Continuous Jubilee through Conversion, 17th Saturday (I), July 31, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola
July 31, 2021
Lev 25:1.8-17, Ps 67, Mt 14:1-12

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Over the course of the last ten days we have pondered, through the use of Jesus’ seven different parables, what the Kingdom of God is and how we enter it. He taught us about good soil and the three types of insufficient soil: stubborn, superficial and dissipated by pleasure or fear. He taught us that the Kingdom comes into contact with both wheat and weeds, that the dragnet of the Church encompasses both “good” and “bad” fish. We saw these parables played out yesterday in Nazareth, where the stubbornness and superficiality of Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes against both seed and Sower in the synagogue is contrasted with the faith of Mary and Joseph. We see it play out again today in the forest of thorns in the flesh of Herod and the receptivity of St. John the Baptist, who had made God his treasure and pearl. It’s important for us to see the huge contrast between the slavery that bound Herod even though he was externally a free king with the power to determine life and death and the freedom of John the Baptist, even though he was arrested, bound, imprisoned and eventually martyred. And it’s important for us to see the contrast of Herod’s actions and those of God as seen in the practice of the Jubilee in today’s first reading and in Jesus’ words in the Nazarene Synagogue.
• King Herod was so enslaved by lust and ego. We see this in his not only cavorting with but stealing and marrying the wife of his half-brother Philip. The book of Leviticus had said clearly, “You shall not have intercourse with your brother’s wife, for that would be a disgrace to your brother” (Lev 18:16). Herod had gone to Rome to visit his brother and while there seduced his sister-in-law, persuaded her to leave his brother, divorced his own wife and married her. To make the incestuous matters worse, Herodias was Philip’s and Herod’s niece as well. For all these reasons it was not right, as John the Baptist said, for Herod to have Herodias as his wife. His lust led to the eclipse of his conscience. With a string of violent verbs, the evangelist tells us that Herod had John arrested, bound, and imprisoned. He wanted to kill him, St. Matthew tells us, but he feared the people. He was eaten alive by fear. Eventually Herod would kill John when his vindictive putative bride pimped her princess daughter to do a striptease before her step-father/uncle and all his drunken courtiers to seduce him into vowing to give her anything she wanted. And when she asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, Herod gave the command. And to the Aramaic tune of Happy Birthday to You, the soldiers brought in, instead of birthday cake, the Baptist’s severed head and presented it to this lustful, power-hungry, self-important little assassin. But while that day was a tragedy for Herod and all those participating in his Satanic liturgy where lust ruled instead of sacrificial love, where immoral oaths dominated over the truth, it was a triumph for John the Baptist: in essence, his spiritual birthday in which he was born into eternity and we believe leaped for joy again. John the Baptist was free to say the truth because he was free ultimately of the fear of death. When Herod hears of Jesus, eaten alive by fear, he thought he was John the Baptist, saying, “He has been raised from the dead,” the very words the angels will use at the tomb about Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus was certainly not John reincarnated or resurrected, but John would share in Jesus’ resurrection and he in essence was a precursor to Jesus as the Resurrection and the Life, just like he was in birth, in preaching, and in martyrdom.
• In contrast to Herod’s slavery to lust, we see in today’s first reading and in Jesus’ messianic mission God’s call to be free in order to love. God announces a Jubilee to be celebrated every fifty years. It would be a time in which people would be reconstituted. Slaves would be freed. People would return home. Debts would be forgiven. It would be a chance for a new beginning. There is a lot of scholarly discussion as to whether or how often this Biblical concept of the Jubilee was practiced during Old Testament times, but there is no doubt that when Jesus appeared in the Nazareth synagogue and began to proclaim the Prophet Isaiah’s messianic job description and give his one sentence homily that Isaiah’s words were fulfilled in him that he was proclaiming this Jubilee, this new beginning. St. Luke tells us that Jesus “unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.’ Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and … said to them, ‘Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing’” (Lk 4:16-21). That year acceptable to the Lord is the Jubilee Year with no last day. It was meant to be a time of liberation, of proclaiming liberty to captives and letting the oppressed go free. That’s what Jesus came to give us at a supernatural level and to help us to give others at a supernatural and natural level. Rather than the egocentric lust filled slavery to our flesh, Jesus was making possible for a theocentric love of God and others, sacrificing ourselves for others rather than sacrificing others for pleasure, and rather than offering others half our kingdom, seeking to conform everything we do to help others, with us, seize all of God’s kingdom.
• John the Baptist’s whole life was to announce that kingdom and to help us make straight the paths for the king to arrive. When Jesus himself took up the mantle, he proclaimed, “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand.” And then he hold us how to seize it: “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” We needed conversion so that we might live by faith, because those in the kingdom live by entrusting themselves wholeheartedly to the King. Conversion is ultimately not about eliminating bad habits — although that’s essential — but about the living the new life God gives, about literally “turning with” (“con-verting to”) the Lord in everything. This was the conversion that St. John the Baptist preached to the crowds and to Herod.
• Today we celebrate the feast of someone who shows us how to heed God’s message of conversion. It was 500 years ago, on May 20, 1521, that he began the arduous nine-month process of profound metanoia. Until he was 30, Iñigo López de Oñaz y Loyola, the future St. Ignatius of Loyola, vainly sought worldly treasure, mainly honor on the battlefield. But then, as a 30-year-old Basque soldier, he had his right leg shattered and left calf torn off by a cannonball during the Battle of Pamplona — with the projectile shot spiritually straight from Damascus. While he was convalescing, he tried without avail to get his hands on the epic tales of chivalry and romance common to the epoch. The only volumes to be found were a life of Christ and a book on the lives of the saints. In desperation he began to read them — and not only were his heart and the direction of his life changed, but also the history of the Church and the world. López was pierced by his own shallowness compared to the saints’ substance and roused by the courage of the martyrs in fighting the good fight on the battlefield that mattered most. In contrast to his vain pursuit of earthly honors, their seeking and seizing the most lasting and valuable treasure captivated him. After reading about Francis of Assisi and Dominic of Guzman, two 13^th-century mendicants who extravagantly gave up so much of what the world treasured in order to obtain a much more valuable fortune, and who formed religious families to help the whole world rediscover true riches, he asked one of the most important questions in history: “These men were of the same frame as I. Why, then, should I not do what they have done?” Why can’t I do what Francis of Assisi did? Why can’t I do what Dominic of Guzman did?” Led by their example and many graces, the one we now know as Saint Ignatius of Loyola made the commitment to serve the true King and to sacrifice everything to extend his kingdom.
• The transformation was arduous. Once he had recovered enough to journey, he traveled to Montserrat, where he laid down his sword before the famous statue of Our Lady, exchanged his expensive clothes for sackcloth, spent 11 months praying in a cave in Manresa, where he formulated what would eventually become his famous Spiritual Exercises, the most popular and influential retreat manual in history. He journeyed to the Holy Land where he intended to defend the holy places and the true faith, before the Franciscan superior sent him home lest because of his zealous provocations he be killed. To be of use to God, he discerned he needed an education. With extraordinary humility he went literally to grammar school in order to learn Latin with young boys, before heading to the Universities of Alcala, Salamanca and Paris. There his roommates were the future Saints Francis Xavier and Peter Favre and God through him set in motion the plan for the founding of the Jesuits.
• As we mark the quinquecentenary of his conversion, seeing and celebrating what God accomplished in his life, it’s important for us to raise the same question God inspired him to ask after reading the lives of the founders of the Orders of Friars Minor and of Preachers. Ignatius, after all, is of the same frame as we, with virtues, vices and 46 chromosomes. Without the help of cannonballs and orthopedic surgeons, why can’t we do, why shouldn’t we do, what he has done? This summons to saintly imitation does not mean that God is calling all of us to be Jesuits or found worldwide religious orders, any more than the light God gave Ignatius did not mean he was asking him to replicate all Saints Francis’ and Dominic’s choices and deeds. But God is indeed calling us to respond to the grace of conversion and holiness just like the intrepid Basque did a half millennium ago. God is calling us to heed the perennial message of St. John the Baptist. God is summoning us to live the perennial Jubilee of his presence and to invite others to this total restoration. And that conversion is one ultimately of self-giving. Above the place in the Loyola Castle where his metanoia happened through reading the lives of the saints, it says, not “Here, he converted,” but rather, “Here he gave himself to God.” To convert means to give ourselves entirely to God. That’s where Ignatius’ prayers find their beginning. First, his Prayer for generosity: “Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve; to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for reward, save that of knowing that I do your will.” And to make that self-giving possible, a prayer for God’s grace and love over self-reliance, his famous Suscipe: “Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my entire will, all I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me.”
• As we prepare for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we come with love, not lust, sober not drunk. We bring not a martyr’s head on a platter, but our whole lives on a paten, in order to be united, like Ignatius, with Christ’s self-offering to the Father and receive from God in return the King himself, the King under whose banner St. Ignatius after his conversion marched, the King John the Baptist announced and served, the King who calls us just as much as he called them.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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