Appreciating Aright the Greater-than-Solomon-and-Jonah, 28th Monday (I), October 14, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Pope St. Callixtus, Martyr
October 14, 2019
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 or over-exposure. 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 1,660 miles each way just to hear Solomon’s wisdom, 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 bring people to conversion and to enrich the Church with Christ’s 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 how to trust in God’s love and cooperate with the Holy Spirit, about the status of the Jews, and about authentic Christian spirituality. Today he describes himself to the Romans and what he was hoping to do. He says that he is a “slave of Christ Jesus,” serving him as Lord, was “called to be an apostle,” and was consecrated or “set apart for the Gospel.” He wanted to serve Christ better than any slave his Master, knowing that the way he would do so is belonging fully to him and the Apostle that Jesus himself called and sent him out to proclaim. His mission, he tells us, was to bring about the “obedience of faith” in those “called to belong to Jesus Christ” and “called to be holy.” He was seeking to make them by faith slaves of Christ too, belonging to him, obeying him, becoming united to him in a holy communion. The underlying truth he was conveying is that when we truly believe, faith impacts our life. It revolutionizes every thing. When we believe in Christ, we convert from our own ways and seek to live as he lives, structuring our whole life not on earthly wisdom but his wisdom. When we grasp Christ, and treat him as Lord, we, too, become living, loving, “slaves” of Christ Jesus (instead of sin) because that is paradoxically the path to true freedom, since the truth of his wisdom sets us free.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who was a slave in life before he became a true slave of Christ, who was called by the Lord to be an apostle so that he might bring others to live the Gospel, especially concerning mercy. St. Callistus was a slave who managed his master’s assets. Eventually, either through mismanagement or theft, he lost them and ran away. He was caught, sentenced to manual labor (a particularly hard form of slavery) and sent to the mines. Through various interventions, the Christians in those mines were liberated. Callistus was eventually entrusted by Pope St. Zephyrinus as the steward of Christian cemeteries (the underground catacombs), was eventually ordained a deacon, and after St. Zephyrinus’ death was elected his successor. And because he had made the journey from sin to grace, from slavery to freedom, in deeper contact with the Sign-of-Jonah and Greater-than-Solomon, he sought to make it possible for other to receive that gift. The mercy he showed toward sinners scandalized many of the priests of Rome and beyond as he made it much easier for those who had been misled by sects and heretics to be welcomed back into the fold, for reducing the length of penances necessary for those who had committed sins like murder, abortion, primitive contraception and apostasy to be readmitted to communion and for recognizing the marriages among different social classes in Rome against Roman law. There were some — among them Hippolytus in Rome and Tertullian in Carthage — who thought he was mistaken to be so lenient, but it seems that they were much more concerned with giving strong penances to show the severity of sin than in recognizing conversion when it had happened and facilitating the life of grace. He also set up diakonia for the poor throughout the city and eventually gave all that he had, giving his life for God and for his people, making himself, in essence, a slave to Christ in enslaving himself in love to those for whom Christ died. At the beginning of Mass, we asked God, through his intercession and by his example, to strengthen us so that “rescued from the slavery of corruption, we may merit an incorruptible inheritance.” That’s what it means to heed the call of Christ to conversion from living by our own wits and worldly wisdom to living together with him according to the Gospel.
• At every Mass, we meet the One greater than Solomon and Jonah. We hear him speak, constantly calling us to a new way of life, living as he lives. It’s here that he helps us to live up to our calling to be holy and sends us forth, like he did after his encounter with St. Paul, with the “grace of apostleship.” It’s hear that he transforms us not not only helps us merit an incorruptible inheritance, but gives us himself as that treasure.

The readings for today’s Mass were: