’s lifeless body, removed his kimono, knelt down, joined his hands in prayer and presented his uncovered neck to the executioners. They were so stunned by the boy’s actions that they misfired on their intended lethal blow, instead cutting through the boy’s shoulder and sending him to the ground. Without complaining about what must have been enormous pain, Peter just lifted himself up on his knees and continued praying. He extended his neck once again and was killed, while calling on the names of Jesus and Mary.

If these Japanese martyrs were to come to New York today, to our part of the modern Nazareth, how do you think that they would respond to the challenge facing Catholics with regard to the culture of death that some are trying to force-feed on all of society?

Many of us in the Church have become soft. If there’s a dusting of snow on the ground we use it as an excuse not to come to Church. If the homily is longer than we’d like, we begin to think we’re St. Lawrence on the gridiron. Many of us won’t even invite others to think about coming back to Mass with us or say a word when Christ is blasphemed or innocent people are being calumniated. Many of us won’t be inconvenienced as the Good Samaritan was in giving of our time and our money to help those who are suffering and truly in need, like so many frightened girls and women who discover that they’re pregnant. How shameful it is that the places with the greatest abortion rates in our country, the places with the strongest abortion majorities in state legislatures, are places where the percentage of Catholics is the highest. It’s because many Catholics, way too many baptized believers, have become soft. Our salt has lost is flavor. Our light has been dimmed. Our leaven has not really been the yeast of the Gospel because our own dough has been leavened by spiritual worldliness. Now is the time for us to learn from the faith of the martyrs how to give the type of witness Christ formed us in the womb to give. Now is the time for us to learn from our mistakes, to ask God’s mercy, and to live like those Samurai, or even like five-year-old Peter Hatori.

Let’s get practical. There have been many Catholics who since Governor Cuomo’s disgrace actions on January 22 have been calling for his excommunication and the excommunication of all of those Catholics who were at his side attempting to make New York State American’s abortion capital. I don’t want to get too much into this question at the end of a homily, but even if the bishops who have the responsibility to weigh that question decided to do it, it would not be adequate. Because our circumstances require far more than the denunciation of Cuomo’s actions and even ecclesiastical punishments. What our circumstances require is that voters politically excommunicate such politicians from public office and replace them with people who respect and defend the dignity and lives of all. The question is: What’s it going to take for voters, especially Catholic voters, to conclude that those who celebrate the destruction of human life in the womb as if it’s the Fourth of July, who desecrate monuments and landmarks to gloat about it, who think that babies who survive abortions should be allowed to die without medical assistance, do not represent their values? And when will they resolve to do something about it? And we know that the issue transcends politics into culture. When will we get involved to begin transforming our culture into one in which every child is protected in law and welcomed and loved in life?

The Food that Makes Us Martyrs

To strengthen us for this struggle, the same Jesus who came to the Synagogue in Nazareth comes here to St. Patrick’s. This is the food that made the first martyrs bold in bearing witness to Christ because they knew that they were receiving within Jesus Risen Body and Blood. This is the celestial nourishment that made the Japanese martyrs capable of being so intrepid in the face of a culture and civil leaders who were hostile. May we receive Jesus today with the same love with which Mary did in her womb. May we receive him with faith that amazes him so that he can work great miracles through us, including the miracle of helping make the State of New York the pro-life capital of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: