Considering Our Ways and Giving 1,000 Lives For the Lord, 25th Thursday (I), September 28, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Lawrence Ruiz and his Companions
September 28, 2023
Hg 1:1-8, Ps 149, Lk 9:7-9

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• We are now in the midst of three weeks of focus in the first reading on the post-exilic writings during which the Church has us ponder, if there are no proper feasts, on three days of Ezra, two days of Haggai, three days of Zechariah, two days of Nehemiah, two days of Baruch, three days of Jonah, one day of Malachi and two days of Joel.  These post-exilic writings focus essentially on two things: first, the rebuilding of the temple and, second, the way of holiness so that there is never again an exile from God. Because tomorrow is the feast of St. Michael the Archangel and will have a proper reading for the Gospel, today is the only day in two years we will listen liturgically to Haggai. So let’s listen well to the message God wants us to get through him as we link it to Jesus’ resurrection (the True Temple), to the temple that is the Church, and to the temple that is meant to be each of us together with Jesus.
• In today’s passage from Haggai, we see how the Lord sent the prophet to wake up the people of God whom the Lord had freed from exile. It was happening during the time of King Darius, the son of Cyrus. As we’ve seen over the last three days from the Book of Ezra, Cyrus had allowed the Jews to return and helped them to start rebuilding the Temple and Darius refunded all of their sacrifices. But the Jews did not finish the job. They built something quickly and temporary on the Temple Mount, but then started to prioritize their own affairs. They were saying, “The time has not yet come to rebuild the House of the Lord.” They were delaying the things of God for their own affairs, while constructing their own luxurious paneled houses. Haggai, speaking for the Lord said, “Is it time for you to dwell in your own paneled houses, while this house [of God] lies in ruins?” He then went on to say that they would never find fulfillment in sowing, eating, drinking, clothing, or money making. The forceful appeal of the Lord was “Consider your ways!” He told them to go get timber and begin to build the house of the Lord “that I may take pleasure in it and receive my glory.” That might seem like an egocentric statement, but it’s not. The Lord takes pleasure in loving us — we prayed in the Psalm, “The Lord takes delight in his people” — and his glory is, as St. Ireneus would say at the end of the second century, “man fully alive” through the vision of God. God wanted a house so that we would fittingly worship him because it is through such worship that he builds us into a holy temple. It starts, however, with proper zeal. Before the first temple was built, we saw an opposite attitude to that of the post-exilic Jews in King David, who was eaten alive by the fact that he was living in a palace while the ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence, was in a tent. He wanted to build a fitting temple, but God, through the prophet Nathan, replied that He instead would build a temple for David. That temple was obviously David’s own descendent according to the flesh and God’s own Son, Jesus. We’re all called, however, to have the same zeal to build a house of the Lord because that’s the way the Lord in fact makes us his temple. In the Gospel, Herod was curious to meet Jesus, but Jesus will never be able to build a temple for him to dwell within us by curiosity. There needs to be a true relationship, a union, with the Lord, a hunger for mutual indwelling, something that Herod never had.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of the first Filipino saint, St. Lawrence Ruiz, and his companion martyrs, who died in 1637. St. Lawrence is someone who responded to God’s call to consider his ways and change. Married with three kids and a very good calligrapher, he may have murdered a man in the Philippines; regardless, he was accused of murder and was fleeing the charges and the death penalty that came with them. He got on a boat with Dominican priests, a Japanese priest and a leper and landed in Japan. Soon thereafter he was arrested during the ferocious Tokugowa shogunate. The Japanese sadists went through their normal mind games with their prisoners trying to get them to apostatize and it seems that St. Lawrence asked the question whether his life would really be saved if he denied his faith. Regardless, he didn’t apostatize. And when they were about to torture him by putting weights around his neck and hanging him upside down by his heels over a pit with a cut behind his ear so that he would bleed to death over three days, he said, famously, “I am a Catholic and wholeheartedly do accept death for God; had I a thousand lives, all these to Him shall I offer.” He considered his ways and as his earthly dwelling a tent was being destroyed, he was gaining a new dwelling place, eternal, made by God (2 Cor 5:1).
• It is unlikely we will be asked to give our life for God today, especially through being tortured and hung upside down to die. But whether we have 1000 days, 100 years, or many lives to give, the question is: will we give them wholeheartedly for the Lord? Will we give our lives out of love for him through dying and living for others? Will we sow, eat, drink and clothe ourselves in the Gospel, the Eucharist, and the virtues of Christ? We have a chance to make such a self-offering at every Mass as, in exchange for the Lord’s giving his life for us — something he would do 1,000 times over, 1000 times more painfully, if he had to. We can offer our bodies and our lives as a holy and acceptable sacrifice, the only worship that makes sense (Rom 12:1). As we do so, considering our ways, we beg the Lord through St. Lawrence’s intercession, to have zeal for the Lord’s house consume us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
HG 1:1-8

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