Becoming Great Through Receiving God and What He Gives, 26th Monday (II), September 30, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church
September 30, 2024
Job 1:6-22, Ps 17, Lk 9:46-50

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today’s Gospel reading from St. Luke incorporates the passages we have had a chance to ponder at Sunday Mass yesterday and a week ago, both about the path to greatness as well as how we should respond, not with jealousy or defensiveness but joy and delight when others are doing great things for God. These considerations are important for young people at a great university, because this is an environment in which one finds, as expected, a lot of ambition. The Lord doesn’t seek to eliminate human ambition — he’s instilled within us a desire for greatness! — but to purify it. Today in the Gospel, immediately after he told his disciples a second time of the betrayal, suffering and death he would endure, he overhears the disciples speaking not with compassion or concern toward him but with self-interest concerning which of them was the greatest. He takes advantage of what could have been a tremendously awkward moment by describing for them an essential condition for greatness. He says, “The one who is least among all of you is the one who is the greatest,” and he illustrated the means to be the least. He took a child, placed the child by his side, and said, “Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” We become the least — and therefore paradoxically grow in Christian greatness — by receiving children and, in receiving them, receiving Christ and God the Father. Greatness is shown ultimately by receiving God, and one of the greatest ways God is received is through receiving with love, with purity, with sacrifice, those whom God sends. The reason why Jesus likely describing receiving children is because children couldn’t repay, they couldn’t engage in a quid pro quo, they couldn’t likely even say thanks. In highlighting such a child, Jesus was saying, as he did elsewhere, that the greatest would be the one who serves the rest, the one who would care for others not expecting anything in return. It’s a powerful rebuttal to the way that they were jockeying for position as the greatest in worldly categories. They were trying to get something out of their discipleship and apostolate, their friendship, with Jesus. Jesus wanted to help them see that greatness comes from receiving God — including receiving his passion, death and resurrection! — and not trying to “get” anything, but rather to “receive” and to “give.” God will never cease to try to make us great by sending us people to love, and in caring for them, we express our love for God, and the more we love God in this way, the greater we become.
• That’s what connects the first part of this Gospel to the second. There’s a very curious phrase. After Jesus talks about receiving a child, St. Luke tells us, “The John said in reply,” and described the situation that we encountered in yesterday’s Gospel at Sunday Mass, the apostles’ catching red-handed someone doing exorcisms in Jesus’ name and trying to stop him. The “in reply” is mysterious. How the two were connected for St. John is unclear. Perhaps John thought that this unaffiliated exorcist was trying to become great and famous through working unauthorized exorcisms in Jesus’ name. But it likely flowed from jealousy. Worldly desires for greatness always involve wanting to be exalted over others. And when St. John saw someone else casting out demons in Jesus’ name, rather than rejoicing that there was an exorcism and someone being freed from the devil’s clutches, he seemed to think about what that might mean for him and his ordinal position in Jesus’ service. But just as Jesus sought to get John and the others to seek greatness through receiving children, and in receiving them, receiving God, so Jesus tried to do the same with this anonymous exorcist: receiving him and God who was working through him. Jesus reminded him and the others that whoever is not against them is with them and they should not only be focused on the service of others more than on who’s doing the serving, but on receiving God in others, especially when they’re doing God’s work.
• To receive God and whom he sends is the secret of greatness. We similarly see it at the beginning of the Book of Job in the first reading. Job was like no one on earth, God said. After Job lost oxen, asses, sheep, shepherds, camels, sons and daughters and his house, rather than curse or blame God, he replied, “Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I go back again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!” He was great because he received God however God wanted to be received. He received God when God gave him so many earthly blessings; he received God when God took them away. He recognized that he deserved nothing. Everything was a gift. He didn’t consider himself the owner of anything. He valued his relationship with God far more than any of the things that God gave him. He shows us how to bless the Lord’s name in this way. That’s the path to greatness, to accept everything seemingly adverse and propitious in such a way to receive God himself, the true treasure.
• We see this lesson of the path of greatness coming from receiving God through loving receiving what God gives us, from children, to exorcists, to material goods or their removal, illustrated in the life of St. Jerome, the saint that the Church celebrates today. He once sought worldly greatness, but after his profound conversion, he sought true greatness through receiving what God gives, especially through receiving him in his holy word. St. Jerome was a brilliant student born in Dalmatia (modern day Croatia/Bosnia) who went to study under a famous pagan orator in Rome. There his childhood faith became lukewarm as he immersed himself in the Greco-Roman classics. Once, when he was on a study trip with two close friends, both of them died because of a disease they caught and he, too, became deathly ill. During his sickness he had a dream in which he was at his judgment. When he said he was a Christian, Jesus replied that he was, rather, a Ciceronian, because he knew far more about Cicero and his writings than he did about Christ and what he said. He was trying to become great as a scholar of worldly things rather than what mattered. His identify was far more linked to the famous Roman orator and consul than it was to Christ. Jesus’ words in the dream struck Jerome to the core. He needed to seek greatness in another way. So he used the brilliance God had given him to begin to study the Scriptures, learning Hebrew as a penance to gain self-mastery in his fight to have a pure heart. Eventually coming to Rome, Pope St. Damasus made him his secretary and asked him to translate the Bible from its original languages into the common (or “vulgar”) language of the people, Latin, which he did. After St. Damasus’ death, because by his pungent personality and writing he had alienated many, he went to Bethlehem to pray, translate and write, surrounded by a bunch of women who were in essence proto-religious women, who built a monastery for men and two for women next to the place where Christ was born. In all of his work, St. Jerome recognized an essential point, one that has become a key Christian teaching. To receive Christ is to welcome God’s word and Christ as the Word made flesh. It’s to imitate the Blessed Virgin Mary in receiving the Word of God so deeply that it can take on our flesh. His most famous quotation, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ,” means that we cannot really know the Lord Jesus unless we know his world. And so St. Jerome urges us, and Christians of every age, to become great in knowing the Lord through encountering him in divine revelation. Such an intimate knowledge of Christ through Sacred Scripture is the means by which St. Jerome became great. And that same path is open for us. At the beginning of Mass today, we turned to God and asked Him that just as he “gave the priest St. Jerome a living and tender love for Sacred Scripture,” he would likewise grant that we “be ever more fruitfully nourished by your Word and find in it the fount of life.” We confess that we need a living and tender love, not a dead and cold one. We likewise acknowledge that Jesus has the words of eternal life and to know him through Sacred Scripture is the source of eternal greatness. We’ll pray at the end of Mass today about how Christ seeks to lead us to greatness through what he teaches us through his holy word and through his becoming one with him in the Word made flesh: “May these holy gifts we have received, O Lord, as we rejoice in celebrating Saint Jerome, stir up the hearts of your faithful so that, attentive to sacred teachings, they may understand the path they are to follow and, by following it, obtain life everlasting!” Jesus shows us the path of greatness through receiving purely God and everything God gives, through welcoming children and others who cannot pay us back, through embracing with joy and without jealousy what others are doing for God, through receiving the Word of God as words to be lived. Like any Father, like anyone who loves another, God wants us to become truly great and shows us the way.
• One of the most famous paintings of Saint Jerome is found in Rome. At the altar of St. Jerome where, now, Pope St. John XXIII is buried, we see the Viaticum of St. Jerome, as he longs to receive Jesus for the last time from a bishop in the Holy Land. Emaciated, old, and physically frail, but with the heart of a lion, and with the hunger that comes only through decades of ascetical fasting, he knees with reverence as he prepares to receive the Lord with love. That’s a summary of his whole post-converted life. Naked he came into the world and almost naked he was about to leave. The Lord had given him life and, in worldly eyes, the Lord was about to take it away. But he knew through viaticum, he was receiving what he translated into Latin from John 6, the food that would help him live forever. As we prepare to receive that same Lord here, let us ask for the great to do it with as much devotion as St. Jerome. May we learn from him how to be truly Christians and follow him in following Christ along the path of Christian greatness.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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