Announcing the Kingdom of God’s Merciful Love, 14th Thursday (II), July 9, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 14th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions
July 9, 2020
Hos 11:1-4.8-9, Ps 80, Mt 10:7-15

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today through the Prophet Hosea we continue to focus on the reality of the merciful dimension of God’s spousal — and today he reveals, paternal — love. Through his prophet God describes the infidelity of the people of Israel, how after he had rescued them from slavery in Egypt, rather than keeping his covenant, drawing closer to him, and seeking to become holy as he is holy, they broke his covenant, wandered far from him, and became idolatrous. “The more I called them,” God says through Hosea, “the farther they went from me, sacrificing to the Ba’als and burning incense to idols. … I drew them with … bands of love, I fostered them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks, yet, though I stooped down to feed my child, they did not know that I was their healer.” Yet, even though God’s people had repeatedly rejected that love to commit spiritual adultery and even though it would have been fitting for God to have reacted with righteous indignation, he responded rather with mercy. “My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred,” he tells us today through Hosea. “I will not give vent to my blazing anger. I will not destroy,… for I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you, [and] I will not let the flames consume you.” To symbolize God’s relationship to his people, he had Hosea marry Gomer, a prostitute, to show that God’s will was mercifully to take us back after we had engaged in infidelity with other deities, saying, as the Church heard at daily Mass on Monday, “I will espouse you to me forever … in right and in justice, in love and in mercy. I will espouse you in fidelity and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:17-18; 21-22).
• This was the plan of God that was fulfilled when Christ, the incarnation of divine love eventually came and identified himself as Bridegroom. As St. Paul described for us in his Letter to the Ephesians, “Christ loved the Church and handed himself over for her to made her holy, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word so that he might present to himself the Church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle, … that she might be holy and immaculate” (Eph 5:25-27). Despite our sins, Christ not only forgave us, he not only redeemed us by taking us back, but through his merciful love, he changed us, taking our sins away, so that we in the Church might be his holy and immaculate Bride. He continues to do this work of redeeming love through the Sacraments of Baptism and Reconciliation, through the holy bath of his Word and through the one-flesh consummation of our spousal union with him in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. That’s the power of his mercy and the goal of his mercy. That’s what we are called to receive. That’s also what we’re called to live, rejoice in and proclaim.
• That brings us to today’s Gospel. The profound experience of God’s mercy is not something we can or ought to keep to ourselves. It’s a gift we’ve received that we’re called to announce to others. Today in the Gospel, Jesus sends the apostles on their first missionary journey. These would be the ones to whom on Easter Sunday evening he would entrust the power of the Holy Spirit so that just as God the Father had sent him as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world, he could send them with God’s authority to forgive and retain sins in his name (see Jn 20:19-23). He was preparing them — and through them, us — to take his mercy to the ends of the earth. In this first expedition of evangelization, Jesus didn’t give them a lengthy message, just five words in St. Matthew’s Greek, and seven in our English translation: “The Kingdom of heaven is at hand!” What was far more important than words was for them to incarnate the message of the arrival God’s Kingdom in the living, breathing presence of the long-awaited King. His kingdom, they were to announce in the present tense, is one of liberating truth and loving mercy. As a confirmation of the succinct but staggering heraldic proclamation, Jesus gave them his authority to do the very same things he was carrying out to confirm that the long-awaited Messiah had indeed come. He told them, “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, drive out demons.” They were to manifest God’s power over every disease and illness, his power over life and death, his ability to cleanse us of our outer and interior leprosy and all of the alienation associated with it, even his power over the devil. Jesus didn’t want his Father to be able to say about his and the apostles’ contemporaries, “They didn’t know I was their healer.”  But in addition to the proclamation and power, he sent them out with a particular “packaging” for the message and deeds he was commissioning them to announce and accomplish. He wanted them to show by their behavior that the Kingdom had really come and what life in the kingdom looks like. By their peace, by their mutual love and mercy, by their trust in God’s providence, by their joy, he wanted them to be a living display of life in that kingdom. And that’s why he told them:
  • “Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give” — They were not to be preaching in order to gain but to help others be enriched. They were to be signs of the gratuitousness of God’s merciful love.
  • “Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts; no sack for the journey, or a second tunic, or sandals, or walking stick.” — They were to show that they took seriously what they were declaring, the presence of a God who tells us not to worry about what we are to eat, drink, wear or where we are to sleep, since God knows what we need before we ask for it and cares for us more than he cares for the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky (Mt 6:25-30). They were to be signs of trust in God’s providence.
  • “Whatever town or village you enter, look for a worthy person in it, and stay there until you leave.” — Jesus wanted them to be grateful for the hospitality given, rather than perpetually looking for a better deal. They were to be signs of how God wants to enter and stay in every home.
  • “As you enter a house, wish it peace. If the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it; if not, let your peace return to you.” — Jesus was telling them not to make prejudgments or hold themselves back to determine first whether a peaceful person lives there, but to be disposed to give his peace to everyone everywhere. They were to be signs of God’s openness to everyone if only they will receive him and of the peace that life with him brings.
  • Finally, “Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words, go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.” — Jesus wanted them not to be weighed down with bad memories or nurse wounds from one place to the next; if they experienced rejection, he wanted them to let it go rather than carry it to the next place, so that “the good news of great joy” would not be masked by the sadness of a previously negative experience. They were to be signs of God’s respect for our freedom, of the love that is shown in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, as those who are prone not toward grudges but forgiveness. They were also to be signs that God cares for others too and that those that receive grow in faith whereas those who don’t, don’t.
• This “packaging” is needed in every age, because the Gospel must authentically be seen before it’s truly heard. As St. Paul VI affirmed, people respond to witness far more than words. It’s through seeing our generosity that others will come to the source of all munificence. It’s through witnessing our trust in God’s providence that others will be opened to see how ever-reliable God is. It’s through our own peacemaking that others will begin to discern the Prince of Peace. It’s through our resilience that people will see that we’re sowers of an imperishable seed and are undismayed when occasionally we encounter hardened, rocky or thorny soil. It’s through the way we love each other, the way we forgive each other, the way we show the joy of mercy received and given, that others are able to come to the God who has first forgiven us a debt of 10,000 talents and made us capable of paying that wealth forward to all those who owe us by their sins 100 denarii.
• Today we have a great witness of how to receive and reciprocate God’s spousal love, and how with trust in God’s providence to give witness to it, in the Chinese Martyrs. By their lives they testified not just to the truth about God but responded with love to his love: no one has any greater love than to lay down one’s life for his friends, and just as Jesus spousally died for them, they were willing to die for him. Altogether we mark today 120 martyrs, St. Augustine Zhao Rong and his 119 companions, some of the thousands of martyrs in China from 1648 to 2000. Whenever the Church beatifies or canonizes large groups of martyrs, they always look for one who will be the “lead” name. It’s almost always a native son rather than a missionary (and today we celebrate 87 Chinese — children, parents, catechists or laborers, ranging from nine years of age to 72 and four Chinese diocesan priests — and 33 missionaries to China, priests and women religious, especially from the Order of Preachers, the Paris Foreign Mission Society, the Friars Minor, Jesuits, Salesians and Franciscan Missionaries of Mary) and one who, in a sense, summarizes and synthesizes the beauty of the faith, hope and love of all of them. There were so many candidates for the Chinese martyrs. There would have been great fittingness in my opinion if the Vatican had selected St. Chi Zhuzi, an 18 year-old boy who had been preparing to receive the sacrament of Baptism when he was caught on the road one night and ordered to worship idols. He refused to do so, revealing his belief in Christ. His right arm was cut off and he was tortured, but he would not deny his faith. Rather, he fearlessly pronounced to his captors, before being flayed alive, “Every piece of my flesh, every drop of my blood will tell you that I am Christian.” But the Vatican chose St. Augustine Zhao Rong, who was the first native-born Chinese priest to be martyred. And the story of his ascent to the altars on earth, as a priest and as a saint, is one of the most memorable in hagiography. In 1815, he was a 30-year-old soldier escorting French Missionary Bishop Saint John Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse on an infamous Chinese death march from Chendu to Beijing where he would be martyred. He was so moved by the bishop’s patience, his forgiving those who struck him with blows, whipped him with cords and pushed him to the ground, his prayer and his joy along the death march that after the journey, he asked what he needed to do to become a Christian. Once baptized, he queried who would be able to celebrate the sacraments for the people after so many missionary priests had been killed. When he realized that people might live and die without the sacraments, he asked to go to the seminary, even though to be a priest was to basically live under a death sentence. He journeyed to Macao, where they gave him an expedited course and, because the few bishops left who could ordain priests could be arrested and killed at any moment, he was ordained right away, intending that he would continue to learn what he needed on the fly. But he was soon himself arrested after he had begun his priestly ministrations, and then tortured and martyred. He had gone from pagan soldier to baptized Christian to priest to martyr within three months, such was the power of Bishop Dufresse’s faith on the death march, which the bishop transformed into the way to the eternal Jerusalem; such was also the love of God that made Bishop Dufresne so courageous, the contagious love that captivated Zhao Rong. And his own conversion and example of love for God inspired many other Chinese people to come to the faith after him. It’s an incredible love story.
• Today as we celebrate Mass on their feast day, we thank the Lord for the gift of their example, and we ask for the grace, as we prepare to welcome the Prince of Peace “under [our] roof” in Holy Communion, that we may dwell in the Kingdom made possible by that Eucharistic King and become heralds of his merciful, spousal love in life, in death and beyond.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 10:7-15

Jesus said to his Apostles:
“As you go, make this proclamation:
‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand.’
Cure the sick, raise the dead,
cleanse the lepers, drive out demons.
Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give.
Do not take gold or silver or copper for your belts;
no sack for the journey, or a second tunic,
or sandals, or walking stick.
The laborer deserves his keep.
Whatever town or village you enter,
look for a worthy person in it,
and stay there until you leave.
As you enter a house, wish it peace.
If the house is worthy,
let your peace come upon it;
if not, let your peace return to you.
Whoever will not receive you or listen to your words—
go outside that house or town and shake the dust from your feet.
Amen, I say to you, it will be more tolerable
for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment
than for that town.”

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