Being Built on the Cornerstone of Christ’s Mercy, Second Friday of Lent, February 26, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Lent
February 26, 2016
Gen 37:3-4.12-13.17-18, Ps 105, Mt 21:33-43.45-46

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• In the Responsorial Psalm today, we repeatedly cry out, “Remember the marvels the Lord has done!” And we can speak for the rest of our lives about God’s marvels. But the greatest marvel of all is how he takes our sins and not only forgives them but seeks to make them part of our salvation. In today’s readings, we see just that and learn three very important lessons.
• In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, we see how Joseph the future Patriarch’s brothers were envious of him because he was their father Jacob’s favorite. The fact that he loved Joseph the most didn’t mean he didn’t love the other brothers, but their envy led them not only to close themselves to the love their father had for them but also the love they should have for him. Their envy led them, as Genesis tells us, to “hate [Joseph] so much that they would not even greet him” and that interior poison led them much further. When Joseph went out to help his brothers tend the flocks in Dothan, the brothers conspired to plan to murder him and toss his dead body into a cistern and then lie about it to their father by saying a wild beast had devoured him. They wanted to replicate Cain’s invidious and insidious murder of his brother Abel. To save Joseph’s life, one of the brothers, Reuben, persuaded the others just to abandon him into an empty cistern so that he might be able to rescue him later. And so they agreed and threw him down into an inescapable situation, with most of the brothers likely thinking that, while they themselves didn’t shed his blood, it would just be a longer dying process. But then they saw a group of Ishmaelites, basically their second cousins through their grandfather Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael, and sold him into slavery for 20 pieces of silver, not as an act of mercy but of simple profiteering from what they anticipated would be a situation tantamount to his death in Egypt. At every stage, the envy at his good fortune led to evil. Their brotherly betrayal was a prophetic type of what would eventually happen to Jesus when he would be sold by one of his spiritual brothers, one of his closest friends, for silver, too.
• Jesus describes that betrayal, and the envy that led to it, in today’s Gospel. Jesus spoke to the chief priests and the scribes in a parable about the way they had treated all the messengers God had sent them and how they were going to treat him. In the prophets Israel had often been referred to as a vineyard planted by God. God had made the Israelites stewards of that vineyard but expected a harvest when vintage time grew near. The prophets were the ones sent to remind them of that yield of good deeds, but, as Jesus said, “one they beat, another they killed and a third they stoned.” Other prophets were sent and maltreated the same way. Finally God sent his Son but, in prophetic tones that would be fulfilled in the cry of “Crucify Him!” in Pontius Pilates’ praetorium, they shouted out, “This is the heir. Come let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.” They wanted to be owners, not stewards, and were prepared to kill in order to maintain their privileges. They wanted to be the ones in charge of the inheritance of faith, not God himself. The chief motivation behind the persecution of the prophets and the crucifixion of Jesus, it is implied, was envy, envy that led to a hatred so much that it resulted in homicide.
• But we know that that’s not the end of either story. God’s mercy intervenes. God always seeks to bring good out of evil and in both cases God’s goodness triumphed over the worst of human wickedness. Joseph’s being sold for 20 pieces of silver, becoming a slave in Egypt and his ability to interpret dreams eventually brought him to the attention of Pharaoh and to the second position in the Kingdom, an office he was able to use not only to save millions of Egyptians lives during a time of famine but also his family. Likewise, Jesus’ being sold for 30 pieces of silver, taking on the appearance of a slave in order to serve us all and enduring the worst of nightmares led him to save not only millions of Egyptian lives and so many fellow Israelites but the entire human race, including those who had conspired to have him crucified. To use his own words, quoting the Psalms, “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” That is indeed a marvel in our eyes!
• These two points should lead to three sets of resolutions on our part. The first is about the terrible evil of envy and the destruction to which it leads. Envy is sadness and anger about someone else’s being blessed, it’s a coveting of what others have that knows no limit. We need to see it for the capital sin that it is. And the greatest way to oppose envy is to be grateful for all we have rather than upset at what we don’t have and to thank God for the way he’s blessed others, especially our family members and friends.
• The second resolution is about how to endure difficulty,  hardship and betrayal we will suffer because of the evil and envy of others. God always seeks to bring good out of evil and we need to have confidence that our hardships endured can lead to our salvation and the salvation of others. “All things work out for the good,” St. Paul writes to the Romans. Especially when we’re in a situation like Joseph or like Jesus, we need to remember that it’s not the whole story, that God can always use that evil for good.
• The third resolution is to build our lives on Christ the Cornerstone. We are able to do that much better paradoxically because we’ve rejected building our life on him in the past and we’ve opened ourselves to his mercy. When we examine our conscience and see the ways in which we have rejected the Lord, we need to build our lives on that cornerstone, because that’s one of the great means by which we will become like him. But it’s also a means by which we can grow in appreciation of his mercy, because we recognize that he has used our sins as the cornerstone of his relationship with us. As we sing in the Exultet at the Easter Vigil, “O Felix Culpa!,” “O Happy Sin, that brought us such a great redeemer.” When we grasp how much we’ve been forgiven, we discover who God is, who we are, how much we’re loved and what we need to do not to reject him again. It’s much easier to build ourselves on him securely when we have learned how not to take him and his mercy for granted but build our live on him anew whereas previously we rejected him.
• Today as we prepare to receive that “Stone rejected by the builders” in Holy Communion — the greatest marvel of all in our eyes and God’s— we ask him for the grace to build our entire life on Him, our most secure foundation, to draw good out of all the evil we’ve suffered out account of the envy of others, and to help us never to succumb to that capital sin but rather to rejoice in all that he’s given us and given others.

The readings for today’s Mass were: