Becoming Prudent and Faithful Weapons of Righteousness, 29th Wednesday (I), October 20, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Paul of the Cross
October 20, 2021
Rom 6:12-18, Ps 124, Lk 12:39-48

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Peter today asks Jesus, “Is this parable meant for us or for everyone?” There was the implication that the apostles or others might think they were exempt from the lessons. Sometimes we can think ourselves exempt from really paying attention to what the Lord is asking, as if the Lord’s call to conversion is primarily directed to others. But the Lord is always speaking for us and for others, and we need to listen to everything as words to be done, so that we can become what he describes later in this passage, faithful and prudent stewards investing his word and passing this way of life on to others.
• To understand today’s Gospel better, we can begin with yesterday’s, when Jesus spoke to us of the two essential Christian dispositions and actions: to be vigilant with lamps lit for his perpetual coming and to have our loins girt, ready to work and to be sent out by him to finish the job he started of the salvation of the world. Today he reemphasizes these two points in the Gospel when he speaks about the qualities of a faithful and prudent steward. About lamps lit, he tells us to “be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” The Lord is, as Martha of Bethany said before Jesus raised her brother from the dead, constantly “coming into the world.” The unfaithful disciple says, “My master is delayed in coming,” and the devil is constantly trying to get us to think that the Master is delayed, that he’s not already here. But he is here and the good and faithful steward acts as if he were aware of this continual divine accompaniment. About loins girt, Jesus says that the faithful and prudent steward “distribute[s] the food at the proper time.” God has fed us, he’s enriched us, and he wants us to love others with those gifts. The devil, after he’s seduced us to think that our life is meant to be lived apart from the Master, gets us instead to “beat the men servants and the maidservants,” “to get drunk,” in short to sin. Rather than serving others and caring for their needs, both spiritual and material, he tries to get us to hurt them. He’s also trying to get us to forget that we’re really stewards called to account.
• St. Paul picks up these themes in the first reading. He talks about two types of slavery: slavery to sin, what he calls presenting our “bodies to sin as weapons of wickedness”; and consecration to God whereby we present ourselves to God “as raised from the dead to life and the parts of your bodies as weapons for righteousness.” I love this phrase. Our bodies, which are sacraments of who we are body-and-soul, are meant to glorify God, to be given to God and in God to others. So often, however, we allow our bodies to be slaves to sin, as we give ourselves to sinfulness. We see this when people get drunk. We see it when people are addicted to pleasure or sex or power or their egos. By Jesus’ action, he has set us free from this slavery. We can’t be passive, however, to this gift: Jesus, risen from the dead, has brought us fully alive through baptism; he wants us in return to present our bodies to him as risen from the dead, living a new life.
• St. Paul helps us to see that our lives are meant to be weapons. Our thoughts, words and actions can be  “weapons of wickedness,” making ours and others’ lives worse or miserable; or we can use them as “weapons of righteousness,” lifting people up. In Psalm 36, which we prayed this morning in Morning Prayer, we pondered the evil one who sits on his bed at night plotting the defeat of goodness. We’re called to plot the triumph of goodness, to seek to use our lives, together with and in response to God’s action, to build up his kingdom. Our charity is not supposed to be “spontaneous,” even though random acts of kindness are good. It ought to be planned. It should be “plotted.” Our life is a weapon that we can and should use for good. It’s important for us to be practical about creating havoc for the devil each day, by thinking God’s thoughts, by lavishing true compliments and praise to others, by serving them with love in our deeds and helping them to feel the tender caress of God. God wants us to be a weapon in this way.
• The devil, moreover, if he can’t get us to serve in his army, is at least going to tempt us to think that all we’re playing with is a cap gun, that we don’t have much to offer. Jesus addresses that temptation at the end of the parable when he says, not, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and little will be demanded of the person entrusted with little.” Rather he says, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” We’ve all been entrusted with lavish gifts, filled to overflowing. Others may have more than we think we have, but we’ve still been blessed with much. Others may be multibillionaires, but we’re still millionaires. And God wants us to spend what he’s given us! Jesus and St. Paul are both telling us we have a lot to offer.
• Today we have a great example of someone prudently and faithfully used his life as a weapon of righteousness, who knew he had received a treasure from God and wanted to pay it forward. His great inheritance was the gift of Christ crucified and he sought, through a cruciform life, to become a true weapon of holiness. He is someone to whom the Sisters of Life ought to have a great devotion, since he was the founder of the Passionists who run St. John and Paul Church on the Coelian Hill in Rome, which was the titular Church of John Cardinal O’Connor. His tomb is in the beautiful chapel off the right side of the nave. I think it’s without doubt that Cardinal O’Connor prayed in front of St. Paul of the Cross’ tomb very often, prayed for his sanctity, prayed for the Archdiocese, prayed about the seed God had planted to found an order of sisters to pray, fast and work to defend and advance the dignity of very human life. St. Paul of the Cross (1694-1775) was born of very devout parents, who had 16 kids, ten of whom died in infancy, and so they were accustomed to real suffering. He suffered with physical pains throughout his life, but when he was young, his Mother would bring him a crucifix so that he would learn how to unite that suffering to Christ’s suffering for the salvation of the world. When he was 26, the Lord in a vision allowed him to see himself clothed in a black habit with a Cross around a heart saying “Passion of Jesus Christ.” He heard these words spoken to him, “This is to show how pure the heart must be that bears the holy name of Jesus graven upon it.” St. Paul’s heart, our heart, is inscribed from our baptism with the Passion of Jesus, with his Cross, but we need to live that reality. To be a disciple of Jesus means, according to Jesus’ words, to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross daily and follow him. Our heart and life must become cruciform. St. Paul of the Cross, like his apostolic namesake, glorified in the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ by which the world was crucified to him and he to the world. He preached nothing but Christ crucified, often holding a large Crucifix when he would preach. He was able to say that the life he was living in the flesh he was living by faith in the Son of God because he had been crucified with Christ to make that type of life possible. And he loved and celebrated the Cross as a great gift. In the breviary lesson in the Office of Readings the Church ponders this morning, there’s a beautiful — and challenging! — passage in which he says, “When you become true lovers of the Crucified, you will always celebrate the feast of the cross in the inner temple of the soul, bearing all in silence and not relying on any creature. Since festivals ought to be celebrated joyfully, those who love the Crucified should honor the feast of the cross by enduring in silence with a serene and joyful countenance, so that their suffering remains hidden from men and is observed by God alone. For in this feast there is always a solemn banquet, and the food presented is the will of God, exemplified by the love of our crucified Christ.” He celebrated it because “by this sacred path we reach union with God. In this most holy school we learn true wisdom, for it was there that all the saints learned it.” And he urged all who listened to him to embrace in the way of the Cross the path to be a good and faithful steward and a weapon of holiness in God’s kingdom: “Live in such a way that all may know that you bear outwardly as well as inwardly the image of Christ crucified, the model of all gentleness and mercy. For if a man is united inwardly with the Son of the living God, he also bears his likeness outwardly by his continual practice of heroic goodness, and especially through a patience reinforced by courage.” That’s what we prayed for today in the Collect, when we asked, “May the Priest Saint Paul, whose only love was the Cross, obtain for us your grace, O Lord, so that, urged on more strongly by his example, we may each embrace our own cross with courage.” 
• As we prepare this Mass to meet Christ who is constantly coming, we know that he has offered us his body, blood, soul and divinity as a weapon to make us righteous against all the works of the devil. This is the fruit of the Tree of Life that is the Cross. Christ wants us to meet him by presenting our bodies as risen from the dead and as a weapon for him to use to destroy the kingdom of darkness and bring about his kingdom of light. Later on in the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul will tell us, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1-2). That’s exactly what we seek to do at Mass. Pope Benedict once said to the young people of the world that what happens in the Mass can be compared to a nuclear explosion — and that idea is not hyperbole but even still short of the mark, because what happens at Mass has far more energy even than all the nuclear bombs on the planet. But we can stick with the image. What happens here is a nuclear detonation. The Lord seeks to fill us with his energy, and then he sends us out, with loins girt, as faithful and prudent stewards, as weapons of righteousness, to blow up the world! Let’s get strengthened and get started.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
ROM 6:12-18

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