Converted and Firm in Faith, 15th Tuesday (II), July 14, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Virgin
July 14, 2020
Is 7:1-9, Ps 48, Mt 11:20-24

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday we finished a week-long examination of the instructions Jesus gave to the Twelve before he sent them out and we mentioned as an aside that after he had “finished giving these commands to his twelve disciples, he went away from that place to teach and to preach in their towns.” Jesus himself went out to preach and to practice what he had preached to the Twelve. He went out to announce that the kingdom of God was at hand and therefore it was essential to repent and believe. He went out to cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers and drive out demons. He went out without gold or silver or copper for his belt, with no sack for the journey, no second tunic, sandals, or walking stick. He went out as a Lamb among wolves, as wise as a serpent and as pure as a dove, wishing peace upon all those who met him. And as we pondered yesterday, what he looking for above all was welcome. He was seeking those who could welcome him and in welcoming him welcome God the Father and the whole salvific mission. But he also had warned the Twelve that they, like him, would encounter those who were hardened and unwelcoming, who would respond, as our Psalm says, with hardened hearts to the voice of the Lord.
• Today Jesus preaches about three different places — Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum — that ultimately were unwelcoming to Jesus. On the surface, these were places that very much seemed to embrace Jesus. Capernaum during his public ministry was actually called his “home” (Mt 9:1), his home base after departing from Nazareth. They were the cities where Jesus, according to St. Matthew, had worked “most of his mighty deeds.” Jesus had called his apostles from these towns, he had preached in these squares and synagogues, he had cast out demons, healed countless sick people assembled at the door of Peter’s house, fed a multitude with a few buns and sardines and yet, even though many were bringing him friends on stretchers and the whole town was bring their sick to him, they still hadn’t really welcomed him. The reason is because they had given welcome only to those parts of what Jesus was doing that had fit into their own categories. They weren’t really welcoming his message and mission. They weren’t really open to change. They had heard his words calling them to conversion, to a new way of life, to follow him in big things and in small, to love him more than they loved their parents or children or even life, and they responded not with open hearts but hardened ones.
• That’s why Jesus today reproaches the towns for their lack of faith, comparing them negatively to Tyre and Sidon, the debauched metropolises of Phoenicia north of the Holy Land, and to Sodom, one the most notoriously sinful and unwelcoming cities in history, there the residents literally tried to “sodomize” the messengers sent by God to Lot’s house. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida!,” Jesus said. “For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon on the day of judgment than for you.” The word “woe” is not so much a word of anger but of crushed disappointment. It’s as if he were saying, “What a tragedy, Chorazin and Bethsaida! What an absolute pity, Capernaum!” Jesus had come to save them, and his deeds were physical manifestations of greater miracles he wanted to work in their souls, but they didn’t want to cooperate, they didn’t want to change, they didn’t want to repent and believe.  He likewise said about Capernaum, “Will you be exalted to heaven? You will go down to the nether world. For if the mighty deeds done in your midst had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” Jesus had done so much there and yet the people were fundamentally unchanged. They just went on with their unredeemed life as normal.
• At first Jesus might not seem to be following the same instructions he had given to the apostles to proclaim, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” But we remember how Jesus’ public ministry started after his baptism. He said, “The time is fulfilled. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel” (Mt 1:15). The kingdom is such that repentance is demanded. But what is repentance? Often when we hear the word — or the word “conversion” — most of us think of sin and eradicating it. But repentance is actually positive: it means first and foremost looking toward Christ and seeking to live with him. It’s not enough just to eliminate sin; Christ wants us to love. This point was made very clearly by Cardinal Ratzinger in a powerful 2000 catechetical address for the Jubilee of Catechists in Rome during the great Jubilee of the Year 2000. “The Greek word for converting means: to rethink—to question one’s own and common way of living; to allow God to enter into the criteria of one’s life; to not merely judge according to the current opinions. Thereby, to convert means: not to live as all the others live, not do what all do, not feel justified in dubious, ambiguous, evil actions just because others do the same; begin to see one’s life through the eyes of God; thereby looking for the good, even if uncomfortable; not aiming at the judgment of the majority, of men, but on the justice of God—in other words: to look for a new style of life, a new life.” He went on to focus all of us on Jesus. “The Kingdom of God is not a thing, a social or political structure, a utopia. The Kingdom of God is God. Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our—in my life.” He said, “At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to evangelize the poor (Luke 4:18); this means: I have the response to your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness—rather: I am that path.” To convert means to follow Jesus on that path. This is the conversion Jesus’ contemporaries in Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum needed. It’s also the conversion we need.
• It’s somewhat tempting for us to lament what happened in these towns along the Sea of Galilee, but we need to recognize that Jesus has done far greater deeds in New York than he ever did in Capernaum, Chorazin and Bethsaida. What he did there was a just a taste of what he has done here. He teaches every day. He gives us in the Eucharist a far greater miracle than the multiplication of the loaves and fish. He gives us in the Sacrament of Confession a much greater healing that the physical cures he worked there, as he not only exorcises the devil’s clutches from our souls but enters into us to abide with us. At the end of time, however, will he praise us as a city of faith or will he say we haven’t repented and believed? We will say to each of us, “Woe” or will he say, “You welcomed me”? Today Jesus wants us to learn from what happened in these towns of Galilee and get right again what they got wrong. He wants us to embrace him and his message, to repent and believe in the Gospel, to begin to follow him from darkness into the light, to commence living in his kingdom, living a new life. He’s hoping not that we merely respond with what the Church calls “imperfect contrition,” out of a fear that unless we change our judgment will be fiercer than that for Tyre, Sidon and Sodom because to whom more is given more is to be expected (Lk 12:48). Rather, he’s hoping that we respond with “perfect contrition,” a repentance due to love, by recognizing his crushed disappointment when we don’t respond to what he’s doing and make up for lost time.
• In today’s first reading, we have an example of what God doesn’t want to happen in us. God sends the Prophet Isaiah to King Ahaz of Judah. Jerusalem was under attack by Aram and Israel and “the heart of the king and the heart of the people trembled.” Aram and Israel wanted Judah to join them in an alliance against Assyria, but Ahaz instead wanted to seek the protection of Assyria against the two other nations. Isaiah was given by God the mission to go to Ahaz and tell him and all the people of Judah to “remain tranquil and do not fear,” that the plans to overtake Jerusalem “shall not stand, it shall not be!” Isaiah urged Ahaz neither to join Aram and Israel nor to enter into alliance with Assyria. God stressed through his prophet, “Unless your faith is firm, you shall not be firm!” The source of lasting courage in earthly circumstances comes from being in right relationship with God, trusting that God is present, and to obey what he says. But Ahaz’s faith was not firm. He didn’t trust in the Lord enough to do what Isaiah was commanding in the Lord’s name. Ahaz formed an alliance with Assyria, which worked to rout Aram and Israel, but then eventually brought the Kingdom of Judah down, making it vassals of Assyria. Ahaz needed to go to the capital of Assyria to swear allegiance to the King of Assyria and his gods, and eventually the Kingdom of Judah would likewise be destroyed because of its association with Assyria. The message for us is that unless our faith is firm we will not remain stable. Jesus, however, wants to give us that type of firm faith, faith to act on his words, faith to repent, faith to live not with a hardened heart to God’s word but a prompt, obedient and self-giving heart.
• Someone whose faith was firm, who responded to the proclamation of God’s kingdom and mighty deeds with conversion and fruit flowing from faith and love, is the saint the Church remembers today. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a fellow New Yorker, was a Native American born in Auriesville, who was canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict. She was born of a Mohawk father, the chief of the Turtle Tribe, and a Algoquin mother who had converted to Christianity and brought as spoils to Auriesville. At the age of 4, she was orphaned when smallpox decimated her village, claiming the life of her parents and brother and leaving her partially blind. (She was nicknamed Tekakwitha because afterward, because of her blindness, she was routinely “bumping into things.”) She was raised by her uncle, who succeeded her father as chief of the Turtle tribe, and two aunts, all of whom were fiercely resistant to Christianity. They sought to prevent her contact with the “black robes” (the Jesuit missionaries) — St. Isaac Jogues and St. Rene Goupil had died in their village just a decade before Kateri’s birth — and to marry her off at a young age, but she had already been moved by a desire to give herself totally to Jesus as a Christian and as a spouse. To become a Christian was an act of great and firm faith, because the Christians were basically second class, since most of the Christians present were captured slaves and she was risking being treated as a slave. To remain a virgin was an act of ever greater and firmer faith because it meant she would have no one to care for her except God. In fact, when she made a vow of perpetual virginity in 1679 with the consent of her Jesuit spiritual director, she became the first Native American to do so that we know of. Both meant she would suffer rejection, as the sword Jesus spoke about in yesterday’s Gospel that would divide families would divide hers. She overcame their rejection, and boldly sought instruction and baptism against the will of her uncle. Even though familial and tribal loyalties are incredibly strong among the native Americans, after her baptism at the age of 19, she fled to Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. There she dedicated herself to Jesus in a life of prayer and mortification, adoring him as she knelt in the snow outside the Church before it would be opened early each morning and stayed there until the last Mass was celebrated at night, sleeping on a bed of thorns in reparation for the sins of her tribe and for their conversion, caring for the sick and elderly. In worldly eyes, she was an insignificant, simple Indian with the residue of small pox on her face. But she loved Jesus, acknowledged him and bore the fruit of faith and conversion, dying at the age of 24, just five years after her baptism, with her last words “Jesos Konoronkwa” (“Jesus, I love you”) as she passed into his eternal embrace. Pope Benedict said about her at her canonization in 2012, “Leading a simple life, Kateri remained faithful to her love for Jesus, to prayer and to daily Mass. Her greatest wish was to know and to do what pleased God. She lived a life radiant with faith and purity. Kateri impresses us by the action of grace in her life in spite of the absence of external help and by the courage of her vocation. … May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are.” St. John Paul II, at her beatification in 1980, during the tricentenary of her birth, said, “All of us are inspired by the example of this young woman of faith who died three centuries ago this year. We are all edified by her complete trust in the providence of God, and we are encouraged by her joyful fidelity to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Church has declared to the world that Kateri Tekakwitha is blessed, that she lived a life on earth of exemplary holiness and that she is now a member in heaven of the Communion of Saints who continually intercede with the merciful Father on our behalf. Her beatification should remind us that we are all called to a life of holiness, for in Baptism God has chosen each one of us ‘to be holy and spotless and to live through love in his presence.’Holiness of life – union with Christ through prayer and works of charity – is not something reserved to a select few among the members of the Church. It is the vocation of everyone.”
• The greatest gift of all that Jesus gives we have a chance to receive each day. Jesus not only visits our city, but enters into each one of us. This is something that all those who lived in ancient Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, ancient Tyre, Sidon and Sodom, would marvel at, but it is God’s gift so that we may be strong in faith and help others learn how to become firm in faith. As we prepare to receive him now, we ask him for the grace, like St. Kateri Tekakwitha, to respond to his miracles with repentance, so that we can relieve his “woe” and one day like St. Kateri Tekakwitha, be exalted to heaven.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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