Changing Our Direction to Follow the Lord, Saturday after Ash Wednesday, February 20, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum Lenten Day of Recollection
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Saturday after Ash Wednesday
February 20, 2021
Is 58:9-14, Ps 86, Lk 5:27-32

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth,” we prayed several times today in the Responsorial Psalm. And the Truth incarnate responds in the Gospel, first for Matthew and then for all of us, by coming into our lives and saying, “Follow me!”
• Follow me! Those words mean that we have to change course, we can no longer go our own way and do our own thing. Once Christ calls us, once he teaches us his way, we must walk in his truth. That’s the call to conversion. Conversion literally means turning with Jesus. When he turns to the right, we turn with him. When he turns to the Father, we turn with him. When he turns to his mother, so do we. When he turns to our neighbor, we follow him across the road. When he sets his face firmly on Calvary, we walk with him along that way of the Cross. There are two types of people with two different standard reactions to Jesus’ command. Some people are in Matthew’s circumstance, where it’s obvious to them and everyone else that they have been going in the opposite direction of the Lord. These words come as nothing short of a revolution. Many will stubbornly continue to go their own way. Others, like St. Matthew today, will seize the summons as a once in a life time opportunity. We’ll return to him in a moment. The second main group of people hear Jesus’ words, “follow me!” as nothing revolutionary at all. They think that, even if they might have some diversions here and there, from time to time, they “basically” follow the Lord. They can claim, for example, that they’re devout Christians and yet use their high offices to expand the slaughter of the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters in the womb, or turn hardened hearts to Jesus’ brothers and sisters at the border.  They assert they follow Jesus but don’t really make time for him each day in prayer or come to be with him and receive him worthily in the Holy Eucharist. They say they follow him but they think he’s going the wrong way on various issue controversial to our woke age, like his teachings on sexual morality, or his choice to call only men as his apostles despite his exaltation of his mother and many other women, or his affirmation of loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, and forgiving seventy times seven times. This latter group is somewhat like St. Peter after Jesus had revealed Peter’s vocation to be the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church. When Jesus announced for the first time that he would be betrayed, tortured and crucified, Peter said, “No such thing will ever happen to you, Lord!,” and Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do.” After having changed his name from Simon to Peter, Jesus changed it again to Satan, because, like Satan in the desert, Peter was trying to lead Jesus, not follow him. He was thinking according to worldly logic, not divine. He was not interested in the Lord’s teaching him how to walk in the truth, but in his own teaching the Lord the way things should go. And many are in this category, where they believe they’re following the Lord — and, like Peter, they’ve made various big choices to follow him — but they don’t follow him yet fully. They still want sometimes to be in charge of the relationship. Even after the Resurrection, when St. Peter was asking Jesus what would happen to St. John, Jesus simply said to Peter, basically, “Peter, mind your own business. Stay focused. Your job is to follow me!”
• So whether we’re in the first category, that of Matthew, who needs to turn around almost 180 degrees to follow Jesus, or whether we’re in the second, that of Peter, who may be blind as to how much he needs to change to think as God thinks, to learn his ways and walk in them, Jesus meets us all today and renews his powerful, life-changing invitation, “Follow me!” He makes that appeal insistently during the Lenten season.  To convert does not mean just making minor course corrections in our life like cleaning up our speech, being more patient with the family member or work colleague who drives us crazy, giving up a bad habit like an addiction to the internet or social media. Conversion goes much deeper than that. Jesus’ call to us three days ago as ashes were being imposed, “Repent and believe in the Gospel,” is much more profound. The Greek word to convert — metanoete — means to turn around head around, to rethink, to question the path we’re on, to make a choice to try to think as God thinks and live by his ways, consciously choosing not to live everyone else lives, to think as everyone else thinks, to prioritize what everyone else finds important. To convert means ultimately to seek to adopt Christ’s own life as our own, to enter into a deep friendship with him, to die to the old Adam in us so that we can share, full-time, the New Adam’s risen life.
• We see the beauty of this process and gift of conversion in the life of St. Matthew. He was a despised tax collector who used to extort money from his own people to give it to the occupying Romans. The way the Roman tax system worked was that the Romans needed to get a set fee from a given territory; everything the tax collectors got beyond that was theirs to keep. Because of this system, many tax collectors, filled with greed, would begin greedily to rip off their own people with the help of the Roman army. They were like modern mafia dons who extort neighborhood small businesses and even families to pay “protection fees” lest an “accident” happen to their businesses or loved ones. For Jesus to go after Matthew at his customs post then would be as dramatic as his going into the Playboy Mansion and calling Hugh Hefner from his vixens, or entering into Al Capone’s speakeasy and calling him from his booze and hundred dollar bills. But Jesus desires mercy and he came to call sinners to repentance and he was going to show that by going after one of the most notorious sinners of his day. By this point, because of all the miracles Jesus had been working in Capernaum, Matthew must have heard about Jesus. Perhaps he had even stood at a distance to hear him speak or known someone who had been healed. But just like someone in prison would never expect a phone call from the Pope, so he never would have thought Jesus would want him to be among his associates, not to mention friends. Yet in today’s Gospel Jesus enters the place where he was working and says to him, “Follow me!”
• What was Matthew’s response? It was two-fold. First, he immediately left everything to follow Jesus. He left all his money on the table, all his ledgers, everything. That’s how powerful the summons of Jesus really is. Matthew responded far more quickly than the great prophets up until then, like Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or certainly Jonah. A few days ago, on Ash Wednesday, St. Paul implored the Christians in Corinth not to receive the grace of God’s gift of conversion in vain, and Matthew certainly didn’t!
• But his response didn’t end there. The second part of it was to celebrate his conversion. He called together his friends for a party with Jesus, presumably as well so that they could not only share in his unbelievable turnaround but experience a similar one. When the Scribes and the Pharisees saw Jesus not only in a notorious public sinner’s house but actually eating with him, they took scandal. There’s an aphorism that we become like the company we keep and the Pharisees and Scribes totally avoided notorious sinners lest they become like them. They asked the disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” They didn’t think that it was possible that Jesus could lift sinners up to God’s level; rather they were convinced that company would drag him down to theirs.  Jesus, overhearing them, said, “Those who are healthy do not need a physician, but the sick do. I have come not to call the righteous to repentance but sinners.”
• What Matthew intuitively grasped, and the Scribes and Pharisees obstinately didn’t, was that he was sick. He knew his sins were a terrible cancer of the soul and, even though he was surrounded by money, he was slowly dying unhappy and unfulfilled. When Jesus the doctor appeared and said he wanted to treat him, Matthew immediately responded and rejoiced. The problem for the Scribes and Pharisees is that they didn’t recognize they, too, were sick, that they, too, were sinners. One of their most self-injurious characteristics is that they didn’t recognize they needed Jesus because they didn’t need saving. Lent is a time in which the Divine Physician gives us the diagnosis of a death sentence — “remember that … unto dust you shall return” — but then tells us that he will cure us. But we must both recognize we’re sick and then follow his treatment regime. Will we do so or will we be like those patients who, for whatever reason, don’t go to the doctor and don’t follow his advice? He tells us at the end of today’s Gospel, “I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners, to repentance.” Therefore, if we’re called by him, we’re called, like Matthew, as sinners, and summoned to repentance. And our response to that call will involve receiving the gift of Jesus’ mercy in the Sacrament of Conversion that Jesus established on Easter Sunday night and sent Matthew and the other reconciled sinners among the apostles to bring to the world. Please take advantage of the opportunity you have today to receive the coveted vaccine of his mercy in the Sacrament of Confession.
• During this Day of Recollection, we’re going to focus on three interrelated ways that Jesus is calling us to follow him. He said them to us in the Gospel on Ash Wednesday. The first is, “When you pray….” We will ponder how he seeks to lead us apart, like he did Matthew and the apostles, from the crowds to pray with him, as we are doing here today. The second is, “When you give alms,” as he desires us to go with him to care for those who are in need. In anticipation of Jesus’ own actions, Isaiah tells us in the first reading that we must, among other things, bestow bread on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted, remove oppression, false accusation and malicious speech — all of which are rampant today — from our midst, repair the breaches that have been made in society, and restore the ruined homesteads and broken families. Third he tells us, “When you fast,” and leads us into the desert of Lent for 40 days, where, apart from distractions, we can learn how to hunger for what he hungers.
• The Divine Physician today comes with his healing power. He comes to liberate us. Today he has another meal with sinners, not in Matthew’s house, but in his own. And he awesomely has invited us. Let us beg him for the grace to grasp that we are sinners who desperately need him each day to heal us. And let us, through the intercession of St. Matthew, respond to that help to leave our old habits, our old “customs” on the table, and immediately get up to follow him wherever he leads so that, having learned from him his way, we may walk in his truth all the way to the eternal banquet with Matthew and all the saints!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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