Acting on the Word of God and Doing What Is Right and Just, 25th Tuesday (II), September 22, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
September 22, 2020
Prov 21:1-6.10-13, Ps 119, Lk 8:19-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Last Saturday, Jesus spoke to us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, which is a means by which to assess our receptivity and responsiveness to Christ’s words and work in our life. Today we see a beautiful illustration of that parable in the reference to Jesus’ mother, who not just conceived the Word made flesh in her womb, but conceived the Word of God in faith. When the people told Jesus that his mother and his relatives (there’s no separate word in Aramaic and Hebrew to distinguish siblings from cousins) were outside wishing to see him, he replied, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” This was not a violation of the fourth commandment and a put down of his mother, but, like we’ll hear later in St. Luke’s Gospel in the scene of the anonymous woman from the crowd blessing the mother who bore and nursed him, Jesus was giving the real secret to his mother’s greatness: she was the first of all those who would “hear the word of God and act on it,” someone whose whole life developed in accordance with the word of God. Jesus came from heaven to earth to found a family and that family would be constituted by loving obedience to God’s will, in communion with Jesus’ obedience. St. John in his prologue focused on the connection between these two realities as well: that Jesus came unto his own, but his own did not receive him, but to those who did receive him, he gave power to become children of God. As we accept Jesus by his own grace, he constitutes and confirms us as children of God.
• So the first thing we need to ponder today is how we hear and act on the word of God. In Hebrew there is no distinction between “hear” and “obey” when it comes to God: to hear him speaking as God is to will to obey him. To listen to God and then to question the truthfulness or goodness or helpfulness of what he says would be contradictory. There wasn’t fully developed by this time St. Paul’s distinction about the difficulty of doing the good — of not doing the good we desire or not avoiding the sin we detest — but I think it’s still helpful for us to have an attitude that when we listen to God’s word, we listen to it as words to be done. In the Psalm today, we see the attitude we should have before God’s word: We want to walk in the Lord’s law, to understand the way of his precepts, to meditate on his wondrous deeds, to choose the way of truth, to observe his law and keep it with all our heart, to delight in the path of God’s commands and to keep his law continually. This is a life without blame, we say at the beginning of the Psalm. This is the path on which God himself wants to guide us. God’s word is the GPS of our life, and so much more. In the first reading — one of only three days in two years in which the Church ponders the Book of Proverbs (and yesterday we lost because of the Feast of St. Matthew) — I’d like to focus on two of the most relevant pearls of wisdom. The first is, “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” The way we please the Lord most is not by “knowing” but by “doing” what is right and just, by living in right relationship with him and others. The Lord wants to praise us like he praised Mary for hearing and acting on God’s word. The second passage is, “The just man appraises the house of the wicked: there is one who brings down the wicked to ruin.” At the end of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus talked about the two houses, he said that the wise man built on the rock of hearing his word and acting upon it, while the foolish one built upon the sand of hearing his word and not acting on it. The just man is the one who recognizes that the wicked may have built an earthly mansion but because it has no firm foundation it will collapse when the storms of life come. The just man is able to foresee that ruin from his house built of stone by firmly rooting himself in God’s word. Today we’re called to follow our Lady and become like her wise men by doing what we hear Jesus say, by doing what is right and just, by walking in the law of the Lord, choosing the way of truth and observing it with 100 percent of our mind, heart, soul and strength.
• The second application of today’s reading is about communion. Jesus says about the family that he has come from heaven to earth to form that it will be a fruit of hearing and doing the Lord’s word. The communion he prayed for during the Last Supper — that we all may be one as the Father and he are one by the Holy Spirit — will come from obedience to God. There is no other way to have the true union for which God has made us all long. Without this shared desire to know and do God’s word and will, there may be a superficial harmony, but there will never be a communion that will last — and when there’s clear disobedience, there may very well be great division. I remember once as a high school chaplain, there was great division among the faculty that overflowed into the school. Everyone recognized it. Everyone knew it was a big problem. But the real issue was because there, in a Catholic school, there was huge division with regard to people’s approach to the Catholic faith. Some strove to live it; others stood above it, criticizing it and trying to change it. Part of the reason was because in previous decades some of the priests who had served in the school had formed the faculty to a large degree in the theology of dissent that when the Diocese took over, there were huge struggles whenever people talked about fidelity to the teaching of the Church about Mass, confession, the Ten Commandments, etc. At a faculty meeting I said that if we really wanted a familial union at the school, it would start by building all that we were doing on two books: the Bible and the Catechism. Some immediately agreed; others totally rejected. It was sad. The lack of communion was flowing from a lack of “one faith.” I’ve seen the same thing in the priesthood when presbyterates are divided by priests who are faithful disciples and others who do not teach in doctrinal communion or live in moral communion. We’re seeing the same thing in the divisions in the Church with regard to faith and morals between. We have seen the same thing in so many women’s religious communities divided over ultimately questions of fidelity to God, to the Church, to their constitutions. Today Jesus is helping all of us to recognize his great desire for unity and the deep desire for it that he has planted within will be fulfilled only hearing and doing the word of God.
• Today as we celebrate this Mass, the Lord wants us to do what is “right and just,” to “do this in memory” of him, to sow his word in our ears, minds and generous hearts, so that we, like Mary, can become his “mother” in the faith, conceiving that word within and allowing it to grow until we give birth to it in loving deeds; so that we, as his siblings, might imitate and cooperate with his holy obedience. As Jesus sows himself within us today, we ask him to help us to stay united and help others to come into a similar communion!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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