Becoming a House of Prayer by Consuming God’s Word, 33rd Friday (II), November 22, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Cecilia, Martyr
November 22, 2024
Rev 10:8-11, Ps 119, Lk 19:45-48

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

The following points were attempted during the homily: 

• Today, as we prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King, we see in the Gospel how the King wants to get us ready. First he wants to purify us, something we see in his cleansing of the Temple. Second, he wants to fill us with everything we need so that we can become a temple, a “house of prayer,” a dwelling place for God, by helping us to hang on his word, to devour it, so that we can become living commentaries of it. In the couplet of the Our Father Jesus taught us, we pray successively “Thy kingdom come!” and “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” To enter into the Kingdom of Christ the King, we must do God’s will, we must live his word, and that’s what the liturgy of the Word emphasizes for us today.
• The Jesus we see in today’s Gospel is one with whom many, especially today, are unfamiliar. The same Jesus whom Isaiah prophesied would “not break a bruised reed nor quench a smoldering wick” (Is 42:3), the same Jesus whom the psalms would call “kind and merciful” (Ps 145:8) the same Jesus who called himself “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29) started to overturn tables, tossing money on the floor, and making a whip of cords to drive the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. And there is no contradiction between the image of Jesus as the kind, merciful friend of sinners and Jesus as consumed with zeal for his Father’s house, because out of love for sinners and his Father, he really hated the sins that can kill sinners and self-alienate them from God. Jesus’ mercy does not baptize our sin and indulgence, but rather seeks to eradicate it. The word St. Luke uses to describe how Jesus “drove out” the animals is ekballein, the same verb used when he did exorcisms. Jesus wants to exorcise whatever in us is not fit for  God. The Temple in Jerusalem, built in order to be the dwelling place of God on earth, constructed to be a place of encountering God in prayer, had become something very different by Jesus’ time, at least in the experience of many. It wasn’t so much the fact that animals were being sold and money exchanged in the temple precincts that bothered Jesus. It was two things associated with this selling of animals and exchanging money: The first was that the moneychangers and animal sellers were drastically overcharging the people. The temple had become a “den of thieves.” When people came to the temple, they needed to sacrifice an animal to God, the size and value of the animal being determined by their personal means and the type of sacrifice being made. Rather than carry an animal with them for the many miles’ uphill walk to the temple — which was too much of a burden — most would buy one at the temple. But because there was such a demand, especially at the time of the Passover, the merchants had the market to charge the people who needed the animals whatever they wanted. Others who would try to save money by bringing an animal of their own often had to get the animals inspected by Temple officials who needed to verify that the animals were unblemished, as the Mosaic law stipulated. These inspectors often were on the take of the animal sellers to find blemishes that weren’t there and disqualify the affected animals. The poor who had saved their money over the course of the whole year for the trip to the temple, therefore, one way or the other, had to pay these enormous prices. While they were there, they also had to pay a temple tax, which needed to be given in one of two types of acceptable Temple currencies. That meant that most everyone had to exchange money and the moneychangers could take an exorbitant commission, which again penalized the poor most of all. Jesus was outraged that people were coming into the temple to rip off the poor. That was the first thing that incensed him. The second was worse. The Jewish mentality had become so distorted over the centuries that they began to look at their relationship with God as something contractual or even magical. “As long as I sacrifice this animal to God,” they began to think to themselves, “everything will be all right. God will be pleased and satisfied.” Too many people had started to look at the temple as the place to go “pay off” God with their animal sacrifices. They had started to look at God as someone who needed to be “bribed” or “bought” by these gifts. God had said many times through the prophets, “It is a contrite heart I seek, not [animal] sacrifice,” but they hadn’t gotten the picture. So Jesus gave them all a lesson they would never forget — and we would never forget. Jesus wanted to return the temple and the people to the true worship of God. He wanted the temple to be a place of prayer, to be His Father’s House once again. He wanted it to be a place in which we learned to love God and love neighbor, rather than buy off God and rip off neighbor.
• Every time we talk about the Temple, we need to remember that the Temple in Jerusalem was just a precursor of the Temple who would be Jesus’ humanity, the “true Temple,” which he said in St. John’s Gospel during the scene of the cleansing of the Temple would be destroyed and rebuilt on the third day. And Jesus’ salvific will was to incorporate us into himself as the Temple, as St. Paul would highlight in his letters calling us, individually and collectively, the Temple of God and summoning us to glorify God in our bodies. As a Temple, we are to worship God, to be “houses of prayer,” and places where the Word of God resonates. That’s what we see in the other part of today’s Gospel. St. Luke tells us, “Every day [Jesus] was teaching in the temple area.” Every day Jesus teaches us, in the Gospel at Mass, in the Liturgy of the Hours, in our prayerful lectio divina of Sacred Scripture, in the homily, in others’ words, in the encounters of the day, and in various other aspects of our life where the Holy Spirit seeks to help us remember everything Jesus taught and continues to teach. And we see in the Gospel what our response needs to be: the evangelist tells us, “All the people were hanging on his words.” As houses of prayer, we’re called to hang on everything Jesus says, to build our life on his words of eternal life, to grasp that we live on every word that comes from his mouth, and not to let any word — even the “the” — drop to the ground just like we wouldn’t even let the smallest particle of the Eucharist do so.
• Ultimately we’re called to allow the Word of God to take on our flesh, just as Mary did. That’s what today’s first reading is about. It is a fulfillment of the prophetic image of Ezekiel 3, when God said to his prophet, “Son of man, eat what is before you; eat this scroll, then go, speak to the house of Israel. … Feed your belly and fill your stomach with this scroll I am giving you,” and Ezekiel said, “I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth.” Then God sent him to proclaim that word to the House of Israel. Today St. John is told, “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land,” and when he did, the Angel said, “Take and swallow it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey.” And that’s what happened. “I took the small scroll from the angel’s hand and swallowed it. In my mouth it was like sweet honey, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.” And then someone said to him, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.” In this we see various lessons about our approach. We’re supposed to become what we eat, to become existential exegetes. Second, we’re called to recognize the sweetness of God’s words as we taste them, what led us in the Psalm to pray, “How sweet to my taste is your promise! In the way of your decrees I rejoice, as much as in all riches. Yes, your decrees are my delight; they are my counselors. The law of your mouth is to me more precious than thousands of gold and silver pieces. How sweet to my palate are your promises, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Your decrees are my inheritance forever; the joy of my heart they are. I gasp with open mouth in my yearning for your commands.” Third, when we interiorize the word, it may upset us, first because it’s calling us to conversion, and, second, it often moves us to do things that according to our humanity we might shirk from doing, like announcing it as medicine to others who might not want to take the remedy. But the word that we hear and ingest is a word to be done and proclaimed; sometimes the word and the action flowing from it won’t be pleasant — God wants us to know that ahead of time! — while at the same times it has the power to amputate sin and restore us to wholeness.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who shows us what it means to live as  a Temple of God’s presence, to become a house of prayer, to hear and live the word of God, in life and even in death. St. Cecilia was a young girl of a noble Christian family who fasted, wore a hair shirt, and desired to give herself always as a virgin to God, but her father had plans for a good marriage to a young pagan patrician named Valerian. During their wedding, among the music and rejoicing of the guests, Cecilia stayed apart, singing to God within and praying for help. When she and Valerian retired to the place where he was prepared to consummate the marriage, Cecilia told him a secret that she has an angel watching over her and that if he touched her in the way of marriage, the angel would make his suffer, but if he respected her and got baptized, he would see the angel. Valerian received instruction, got baptized by Pope Urban I, and then saw the angel standing by Cecilia’s side who put on both of their heads a crown of roses and lilies, a sign (like we’d see much later in the life of St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe) of martyrdom and purity, respectively. The fact that Valerian could see Cecilia’s angel shows that we’re never abandoned by the presence of the Angel God sends each of us. Valerian eventually helped his brother Tiburtius to convert and the two of them began to care for the bodies of all the martyrs, seeking to bury them. That exposed them as Christians and both were brought to martyrdom with the guard, Maximus, who witnessed their supreme testimony and became a Christian on the spot and almost immediately a fellow martyr. Cecilia buried all three bodies and herself was exposed as a Christian and brought to trial before Almachius. She was unable to be threatened out of her faith and after they tried to suffocate her by fire, ended up trying to behead her, but the axe wouldn’t penetrate through her entire neck. The blow, however, turned out to be fatal after three days and she was buried close to the popes in the catacombs that would eventually be named after St. Callistus. Her relics were translated by Pope St. Paschal in the early 800s to the area that was believed to have been her house and where a Church had been built after the age of persecutions. In 1599, the Cardinal in charge of the Church of St. Cecilia (Cardinal Paulo Emilio Sfondrati), in doing various renovations, decided to re-inter Cecilia with SS. Valerian, Tiburtius and Maximus, and, as he opened her tomb, he found her incorrupt. He had the great renaissance sculptor Stefano Maderno make a sculpture identical to what was seen in the tomb. That statue is now found before her tomb as well as a copy has been placed in the catacombs closed to where her bodied had rested for nearly six centuries. Her remains looked as if she were sleeping. You could see the axe marks in her neck. But what has always struck me — and many others — is the way she seemed to be prophesying even in death. In her right hand, she had two fingers and her thumb extended. In her left, she had her index finger extended. This was a means by which she appeared to be proclaiming her faith in her Triune God, one God in three persons. This was the supreme witness she was giving that not even Roman executioners could cut her off from her attachment to God, because she was united with him even in martyrdom. What St. Ambrose said famously in his treatise on virginity for the feast of St. Agnes is certainly apropos for her: “Virginity is praiseworthy not because it is found in [the virgin] martyrs, but because it makes [the virgin] martyrs.” Her daily choice for Christ strengthened her to choose him until the end! As a Temple of God, she offered herself as a pleasing victim to God, professing her faith in him, one and three. Even as she was being killed, she was making of her life a house of prayer.
• At the beginning of every Mass Jesus comes to do a temple cleaning. He seeks to drive from us whatever is unfit for worship, all our spiritual worldliness, all our manipulation of religion for purposes other than God’s glory and then to fill us with his word, help us to hang on it, ingest it, be transformed by it, and pass it on to others enfleshed. Today God doesn’t give us a scroll and tell us to twice to take it and eat it, but he gives us his body and blood and says, “Take and eat. … Take and drink.” Let us imitate Ezekiel, John, Cecilia and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in taking and tasting the Lord’s promise and fulfillment and receiving God into the Temple he mercifully redeemed us to be!

The readings for today’s Mass were: