Children of the Light Building Each Other Up on the Rock of God’s Word, 22nd Tuesday (I), September 5, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Teresa of Calcutta
September 5, 2023
1 Thes 5:1-6.9-11, Ps 27, Lk 4:31-37

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• This morning, the Church prayed during Lauds Psalm 43, the Psalm which is prayed at the foot of the altar at the beginning of Mass in the 1962 Roman Missal for the traditional Latin Mass. We pray, “O send forth your light and your truth; let them be my guide. Let them bring me to your holy mountain to the place where you dwell.” Today the readings and the feast are all about God’s light and truth, given to us as guide. In fact they point to Jesus Christ himself, who identified himself as the “Light of the World” and the “Way, the Truth and the Life.” Christ’s light and his truth are totally interconnected. We pray in the Psalms, “Your word [of Truth] is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path” (Ps 119:105). As we begin the new academic year at Columbia, it’s a time for us to grow in understanding and living the motto of this institution, now beginning its 270th year: “In lumine tuo, videbimus lumen,” “In your light, we will see light” (Ps 36:10). In the light of Christ’s truth, we are helped to see the light of every truth. Today’s readings reinforce this connection between light and truth and how through them the Lord seeks to guide us.
• In the Gospel, we see the luminescent power of the truth of the Word of God. After he was booted from the Synagogue in Nazareth where he grew up and almost killed, as we saw yesterday, Jesus went to Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, where Peter, Andrew, James and John all lived and worked. In Nazareth when he taught, St. Luke tells us all were initially “amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” but eventually doubts entered because they thought they knew him and those doubts quickly passed to rage and homicidal intentions.  Today in Capernaum, St. Luke says that those in the Synagogue “were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority” and later, after he had rebuked a demon, they were “all amazed and said to one another, ‘What is there about his word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits and they come out!” One of the most important aspects of our Christian response in faith is to be amazed and astonished at Jesus and at his words. This astonishment is an experience most of us, I hope, had when we first started living by faith, when our parents read to us from the Bible or from Bible stories and told us that the Bible contains the words of God himself; when we first began to pray and we recognized that God was listening to us with love; when we first discovered that the Eucharist is God and comes down from heaven on the altar, and dwells within the tabernacle, or loves us from the monstrance; when we first started to hear about Jesus’ great miracles, his multiplication of the loaves and fish, his walking on water, his casting out the devil like he does in today’s Gospel, his healing the sick, and his rising from the dead. This is an amazement and astonishment that likewise would have enveloped us at the time of our becoming aware of God’s calling us to follow him in a special way as his disciples on the road to holiness. But we are vulnerable and prone to losing that amazement and astonishment, when we allow the things of God to start to become routine. That’s why it’s so important for us to approach the Word of God with awe. Those in Capernaum were astonished at Jesus’ teaching, at the power of his word. St. Luke tells us that they were amazed because “he spoke with authority.” Most of their rabbis — as well as the Scribes, Pharisees and anyone who tried to teach the Jewish faith — would normally instruct by citing passages from the Hebrew Bible or from the oral tradition of the rabbis. They were constantly using footnotes to ground what they were saying. Jesus didn’t do that. He spoke as if he were the author — that’s what it means to speak with authority — because he was the author! We see this clearly in the way that he used parables. We see even more strikingly in how he preached the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with what they knew from the Mosaic law and then taking the teaching much further by declaring, “But I say to you.” Much like the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, when Jesus started to do this and their hearts began to burn, those in the Capernaum synagogue could sense that they were hearing the truth from one who knows and experience the exhilaration of seeing everything in a new light. Their minds were illuminated, their hearts ignited, and their lives changed. Christ’s truth is given to us not just to inform, but to transform. The incarnate Truth and as prayed in the Psalm “our Light and our Salvation,” doesn’t just teach us but train us so that in his light we might not just see light but become light, which is why in the Sermon on the Mount he tells us, emphatically, “You are the light of the World.”
• St. Paul picks up on this theme in today’s passage in his First Letter to the Thessalonians, when he reminds his fellow Christians that we are “children of the light and children of the day,” called not to be spiritually somnolent “as the rest,” but “alert and sober,” because God destined us “to gain salvation” and whether “awake or asleep” to “live together with him.” He calls us to live in the light even while we sleep! St. Paul urges his fellow disciples, therefore, to “encourage one another and build one another up.” The way we do that, fundamentally, is to help each other walk in the truth and live in the light of day. Jesus underlines this when he concluded the Sermon on the Mount, saying, “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and buffeted the house. But it did not collapse; it had been set solidly on rock” (Mt 7:24-25). We build each other up by helping each other hear, understand, live and pass on the Word of God.
• The saints are the ones who show us how to do this. Pope Benedict, in his beautiful exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, Verbum Domini, said that the saints are those who have “truly lived the word of God.” He names several saints who, upon hearing a passage of the Word of God, left their old way of life to do what the Lord was asking and became living commentaries on the word of God. He highlighted there how St. Teresa of Calcutta, whom the Church celebrates today on the 26th anniversary of her death and birth into eternal life, having heard the Lord’s words about whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters, we do to him, became “the missionary of God’s charity toward the poorest of the poor.” At 18, she left her home in Skopje (now North Macedonia) to become a Sister of Loreto. She trained in Ireland and then departed for India, where she taught in, and later became principal of, St. Mary’s School for Girls in Calcutta. Everything changed when Jesus revealed to her her “call within a call” on a train to Darjeeling on Sept. 10, 1946, where she was to make her annual retreat. Jesus invited her, “Come, by my light,” and asked her to go out with the light of his charity to care for the most abandoned, the poorest of the poor, and found a community of sisters to join her. The light of divine charity acting on the truth about the dignity of every person, created out of love by God and called to communion with him, inspired her. In Christ’s light she was able to see Christ in a distressing disguise in everyone she met, especially those most abandoned. Her life reveals the harmony between God’s truth and charity, and how the good deeds of charity shine before all to the glory of our Heavenly Father. The same Jesus who called her to “Come, be my light,” and called so many Missionaries of Charity to that same vocation to quench his infinite thirst for souls, calls us to be light in the same way, and, like saint Paul, to encourage and build up others to be children of the light and of the day.
• Saint Teresa was helped to be Jesus’ light and to see all things in his light by her time before him in the Holy Eucharist. When asked once in a trip to the United States about the joy that so radiated from her and her fellow Missionaries of Charity, she said it came from him who is our Light and Salvation. She said, “People ask, ‘Where do the sisters get the joy and the energy to do what they are doing? The Eucharist. … He says come to me.” She added, “The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time that you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus will deepen your union with Him and make your soul everlastingly more glorious and beautiful in heaven, and will help bring about an everlasting peace on earth.” When people would ask her for advice, she would often reply, “If I can give you any advice, I beg you to get closer to the Eucharist, to Jesus.” That was the source of her charity. She stated that the same Jesus who said “This is my Body,” and “This is the chalice of my Blood,” is the one who said, “I was sick and you cared for me.” As we receive Jesus, we are called like Mary to go in haste to bring his light, truth and love to those in need, just like Mary brought him to Saints Elizabeth, Zechariah and John the Baptist. And so today, on her feast, as we prepare to be astonished and amazed at the performative words of Jesus, “This is my Body,” and “This is the chalice of my Blood,” we give thanks for how he encourages and builds us up in the Mass and helps us guide us by his light and his truth. We don’t need a demon crying out in the midst of the Chapel to get us to take this message seriously. Today St. Teresa of Calcutta and all the saints cry out to help us recognize that the one we’re about to receive is the Holy One of God, and, astonished by his word, to build our whole life on Him and out of charity, like she did, to help others do so, too.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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