Adjusting to Christ’s Lyrics, Melody and Rhythm, Second Friday of Advent, December 11, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of Pope St. Damasus
December 11, 2020
Is 48, Ps 1, Mt 11:16-19

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we have been pondering, Advent involves a triple dynamism: the Lord comes, we go out to meet him with lighted lamps, and then, transformed by the encounter with the Bridegroom, we continue to journey with him and finish together with him his mission.
• When we go out to meet him, it’s not just to shake his hand but to have him shake us up and transform us. In the Gospel today, Jesus says that many of us don’t encounter him with that conversion in mind. He describes his generation — and frankly every generation — like children in marketplaces “sitting” — in other words, not wanting to move. They’re playing different music and want everyone to respond to that music: if they play the flute, they want people to dance; if they play a dirge, they want people to mourn. The key is that they want to set the terms of the interaction. They want the others to move and change. That’s what Jesus was saying they were doing with both of the figures that the Jewish people had been awaiting, “Elijah” and the “Messiah,” the precursor and the Anointed One, ultimately God’s messenger and God himself. They criticized John the Baptist for his ascetical fasting; and when Jesus wasn’t fasting because he was showing us how to rejoice because the Bridegroom was with us, they criticized him for drawing close in mercy to the hedonists like the tax collectors and other sinners, who were enjoying the things of this world in a disordered way. They failed to grasp that it’s we who should be dancing to the Lord’s music and not the other way around. They were classifying-and-conquering not only the principle figure of preparation for the Messiah’s Advent, St. John the Baptist, but the Messiah himself.
• I also think it’s significant that Jesus describes them as sitting in the “marketplace.” The marketplace is where we go to buy things according to our preferences. Today this is an issue because in the marketplace we learn a type of “consumerism” that can then come to impact our faith. We like things to happen according to our pleasures and preferences: we like certain Mass times and not others, certain liturgical forms, certain music or none, certain popes, bishops or priests, certain Psalm tones, certain Eucharistic prayers, certain lengths of homily, certain messages, certain styles. This consumerism can cause us to behave much like the children in the marketplace, trying to play the music for our relationship with the Lord. We play soft, sentimental hits and want the Lord just to touch our emotions. We’ll play marches and want the Lord to ship others around us into shape and boss them around like a drill sergeant. We’ll play horror movie music to try to “scare the hell” out of people. We’ll play heavy metal and drown out the Lord’s whisper. We won’t play any music at all, because we’re in a bad mood, or hate music, or can’t sing, or anything else. The point is that we need to attune ourselves to what the Lord is playing.
• In the first reading, God tells us through Isaiah, “I, the Lord, your God, teach you what is for your good, and lead you on the way you should go.” We need to allow him to teach and guide us, rather than our seeking to teach him how the world, our life and the lives of those around us should run. We need to follow him rather than, like Peter when Jesus called him “Satan,” try to lead him. We prayed in the Psalm, “Those who follow you Lord will have the light of life,” a phase taken from Jesus’ words in St. John’s Gospel. Those who don’t follow the Lord, we infer from these words and confirm from personal experience, wander in darkness. The Psalmist describes the type of fruit we’ll produce when we align ourselves to the Lord’s music, when we delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on his law day and night: we will be like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade. When we listen to what the Lord teaches us for our own good and allow him to lead us on the way we should go, hearkening to his commandments, as Isaiah tells us, we will spiritually prosper like a river. But if we don’t, if we want to remain in control, the Psalmist tells us we will be like chaff, dead airy matter with no holy solidity, blown away by our whims.
• The saints are those who show us how to get up from a situation of our whims, adjust our lives to the Lord’s tune, and follow the Lord with the light of life. St. Damasus, whom we celebrate today was a pope famous for two things: adorning all of their graves in the catacombs and making it possible for the hordes of pilgrims coming to Rome to visit and venerate their mortal remains; and getting St. Jerome to translate the Bible into the common language of the people so that they could read it, understand it, live it and share it. What he did for the tombs of the martyrs was far more than renovation projects. After the legalization of Christianity by Constantine in 313, many were becoming Christians because Constantine wanted Christians in his civil service, because he know that Christians at the time would never lie and he wanted trustworthy people around him. But that brought a problem. Whereas prior to the legalization of Christianity, the only people who were becoming Christians were those who were willing to die for their faith, many after the legalization were getting baptized in order to get ahead. So there was a backlash among many Christians who thought that the practice of the faith was becoming diluted. There were two things they did. First, they started to go out into the desert as monks. Advent is a season in which we’re all called to have desert days, days of prayer, days of recollection, to make sure we’re not caught up in spiritual worldliness. The second thing they did was to venerate the martyrs, those who gave the supreme witness of the faith for him who previously died for them. The martyrs are those the Book of Revelation who, dressed in white, follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They adjust their whole lives and even their death, eternally, to his tune. St. Damasus is also famous for authorizing St. Jerome to translate the Bible from its original languages into the common language of the people, Latin (the “Vulgate”), so that people would be able to know the lyrics of the Lord’s tune so that they could sing it with their words and dance to it with their lives. We ask for his intercession today to let God’s word become flesh in us, especially the Word proclaimed to us today.
• Today we ask the Lord to help us to learn from St. Damasus how to leave behind our desire to sing at our speed, at our pitch, with our version of the lyrics, with the melody that might please us most, to singing the Lord’s ever “new Song” and help synchronize the world to the Lord’s music.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 11:16-19

Jesus said to the crowds:
“To what shall I compare this generation?
It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance,
we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said,
‘He is possessed by a demon.’
The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said,
‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard,
a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’
But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”

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