Christian Foolish Enough in Faith to Become Genuinely Wise, 22nd Thursday (II), September 3, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Church
September 3, 2020
1 Cor 3:18-23, Ps 24, Lk 5:1-11

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s first reading, St. Paul tells the Corinthians and us, “If anyone among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool, so as to become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God.” We see an illustration of how God’s wisdom turns human wisdom upside down in today’s Gospel. After having borrowed Peter’s boat as a floating pulpit to preach to the crowds, Jesus tells Peter to take his boat and put out into the deep water, lowering his nets for a catch. Peter had already worked all night and caught nothing. He wasn’t just tired but discouraged. The command of the Lord was absurd to anyone experienced in fishing on the Sea of Galilee, where people caught fish in shallow water at night time, not deep water in daylight. It would be as if a fisherman had told Jesus, a carpenter, to drive in nails by holding the head of the hammer and striking with the handle. Peter, however, at the Lord’s word, put out into the deep and caught the biggest catch of his life. The wisdom of this world is indeed foolishness in the God-man’s eyes! That trust in the Lord that led Peter to put out into the deep was meant by the Lord to teach him and Andrew, James and John, about the life of faith and the work of evangelization: even when it seems something “won’t work,” God can bring extraordinary results.
• We see this truth contrasting God’s wisdom versus worldly wisdom throughout this scene and throughout salvation history. Worldly wisdom would choose a good man rather than one whose first words were “depart from me for I am a sinner,” a rabbi rather than a fisherman, a nobleman rather than someone most considered a nobody. As St. Paul told us on Saturday, however, “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise.”
• If we wish, like Peter, to be Jesus’ followers, we need to learn to trust in his wisdom far more than the world’s. We need to learn how to become a fool for and with him. To the Jews, as St. Paul described last Friday, the Cross is a scandal, to the Greek’s it’s folly, but to those with faith, to those who are fools full of God’s wisdom, it’s the “power and the wisdom of God.” It’s craziness to have Jesus’ version of talent recruitment, choosing the weak and ignobly born ignoramuses to shame the strong and worldly wise nobles of the world, but that’s precisely what God did. Perhaps most strikingly, to worldly wisdom the beatitudes are farcical. To be happy, worldly wisdom says we need to be rich, whereas Jesus’ wisdom says we need to be poor in spirit; worldly wisdom says we need to be strong and powerful, Jesus’ wisdom says we need to be meek and peacemaking; worldly wisdom says we need to have all our desires satiated,  whereas Jesus’ wisdom says we must starve for holiness; worldly wisdom says we need to give our libido free rein, whereas Jesus says we need to be pure in heart; and worldly wisdom says we need to be popular and liked by everyone, whereas Jesus’ wisdom says we need to be willing to be persecuted and reviled because of him.
• The question for us is whether we’re wise according to God’s wisdom or the world’s. Many consider themselves wise in this age and judge the wisdom of God by those standards rather than the other way around. They look at the world through the lens of politics and try to box everything in the Church into conversatives versus liberals. They are beholden to psychology and evaluate the entire spiritual life as a think of the psyche instead of the Spirit. They have a strong notion of the philosophy of history and look at everything as if it’s history repeating itself and as if God can’t do anything novel. They’re empiricists and don’t think anything in the faith is real unless it can be measured scientifically. Or they’re relativists thinking that there’s no such thing as truth and hence undermine any and all moral norms. When we start from any of these world views, it hinders our progression in faith, which requires our being “fools for Christ” with regard to faith.
• St. Paul applies the whole discussion to the “jealousy and rivalry” that was reigning among the Corinthians. He suggested that worldly wisdom implied that they should align themselves with their earthly heroes in the transmission of the faith like people become partisans of political candidates, sports teams, favorite musicians and everything else. Paul turns that wisdom upside down, saying that it’s not the Corinthians who belong to  Paul, Apollos or Cephas but rather the other way around, that all three of those apostles belong to them and are at their and God’s service — and not only do they have these great apostolic missionaries at their service, but the world, life, death, the present and the future all belong to them as well, and they to Christ and Christ to God. But you need to be a fool to Christ (1 Cor 4:10) to grasp this!
• Today we celebrate the feast of one of the greatest saints in history and in my opinion, the greatest Pope.  He was a man full of the Lord’s wisdom, rather than the world’s, and he dedicated his life to trying to bring that wisdom to the world through the Church in so many innovative ways. He was prefect (mayor) of Rome when he was just 30 and did a tremendous job in trying to rebuild the buildings and morale of Rome after four brutal sackings within a short period of time. He recognized, however, that God was calling him to something different and more. In an act considered foolish by so many who look at earthly power as the goal of life, he left the civic power behind in order to become a monk, founding the first Benedictine monastery in Rome in his house on the Coelian Hill across from the Colosseum. There he grew in prayer, holiness and divine wisdom. Eventually, however, the Pope asked him to leave the Monastery and go as his apocrisarius, his legate, to the emperor in Constantinople. It would have been easy for him to beg off returning to public life, but he grasped that God was asking him to serve him in this new way, to put out into the deep as a diplomat sent to a place where he didn’t speak Greek, and so he took the commission. He wisely brought along some of his monks with him so that he could keep up the good habits of prayer and divine wisdom that he had established and would need even more among all the intrigues at the imperial court. Eventually he was allowed to return to Rome, where he and his monks would regularly sacrifice themselves to care for those who were suffering from the plague and other illnesses in the city. Eventually, after the death of Pope Pelagius II, Gregory was elected his successor. He tried to refuse the office he didn’t want, but after it became clear it was God’s will, he accepted, and was ordained a priest and a bishop (he had already been ordained one of the seven deacons of Rome while still in the monastery). Over the course of his 15 years, he set an example of spiritual wisdom and sought to train others in the same discipline. He wrote Dialogues for common folks, pastoral letters for priests, and a Commentary on Job for monks precisely so that they might be filled with the knowledge of God and his wisdom. He wrote a “Pastoral Rule” for all bishops, one that is still very much consulted today, in which he talked about the bishop’s duties to preach and to instill discipline, both of which are essential to the formation of Christians in wisdom. He reformed the liturgy, both with regard to its music (Gregorian Chant), with regard to the need for mercy (by introducing the three cycles of three Kyries at the beginning of Mass), the focus on God’s grace by inserting the “Hanc igitur” in the Eucharistic Prayer, and even the dependence on God the Father by moving the place of the Our Father in the liturgy. Because he knew lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi, that the way we pray forms the way we believe that in turn forms the way we live, he wanted the Mass to be precisely that means by which we’re filled with God and his light. He confronted, rather than ducked, problems in society and in the Church. He had special care for the poor, orphans and widows. He prayed and intervened to help out during terrible plagues that would come from the overflowing, polluted Tiber. He sent his monks into the deep as fishers of men, to places near and far, evangelizing and assisting illiterate kings in the government of their feudal empires. He became truly what he chose as his papal title, a servant of the servants of God (servus servorum Dei). He belonged to the people as their servant, just as Paul did, just as Christ did. Gregory did so much to help people live like Christian fools for Christ and seek to follow in the apostolic way of sanctity. He helped others to live this way precisely by helping unite them to Christ who did all of these “foolish” things.
• The most striking example of the difference between worldly wisdom and God’s wisdom is with regard to the Eucharist. To the worldly wise, it’s absolutely foolish to believe that what starts out as bread and wine, after another human being says a few words, turns into God while maintaining all its appearances; it changes into the same Jesus Christ through whom all things were made, who was incarnate of the Virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was killed on the Cross, rose on the third day and now sits at the Father’s eternal right. It’s even more foolish to make this “bread” and “wine” the source and summit of our entire life, arranging our schedules to come here to receive him each day. But for those of us who are true fools for Christ, we recognize that there’s no more fitting place for us to be. And it’s from here that the Lord sends us out, like he would send Peter, Andrew, James and John, to be fishers of other fools.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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