Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday of Advent, Extraordinary Form
December 20, 2020
1 Cor 4:1-5, Lk 3:1-6
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
At daily Masses this Tuesday (in the Ordinary Form), the Church pondered Jesus’ parable of the two sons whom the Father asked to go out and work in his vineyard. The first son said “No,” but afterward had a change of heart and went. The other son said, “Yes, Sir!” but did not go. Jesus asked the chief priests and the elders of the people who were surrounding him which of the two did the Father’s will. And they replied, “The first,” to which he said, to their shocked ears in application of the Parable: “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God before you! When John [the Baptist] came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him, but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not later convert and believe him!”
Today is the third consecutive Sunday in which John the Baptist comes to us in the “way of righteousness” calling us to a particular form of hard work in the vineyard of our soul. Two weeks ago we heard his appeal in St. Matthew’s Gospel, last week in St. John’s, and today in St. Luke’s, and while there are slightly different emphases and nuances in the different accounts, what unites them is the un-nuanced priority given to his central summons, the message God sent him to announce at the Jordan 2000 years ago and sends him to reiterate every Advent. John the Baptist calls us, as a voice of Jesus crying out in the desert, to “prepare the way of the Lord,” to “make straight his paths,” to fill in the “valleys” of a shallow prayer or moral life, to lower the “mountains and hills” of our pride and vanity, to straighten the “winding roads” that distract and delay us from growth in holiness and to smooth those paths that are rough, inconsistent, coarse and unfit for encountering the Lord and following him fully.
Two weeks ago when he called us to conversion, we said, “Laus tibi, Christe!” after his words were proclaimed. Last week, we repeated that praise to Christ for the summons of his precursor. Just minutes ago, we shot for the spiritual hat trick. But the question for us is whether we’ve really followed through. Have we just said “Yes, sir!” like the second son in Jesus’ parable or have we acted on that commitment? Have we, like road construction workers and civil engineers, done the hard work of conversion to which the Baptist calls us or are the same mountains and valleys, the identical winding roads and rough ways still there?
In his parable, Jesus told the chief priests and elders of the people that the publicans and prostitutes were entering God’s kingdom before they were, because when these notorious classes of sinners heard the Baptist, they were repenting, whereas the religious leaders of the people were just giving lip service to the divine call John was announcing. When God through his Church sends us St. John the Baptist for three consecutive Sundays in Advent, he is basically saying to us, “I’ve called you not once, not twice, but three times to conversion!” Would he be able to say to us now that we’ve responded to that call the way the known sinners of John’s days did or the way the so-called more religious people did?
One of the most obvious applications of this summons to prepare the way of the Lord is to make a really good confession in Advent, what we’d like to be the best confession of our life, the confession we would make if it were our last. If you have not yet had the chance to do so, tomorrow is Reconciliation Monday, and confessions will be heard here at St. Agnes and every other parish in the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn from 4-8 pm. The whole Advent season is meant to prepare us to encounter Christ in his mercy. We sing, in some of the most famous Advent hymns, “Come, thou long expected Jesus, born to set thy people free, from our fears and sins release us, let us find our rest in thee” (Come thou long expected Jesus). “Then cleansed be every heart from sin, make straight the way of God within, prepare we in our hearts a home, where such a mighty guest may come” (On Jordan’s Bank). In the Rorate Caeli, one of the most famous Advent hymns taken from words of the Prophet Isaiah that we partially sang in today’s Introit, we pray, “Do not be angry, O Lord, and remember no longer our iniquity… We have sinned and have become as one that is unclean: and we have all fallen as a leaf, and our iniquities like the wind have carried us away.” Then we hear God’s response: “Be comforted, be comforted my people: thy salvation comes quickly: … I will save you: fear not, for I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your redeemer.” All of this prepares us for what we’ll bellow on Christmas: “O Holy child of Bethlehem! Descend to us we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today” and “Hark, the Herald angels sing glory to the newborn King! Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled.” John the Baptist is calling us to receive that mercy mild, to become in our depth sinners wholly reconciled, to cast out our sin and enter in. We will not experience the joy to the world and the pax hominibus unless we act on the Baptist’s urgent invitation.
It’s not enough, however, for us to do act on it personally, to make straight the paths for Christ to come to us. God wants us to become John the Baptists for others, to be those who announce the need for, and offer of, God’s mercy mild, who help others prepare the way for Jesus. St. Paul is doing so in today’s epistle, taken from his First Letter to the Corinthians. He confesses to them, “I am not conscious of anything against me, but I do not thereby stand acquitted; the one who judges me is the Lord,” and he reminds them that when “the Lord comes … he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts.” St. Paul’s whole life was to try to help others experience the same life-changing divine mercy he himself had. “I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and an arrogant man, but I have been mercifully treated,” he wrote to St. Timothy. “Indeed the grace of our Lord has been abundant,” he continued. “This saying is trustworthy and deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Of these I am the foremost. But for that reason I was mercifully treated, so that in me, as in the foremost, Christ Jesus might display all his patience as an example for those who would come to believe in him” (1 Tim 1:13-16). This is why he wrote in his Second Letter to the Corinthians that by the incarnation of Jesus, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, as if God were appealing through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:19-20). Having received God’s mercy, he became an emissary of that mercy. Or to use his words from the beginning of today’s passage, “Thus should one regard us: as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God,” adding, “it is of course required of stewards that they be found trustworthy.” To be a trustworthy steward of God’s mysteries, a faithful servant of Christ, we must guard the treasure of God’s mercy and, like the good and trustworthy servants in God’s parables, invest that talent or gold coin and make it grow. These last days of the Advent season and beyond are the time for us to prove to be these types of servants and stewards.
There is a broader sense, of course, to St. Paul’s use of the word mystery. It certainly refers, as Doctors of the Church and theologians have taught, to the sacraments, each of which in Greek is called a mysterion. But the mystery of God’s work in the sacraments ultimately flows from the greatest mystery of all: the “mystery hidden from past ages and generations” (Col 1:26; Eph 3:9), which is the incarnation of the Son of God. God himself has entered our world. He is Emmanuel, God-with-us. We are not alone. There may be a pandemic raging. There may be social strife, widespread economic problems, and political upheavals. There may be painful scandals in the Church. There may be personal or familial crises. Into it all, God has entered, just like he humbly entered the turmoil 2,000 years ago. We are called to be trustworthy stewards of this mystery most of all and true servants of Christ not in the abstract, but in the concrete way he continues to abide with us in the world.
We are, therefore, called to be stewards of the mystery of Christmas, first within ourselves, and then within the world. We are servants of Christ, summoned to bring to others the reality of the light Jesus brought into the world’s darkness, a light that has not been extinguished and is meant to burn even more brightly in the difficulties of our age. St. John the Baptist and St. Paul were both good and faithful stewards and servants. So was Saint Joseph, about whom Pope Francis wrote a beautiful apostolic letter on December 8, as he proclaimed a “Year of St. Joseph” to mark the 150th anniversary of St. Joseph’s being named patron of the universal Church. Pope Francis wrote, “Saint Joseph reminds us that those who appear hidden or in the shadows can play an incomparable role in the history of salvation,” and that is certainly what St. Joseph did. He teaches us how to be a faithful, humble, trustworthy guardian of Jesus and is a living commentary on how to respond to the mystery of Christmas. He also shows us how to love the best steward and servant of all time, the one “full of grace” who identified herself as the “handmaid of the Lord” and who wanted her whole life to develop according to God’s word. During these last days of Advent, let us ask for the grace to enter Mary’s womb so that we might contemplate there, and grow together with, the Blessed Fruit of that womb. And then, at his birth, as we ponder the homage of the angels, the shepherd, the Magi, even the animals, let us move from her womb into her contemplative heart, so that we, too, may become servants of the Lord who let our whole life develop according to God’s word-made-flesh.
Mary and Joseph, John and Paul, are all appealing to us this weekend to prepare the way to live to the full the ongoing Revelation of the mystery of Bethlehem, the Revelation whom we prepare now to meet at the altar.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians.
Thus should one regard us: as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Now it is of course required of stewards that they be found trustworthy. It does not concern me in the least that I be judged by you or any human tribunal; I do not even pass judgment on myself; I am not conscious of anything against me, but I do not thereby stand acquitted; the one who judges me is the Lord. Therefore, do not make any judgment before the appointed time, until the Lord comes, for he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will manifest the motives of our hearts, and then everyone will receive praise from God.
The continuation of the Gospel according to St. Luke
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the desert. He went throughout [the] whole region of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “A voice of one crying out in the desert: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths. Every valley shall be filled and every mountain and hill shall be made low. The winding roads shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”
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