Becoming Truly Great in God’s Kingdom, Tenth Wednesday (I), NY Archdiocese Young Adult Mass, June 14, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Monthly Mass for Young Adult Catholics
June 14, 2023
2 Cor 3:4-11, Ps 99, Mt 5:17-19

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

Today Jesus serves us the third course in what is a seventeen-course daily Mass feast of his words from the Sermon on the Mount. We began on Monday with the Beatitudes. Yesterday, he summoned us to our vocation to be Salt of the Earth and Light of the World. Today he speaks to us of what his relationship is to the law and the prophets and what he therefore wants our relationship to be, telling us that the greatest in his kingdom will be the one who observes what he commands us and teaches others to do the same. Insofar as the Lord has summoned us to that greatness, let’s listen attentively to how he enfleshes it.

At the beginning of today’s Gospel, Jesus announces, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” He was coming to respond to all of the Old Covenant hopes, to be the “Yes” to all God’s promises, even the littlest: “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,” he continued, “not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” He was going to fulfill all of the prophecies of the Old Testament and bring the entire law to find its completion in his two-fold command to love God with all of our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor as Christ has loved us. As he will show us throughout the Sermon on the Mount, he would fulfill everything not by scrupulous observance of every letter and part of the letter, but by bringing everything he had given in the Old to fulfillment as a seed metamorphoses into a tree or an embryo into an infant and then into an adult. The fifth commandment not to kill he would fulfill by telling us not to be angry, not to insult, not to hate. The sixth commandment not to commit adultery he would complete by telling us not to look on others with lust, lest we be adulterers in the heart. The seventh commandment not to steal he would perfect by telling us not to withhold our tunic from someone who takes our cloak and to give to the one who asks of us. The eighth commandment not to bear false witness he would perfect by telling us not to swear oaths at all but to let our yes be yes and no be no. He was fulfilling the law through helping us to interiorize everything, transforming the fruit by renewing the tree. Rather than not hating, insulting, killing, using, plundering and deceiving our neighbor, he was leading us, like him, to love our neighbor and even our enemy.

The moral revolution Jesus was igniting during the Sermon on the Mount would be slow to take effect. The scribes and the Pharisees fiercely and homicidally resisted, because they wanted to maintain the letter as written and not to see it fulfilled as Jesus indicated. The laxist Sadducees and and Herodians withstood it, because they preferred to see the law and prophets conveniently ignored rather than taken even more seriously. Even many of the first Christians opposed it, because they thought in order to be a good Christian, one first needed to be a good Jew, and keep all 613 commandments in the law and the prophets. St. Paul was battling against this tendency in tonight’s first reading.

As one biblical scholar says, the Old Testament was like an unfinished symphony waiting for Christ to come and bring everything together. We’re hearing the first notes of that finished masterpiece, that incredible incarnate synthesis, by the God-Man in today’s Gospel.

But it’s not enough for Jesus to complete and perform that symphony. He wants us to learn it, play it, and help others to learn and play it without ceasing. And he wants us to play and teach it well, better, in fact, than a Julliard grad performs Bach and Beethoven and Fiedler and Bernstein conducted Mozart and Mahler. Jesus wants us to be great and tells us how: “Whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” He summons us to greatness in discipleship, to follow him, in living the two-fold commandment of love on which all the law and the prophets hangs (Mt 22:40). He also summons us to greatness in the apostolate, in teaching others how to fulfill the law and respond to the Holy Spirit’s help to do so.

It’s important for us tonight to hear this call to greatness. Throughout the rest of the Sermon on the Mount he is going to be reinforcing this vocation to true spiritual excellence, showing us how to have our righteousness to surpass that of the highly religious scribes and Pharisees as well as to exceed that of the virtuous pagans, who love those who love them. He summons us to be perfect like our heavenly Father is perfect, merciful like our Father is merciful, and holy as the Lord our God is holy, by building our whole life on him and his word and helping others to do so.

In some parts of the Church, this calling to greatness, to holiness, to excellence is muffled or turned off altogether. Some leaders in the Church proclaim they’re satisfied if people are merely showing up, even if they’re leaving unchanged, lukewarm, and mediocre. In other places, the highest aspiration seems to be just to be, and be considered, a “good person.” Sometimes in youth ministry, even in religious life, Catholics are trained to regard all ambition and aspirations to greatness almost as sinful violations of the virtue of humility, as if every ambition is what Saint James calls “selfish” (James 3:16) But there’s a huge difference between a passion for self-aggrandizement — an ego-indulging hunger for riches, honor, power, a desire not just to be the best but to be acknowledged as the best — and a holy zeal for the things of God and his kingdom. Saint Paul told us in his first Letter to the Corinthians, “Strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts,” and said that they were not things like prophetic gifts, faith to move mountains, heroic feats of enduring suffering, but faith, hope and especially a charity that is patient, kind, not arrogant or rude. We think about how ambition worked in the life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Prior to the Battle of Pamplona, where he had his leg shattered by a cannon ball, he vainly sought worldly honor on the battlefield and in the courts of royals. After convalescing for many months, studying the life of Christ and reading the lives of many saints, he was filled with a sacred ambition and asked, “Why can’t I do what” what Saint Dominic and Saint Francis have done? He became instead ambitious to do everything for God’s greater glory. And he inspired generations of others, starting with his college roommates St. Francis Xavier and St. Peter Favre, to share that holy hunger. And there’s no reason why we can’t do what Francis, Dominic, and Ignatius have done, not to mention Patrick, Teresa, Catherine, Therese, Damian, Elizabeth Ann, Junipero, Kateri, Isaac, Rose Philippine, Solanus, Cabrini, Cope, Drexel, Goupil, Guérin, Lalande, McGivney, and Neumann.

Jesus never tried to eliminate his disciples’ ambition, but to purify it and direct it toward true greatness. Let’s look at what he teaches us about what it truly means to be great in his eyes, in what truly matters, in what endures.

First, Jesus wants us to be great in faith. He praised the Syro-Phoenician mother and the Roman Centurion for their great faith and longed that all in Israel would emulate it. All the more, he would want us, his disciples, to have great faith, to trust in him fully, and to come to know, love and base our whole life on what he teaches. Knowing that call, we beg him, like his first followers, “Lord, increase my faith!” (Lk 17:5).

Second, Jesus wants us to be great in humility. In response to the disciples’ question elsewhere in the Gospel, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?,” Jesus called a child over and declared, “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.” To be great in humility is not contradictory, merely paradoxical. Just like a child is totally dependent on his or her parents, so Jesus wants us to become great in our filial dependence on all God wants to give. The perennial temptation for us is to think we don’t need God, that we’re self-sufficient. The chief sin of the prodigal son was to treat the Father basically as if he were already dead, to get the inheritance right, forgetting that a far more important treasure than half the father’s wealth was the relationship with the Father. Jesus indicates for us that the path to greatness is to become excellent in humbly recognizing our need for, and receiving with gratitude, all God wants to give.

Third, Jesus wants us to be great in imitating his self-sacrificial love. Once he said, “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” On another occasion, when his apostles were jockeying for the top positions in what they thought was the earthly messianic administration he was about to inaugurate, he told us, “You know that those who rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.” Then he added, “For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mk 10:43-45). Jesus wants us to trade in our false notions that greatness means you have a butler and valet, a chauffeur and a pilot, and a whole staff of people serving you at your beck-and-call, to a notion that the greater we are, the more we will in fact serve others. But the notion is not enough. He wants to give us the help to make the choice to follow him on the way to greatness, which is the path of self-emptying loving service. That is the path he chose, that path that the apostles after the resurrection chose, the path that the saints in every age have chosen.

Fourth, he wants us to be great, as he tells us today, in living by his teachings and, as he said before his ascension, going to “make disciples of all nations, … teaching them to observe everything I have commanded” (Mt 28:20). This is a summons to holiness and mission, to strive to love God with all we’ve got and love our neighbor with the love with which God loves us. Just as Jesus the Truth incarnate loved us enough to fulfill rather than abolish the law, so he sends us out to do so. We don’t become great in the kingdom by trying to win human respect through watering down or abolishing the challenging parts of the Gospel to suit modern tastes. He tells us in the Gospel today that the one who “breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so” will be “least in the Kingdom of heaven.” He wants us to be great, not the least, and we do so by practicing what he teaches and helping others to practice them to virtue and perfection.

The fifth and last way Jesus summons us to greatness is through a Eucharistic life. When Saints John and James asked Jesus for the top spots in the kingdom, Jesus asked them, “Can you drink of the chalice I’m about to drink?” He framed the path to greatness in terms of drinking the chalice Christ would drink. This is of course a reference to the chalice of sacrificial suffering, prophesied by Isaiah, that he would drink (Is 51:17). But that chalice was ultimately filled with Precious Blood. To be great, Jesus wants us to be ambitious to drink his chalice, to become one with him, to live a truly Eucharistic life, which is one that not only prioritizes adoringly receiving him at Mass by lovingly worshipping him and spending time with him outside of Mass, but also making our lives commentaries on the words of consecration, saying to others, “This is my Body, this is my blood, this is my sweat, my tears, all I am and have in ransom for you.”

As we enter more into the Eucharistic Revival, particularly the parish phase that began three days ago, we ask the Lord Jesus to help make us truly great in each of the four pillars our bishops are asking us to focus on: to be great in reinvigorating the celebration of Mass; to be great in making time for personal encounters with Jesus in Eucharistic adoration; to be great in participating in robust faith formation opportunities, learning our Eucharistic faith better so as to pass it on more attractively and effectively; and to be great in inviting others to come back to Mass. Inviting our peers to join us at this monthly Mass might be a good place to start. Ultimately we ask the Lord Jesus to send the Holy Spirit to make us great in laboring for the food that endures to eternal life that Jesus gives us, in drawing our life from him in the Holy Eucharist, and then in helping others to learn how to live as Eucharistic disciples and Eucharistic apostles.

The readings for tonight’s Mass were: 

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