All Hands Fully On Deck, 26th Sunday (B), September 29, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
September 29, 2024
Numbers 11:25-29, Ps 19, James 5:1-6, Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Sometimes we can approach the things of the faith as if they’re complicated. Especially when we’re young, trying to discern why God made us and what is the special task he has before us, we can believe we have to work very hard to try to decipher what God is asking. When we hear the Word of God at Mass, for example, we can sometimes labor to determine its principal message and how to apply it to our life. But I believe that everything God tells us can be broken down as a two-fold summons: to be a devout disciple and an ardent apostle. The Lord wants to help us grow in our communion with him and to prepare us to help others grow in communion with him, too. He wants to strengthen us in personal holiness and equip us to continue his saving mission. This Sunday’s readings are no exception. In them, God is reminding us, first, that he wants all hands on deck, that he desires to incorporate everyone’s efforts into channeling his grace into the world; and, second, that he wants us fully on board, not partially, uniting ourselves wholly to him so that we might indeed be effective instruments to draw people to communion with him rather than drive them away. In these readings, he is pouring out wisdom on us not only how to live well the gift of our time at Columbia, but also to order our life toward its fundamental two-fold purpose. As we prayed in the Psalm, what the Lord teaches us is perfect, refreshes the soul, true and trustworthy, wise and just, pure and enduring. Let’s, therefore, let God’s word this afternoon to renew us as followers of Christ and as fishers of men.
• In today’s Gospel, we encounter a big contrast and a huge surprise. The contrast is between those who are working for God and those who are not. As Jesus says, some are “for” Him; others are “against” Him. The surprise is that those who seem to be working for the Lord in fact might not be, and those who seem not to be laboring with and for Him in fact may be. Insofar as all of us are here at Mass because we desire to be working for the Lord, because all of us want to hear him one day say to us, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” we need to examine what the Lord Jesus says today and see whether we are really on his side.
• In tonight’s Liturgy of the Word, we see that sometimes those on the Lord’s team aren’t wearing the team uniforms and those who bear the team colors are often not actually helping the team win. In the first reading, Eldad and Medad were not present in the desert tent with the other 68 elders chosen to prophesy in the name of the Lord to the Israelites when the Spirit of God descended upon them. But the Lord filled them with his Spirit anyway and they began to proclaim God’s word throughout the camp. The still young and immature Joshua, who would become Moses’ successor, objected with panic, “Moses, stop them!” Let’s not miss what Joshua was doing. He wanted to have them stop preaching about the Lord! He wanted them not to cooperate with the Spirit! He preferred that the people not hear about God than about Eldad and Medad do it! We have to ask: who was working for the Lord here and who was not? Moses told Joshua there was no reason to be jealous. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!,” he exclaimed. And by all he meant all. God wants us all to proclaim him, to spread his truth, to invite all others into the circle of his incredible love. While it’s better, of course, when things are done together, when there’s communion and coordination, the most important thing is not who is proclaiming but that God is being proclaimed. Even those we think are not the ones chosen by the Lord to be his ambassadors might in fact be important emissaries and coworkers in the end. We shouldn’t be jealous when others begin working for the Lord, but joyous.
• We learn the same lesson from the Gospel. Soon after the failure of the disciples to cast out a demon from a young boy (while the Lord was being transfigured before Peter, James and John on the mountain) and after the Lord had castigated their generation for its lack of faith, the disciples caught someone who wasn’t among their number casting out demons in Jesus’ name. St. John told Jesus that he and the other disciples had tried to stop him. They tried to stop him from casting out devils who were attacking, infesting or possessing other human beings. Who was working for the Lord in this Gospel scene and who was working for the evil one? It’s a particularly poignant question on the traditional feast day of Saint Michael the Archangel, whom we invoke to cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. The disciples were the ones who were supposed to be the Lord’s collaborators, but like Joshua 13 centuries before, they still hadn’t figured out God’s ways. Jesus had come to set prisoners free, to defeat Satan once and for all, but his still-immature disciples wanted to stop someone from doing exorcisms because, essentially, they were more concerned with what they thought were their exclusive prerogatives in God’s kingdom than in accomplishing his work. None of us should ever think we have a monopoly on the name, mission, message and power of Jesus. We should never find God’s action in others a threat, but rather something to marvel at and praise him for. We should of course want to help others to come to the fullness of the truth about God revealed to us by Christ in His Church, but we should rejoice whenever others, at whatever stage of revelation they’ve received, are corresponding to the gentle breeze of the Holy Spirit, trying to oppose the devil and do the Lord’s work. Today the whole Church repeats with Moses, “Would that all God’s people were prophets!”
• In his gentle correction of one of the “sons of thunder,” Jesus gives St. John and all of us two important principles about how not to oppose the divine desire for all people to be prophets. The first thing he says is “There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me.” The Lord sometimes permits people to do things like exorcisms to help them learn how to speak well of him and to give them a prominent pulpit. The second thing he says is, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” We live in a society hyper-polarized by politics and a Church rent with so many tragic divisions going back to the fights among the apostles over who was the greatest, to the disputes in Corinth about which apostle they like the most, to the various schisms that have wounded Christ’s Body the Church over the centuries. Those divisions, the choice between being for and with Christ versus against him, begin in our hearts. There’s a temptation, even and perhaps especially among many serious believers, to focus so much on what distinguishes us from others that we lose what unites us. Focusing on such differences, we can pull ourselves, and push others, away. In our interactions, we often begin with what we criticize rather than what we admire. We fault others for what they don’t get right rather than focus on what they do. Despite the redwood forests impeding our vision, we obsess about the specks in others’ eyes. We see this tendency in the Gospel with many of the Pharisees, literally the “separated ones,” who were constantly distinguishing themselves from others so that they really lost the capacity to unite. Like one of their number in Jesus’ parable about prayer, they proudly and condescendingly gave thanks that they were not like all the rest, who were guilty of various types of notorious sins. Jesus wants us to recognize and prioritize in others those parts that are united with him. He wants us not only not to stop them, but to encourage and assist them. He tells us today that anyone who gives us a cup of water to drink because we belong to him is ultimately cooperating with grace, is corresponding to the work and life of the kingdom, and is, in short, somehow with and for him and therefore with and for us. It’s important for us to grasp this point. At a time in which some of our leading national personalities, in politics, in social media, and sometimes in the Church, are constantly trying to divide and conquer people, Christ wants us as his disciples to be signs and agents of communion. On a campus in which some try to label and cancel those with whom they disagree, the Prince of Peace wants us to be peacemakers and therefore true children of God. At a time in which so many are lost, the Good Shepherd wants us, like him, to gather rather than scatter his flock.
• Even though God wants all to be prophets and to recognize that those who are not against him are for him, it’s important for us not to miss the fact that not all God’s people are in fact prophets. Jesus says quite strongly that there are those who are “against” Him, those who not only do not work for and with him, but actively oppose him. We see many of these adversaries in the Gospels: Satan in the desert; various of the Scribes and Pharisees during Jesus’ public ministry; Herod the Great at Jesus’ birth; Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate at Jesus’ death; even, for a very short time, St. Peter, whom Christ called Satan and told to get behind him when he rejected the possibility that the Lord would suffer. Those, however, were not the ones Jesus specified in this episode as those who were “against” him. He referred, rather, to those who give scandal. Those who are against Jesus are the false prophets, who teach others, especially the young, not about how to know, love and serve the Lord but rather how to sin. Such is Jesus’ love for his children that he passionately warns everyone who harms through scandal those still being formed in the faith to know what punishment they should expect: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and thrown into the sea.” They would be better off drowning in the ocean, he suggests, than having to answer to him face-to-face. The word “scandal” in the Greek original means two things: something that causes another to fall and something that is an obstacle to someone’s doing good. Applied to the matters of faith, scandal is something that either causes another to sin against God or that prevents the access of another to the kingdom of God. We can easily call to mind those whose deeds lead others astray. We can think of bishops and priests who haven’t walked the walk, as we witnessed in the terrible scandals of sexual abuse and the failure of those in positions of authority to eradicate them. We can think of celebrities from the world of music, movies and sports whose example draws the young into drugs, into using others in relationships, or into the worship of status. We can call to mind educators who teach young people in public schools confusing ideas about what it means to be a boy or a girl or who promote sinful sexual activities, abortion and other practices totally contrary to what God wants. We can think of politicians who, rather than trying to unite and serve all, demagogically try to turn some groups against others in order to score political points or solicit votes by appealing to baser interests or fears. St. James today in the second reading describes the scandal of wealthy Christians who were living in luxury and splendor while so many were going without, who were withholding wages from workers, and who were basically living in a selfish way rather than loving their neighbor as Christ had loved them; this is a pattern that repeats itself among some Christians in every age, who rather than being a steward of God’s blessings, rather than using what they’ve received to help others and build up Christ’s kingdom, were using it fundamentally for themselves while so many all around them are in need. We can likewise think about Catholic parents who don’t pray, who don’t go to Mass, who don’t live by the commandments who lead their children not to follow Christ but imitate their own bad behavior. We can also call to mind practicing Catholics who, rather than lifting those around them up, become bad leaven, whose pessimism, foul language, worldliness, pride, disobedience, drug and alcohol dependence and other bad habits lower the standards of those around them, make it easier for them to sin and harder for them to be virtuous. If it were possible to buy stock in a millstone business, now would be the time to buy big. But Jesus leaves us the unforgettable image of a huge millstone not principally to threaten us but to call to conversion. With similarly striking metaphors of plucking out eyes and chopping off hands and feet, he is urging us to be brutal in cutting out of our life not only what leads us to sin but what leads others to sin. He is summoning us urgently to eradicate from our life what hinders our being faithful disciples or effective apostles. And sometimes it’s precisely the fear of scandalizing others that can get us finally to cut sin out of our own life.
• In my priestly life, including here on campus, I’ve had many conversations, for example, with those who are involved in sexual sins with others. Sometimes they don’t really have a horror for what a mortal sin is when it comes to their own relationship with God. They don’t realize that their sins, like every sin, led to Jesus’ crucifixion on Calvary. They don’t have much of a desire to stop sinning, because, at least at this point in their life, they like the sins they’re committing more than they love the Lord. But then I ask them, gently but with fatherly firmness, “Do you actually care for your girlfriend?” When they reply, “Yes,” then I ask, “Then how could you be so cavalier in leading her into sin? Do you grasp that in sinning together, you are essentially murdering her soul for your pleasure? Rather than protecting her, you’re essentially handing her soul over to the devil. Rather than being willing to sacrifice your life for her, you’re sacrificing her for your gratification. How is that consistent with the care and love you say you have for her?” I’ve witnessed some dramatic conversions when people in such situations have begun to grasp that leading people into sin is contrary to the type of person they want to be, and, once they awaken to what sin could do to the soul of someone they care about, they begin to take more seriously what sin does to their own soul and begin to get the courage metaphorically to pluck out eyes, or chop off hands or feet, to eliminate the sins that harm themselves and others and avoid the near occasions of sin. In the midst of a culture in which we’re often hypercritical of others and soft on ourselves, Jesus wants to help us to do the opposite, receiving his mercy and strength to become truly holy disciples so that we might be his powerful prophets in the midst of the world he came to redeem.
• It’s key for us to grasp that Jesus is calling us to do far more than just excise metastatic moral cancers. He wants us to be prophets, those who announce his words and encourage people to imitate and follow him. He wants us, by our words and actions, to inspire others to live off every word that comes from his mouth, to treat his law — as we pray in today’s psalm — as perfect, trustworthy, wise, refreshing, pure, and just. He wants us to show what’s really important in life, to encourage others to pray, to love the Mass, to be grateful for confession, to learn our faith better, to sacrifice ourselves to care for the poor and needy, to use appropriate language, to be honest, to see the good in others, to forgive and give people second chances, to be faithful to the Lord in everything, to strive to become saints, and to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength. Rather than being fitted for millstones fit for drowning by dragging others into the depths of sin, he wants us to become through virtuous behavior like hot air balloons helping everyone to rise up to God. He wants to help us to be with and for him, so that we can be his instruments to help others enter into far deeper communion too. He wants us all to be true and holy prophets in action. The best way to learn to do so is from the Master himself. At Jesus’ time there was a lot of hypocrisy. He pointed to it when he said that his contemporaries should listen to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees who sit on Moses’ seat, but not follow their example, because their example was a clear violation of the words of God they spoke. Jesus, on the other hand, was integrity incarnate. He never merely said, “Do what I say,” but always, “Follow me.” And he set his goal, his eyes, on always doing the will of the Father who sent him, of leading others on the way of sanctity, which is the way of the Cross, all the way to heaven. In order to be the type of true prophet that God wants us to be, we, too, need not merely to mouth the words of the faith, but to be able to say to others, especially those who might look to us, “Follow me!,” by living not for worldly goals and ambitions but progressing resolutely on the clear path set out by Jesus and the Church he founded. We need to toss from our lives whatever is not fitting for that journey, so that others, in following our footsteps, may come to God. We begin every Mass by calling to mind all those parts of us that are not yet in communion with God, that we need to pluck out or chop off. We ask the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Michael and all the angels and saints to pray for not just for ourselves but for all those whom God wants to be with us, that he might have mercy on us, help us to eliminate those actions and habits from our life, and grow to become truly like him. That’s the preparation we need in order to receive on good and fruitful soil the seeds of the Word of God that are implanted in the readings from Sacred Scripture. That’s the way we become reading to enter into a Holy Communion with Jesus, present for and before us in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist. That’s the way we will be transformed to become God’s instruments to bring others to full communion with him and us.
• “Would that all God’s people were prophets!” The Lord would not be calling us to be his prophets in word and deed unless he were planning to give us all the help we need to live up to that vocation and mission. He gives us that help today. After having heard him in Sacred Scripture, he commissions us to be his living echoes in the world. Through worthily receiving His body and blood inside us, we become one with him and with others, the source of the spirituality that reinforces that those who are not against us are with us. Through the intercession of St. Michael, we ask the Lord Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, to heal our wounded eyes, or sinful hands, or scandalously wayward feet, so that every part of us — and the lives of those whom he has entrusted to us — may be “with Him” in this life and in the next. We ask him to send the Holy Spirit upon us, like he did among the seventy elders, so that we might all be true prophets on the Columbia campus, so that we can help everyone, as the university’s motto attests, see all things in the light of Christ (Ps 36:100). We ask him to send us not just seeking to give others a cup of water, but bring them with us here, to lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Alleluia CF. JN 17:17B, 17A

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Your word, O Lord, is truth;
consecrate us in the truth.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

 

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