Contentedly Religious and Poor in Spirit, 24th Friday (I), September 20, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Andrew Kim Taegon and Companions
September 20, 2019
1 Tim 6:2-12, Ps 49, Lk 8:1-3

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told us we need to make a choice between serving God and serving mammon, because we will either use mammon to serve God and try to use God to serve mammon. In today’s readings we see on display that fundamental contrast between the idolatry that is greed and poverty in spirit treasuring God’s kingdom.
• In the first reading, we see Mary Magdalene, Joanna and Susanna and the “many others” using their resources to care for Jesus and the Twelve. All they had they were dedicating to the spread of the kingdom. They “provided for them out of their resources,” which were far more than financial. They are models for us of spiritual maternity.   This was not a group of bored do-gooders who figured that these wandering 13 men would be lost without their feminine genius and maternal practicality. No, St. Luke tells us, that they were all “women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities.” Each of them had received from Jesus a physical healing, a spiritual healing, or probably both. And having received much, they loved much, and they wanted to give Jesus and his mission all the love, the time and the material goods they could. All of their money, like their hearts, was consecrated to God.
• In the first reading we see St. Paul warning St. Timothy about the false prophets, theological sophists, who use “religion to be a means of gain.” They were trying to fulfill their three-fold concupiscence off of religion, getting famous, being lauded, becoming rich, and learning how to control people. The same temptation remains today of faking faith to profit in some material way. St. Paul says, in a shocking synthesis, that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Acquisitiveness, the worship of the ancient golden calf, is a spiritual cancer that metastasizes into all parts of life and leads, St. Paul describes, to conceit, arguments, verbal disputes, envy, rivalry, insults, evil suspicions,and mutual friction. So much harm comes when we’re trying to gain money. We use others. We hurt others. We throw them away when they’re not of use to us. When we place our treasure in mammon, we begin not to be satisfied with what we have, because there’s always someone with more mammon and we begin to think we never have enough, and in the pursuit of more, we destroy often our relationships with others, with the environment, with ourselves, and with God. The Psalm focuses on this, saying about money lovers that rather than trusting in and praising God, “They trust in their wealth; the abundance of their riches is their boast,” and reminds us that when someone dies, “his wealth shall not follow him down.” St. Paul describes another way, which he sums up as “religion with contentment.” It’s a way of living by faith-filled gratitude, content with what we have rather than obsessed about what we don’t have, happy with what God has provided rather than desirous of mammon, a lifestyle that doesn’t bring us down but lifts us toward God. As St. Paul wisely reminds us, “We brought nothing into the world, just as we shall not be able to take anything out of it. If we have food and clothing, we shall be content with that.” That faithful spirit of thanksgiving allows one to “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness.” It helps to “compete well for the faith” and to “lay hold of eternal life,” because, like the letter to the Hebrews says about the first Christians, we permit ourselves to be stripped of earthly possessions because we have a far greater one! This is what only those who are poor in spirit, those who place their treasure in God, know.
• We see this truth lived with remarkable poignancy in the lives of the Korean martyrs. Pope Benedict wrote in his encyclical on Christian hope (Spe Salvi) that the first Christians and the martyrs were able to be plundered of their property, their goods, their livelihoods and even their life because they had a “better and abiding possession” (Heb 10:34). So much was “taken away from Christians in the course of persecution,” he said, but they “stood firm, though, because they considered this material substance to be of little account. They could abandon it because they had found a better ‘basis’ for their existence—a basis that abides, that no one can take away. … Faith gives life a new basis, a new foundation on which we can stand, one that relativizes the habitual foundation, the reliability of material income. A new freedom is created with regard to this habitual foundation of life, which only appears to be capable of providing support, although this is obviously not to deny its normal meaning. This new freedom, the awareness of the new ‘substance’ which we have been given, is revealed not only in martyrdom, in which people … by their death, renew the world.” We saw this truth recapitulated in the Korean martyrs. In the late 1700s, some educated Korean laypeople found some texts from the Jesuit priests who were martyred missionaries in China. Because Korea was so xenophobic, it didn’t allow any foreigners in the country, including missionaries. But these lay people, searching for the truth, found that the Truth had a name. They baptized each other and tried to live the faith as best they could. When finally a missionary priest was smuggled in 12 years later, he found that there were already 4,000 Catholics present. And these Catholics knew how to behave so well that they were willing to suffer for the faith, to pick up their cross daily and even die on it. There were six ferocious anti-Christian persecution waves — in 1791, 1801, 1827, 1839, 1846, and 1866 — but none of them had the purpose that the Korean authorities wanted, of intimidating those who remained out of the practice of the faith. They continued to persevere. Today we celebrate St. Andrew Kim Taegon, who was the first Korean priest. At the age of 15, he was identified by a smuggled French missionary priest as someone with a priestly vocation, and he was sent to walk by foot over 1000 miles to study in a seminary in Macão. While he was away, his father, a convert, was tortured and martyred in the 1839 persecution. Fr. Andrew returned in order to spread  the faith and would die in the persecution of 1846. While he was in prison awaiting execution, he wrote a letter to his fellow Korean Catholics to strengthen them in the faith and in the recognition of the treasure they have. He asked what good would their baptism be “if we are Christians in name alone and not in fact? We would have come into the world for nothing, we would have entered the Church for nothing, and we would have betrayed even God and his grace. It would be better never to have been born than to receive the grace of God and then to sin against him” by betraying the faith under duress. He called them to model their life on Christ’s own choices. “Dearest brothers and sisters,” he wrote, “when he was in the world, the Lord Jesus bore countless sorrows and by his own passion and death founded his Church; now he gives it increase through the sufferings of his faithful. … As the Scriptures say, God numbers the very hairs of our head and in his all-embracing providence he has care over us all. Persecution, therefore, can only be regarded as the command of the Lord or as a prize he gives or as a punishment he permits. Hold fast, then, to the will of God and with all your heart fight the good fight under the leadership of Jesus; conquer again the diabolical power of this world that Christ has already vanquished.” This is the example that we asked God at the beginning of Mass today to help us profit from always! In 2015, when Pope Francis went to Korea to beatify 123 of the martyrs of Korea, he spoke about how they chose God over mammon. “Soon after the first seeds of faith were planted in this land,” he said, “the martyrs and the Christian community had to choose between following Jesus or the world. They had heard the Lord’s warning that the world would hate them because of him (Jn 17:14); they knew the cost of discipleship. … They were willing to make great sacrifices and let themselves be stripped of whatever kept them from Christ – possessions and land, prestige and honor – for they knew that Christ alone was their true treasure.” He went on to apply the example of their witness to our own situation: “So often we today can find our faith challenged by the world, and in countless ways we are asked to compromise our faith, to water down the radical demands of the Gospel and to conform to the spirit of this age. Yet the martyrs call out to us to put Christ first and to see all else in this world in relation to him and his eternal Kingdom. They challenge us to think about what, if anything, we ourselves would be willing to die for.” Are we willing to die for him who died out of love for us? Are we willing to serve him or are we enslaved to things that keep us from him? Are we conformed to the Holy Spirit or to the spirit of this age?
• Today at Mass we receive the Gift that made them strong in trial, the Pearl of great price worth selling everything else to obtain. This is the source of religious contentment. He is the one for whom Mary Magdalene, Susanna, Joanna cared, and who strengthens us to go out to care for him in the disguise of others, with all the resources he places within us and at our disposal.

The readings for today’s Mass were: