Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
September 23, 2018
1 Cor 1:4-8, Mt 9:1-8
To listen to an audio recording of today’s Mass please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
- Today we have one of the most powerful scenes in the Gospel, in which Jesus revealed not only his divine power the priority of his merciful love. The same Jesus who encountered the paralyzed man comes here to St. Agnes to meet us. After the Gospel scene, St. Matthew tells us those present “were struck with awe and glorified God.” That’s what’s always supposed to happen when we meet God himself come into our world. That’s what should occur whenever we see the outpouring of his merciful, healing love. Today in a particular way, let us enter into this scene as if we were doing so for the first time and learn the lessons it contains that should fill us with awe and praise.
- The first lesson is about Jesus’ desire to heal our souls. After many days away preaching, Jesus had come to Capernaum and it was reported that he was “at home,” which almost certainly means he was at Peter’s house. St. Mark and St. Luke describe for us that there were so many people present that there was no room for the sick to get in. Rather than waiting, they did the very difficult thing of lifting their paralyzed pal up onto the roof. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to balance a paraplegic or a quadriplegic, but they did it to get him up onto the roof on a stretcher, and after they had opened up the thatched branches of the roof, to lower him down without having him fall on peoples’ heads. What a scene the whole thing must have been, but they were not to be stopped or even delayed. It was obvious why the friends had brought the paralyzed man to Jesus. They wanted him to heal him of his physical infirmity. But Jesus had come from heaven to earth primarily not to cure us of our physical ailments, but to save us by healing us of our spiritual cancers. That’s why the first thing Jesus did for the paralyzed man was to say, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” He only healed him of his paralysis as a confirmation against the critics present, in order essentially to demonstrate that he was the God who not only could make cripples walk but make sinners saints.
- The essential gift Jesus wants to give each of us is this spiritual healing. We’ve come here to Peter’s house, the Church built on the rock whom Jesus made Peter, and it’s here that Jesus wants to give us the same gift healing he gave to the man in the Gospel. He has the power to forgive sins and, in order to make his mercy available and easy, on Easter Sunday evening he breathed that power to forgive and retain sins to his apostles. We all need this spiritual healing, because sin paralyzes us and others in so many ways. Our the last few months we’ve all witnessed the terrible virus of sin that is in the Church, including in many of the clergy, that has scandalized so many. We’re living at a time in which unexpiated guilt is wreaking so much havoc. After two World Wars and the Cold War, the Holocaust, the genocides in Armenia, the Ukraine, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, after so many atrocities from tyrannical governments, after the waterfalls of blood flowing from more than two billion abortions worldwide, after the sins that have destroyed so many families, after so much physical and sexual abuse, after lengthy crime logs in newspapers every day, after the scourge of terrorism, after so much hurt and pain, the terrible weight of collective guilt crushes not only individuals but burdens structures and whole societies. The modern world is like one big Lady Macbeth, compulsively washing our hands to remove the blood from them, but there is no earthly detergent powerful enough to take the blemishes away. We can converse with psychiatrists and psychologists, but their words and prescriptions can only help us deal with our guilt, not eliminate it. We can confess ourselves to bartenders, but they can only dispense Absolut vodka, not absolution, and inebriation never brings expiation. We can escape reality through distractions and addictions — drugs, sports, entertainment, materialism, food, power, lust, and others — but none can adequately anaesthetize the pain in our soul from the suffering we’ve caused or witnessed. Whether we admit it, whether we realize it, we’re longing for redemption. We’re yearning for a second, third or seventy-times-seventh chance. We’re pining for forgiveness, reconciliation, and a restoration of goodness. We’re hankering for a giant reset button for ourselves and for the world. And if we can’t have that personal and collective do over, then at least we ache for liberation from the past and, like Zacchaeus or Ebenezer Scrooge, for a chance make up for has been done. We want atonement. And God responds to our age’s great desire and need for expiation with the same gift we see in the Gospel.
- As Pope Francis repeatedly says, everything Jesus did — preaching, teaching healing — was meant to bring about forgiveness, the reconciliation of the human race with God. That’s why the first thing Jesus did in today’s Gospel, when a paralyzed man was dangerously lifted onto a roof and lowered into his midst in a home, was to heal his sins. Our friends may not need to bring us here on a stretcher or in a wheelchair, but we can be guaranteed that there are cloistered nuns all over the world, joining the saints in heaven and our guardian angels, praying for us that we might not receive the grace of the opportunity for confession in vain. The gift of the Sacrament of Confession, the healing power of Christ’s merciful love, should fill us with awe and lead us to glorify God. The Son of Man still has authority on earth to forgive sins, and he wants to use that authority through his Church to heal your sins and mine.
- And he wants us, like the friends of the paralyzed man in the Gospel, to bring others to receive his mercy as well. That’s the greatest gift we could give to others, something far greater than physical healings. We may encounter obstacles. We may have to get through crowds of people blocking our access to Jesus. We may have to endure people’s objections about the Sacrament. But it’s worth it.
- Today the Church celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the earthly death of one of the great confessors in the history of the Church. St. Pio of Pietrelcina, called home as a good and faithful servant on September 23, 1968, was an icon of Christ’s mercy. He was associated with that mercy won for us on Calvary in a particular way through his stigmata. He shared his love for others as we see in his founding the Casa del Sollievo della Sofferenza as a first-rate hospital to care for those who were seriously ill, with paralysis and so many other diseases. But he was most associated with Christ’s mercy by his work in the confessional. From dawn until dusk, his immobile cross was the wooden box of the confessional, where he would mercifully seek to forgive the sins that led to the Lord’s crucifixion. Penitents from all over the world traveled to kneel at his ear, often needing to wait days, despite his hearing confessions more than 12 hours each day. His holiness, and sometimes his violent reaction against the sins that were spiritually killing his penitents, brought many of them to profound conversion. To all who flocked to him, he held up the ideal of holiness, repeating to them: “Jesus has no interest outside of sanctifying your soul.” Confession is when the entire sacramental economy exists just for each of us, when time stops, as we begin to experience what Saint Paul exclaimed to the Galatians, the “Christ died for meand gave his life up for me.” And by the time he gave to individual penitents, he should each of them just how valuable they were to God.
- Not only was he an instrument of the Lord’s spiritual healing and for so many physical healings through miracles or through the House for the Relief of Suffering, but, like the friends in today’s Gospel scene, he was regularly bringing other people to the Lord Jesus.
- He did so first by urging people to pray, and founding prayer groups all over the world. Even after long grueling hours in the confessional, he would spend much of the night in prayer. He once described himself as a “only a poor friar who prays” and encouraged lay people to come together to pray in small groups, tens of thousands of which now exist across the globe under his celestial patronage. “In books we seek God,” he said, but “in prayer we find him. Prayer is the key which opens God’s heart.” He prayed because he knew there was no better use of his time than to enter into communion with the God of eternity, and he taught others that hunger.
- He sought to bring people to Christ in the Mass. His daily Mass used to last a few hours, as he united himself to the Lord’s prayer from the Upper Room and from the Cross. Despite the crowds who attended each day, the local ecclesiastical authorities for a time banned him from celebrating the Mass publicly because they thought three hours was scandalously too long. I wonder whether the same well-meaning but myopic authorities would have tried to hurry Jesus, too, during the agonizingly slow three hours he took to offer his body and blood on the Cross!But he knew he was hearing Christ preach in the Mass and welcoming him into his hands on the altar, and he wasn’t going to place anything else ahead of entering into that moment. He sought to help everyone else learn from his reverence how the Mass should fill us with awe and lead us to glorify God.
- He sought to bring people to Christ through the Cross. Thursday, September 20, was the 100thanniversary of his receiving the Lord’s sacred stigmata, through which for 50 years he bore, with undeniable visibility in our modern skeptical age, he bore the five wounds of Christ in his own body. Those wounds were a tangibly irrefutable reminder to everyone of Christ who bore those wounds first and mysteriously allowed Padre Pio to share in his own excruciating pain. Two years before his priestly ordination, Padre Pio referred to this unique pathway of the Cross when he wrote, “In order to succeed in reaching our ultimate end we must follow the divine Head, who does not wish to lead the chosen soul on any way other than the one he followed; by that, I say, of abnegation and the Cross.” Christ does not call everyone to bear the stigmata, but he does call everyone to pick up his cross daily and follow him along the way of the Cross. It is under the Cross, Padre Pio said, that “one learns to love.” It is for that reason, he said, “Calvary is the hill of the saints.” Padre Pio was united to Christ on the Cross in more ways than by the stigmata. For decades he suffered from the suspicions and calumny of many in his order who were confused by and perhaps envious of his divine predilection. He bore all these hardships humbly, with religious obedience, as a “crucible of purification.” When St. John Paul II visited his tomb, he said, “The life and mission of Padre Pio prove that difficulties and sorrows, if accepted out of love, are transformed into a privileged way of holiness, which opens onto the horizons of a greater good, known only to the Lord.” And finally he lived Christ’s kairosof mercy in the Confessional. .
- When Blessed Paul VI visited San Giovanni Rotondo to pray at Padre Pio’s tomb after his death, he didn’t praise him for his inimitable qualities, like his ability to read souls, his reputation for bilocation, the miracles worked through his intercession, or for his stigmata. He praised him for his emulable ones: because “he said Mass humbly, … heard confessions from dawn to dusk … and was a man of prayer and suffering.” And St. Pio is interceding for us that we will share his love for God and others and love prayer, love the Mass, love the Sacrament of God’s mercy, and love even suffering as a path of holiness.
- Paul in today’s first reading gave us words that described St. Pio. Because of the grace of God bestowed on him in Christ Jesus,he was enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge,as the testimonyto Christ was confirmed among so many,so that they would not be lacking in any spiritual gift as they awaited for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Today as we celebrate this Mass, let us ask through St. Pio’s intercession for us to be enriched in every way by Christ and become his witness among others so that they, too, many not lack the spiritual gifts Christ came into the world to bestow as we, together, await the revelation of our Lord Jesus who will come for us one day as he came for St. Pio 50 years ago today.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading for the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians
I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus, that in him you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew
Jesus entered a boat, made the crossing, and came into his own town. And there people brought to him a paralytic lying on a stretcher. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Courage, child, your sins are forgiven.”At that, some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” Jesus knew what they were thinking, and said, “Why do you harbor evil thoughts?Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins” — he then said to the paralytic, “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.” He rose and went home. When the crowds saw this they were struck with awe and glorified God who had given such authority to human beings.
