Considering Our Ways and Prioritizing the Lord, 25th Thursday (I), September 23, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 25th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Saint Pio of Pietrelcina
September 23, 2021
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 in which the Church has us focus, 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. Today as we begin the first of two days listening to Haggai, we focus explicitly on the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem, which is meant to help us, of course, ponder Jesus’ resurrection (the True Temple), the temple that is the Church, and the temple that is meant to be each of us together with Jesus.
• The Lord sent Haggai to wake up the people of God whom he had freed from exile. It was during the time of King Darius, the son of Cyrus, who had allowed the Jews to return and helped them to start rebuilding the Temple. The Jews built something quick 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, and building their own luxurious interiorly decorated houses instead of the Temple. 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 that worship that he builds us into a holy temple. It starts, however, with zeal for him. We remember King David before the building of the first Temple. He 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 hadn’t come into the world to be an interesting accessory to our life. He had come to save us. He had come to dwell with us. And he 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 someone who truly became Jesus’ temple and instrument to build others on him who is the Cornerstone. When we think about Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, it’s easy to think about his more unique gifts, like the sacred stigmata with which he was marked for fifty years, his capacity to read souls, the gift of bilocation, the working of miracles, and the prediction of the future. But I always think back to what St. Paul VI said about him when he visited San Giovanni Rotondo after his death. He praised Padre Pio not for those inimitable qualities but for what all of us can emulate: “He said Mass humbly, … heard confessions from dawn to dusk … and was a man of prayer and suffering.” In each of these four ways the Lord was building him up and through him building up the Church. In each of these ways he was hearing what the Lord was asking and helping others to hear the same message.
• Through the Mass, he was built up and helped others to be built up. The early Christians taught “Ecclesia de Eucaristia,” that the Church lives by the Eucharist, that the Eucharist makes the Church. We see that truth displayed in St. Pio’s discipleship and apostolate. He was united to Christ and sought to bring people to him in the Mass. His daily Mass used to last a few hours, as he united himself to the Lord’s prayer from the Upper Room and from the Cross. Despite the crowds who attended each day, the local ecclesiastical authorities for a time banned him from celebrating the Mass publicly because they thought three hours was scandalously too long. I wonder whether the same well-meaning but myopic authorities would have tried to hurry Jesus, too, during the agonizingly slow 3-6 hours he took to offer his body and blood on the Cross! But St. Pio knew he was hearing Christ preach in the Mass and welcoming him into his hands on the altar, and he wasn’t going to place anything else ahead of entering into that moment. He sought to help everyone else learn from his reverence how the Mass should fill us with awe and lead us to glorify God.
• He sought to restore people to Christ and rebuild them into God’s dwelling place through his indefatigable work in the Confessional. From dawn until dusk, his immobile cross was the wooden box of the confessional, where he would mercifully seek to restore people’s souls to their baptismal beauty. To all who flocked to him, he held up the ideal of holiness, repeating to them: “Jesus has no interest outside of sanctifying your soul.” Confession is when the entire sacramental economy exists just for each of us, as we begin to experience what Saint Paul exclaimed to the Galatians, the “Christ died for me and gave his life up for me.” And by the time he gave to individual penitents, he showed each of them just how valuable they were to God.
• Padre Pio was a man of prayer who urged others to pray, founding prayer groups all over the world. Even after long grueling hours in the confessional, he would spend much of the night in prayer. He once described himself as “only a poor friar who prays” and encouraged lay people to come together to pray in small groups, tens of thousands of which still exist across the globe under his celestial patronage. “In books we seek God,” he said, but “in prayer we find him. Prayer is the key that opens God’s heart.”
• And he was a man of suffering who taught the world about the meaning of suffering together with the Lord’s sufferings. Paradoxically as we suffer, we can be built up more and more into Christ’s temple and help him rebuild his Church. The Church is built up, not destroyed, on Calvary. Through suffering, we can make up what is lacking in our own flesh of Christ’s sufferings for the sake of the Church. He was associated with the Lord’s sufferings on Calvary in a particular way through his stigmata. Two years before his priestly ordination, Padre Pio referred to this unique pathway of the Cross when he wrote, “In order to succeed in reaching our ultimate end we must follow the divine Head, who does not wish to lead the chosen soul on any way other than the one he followed; by that, I say, of abnegation and the Cross.” Christ does not call everyone to bear the stigmata, but he does call everyone to pick up his Cross daily and follow him along the way of the Cross. It is under the Cross, Padre Pio said, that “one learns to love.”  It is for that reason, he said, “Calvary is the hill of the saints.” Padre Pio was united to Christ on the Cross in more ways than by the stigmata. For decades he suffered from the suspicions and calumny of many in his order who were confused by and perhaps envious of his divine predilection. He bore all these hardships humbly, with religious obedience, as a “crucible of purification.” When St. John Paul II visited his tomb, he said, “The life and mission of Padre Pio prove that difficulties and sorrows, if accepted out of love, are transformed into a privileged way of holiness, which opens onto the horizons of a greater good, known only to the Lord.” Similarly, he helped others to share in it through his founding of the Casa del Sollievo della Sofferenza as a first-rate hospital to care for those who were seriously ill, with paralysis and so many other diseases. It continues that mission until this day.
• In all of these ways, St. Pio built up the Church and people as living stones erected on Christ the cornerstone. His life leads us to “consider our ways” and to prioritize the reconstruction project into God’s holy temple God desires for all of us. As we celebrate Mass today, we try to do so with St. Pio’s reverence, cooperation and zeal.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
HG 1:1-8

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