Being Built Up in the Most Holy Faith, 8th Saturday (II), June 2, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of Our Lady, Cause of Our Joy
June 2, 2018
Jude 17.20-25, Ps 63, Mk 11:27-33

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The rarity of hearing the Letter of St. Jude in the Liturgy
  • Only passage from the 25 verse letter in the two year liturgical cycle
  • The sixth through tenth weeks in Ordinary Time can often be lost depending upon when Ash Wednesday, the Lenten and Easter seasons are. No weeks suffer more than the 7th through 9th weeks. In the 13 year period between 2011-2023, for example, we lose the Sixth Week twice, the Seventh five times, the Eighth five times, the ninth five times and the tenth four times. Even when Lent is late and we’re able to enter into the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time, Ash Wednesday can often make Thursday, Friday and Saturday of the Eighth week disappear. Even when Lent is early and we have the 8th week, the Saturday can often become a special feast, like the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In fact, as I was preparing for Mass today I had to say that I don’t think I have had the chance to celebrate Saturday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II, in my nearly 19 years as a priest. So it’s a rare privilege to have it!
• The context of the Letter
  • The problems of the early Church with Gnosticism and antinomianism, with people who thought that grace gave them the permission to do whatever they wanted in contravention of the moral law because they were “spiritual” and not enslaved to the law. The Letter of Jude gives many Old Testament examples of what happens when people live by such presumption earlier in the Letter.
  • The six and a half verses we do have focus on the response of the faithful Christians to this challenge, which was probably facing the Church in the decade of the 70s AD.
• The first response is to grow in faith, and he proposes several means:
  • Remembering the words of God spoken by Jesus through the apostles. The gnostic antinomians were ignoring them.
  • Building ourselves up in the most holy faith, not just remaining where we are, letting God build us on him the Cornerstone. The gnostic antinomians were becoming weaker by basing themselves on Gnostic ideas. This is what it means to be athirst for the living God as we prayed in the Psalms, to be hungering constantly for more, never to say enough when it comes to the way we respond to God in faith.
  • Praying in the Holy Spirit, which means allowing God to teach us to pray and to help us, rather than thinking our ideas are enough, a temptation to which the gnostic antinomians were succumbing.
  • Keeping ourselves in the love of God, which is based on keeping the Lord’s commandments, rather than breaking them as the gnostic antinomians were.
  • Waiting for the mercy of the Lord that leads to eternal life, rather than thinking we don’t need it like the gnostic antinomians.
• The second response has to do with those who had succumbed to the heresy du jour. Jude asks us to do three things:
  • Have mercy on those wavering under temptation. He’s not calling us to separate ourselves from them but to help them get back on the narrow road.
  • Save others by snatching them out of the fire. Sometimes real love is shown by rescuing people from situations of death without asking their permission. We want to engage their freedom but sometimes — as parents know with their children — they just have to act and deal with the consequences of the tantrums later…
  • Have mercy with fear, meaning to recognize that the spiritual cancers others have can infect us, and therefore not being touched by their “outer garment stained by the flesh.” We’re called to love the sinner and hate their sin out of love for them, without thinking we might never be vulnerable to the sins that ensnare them. To go into their darkness, we need to stay even more attached to Christ the light. That’s why in the beautiful doxology we refer to God as the “one who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you unblemished and exultant,” because we need to be attached to him, the “only God our Savior,” to be able to have this type of mercy with fear, snatching others without being scorched, and mercifying without wavering ourselves.
• In the Gospel today, Jesus was reaching out to the chief priests, scribes and elders who were seeking to entrap him the day after he had driven out the money changers from the temple. They asked him about the authority with which he was doing such things, anticipating that if he said his own authority, they could have him arrested for vandalism or worse, and if he said God’s authority they could entrap him for seeming to oppose God’s will with regard to the temple. He transcended the question not principally by putting them in the same situation of answering a question, but by bringing them to the figure of St. John the Baptist. When Jesus asked, “Was John’s baptism of heavenly or of human origin?,” he was doing more than just getting them to say heavenly or human, something that would, they themselves recognized, put them in an awkward situation for the reasons St. Mark transcribes. Rather he was bringing them to the figure of conversion, to the one who came to make straight the paths for the Lord and his Messiah, and that’s something they refused, because like the gnostic antinomians, they themselves didn’t think they needed conversion. When they refused to accept John’s conversion, it was clear that they would similarly refuse Jesus’, and hence there was no reason to state the triune authority on which he was acting, because they simply didn’t want to leave the fire or abandon their spiritually leprous clothing.
• While they didn’t live as God wanted, one who did is the Cause of Our Joy whom we celebrate today. The Blessed Virgin Mary’s heart was an echo chamber remembering all that God had taught in the Old Testament, what her Son had taught during his life, what the apostles were teaching and writing. Her heart points to what sacred tradition is and does, treasuring the word of God, enfleshing it and passing on ourselves together with it in witness. Mary constantly grew in faith by allowing her life to develop in accordance with God’s word. She prayed and lived in the Holy Spirit, from her immaculate conception, to the annunciation, to Pentecost and beyond, and taught the early Church how to do so. She kept herself in God’s love and gave that Love her womb and her heart. And she prayed for, awaited, thirsted for and sang of God’s mercy, which he shows to Abraham and to his children for ever. She is praying for us, in the midst of net-gnostic antinomians that we may be able to do what Jude, inspired by the Holy Spirit, called the Christians of his age and every age to do. And the Cause of our Joy brings us to the one St. John the Baptist pointed out, the Lamb of God, who seeks that his joy may be in us and ours be brought to perfection.

The readings for today’s Mass were: