Appreciating and Responding to Christ’s Greatness, 28th Monday (I), October 12, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Family
October 12, 2015
Rom 1:1-7, Ps 98, Lk 11:29-32

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• One of the real dangers in the spiritual life, especially those who are always around the sacred, is to begin to take the sacred for granted because of routine. Today’s Gospel is one of the best to help snap us out of it. Jesus reminds us that he’s a greater sign of conversion than Jonah and a greater source of wisdom than Solomon. That leads us to ask ourselves that if the pagan Ninevites totally converted at Jonah’s preaching and the Queen of Sheba were willing to travel 1660 miles each way just to hear Solomon, are we converting each time we come into God’s presence as profoundly as the Ninevites did and are we hanging on Christ’s words of wisdom the way the Queen of Sheba did.
• St. Paul is someone who was converted entirely when he encountered Christ, spent 14 years in the desert of Arabia seeking to learn Christ’s wisdom in prayer and then spent the rest of his life trying to enrich the Church with that wisdom. In today’s first reading we begin four weeks studying his greatest theological treatise, written not so much in response to questions or problems in a community he had founded (like in so many other letters) but to a community he had never visited, proposing what were in his mind answers to the biggest questions they probably would have, about how to be right with God, about the status of the Jews, and about authentic Christian spirituality.
• In this Year of Consecrated Life, we can begin our look at this great Epistle from the lens of consecration. We see several different attributes of Paul’s consecration that are relevant to our own: to be a “slave of Christ Jesus,” serving him as Lord; “set apart for the Gospel,” which is the purpose of our consecration; the “obedience of faith,” in which we listen attentively and trustingly for God’s voice as a word to be done, including through superiors; “called to belong to Jesus Christ,” which is the essence of consecration; and “called to be holy,” as consecration is meant to be sanctification. All of this is meant to happen in encounter with Jesus Christ, whom St. Paul regularly and concisely presents as the God-man in two images: “descended from David according to flesh,” the truth of his humanity and Messianic call; and “established as Son of God in power … through resurrection from the dead,” the sign of his divinity and transcendence over the end of humanity in death.
• That is the Jesus we meet at Mass, with his human body and blood received from Mary according to the Davidic line, and risen from the dead. He’s greater than Solomon and Jonah. And he’s here teaching us, calling us to conversion, sanctifying us and sending us forth with the “grace of apostleship.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: