Choosing Life through Clinging to Christ along the Way of the Cross, Thursday after Ash Wednesday, March 7, 2019

Father Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday after Ash Wednesday
Memorial of SS. Perpetua and Felicity
March 7, 2019
Dt 30:15-20, Ps 1, Lk 9:22-25

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Throughout Lent, we focus first and foremost on God’s desire to save us and to recognize, as we heard yesterday with St. Paul, that “now is the day of salvation,” this Lent, today is the time to respond. “God so loved the world,” St. John tells us in his most famous passage, “that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God does not want us to perish. He didn’t even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, so that we might not perish but have life to the full. But God’s will is not enough, because he willed to make us free. We need to respond to that offer.  Todays’ readings, on our second day in the pilgrimage of Lent, are about the choices we are called to make in response to that offer and to the grace God gives us that St. Paul appealed yesterday that we wouldn’t take in vain. The choice is framed by Moses in today’s first reading. The Israelites were drawing toward the end of their 40 year pilgrimage in the desert. Moses had led the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, accompanied them through the desert for four decades and now they were on the opposite side of the Jordan from the long-awaited Holy Land. God had told Moses that he would die before crossing, so Moses in today’s first reading, was giving as a sort of last will and testament, a summary of what God had done for them and taught them. As the long experience of their time in the desert had taught them, however, God’s wondrous actions were not enough. The ten plagues weren’t enough. Their passing through the Red Sea on dry land wasn’t enough. The manna from heaven, the daily quails, the water from the rock the theophanies associated with giving the Ten Commandments were not enough. None was sufficient to keep many of the Jews faithful. Many of them complained that they should have remained in Egypt, others made a golden calf, even Aaron the high priest fell into the clutches of a wavering faith. So Moses want to urge them to choose and choose wisely. He framed the decision facing them as it truly was, a decision of life and death: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.” He reminded them that the choice for God is a life-giving choice, a choice full of blessing; and that the choice against God, even if it might seem at first a choice that leads to life and happiness, is actually fatal. This is not something, of course, that they recognized. Throughout the desert they complained that they had left their fleshpots in Egypt behind just to perish in the desert by following the Lord. Along the way, many times they thought that the choice for God was a choice for death. But it was a choice for life. And those who sought the counterfeit path of turning their hearts away from God, of refusing to listen, of adoring and serving other gods, never made it out of the desert.
• That’s the choice that faces all of us in Lent as we enter not into a 40 year but 40 day journey. Lent historically and actually is a catechumenate, an ecclesial preparation for baptism at the Easter Vigil or, for those of us who have already been baptized, a 40 day renewal of the meaning of our baptism. Like the Jews, we have been set free from the slavery of sin and death, passing through the waters of baptism like the Jews passed through the Red Sea. We are presently in the desert with Jesus for these 40 days looking with him toward the eternal promised land that is anticipated in the celebration of Easter. It’s a time for us to focus on the graces of our liberation and the choice God has given to our freedom between life-giving fidelity through “loving him, walking in his ways and keeping his commandments,” through “heeding his voice and holding fast to him” or the path that leads to death under the seduction of bringing life.
• The contrast between these two paths is highlighted in today’s Psalm, which is the first of all the Psalms and the one that in a sense orients the praying of every psalm. It describes the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night” as like a “tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” He receives life and is able to give life from his contact with the “living water” of God. On the hand, the “wicked” man, the one follows “the counsel of the wicked, … walks in the company of way of sinners, [and] sits in the company of the insolent” as “like the chaff that the wind drives away.” There are no roots, no substance, no life. The Psalm says, “the way of the wicked vanishes.” That’s the choice facing us as we begin Lent. Tahe question comes to us: Isn’t this choice a no-brainer? Who, after all, would consciously choose death over life? It’s like the choice between eating filet mignon or tree bark. But in the Gospel we see why the choice, though conceptually simple, is morally challenging.
• But before we get there we should stop to reflect on St. John Paul II’s insights about this passage within the context of the Gospel of Life that you, Sisters, live, announce to the world and help others to live. In Evangelium Vitae 28, St. John Paul says, that we need to be “fully aware that we are facing an enormous and dramatic clash between good and evil, death and life, the ‘culture of death’ and the ‘culture of life.’ We find ourselves not only ‘faced with’ but necessarily ‘in the midst of’ this conflict: we are all involved and we all share in it, with the inescapable responsibility of choosing to be unconditionally pro-life. For us too Moses’ invitation rings out loud and clear: ‘See, I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. … I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live’ (Dt 30:15, 19). This invitation is very appropriate for us who are called day by day to the duty of choosing between the ‘culture of life’ and the ‘culture of death.’ But,” St. John Paul II emphasizes, “the call of Deuteronomy goes even deeper, for it urges us to make a choice which is properly religious and moral. It is a question of giving our own existence a basic orientation and living the law of the Lord faithfully and consistently: ‘If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live … therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice, and cleaving to him; for that means life to you and length of days’ (30:16,19-20).” Choosing life must become a whole way of life. And then St. John Paul II finishes by reminding us that that choice of life is ultimately a choice of a Person who is the Resurrection and the Life: “The unconditional choice for life reaches its full religious and moral meaning when it flows from, is formed by and nourished by faith in Christ. Nothing helps us so much to face positively the conflict between death and life in which we are engaged as faith in the Son of God who became man and dwelt among men so ‘that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (Jn 10:10). It is a matter of faith in the Risen Lord, who has conquered death; faith in the blood of Christ ‘that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel’ (Heb 12:24).”
• So with that choice of a person in the desert of Lent, we turn with faith to the Gospel, where Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life incarnate, tells us that the path of life is paradoxically a path of self-denial. Just as he was going to “suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes and be killed” before being raised to unending life on the third day, so “if anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
 and take up his cross daily and follow me.
” He gets even more explicit about that paradox: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
 but whoever loses his life for my sake will save.” In order to obtain life, we need to die to ourselves. We need to lose our life for the sake of God and the Gospel in order to retain it. In the choice between self-denial and self-affirmation, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it really is the former. In the path between the Cross and the comfy recliner, we think the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. In the path between following Christ to Calvary and going to Club Med, we think that the latter is the path of life, but it is the former. The path of life doesn’t seem to be life-giving and the path of death on the contrary does. But that’s what we have to grasp. There’s a choice between forfeiting oneself to gain the whole world or forfeiting the whole world to gain oneself.
• This is why living a good and holy Lent is so important. Lent is meant to help us to make the choice for real life, to help us to walk in the footsteps of Christ, to plant ourselves in his living water in the midst of the desert so that we may grow to eternity. But we need to make the full and conscious choice for life, which requires the full and conscious choice to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Christ. The three Lenten practices, when we choose to live them generously, are all geared to do this. All three teach us self-denial: fasting denies the dominion of our lower appetites, almsgiving denies our selfishness, prayer denies our egocentrism. Each, in a sense, is a Cross that leads to our self-death, because at times giving into our cravings, spending what we have on ourselves, and using our time for our own pursuits seems the path of life but they’re not. And each helps us to follow Christ in his own fasting, giving of himself to the point of death, and prayer. But for these to occur, we really must choose bold resolutions that can help facilitate these spiritual fruits, rather than soft ones that even if we keep them won’t really lead to the crucifixion to the worldliness that is necessary in order to experience the life that Jesus wants to give.
• Today we have two great saints who chose to follow Jesus along the way of the Cross in this way, who entered into Christ’s death so that they might rise with him, who became trees that gave fruit like the grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying. SS. Perpetua’s and Felicity’s stories are particularly relevant for the Sisters of Life, because they were both young mothers, martyred in the northern African city of Carthage. But they were spiritual mothers, too, for the early Church and still for us today, breastfeeding us on their heroic faith. The account of their martyrdom is one of the great hagiological treasures of the early Church, because Perpetua wrote of their sufferings in detail the day before their death, and eyewitness accounts of their martyrdom were immediately spread around the early Church. These accounts were so highly regarded by the early Christians that St. Augustine needed to remind them that they should not be treated during Mass with the same reverence as the readings from Sacred Scriptures. Perpetua was a 22 year-old newlywed and mother of a small child and Felicity was a young married slave pregnant with her first child. They were arrested as catechumens and baptized in prison awaiting execution. They both knew that to profess Christianity was a “crime” punishable by death, but they were undeterred. Perpetua’s father, an old man and a pagan, tried all means imaginable to get his daughter to save her life by saying a prayer and making a small sacrifice to the pagan gods. He first begged her to have mercy on his white hair. As deeply as Perpetua loved her father, Perpetua replied, “I cannot call myself by any other name than what I am — a Christian.” She knew the faith was a treasure and she wasn’t going to be ashamed of it. She observed Jesus’ teaching that we must pick up our Cross and follow him, we must become like the grain of wheat and fall to the ground and die, we must “lose” our life in order to save it, we must acknowledge Christ before others and he will acknowledge us before the Heavenly Father. Her father in desperation tried violently to shake her, but he wasn’t able to shake her of her fidelity. Finally he brought her much-loved baby boy, saying, “Look upon your son who cannot live after you are gone,” and throwing himself at her feet begged her with tears not to bring such dishonor on their whole family. Perpetua wrote of how much she grieved for her father and family, but entrusted herself to God, whom she knew loved her family even more than she did and would take care of them should she die for love of him. When she was led before the procurator of the province, Hilarian, he tried all the same tactics of the threats of torture, of the pain of her father, of the ruin that would come to her son. But none worked. Upon his query, “Are you a Christian,” she answered resolutely, “Yes, I am.”  She was sentenced to be killed by wild boars, cows, leopards, bears and gladiators in a spectacle for bloodthirsty soldiers. Alongside her on the altar of the arena was Felicity. Because she was pregnant when captured, she feared that she might not be able to give the supreme witness of her love for Christ, because in general Romans did not execute women who were pregnant lest they execute a child for the “crime” of the mother. She asked some clandestine Christians, however, to pray for an early childbirth and her prayers were answered. She gave birth to a girl whom two of her fellow Christians adopted. As she was being led into the ampitheater, she was singing triumphal psalms and rejoicing that she had so quickly passed “from the midwife to the gladiator, to wash after the pangs of childbirth in a second baptism.” She was to be baptized in the same baptism of blood for which Jesus once longed and said, “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!” (Lk 12:50). She was renewing her baptismal commitments as she was heading to the fulfillment of baptism. She was, to quote St. Paul in his letter to the Romans, being baptized into Christ’s death so as to share in his resurrection. The procurator set a savage cow upon Felicity and Perpetua. The cow violently threw Perpetua down on her back, tearing her tunic and disheveling her hair. Perpetua got up and quickly pinned her hair, since letting one’s hair down in the ancient world was a universal sign of mourning. In the meantime, the cow had gone after Felicity and had brutally tossed her on the ground. Perpetua ran over to her and helped her up the cow ran away. They stood awaiting another attack, but none came. They turned to the crowd and shouted to the Christians among them, as great teachers and observers of the wondrous gift of faith, “Stand fast in the faith and love one another, and do not let our sufferings be a stumbling block to you.” They gave each other the kiss of peace, and since the cow wouldn’t kill them, the gladiators were dispatched to pierce them with a sword and send them to God. They then completed their earthly journey of faith soon after their baptism. Their faith came to perfection, as did their hope and love. And they gave the ultimate witness of keeping Christ’s words and teaching others to do the same.
• Today, with Moses, Jesus and the Church place before us, like he did before SS. Perpetual and Felicity, this choice between life and death, between a blessing and a curse, between the fruitful tree and the chaff. God so loves the world that he gives us his only Son continuously in our participation in his life-giving death and resurrection in the Eucharist, as we opt to lose our life with him so as to be saved by him forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: