Becoming Fully Trained Disciples Like Our Teacher, 23rd Friday (II), September 9, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Peter Claver
September 9, 2022
1 Cor 9:16-19.22-27, Ps 84, Lk 6:39-42

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us an indication of what he hopes we will become: “When fully trained,” he said, “every disciple will be like his teacher.” Jesus wants us to become like him, to love as he has loved, to live as he has lived. The essence of human life and of Christian existence is to become “fully trained.” God provides this training, through his Word, through his Church, even through the suffering he permits. In the Gospel, in the powerful parable of the splinter and the wooden beam, Jesus indicates to us that he wants us paying attention to the ways that we need to grow, to those aspects of our own conduct that still need to be trained, rather than to obsess about others’ faults and flaws, so that we might see clearly, virtuously, charitably and be better trained to help our neighbor.
• St. Paul in the first reading today likewise talks about the training necessary to become saints, to become like Jesus. He makes an analogy to the training of championship athletes. “Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win. Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.” We need to learn how to exercise discipline in every way, because discipline makes disciples. In this, St. Paul leads the Corinthians and us by example. He says, “Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing. No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.” He was taking out his own logs from his life and that’s why he was able to see so clearly to assist others.
• And help others he did. He wanted everyone to become fully trained disciples through exercising discipline in every way. He made himself “a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible.” He became “all things to all, to save at least some.” His love for others and his recognition of God’s love for them because the driving force of his zeal. He wasn’t doing it for money or for earthly compensation, but because of an interior obligation to share the joy of what he himself had received. “Woe to me,” he says today, “if I do not preach the Gospel!” He recognized he had been given a treasure of which he had been made a steward and sought to pass on free of charge what he himself had received. A Christian spiritual athlete fully formed will have that same holy woe.
• Today we celebrate one such great spiritual athlete, St. Peter Claver, the great apostle to the slaves in Colombia. As a young Jesuit, St. Peter left his native Spain in order to go to Cartagena to minister to the African slaves when they would disembark after a brutal trans-Pacific journey, be sold and bought. Their condition was execrable. He spent his last 44 years of life as a slave to the slaves, a Good Samaritan, catechizing them by learning their dialects or finding translators, baptizing more than 300,000 of them, sharing their life and doing everything he could to introduce them to Christ and to how he has overturned worldly values. He slept in the slaves’ quarters rather than in their masters’ when he came to preach missions to them. And he sought to proclaim the Gospel and bring the message of conversion to the slaveowners, helping them to take out the planks from their eyes and souls. In the letter that the Church ponders on his feast day in the Office of Readings, he shows how everything culminated in introducing them to the mystery of God’s love on the Cross, so that they may unite their own sufferings to Christ and become truly interior free. “Yesterday, May 30, 1627, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity,” he wrote to his Jesuit superiors, “numerous blacks, brought from the rivers of Africa, disembarked from a large ship. Carrying two baskets of oranges, lemons, sweet biscuits, and I know not what else, we hurried toward them. … We had to force our way through the crowd until we reached the sick. Large numbers of the sick were lying on the wet ground or rather in puddles of mud. … We laid aside our cloaks, therefore, and brought from a warehouse whatever was handy to build a platform. … There were two blacks, nearer death than life, already cold, whose pulse could scarcely be detected. With the help of a tile we pulled some live coals together and placed them in the middle near the dying men. Into this fire we tossed aromatics. Of these we had two wallets full, and we used them all up on this occasion. Then, using our own cloaks, for they had nothing of this sort, … we provided for them a smoke treatment, by which they seemed to recover their warmth and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see. This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions. And in fact, convinced as they were that they had been brought here to be eaten, any other language would have proved utterly useless. Then we sat, or rather knelt, beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine. We made every effort to encourage them with friendly gestures and displayed in their presence the emotions that somehow naturally tend to hearten the sick. After this we began an elementary instruction about baptism, that is, the wonderful effects of the sacrament on body and soul. When by their answers to our questions they showed they had sufficiently understood this, we went on to a more extensive instruction, namely, about the one God, who rewards and punishes each one according to his merit, and the rest. We asked them to make an act of contrition and to manifest their detestation of their sins. Finally, when they appeared sufficiently prepared, we declared to them the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Passion. Showing them Christ fastened to the cross, as he is depicted on the baptismal font on which streams of blood flow down from his wounds, we led them in reciting an act of contrition in their own language.” Everything ultimately led to their focus on Christ fastened to the Cross and how the blood and water flowing from his side made Baptism a real share in his passion, death and resurrection. He was showing them how to enter into and participate in Christ’s love which made him capable of bearing such enormous sufferings. He was helping them to recognize Christ could make them rich in their poverty, and to sanctify their hunger, their sufferings, even their dehumanization, for Christ ultimately identified with them in their maltreatment. He preached to everyone he could, even from a stretcher when we was too infirm to walk. He made himself all things to the slaves — even sleeping in their quarters rather than in their masters’ when he came to preach missions to them — so as to save as many as he could. And his example remains a powerful witness to us all today.
• The greatest spiritual training of all takes place through the Mass, in which we enter into Jesus’ own passion, death and resurrection. He gives us the chance here not only to become “like” him but to enter into communion with him, so that the Master can continue to teach and train us, his disciples, from the inside. This is the means by which we learn from him how to give our lives, our own body, blood and soul, for the salvation of others, to save as many as possible. Hearing the Word of God zealously proclaimed, we’re moved to receive God’s blessing at the end of Mass and to “go and proclaim the Gospel of the Lord.” Examining our consciences before Mass, we confess to God and to others that we’re sinners with logs in our eyes but that we’re turning together with them to the Lord so that we may likewise see and experience his mercy to such a degree that with our eyes healed we may help others to see by faith. This is where we receive a foretaste of the imperishable wreath with which God one day seeks to crown us, as he did St. Paul and St. Peter Claver. The Lord’s dwelling place is indeed lovely, as we prayed in the Psalm, and he seeks to make his dwelling place in us and in all those to whom he wishes to send us, as he sent Paul and Peter Claver before us. May we receive Jesus’ help to become as fully trained as they!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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