Becoming Worthy of the Kingdom and of Our Divine Calling, 21st Monday (II), August 26, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed John Paul I
August 26, 2024
2 Thes 1:1-5.11-2, Ps 96, Mt 23:13-22

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s readings we encounter two totally different visions of the religious life, one that the Lord very much wants of us and the other that the Lord very powerfully condemns. They help us not only to examine our own approach to our Christian life but also to grasp what made Blessed John Paul I, whom the Church celebrates today, such a witness and example for us of how to become worthy of the Kingdom of God and of our divine vocation.
• We begin with what God doesn’t want. Today Jesus begins with a serious of seven very forceful denunciations of the religious habits of the Scribes and the Pharisees. When someone is meek and humble of heart, when someone is seldom angry, goes ballistic, it’s much more powerful. Thus, when we see Jesus get as indignant as he does in the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew as he presents seven “woes” against the Jewish religious leaders of his day — he gives us three today, two tomorrow and two Wednesday — we need to take what he says even more seriously and make sure that we don’t imitate any of the habits that he forcefully condemns. To grasp better what he says, we should know a little bit more about the Scribes and Pharisees. The Scribes were the class of scholars of the law who arose after the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile. Under Ezra and Nehemiah the Jewish people made a national commitment to live by the law of God, recognizing that their failure to do so had led to their captivity. The Scribes were the experts on the law who studied what God had given and then developed a whole series of intricate derivative laws and practices to help live by the Lord’s law. Eventually their regulations filled fifty large volumes. The Scribes were the ones, for example, who took the third commandment about keeping holy the Lord’s day and developed the lengthy list of regulations as to what types of exertions would be considered work that would violate the sabbath, whether it was picking a head of grain, or walking a certain number of steps, or even lighting a lamp. The Pharisees were the ones who arose in the second century BC, during the time of the Syrian leader Antioches Epiphanes, who was trying to extirpate the Jewish religion, to dedicate themselves totally to keeping all the scribal legislation of God’s law. The name Pharisees refers to their being “separated ones,” separated not only from the sins of idolatry but also separated frankly from normal human life, as they gave all their attention to living by the 50 volumes of regulations. Over the course of time, for the Scribes and Pharisees, these regulations became just as important — in some ways, even more important — than the actual law of God. Pleasing God became a thing of how one used egg shells ritually to wash one’s hands and other types of ablutions, how meat was prepared, how one avoided activity, including charitable activity, on the sabbath, and so forth. This whole approach was suffocating real religion, which is not a neurotic observation of minutiae, but a loving communion with God that overflows into God-like loving communion among others.
• In the first two “woes” today, Jesus describes how the Scribes and the Pharisees are “hypocrites” — literally, actors — for obsessing on outward appearances, on externals, on how they look before others, but whose hearts are far from God and often full of thoughts that are totally ungodly. By this approach, Jesus says, they’re not only not entering the Kingdom Jesus had come from heaven to establish, but serving as impediments for others to enter. When they make a convert, he says, they make him a “child of Gehenna twice as much as [them]selves,” because they form their proselyte to think that religious is all about scribal regulations rather than truly loving God and others, as God wants and teaches. The way they lived their religion was a scandal rather than a bridge for people to come to God and enter his kingdom. Jesus’ condemnation of their approach has a lot to do with us. Since the beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis has preached a lot about the way many today look at the Christian faith as fundamentally the fulfillment of a whole bunch of commandments and rules, what he describes as a “disjointed multitude of doctrines,” rather than the proclamation and living out of the good news that Jesus loves us, came into the world to save us, seeks to walk with us each day, wants to form us to love like him, and entrusts his mission of salvation to us so that we might all fully enter his kingdom here and forever. The Holy Father is obviously not saying that the commandments, that Christian moral life, aren’t important, but that often the way we live our faith and talk about it to others begins with a whole series of do’s and don’ts rather than with God and his merciful love. Jesus wants us fully to enter into his Kingdom by living in loving communion with him the King and then becoming means for others to follow our example and joyfully enter into that kingdom, too.
• The third “woe” Jesus describes is the Scribes’ and Pharisees’ whole system of lying while pretending to tell the truth. They taught and believed that if one bound oneself by an oath to God that one had to keep it, but they also believed that only a “binding oath” was obligatory. A binding oath, they said, made God explicitly one of the parties of the oath. Any other oath that didn’t explicitly engage God could be broken, they taught. Often, therefore, they’d make false oaths, pretending that they were committing themselves to something, only to be intending to break it. Jesus exposed their duplicity when they would pretend as if oaths made calling on the temple, or the altar, or heaven were not binding but oaths made by the gold of the temple, or the gift of the altar, or by the throne of God somehow were. They were pretending to be faithful and truthful, while actually lying and intending to lie. Jesus reminded them that when we swear an oath, we’re committing ourselves to have God ensure that we’re telling the truth — and any of the objects mentioned (temple, altar, heaven) are in relationship to God, just as others to whom they would be planning to lie, are in relationship, too. For us as Christians, we need to be aware of the same tendency to keep the outward appearances that we’re Christian and truthful while at the same time trying to deceive others. I remember that in Italy, there was a culture of lying that was actually somewhat shocking. People would tell you one thing and then fake as if they never said it. Such a culture even invaded Catholic universities and seminaries. Here in the US, we have a greater cultural honesty overall, but we are masters in the culture of the half-truths of spin, of the white lie, the calculated perjury of court trials, and the burgeoning practice of fake news and AI-generated deceptions. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said he didn’t want us to take oaths at all because he wants us to live in a way that our yes means yes and our no means no and to grasp that anything short of truthfulness comes from the evil one. He doesn’t want us to be actors, pretending one thing and thinking or doing another. He wants us to live the truth that sets us free, which is essential for entering the Kingdom and helping others to enter it, something that the Scribes and Pharisees were not doing.
• Before his conversion, St. Paul had been a Pharisee and had excelled beyond his peers in observing all the minutiae of the law. But after the Lord met him on the road to Damascus, he realized that we were not saved by our own efforts and certainly not by the rigid observance of all of the man-made scribal traditions, but that we’re saved by God, more specifically by grace (our participation in God’s very life) through faith (our committed response to God) in Jesus Christ. In his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, in contrast to Jesus’ woes today, St. Paul gives three specific reasons to praise the true religion of the first Christians in Thessalonika who were under attack and persecution. He praised them for their flourishing faith, their growing mutual love and their endurance (hupomone) in all persecutions and afflictions. The Christian life is meant to be a life of flourishing faith, living the truth in God and in what he says in such a way that it overflows  beautifully into a consistent life of faith, not externalist pretensions. The most important flower in the garden of faith is love of God and love of neighbor; a faith that doesn’t lead to love is a defective faith. St. Paul praised the Thessalonians for precisely that type of love that existed among them and from them for Christians elsewhere and for those who were persecuting them. The other crucial flower of faith is perseverance in faith under duress, which is what the Thessalonians were likewise doing, remaining true to God even and especially when they were needing to suffer for him who suffered everything for us.St. Paul said that this flourishing faith, overflowing mutual love and constancy were the means by which they would become “worthy” of the Kingdom of God and of their Christian calling to Christ-like holiness. Their faith and love under affliction was what would “bring to fulfillment every good purpose and every effort of faith” and would lead to the glorification of God’s name and their own holy glorification by the radiance of Christ’s life shining through their own.
• These virtues of flourishing faith, mutual charity and faithful endurance are likewise the pathway for us to become worthy of our calling, to enter the kingdom, and to help draw others to enter the kingdom with us. Someone who contagiously showed us how to do this is the holy one the Church remembers today, Blessed Pope John Paul I, the former Cardinal Albino Luciani, who was pope for 33 days, from today, August 26 through Sept 28, in 1978. He was the first pope to have a double name, which was a homage to his two immediate predecessors John XXIII who had named him a bishop, and St. Paul VI, who had named him a Cardinal. He was called the “Smiling Pope” because he radiated joy in his whole bearing, especially in the four Wednesday general audience catecheses he gave, passing on the faith with so much pleasure. Unlike the Scribes and Pharisees who complicated the life of faith, he simplified it and showed its beauty. When he was a young priest, he published a book entitled Catechesis in Crumbs, in which he tried to teach the truths of the faith in a simple, direct, and comprehensible way for everyone. When he was made a bishop at the age of 46, he took the motto Humilitas (humility) and said he sought to be a “bishop who is a teacher and a servant.” In 1976, while Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, he published Illustrissimi (“The Illustrious Ones”), a collection of letters addressed to famous figures in history, all with the point of teaching the faith. When he elected he came out on the balcony smiling. St. Teresa of Calcutta would say about him, “He has been the greatest gift of God, a sun beam of God’s love shining in the darkness of the world.” Rather than using the royal “we,” he used the simple “I.” He simplified the papal inauguration, refusing to be crowned and not wanting to be carried in a chair, eventually relenting on the latter when he was told that was the only way people could see him. He sought to help all the faithful become worthy of the kingdom and of their baptismal vocation. Leading up to the Second Vatican Council, anticipating Lumen Gentium’s insistence on the universal call to holiness, he said, “We are called by God to be true saints” and said that by professing love for God, Catholics are saying, “My God, I want to be holy, I will strive to be holy.” He was anything but an actor and he called others to live with Christian integrity too. His feast day is an occasion on which to ask for the virtues of gratitude, love, endurance and faith. It’s a time to beseech divine help so that, like him, we may avoid the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees and learn, rather, how to imitate his flourishing faith, abounding charity, courageous perseverance, humility and cheerfulness. That is the way we may live with integrity our vocation to holiness in response to our call and infectiously draw many others with us to come to human and Christian fulfillment and glorify the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in accordance with his grace.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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