Christian Joy and Hunger, 22nd Friday (II), September 4, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart
September 4, 2020
1 Cor 4:1-5, Ps 37, Lk 5:33-39

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Four times a year at daily Mass — on the 2nd Monday of Ordinary Time, on the Friday after Ash Wednesday, on the 13th Saturday, and on the 22nd Friday — the Church has us focus on Jesus’ words about feasting and fasting and the parables of the patch and of the wineskins. It is one of the most common themes we have, because it’s central to our life as believers. Jesus, in them, teaches us about how he wishes us to relate to him. He has come to give us new life but the new life is not a minor revision to our “operating system,” to eliminate some “bugs” in the software; rather it’s a thorough revamp. At the time of Jesus there were three purposes for fasting: reparation for one’s sins and those of others; supplication, or prayer in the body, for some petition; and the desire for authentic self-mastery through the capacity to say “no” to one’s appetite for food and “yes” to some other purpose, developing a moral muscle that can help to say no to other temptations in order faithfully to say yes to God. These purposes flowing from Old Testament times were not bad or immoral. But Jesus today gives thoroughly new purpose. He says the purpose of fasting is to help us hunger for him in his absence. When he is “ripped away” — the same verb that is used for his arrest in Gethsemane — it is then that we fast. With regard to fasting, we need to do more than just copy what they did in previous times. We need more than a minor correction or  “patch.” We need a new heart. We need a new longing. We need a new hunger.
• Today the readings specify three “new” ways we need to relate to Christ.
• First, as “friends of the bridal chamber,” which is what is poorly translated as “wedding guests.” Because Jesus the Bridegroom is with us, pouring himself into our life, we must like groomsmen and bridesmaids be full of joy. That’s the first type of wine he wants to pour into us anew. A Christian must be defined by a sense of joy because of the presence of the Bridegroom. To be a Christian is, to some degree, always to be living out the joy we see on wedding days, as friends of the Bridal Chamber as Christ unites himself to others, and as Bride, as the Bridegroom unites himself to us. Sometimes as Christians we do better at fasting than we do at feasting in the Lord’s presence. We behave as if the Lord is absent more than we live in his presence, pondering in depth what it means. Today is an opportunity to receive new wineskins from Christ so that we might live out that spousal mystery.
• Second, St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians says we’re called to be servants of Christ. The word servant he uses is not diakonos or doulos, the common Greek words for “servant” or “slave.” It’s huperetes, which means the slave who mans the rudder in a big ship, whose doesn’t establish the direction (the captain does) but helps head in that direction. That’s what we are called to do for Christ, trying to point our lives and those of others in the direction Jesus sets, not steering off course. This is true in this life and toward the eternal port. Jesus wishes to renew us in that direction today.
• Third, St. Paul says that we’re likewise called to be stewards of the mysteries of God. The word steward is economos, which means the one who implements the law of the house, who administers. We’re entrusted with the mysteries of God, which first means all God’s graces, the new wine he seeks to pour into our fresh wineskins. It also means the sacraments, the effect of which he wants to see grow as we invest these gifts like a good business manager would money. But it also means the world and others, who are mysteries of God’s loving care. We seek to be good and faithful servants of all those gifts. And Jesus wants to pour into new wineskins the help we need to be so.
• And Jesus the Bridegroom does all of this here at Mass, where he welcomes us not merely as “sons of the wedding chamber,” but actually as bride and friend of the bridegroom, desiring to give us new wineskins to receive him who will help us to become truly joyful rudder men, faithfully caring for the gift of every one and thing God in his goodness has bestowed.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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