Becoming Witnesses of Hope by Living and Serving with God in the World, 29th Tuesday (II), October 22, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 22, 2024
Eph 2:12-22, Ps 85, Lk 12:35-38

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were made in the homily: 

• Today on the Memorial of St. John Paul II, as I look at this morning’s first reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians and Jesus’ promise in the Gospel about eternity, my thoughts turn to what John Paul II said to the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1995. The readings today are about hope and he came, he said, “I come before you as a witness: a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope, a witness to the conviction that the destiny of all nations lies in the hands of a merciful Providence.” In that speech, he gave the reason for the hope that he bore within. For him, hope was essentially a paraphrase of his famous repetition of Jesus’ words “Be not afraid!” in the Mass to inaugurate his papacy which took place 46 years ago today. He said to the representatives of the nations of the world, “Now is the time for new hope, which calls us to expel the paralyzing burden of cynicism from the future of politics and of human life. … We must learn not to be afraid, we must rediscover a spirit of hope and a spirit of trust. Hope is not empty optimism springing from a naive confidence that the future will necessarily be better than the past. Hope and trust are the premise of responsible activity and are nurtured in that inner sanctuary of conscience where ‘man is alone with God’ and he thus perceives that he is not alone amid the enigmas of existence, for he is surrounded by the love of the Creator! Hope and trust: these may seem matters beyond the purview of the United Nations. But they are not. The politics of nations, with which your Organization is principally concerned, can never ignore the transcendent, spiritual dimension of the human experience. … In order to recover our hope and our trust at the end of this century of sorrows, we must regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires.” He finished by saying, “As a Christian, my hope and trust are centered on Jesus Christ. … Jesus Christ is for us God made man, and made a part of the history of humanity. Precisely for this reason, Christian hope for the world and its future extends to every human person.” When George Weigel was choosing a title for his definitive biography of St. John Paul II, a work in which I played a small role, he chose “Witness to Hope,” something that not only summarized his speech to the United Nations, but his whole life.
• We are all called to be witnesses to hope because of our faith in Jesus Christ and bring that hope to the campus and to the world. Today’s first reading teaches us that our hope comes from the fact, as John Paul II said, that Jesus is with us in the world. St. Paul describes to the Christians in Ephesus their situation before the proclamation of the Gospel. “You were at that time without Christ, alienated from the community of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.” They were hopeless because they were living without God in the world. Once one begins to live with God, one begins to have hope in every circumstance. We could even define hope as “living with God in the world.” Pope Benedict wrote about this in his beautiful 2007 encyclical on Christian Hope, Spe Salvi. “Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were ‘without God’ and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. … Here too we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well. … The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life. … The Ephesians, before their encounter with Christ, were without hope because they were ‘without God in the world.’ To come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope.” That’s the hope that came to all the nations. St. Paul describes it, “Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the Blood of Christ.”
• That hope is supposed to be reinforced by living in communion with other believers who are supposed to be, with us, mutual witnesses to hope. Our communion with Christ leads to a communion with his body the Church. St. Paul says of Jews and Gentiles that Christ “made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, … that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two … and might reconcile both with God, in one Body, through the Cross.” That dividing wall of enmity is a reference to the tall wall of separation in the Jerusalem Temple between the Courtyard of the Gentiles and the Courtyard of the Jews. A gentile couldn’t enter the inner courtyard and there was a sign that if one were caught he would be executed. There was strict separation between the two. Christ tore down that wall “that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both [Jew and Gentile] with God, in one Body, through the cross, by it putting that enmity to death.” That leads to the beautiful reality that in Christ, as St. Paul says, “So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God,  built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is held together and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord; in him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” That’s the reality of the Church. We are united with each other but also with the the saints, built upon Christ, as a holy temple, the dwelling place of God. That’s a great living source of hope as Christ our Hope dwells within us, as we constantly give reasons for the hope within us to each other, and as we together give a witness of hope to the world.
• That hope is obviously nourished by Jesus’ great promises of what awaits us as his faithful disciples, as his  friends, followers, and members of his Mystical Body. Today in the Gospel he gives us a great promise of what heaven will be like when he says that “he will gird himself, have them recline at table and proceed to wait on them.” He shows the enormous gratitude God will give to us for our fidelity, for our trusting with hope in Him, for our living in communion with others, and by the way we live out our love for him and each other. For this to occur, we have to keep an awareness of his presence with us in the world, which is the source of hope. He summons us to be “like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. … And should he come in the second or third watch and find them prepared in this way, blessed are those servants.” This is the attitude we call “presence of God,” an awareness that Jesus is with us in the world, an alertness to the various ways he comes to us. This is the fundamental source of our hope, as Pope Benedict says. This awareness of the presence of God is contrasted with the attitude Jesus will describe in tomorrow’s Gospel: namely the person who forgets God, who thinks “My master is delayed in coming” and “begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk.” These are people who live without God in the world. So our hope is shown in our service of God and others. If we’re aware Jesus is with us, it’s so much easier to love him and others. And the more we do, the more we are filled with love for God and others, the easier it is to be filled with hope and to become, through our Christian loving service, true witnesses of hope in a world that needs us to be beacons.
• Jesus wants to help us keep a lively awareness of his presence, which is the source of our hope. He meets us in prayer. He comes to abide in us in Holy Communion. He wants to make us more and more fellow citizens with the saints through Holy Communion. Jesus’ promise that if we remember him and live with him in the world, if he finds us vigilant in loving service, “he will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them,” comes to fulfillment in the Mass. That’s what Jesus, after all, did at the Last Supper, taking on the form of a slave and washing his apostles’ feet and feeding them with his very own body and blood. That’s what he does for us here at this Eucharistic banquet. That’s what he promises to do forever in heaven if we, like St. John Paul II, live together with Him in the world and live in a communion of genuine sacrificial love with all the holy ones, building our entire life on Christ the capstone. At every Mass, we come together to give everyone a reason of the hope that’s within us. And at the end of every Mass, we are sent out with Christ within and with his blessing to be witnesses of this hope!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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