Bringing from the Storeroom Old and New, Seventeenth Thursday (I), August 1, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Peter Chrysologos, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
July 30, 2015
Ex 40:16-21.34-38, Ps 84, Mt 13:47-53

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the last of eight images of the kingdom in this 13th chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. In the image of the Kingdom of heaven as a dragnet thrown into the sea, we can see two great lessons: The kingdom seeks to draw everyone in, but not everyone is fit for the kingdom. The net will collect fish of every kind, but the good — literally the “beautiful” in Greek — will be retained and the bad — literally the “rotten” — will be thrown away after the haul. So there is a universal will for salvation but there’s also a judgment and not everyone will make it. This is one of the main points Jesus makes in his parables of the kingdom. He makes the same point in the Parable of the Weeds and the Wheat, that both good seed and darnel will grow in his field, but at the end they will be separated and those not fit for the kingdom will be separated by angels and thrown into the fire where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth. Likewise he makes the point when he describes the kingdom as a banquet. His servants go into the highways and by-ways to “compel” everyone into the banquet, but those who are improperly dressed for the feast, those who have not maintained their baptismal garments properly cleaned and pressed for the feast, will be cast out to the same dark place of teeth-grinding and wailing. He reiterates it yet again in response to the faith of the Centurion. He says that many will come from the east and west — i.e., non-Jewish lands — to recline with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob at the banquet, but many of the children of the kingdom will be cast into the outer darkness, where there’s tear-filled dental destruction. Perhaps the most famous image is Jesus’ description that at the last judgment he will separate us as a shepherd distinguishes the sheep from the goats on the basis of faith working through deeds of love for him in the image of those in need; the goats who fail to do this will be forced to depart from him into the eternal fire of punishment.
• To understand this means to understand the incredible stakes of our freedom, to respond with faith and live according to what God has revealed to us, to make the kingdom the precious pearl or hidden treasure worth losing our life for in order to gain it forever. Today there are many who are universalists, believing basically in the ancient heresy of apocatastasis, which teaches that basically everyone goes to heaven, no matter what one does. Theoretically, of course, we can fathom that Judas, Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, serial killers, and all the people who don’t like us might end up in hell, if there is a hell; but we can’t envisage ourselves, any of those we care about, or a sizable chunk of ordinary people ever ending up in Gehenna. How could a God Who is full of compassion, slow to anger, and rich in kindness ever set up an eternal, infernal dungeon in which He mercilessly punishes people for disobedience? How could God Who is love ever establish an everlasting Abu Ghraib for anyone, not to mention His beloved children? And if it’s the case that only those with post-doctoral degrees in Satanic wickedness are candidates for the eternal hall of shame, then, at a practical level, we can all just calm down, because very little now matters to our or others’ eternal destiny. It doesn’t matter if we spread the faith, because everyone gets to Heaven whether or not they know Jesus Christ. The Sacraments don’t matter. The Word of God doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if we pray or play, if we keep or break promises, if we steal or sacrifice, if we come to Mass or sleep in, if we’re faithful to our spouse or cheat, if we provide for or neglect our family, if we forgive or settle scores, if we love or abuse the poor, or if we welcome or abort the littlest of Jesus’ brethren. None of this matters — or at least none of it matters much. Since almost everyone in the class is going to make the eternal honor roll no matter what they do, while we may still admire those who study hard, the really wise ones are those who eat, drink and be merry and still get their easy A.
• But Jesus says otherwise. He says that those who live by faith working through love and those who don’t will be separated. He says that those who choose the kingdom and those who reject it won’t end up together. He takes our freedom seriously and so must we. To ask us if we understand these things means to ask us whether we grasp the incredible stakes of our choices. Jesus said that He had come into the world not to condemn the world but to save it, but He added, “The one who rejects Me and does not receive My word has a judge, and on the last day the Word that I have spoken will serve as judge” (Jn 12:47). Those who reject Jesus’ words of eternal life, who prefer to walk in the darkness instead of the light, who fail to live by faith and enter the kingdom, become their own judges by the way they respond to the truth God has revealed. “There are only two kinds of people in the end,” C.S. Lewis once famously wrote. “Those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are in hell choose it.” Hell exists not despite God’s love but precisely because of it, in order to honor the desires of those who don’t want to live in loving communion with Him and others. It is the state, as the Catechism calls it, of “definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” It is the tragic possibility of human freedom for those who, in voluntarily choosing sin, separate themselves from God and others.
• And so we ought to draw some moral lessons. There’s both good and bad fish in the net of the Church, like wheat and weeds in the field of the Church. We shouldn’t be shocked that we find in the Church people who are sinners, even occasionally people who are corrupt, unrepentant sinners. There are people within the Church, not to mention within society, who are living the type of life in which they’re being prepared to be tossed out where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, who are the weeds fit for burning at the end. We see them even in the clergy, as all of us have been painfully reminded about in the last year. But Jesus preached this parable not fundamentally as an image of predestination, but of conversion, to awaken us and everyone to the fact that just because we’re in the Church doesn’t mean necessarily that we’re guaranteed heaven. It’s not enough to practice the faith on the outside. We have to be living it on the inside. We need to be seeking total communion with Christ.
• At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus asks the disciples and us, “Have you understood all these things?” The Greek means “Have you put all of these things together?,” indicating putting new truths together as the pieces of a mosaic with the other tesserae to form a whole. It’s not enough merely to hear Jesus’ parables and ponder the images. It’s not enough for us to have him solve the riddle of the images used in the parable. It’s to grasp the truths pointed to by Jesus’ unforgettable illustrations using similes from daily life and grasp them in such a way that it helps us to live with increased faith in that kingdom. All of them are meant to form a whole that helps us live properly in the kingdom. Jesus mentions that the scribe instructed in the Kingdom is like the head of his household who takes from his storeroom both old and new. What it means is that when we truly convert to Christ, it’s not like we lose whatever was authentic in our lives before, but find the fulfillment of all of those things. For the scribes, the scholars of the Old Testament, once they learn about the Kingdom, about Jesus’ fulfilling their messianic hopes, they are able to take from their storeroom of prayer and study both “new and old” to live by and help others to live by. The Lord wants to transform us in the same way. He doesn’t throw out our own experiences, but reforms them in the new clay pot that he continually seeks to perfect in us with our permission. It also means that in our “understanding” of the parables there’s always going to be the “new and the old.” We’re never going to exhaust the store room. There’s no simple, limited explanation of them that will become stale after we grasp it, but more and more applications, greater depth. That’s the way it is with the faith in general. Over the course of these last eight days, we have recalled past graces of understanding as we’ve heard these parables anew, but we have grown in ways, too. And that enriching of old experiences with new is also pointed to by the powerful imagery in the first reading, as Moses built a tent for the Lord’s presence and the ark of the Covenant. The Lord would come down as a cloud during the day and a pillar of fire at night: in day light God featured the fact that he was mysterious, nebulous; at night he featured that he was still the unconsumed burning bush, a vertical column coming down from heaven of light and love. Both are important images that pertain not only to the parables but to all of God’s self-revelation. God is always mysterious, but we do know something of the fire of his love and light even in the midst of darkness. But then we see that when God was within the tent, the Israelites stayed put, and when the cloud arose that’s when they began to move. There was an interplay between staying put — being still and knowing their God — and movement, getting up and following God, knowing that God was with them in both. It was a cycle of resting where they are (with what they are already familiar) and moving as God would accompany them (the new), but in both, God wanted to be with him in his nebulous, fiery, holy presence.
• Someone in whom the Lord was constantly summoning both old and new, who was being led by the Lord both in daylight and nighttime, is the great doctor of the Church we celebrate today, St. Alphonsus Maria Ligouri. He grew up learning old and new about God in a pious home. He received a superlative education with double law degrees at the age of 16 and was a legal wunderkind. Eventually, however, he began to wander from the faith. And after losing his first case on a technicality at the age of 26, he began to look at the vanity of his life and seek something substantial and lasting. Converted and in a sense liberated, he sought the priesthood, against much opposition from his father. He eventually founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, which was dedicated to preaching missions, bringing people back to the faith, helping them to learn and live by the truth that sets us free (Jn 8:32), helping them, essentially, to become good and beautiful fish in the dragnet of the Church. It was a work that brought great consolation in seeing people turn their lives around, receive God’s mercy for the first time in decades, reconcile familial disputes and more. He preached in simple terms so that everyone could understand and respond to their evangelical emancipation. A few centuries later, St. Alphonsus’ homilies are perhaps most famous for the graphic imagery he would use about what happens at the judgment and death and some have said that he tried to “scare the hell” out of people. But his goal was never to preach to the folks as if they were a bunch of convicts on the way to prison but as much beloved sons and daughters of God called to cease squandering their lives in self-made pigsties and make the way home, here in this world, to the celebration God has for us not with a fattened calf but a Lamb looking as if he has been slain. His many books on the Glories of Mary were meant to show how it is possible to imitate her faith so that our own souls may magnify the Lord and our spirits rejoice in indescribable happiness. St. Alphonsus gave his entire life so that no one would lose the precious gift of redemption for which the Redeemer paid such a precious price, but rather use their freedom and in faith choose continually and definitively to live in the kingdom of the redeemed. Eventually when he was 49 and could no longer preach in person as much because of rheumatoid arthritis, migraines, and many other maladies, started to write books, and before he died 42 years later, had written 111, an extraordinary output that flowed from his zeal, on Christ, on the Sacraments, on Mary, and the Christian life as seen in the lives of the martyrs and more. His works preach still. He was constantly seeking to help others to become good and beautiful fish. At the beginning of Mass we prayed that we become new basing ourselves on his “old” wisdom:  “O God, who constantly raise up in your Church new examples of virtue,” — referring not to St. Alphonsus but to us and those who have come after him — “grant that we may follow so closely in the footsteps of the Bishop Saint Alphonsus in his zeal for souls as to attain the same rewards that are his in heaven.”
• Today as celebrate this Mass, we thank God for having caught us in the net of the Church. We thank him for the “old” he has already revealed to us that has brought us here as well as for the “new” with which he never ceases to enrich us. We thank him for being here with us and letting the cloud of his holiness not just hover over us but within us, and we thank him for lifting up that cloud afterward and with fire leading us out to set the world ablaze. The Lord’s dwelling place is indeed lovely and he has chosen us to be that dwelling place as he sends us out to make the whole world he created more lovely by transforming it into his kingdom where the King reigns. And he does that through uniting us to himself in the Holy Eucharist. We know that the choice between the good and the bad fish, between the beautiful and the rotten, takes place according to a very straightforward criterion. The Jews weren’t spending all-nighters on the Sea of Galilee trying to catch fish for aquaria. The good or beautiful fish that are saved are those that are fit for eating, who are capable of making themselves a holocaust for others. To use the famous acrostic of the early Church, in which the Greek word for fish, ichthus, was understood to signify by its letters “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior,” the good and beautiful fish are those who, like Jesus, are able to say, “This is my body … given for you,” given to nourish you, given to help you live. The rotten fish are those who have been corrupted by interior selfishness, who by their own choices have made themselves unfit for this type of total service. To live in the kingdom means to imitate the King in humbly serving all his subjects, giving oneself totally for others, losing one’s life for the sake of advancing the Kingdom so as to save it. This is what Jesus wants to help us to put together. This is the “ever new” that he wants to combine with everything else he from his divine storehouse has given us up until now.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 13:47-53

Jesus said to the disciples:
“The Kingdom of heaven is like a net thrown into the sea,
which collects fish of every kind.
When it is full they haul it ashore
and sit down to put what is good into buckets.
What is bad they throw away.
Thus it will be at the end of the age.
The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous
and throw them into the fiery furnace,
where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.””Do you understand all these things?”
They answered, “Yes.”
And he replied,
“Then every scribe who has been instructed in the Kingdom of heaven
is like the head of a household who brings from his storeroom
both the new and the old.”
When Jesus finished these parables, he went away from there.