Christ’s Two-fold Mission of Obedience, Third Tuesday (I), January 27, 2015

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Tuesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Angela Merici
January 27, 2015
Heb 10:1-10, Ps 40, Mk 3:31-35

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• God the Son came into the world for a two-fold mission and we see both aspects of that mission in today’s readings. His mission was one of obedience. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that all Old Covenant sacrifices were not sufficient to “take away sins” or to “make perfect those who come to worship by the same sacrifices.” The sacrifices of “bulls and goats” and other animals are a sign of the need for forgiveness, “only a yearly remembrance of sins,” but they are not capable of taking them away and sanctifying the worshippers. That’s in total contrast to the sacrifice Jesus himself would make in the New and Eternal Covenant. Putting into Jesus’ mouth the words of Psalm 40 that constitute today’s Responsorial Psalm, the Letter to the Hebrews says, “For this reason, when he came into the world, he said: ‘Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you took no delight. Then I said, As is written of me in the scroll, Behold, I come to do your will, O God.'” There’s a Hebrew couplet here, in which the same thing is said twice with different words: the first point is that the sacrifices, burnt offerings, sin offerings of the Old Covenant neither were sought by God nor delighted him; the second is that God the Father prepared a body for Jesus, a body that would do God’s will.” That’s the sacrifice that God both desired and that delighted him. God wanted a sacrifice of obedience in the flesh to counteract the sins that needed to be expiated, because every sin, from Adam’s and Eve’s down to yours and mine, flows from disobedience, from a refusal to hear what God is saying and act on it.
• Jesus’ whole existence is a commentary on obedience. We see a glimpse of this in the Psalm today. If we pay close attention we realize that the way the Psalm is quoted in the Letter to the Hebrews is not exactly the way it appears in the Psalm. The reason for that is because the author of the Letter to the Hebrews was using the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament, written about 270 years before Christ by Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Hebrew version found in the Psalms. The Psalm says, “Sacrifice or oblation you wished not, but ears open to obedience you gave me. Burnt offerings or sin-offerings you sought not; then said I, ‘Behold I come.'” Instead of a “body you have prepared for me,” the Hebrew says, “ears open to obedience you gave me.” As I’ve stressed many times, in Hebrew the same word is used for “listen” and for “obey,” because conceptually the Jews believed if we’re really listening to God we’re going to obey him. In Latin, this same idea is kept in the word for obedience, ob-audire, which means to listen intensively. Jesus came into the world to obey. The entire body God prepared for him was meant to be an “ear” listening to God and acting on what was heard. This was the sacrifice God desired and delighted in. This is the sacrifice that can do far more than symbolize our need for forgiveness but actually expiate our sins of disobedience. Jesus’ whole life was a commentary on the words of the Psalm refrain we recited today, “Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will.”
• But that’s only the first half of the mission for which Jesus took on a body in order to give that body for us in atonement for our sins. He also came into the world to teach us how to obey in the same way, to listen not just with our ears but our whole body and soul and act on what God has asked. We see that in today’s Gospel. When people informed him that his mother and his relatives were outside wanting to see him but couldn’t get into the crowded house, Jesus used it as a teaching opportunity to describe the type of family he had come from heaven to earth to found: “Who are my mother and my brothers?,” he asked. Then turning to those seated around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” The family of faith Jesus was forming for his heavenly Father would be compromised of those who do the Father’s will, those who hear God’s word and act on it. This is obviously what constitutes the greatness of Mary, Jesus’ mother, someone who upon hearing from the Archangel Gabriel that God’s will was for her to conceive the Son of God in her womb, replied, “Let it be done to me according to your will.” Jesus wants us all to become his brothers and sisters morally by imitating him in obeying the Father. He taught us to pray to God as a family asking for the grace to become his true sons and daughters through obedience, by meaning the words Jesus put on our lips: “Our Father… thy will be done.” St. Paul’s words to the Romans here that are a fitting commentary on how God has likewise prepared a body for us so that we may do the Father’s will by obediently offering that body as a sacrifice in union with Jesus for our salvation and the salvation of others. St. Paul wrote, “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1). To form us to do that is the second reason why Jesus came. And he assists us to do that by uniting us to his body through Holy Communion so that all of us together make one pleasing and acceptable sacrifice to God.
• The saints are those who are distinguished by their obedience to God, by their behaving truly as Jesus’ spiritual siblings. Today we celebrate St. Angela Merici (1474-1540), the foundress of the Ursuline Sisters, the first and the oldest teaching order of religious sisters in the history of the Church. She was one who from an early age recognized that God was calling her to help form the poor girls of her hometown in the faith so that they might know what God is asking of them and lovingly put it into practice. So she surrounded herself by other young women, eventually forming the Congregation of St. Ursula. Her whole life can be summarized by the entrance antiphon today taken from Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount: “Whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 5:19). She was one who obeyed God and spent her life forming sisters and with them countless children how to obey God, too. And that’s why today we celebrate her as one of the greatest in God’s kingdom. We prayed at the beginning of Mass that she would help us like she has helped so many students to “hold fast to [God’s] teaching and express it in what we do.” That’s what Jesus came to form us to accomplish. Let us ask him for that grace as we obediently “do this in memory of” him and unite ourselves to his holy holocaust of “ears open to obedience” lived in a body totally given to obedience. Today we say with him, “Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: