Converting Our Ambitions, 7th Tuesday (II), May 22, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Rita of Cascia
May 22, 2018
James 4:1-10, Ps 55, Mk 9:30-37

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we return to the readings of Ordinary Time, we do so conscious of what we have been marking these last few days. On Sunday, we prayed in the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, that the Holy Spirit might “lava quod est sordidum,” that he might “sana quod est saucium,” that he might “rege quod est devium,” and today’s readings help us to see what’s dirty that needs to be washed, what’s wounded that needs healing, what’s erring that needs to be set on the straight path: it’s our ambition. We saw with yesterday’s celebration of Mary’s motherhood of the Church what her ambition was — it was always directed toward God, toward his word, toward saying fiat to his various annunciations, whether by the Archangel, by Simeon or by Christ himself giving her us to be her spiritual children — and she’s doubtless praying and working to help us to share her son’s ambition for his Father’s glory and for the salvation and sanctification of the human race. Today is about the conversion of our ambition so that zeal not for self-aggrandizement, but for the Father’s house, will consume us just like it consumed Christ.
• In the Gospel, we encounter one of the saddest scenes in Sacred Scripture.  Jesus describes to the apostles that he will be betrayed, tortured and murdered and the apostles, rather than consoling him, started arguing about which one of them would be the greatest. It always seemed to be this way when Jesus spoke about his upcoming crucifixion. When he said it for the first time, St. Peter took him aside and rebuked him. When he said it the third time (today was the second), James’ and John’s mother approached asking for him to appoint her two sons to the chief positions in his Messianic reign. If there were ever any greater illustration of the evil of “selfish ambition” that St. James speaks about (in the passage immediately preceding today’s), this is it. We’ve heard these passages so often that the ugliness of the apostles’ selfish jockeying for position can be lost on us, but imagine if your father came to you and told you that the doctor had just given him two weeks to live and, instead of consoling him, instead of even caring about him, you immediately shifted your attention and asked him to help you get a promotion at work. That’s what was happening in these scenes.
• Jesus, however, didn’t want to suppress their ambition. He had, after all, chosen men with the capacity for ambition, who were seeking to be great. What he wanted to do, however, was to cleanse their desires, to change their “selfish ambition” into a holy one and chart out for them the path to true greatness. That’s why rather than rebuking them, he said, “If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.” The path to greatness in his kingdom is heroic humility and ambitious, self-less charity. To illustrate his point, he embraced a child and said that whoever receives such a child in his name, receives him and in receiving Him receives God the Father. The reason he chose an infant is because a child can’t and basically will never pay us back. A child will seldom if ever thank us. To receive a child, to change a child’s dirty diapers, to feed a child, to care for a sick child all night, to work hard to support a child — all of this is a training in humility and charity. The family, for that reason, is meant to be a school of love, and the more children received in God’s name, the more challenging that school. That school of humble love can be even greater when the children received are not one’s own biological children but adopted or foster children. But Jesus points out that this path of spiritual and material fatherhood and motherhood is a real path to greatness, to becoming the least and servant of all. Do we have the type of holy ambition to which Jesus calls us all as his disciples? Do we seek to model our lives after him who came not to be served but to serve and give his life in an unrequited ransom for the many?
• Most often, our honest answer to that question is “no.” We may have an ambition to be a saint but we struggle to will the means Jesus gives us. In fact, even if we have those holy ambitions, many times they’re overwhelmed by our worldly ambitions. That’s why it’s important for us to ponder what St. James tells us in the first reading today, because he not only bluntly speaks to us about our impure desires but shows us the path of reform.
• St. James says that our selfish ambitions and bitter envies, the wars and conflicts that exist, all come from our heart, from our “passions” from what we desire. It begins by coveting the goods of others. Because we don’t have what our heart desires, we begin to envy and even to kill, first with our tongue and then often with our hands. In most cases, we still don’t ever obtain what we’re looking for, but even if we do obtain it, it can never deliver on the joy we’re looking for. Just ask multimillionaires, many of whom are never satisfied and seek only to become richer. Just ask SuperBowl Champions: one is not enough, but there’s a hunger for the next one. St. James says that our passions can even corrupt our prayer: we don’t possess what we desire because we don’t “ask” for it.God cares for us more than the lilies and the sparrows and will provide all we really need, but we don’t ask, because often we know that we couldn’t ask him for those things in Jesus’ name because Jesus himself would not ask for many of the things we desire. Even when we do pray, he says, we don’t receive, “because [we] ask wrongly, to spend it on our passions.” We ask for things not so that God’s name will be hallowed, his kingdom come, and his will be done, but to advance our name, our kingdom, our will and our ego.
• We always seek things under some aspect of the good, but what happens is that aspect of the good can become absolute, it can become a god that leads us to cheat on the one true God and even to treat him as if he’s dead. That’s why St. James calls the early Christians to whom he was writing who engage in these types of selfish passions, “Adulterers.” They should be faithfully loving God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength, but instead they’re giving their hearts and their adoration to created idols, whether other people or things. We can’t serve two masters, however. As Jesus says, we’ll hate one and adore the other. That’s why St. James immediately reminds us, “Do you not know that to be a lover of the world means enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wants to be a lover of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” There are two ways of loving the world. St. Josemaria used to speak about “passionately loving the world,” by which he meant not despising what God created and pronounced “good,” but gratefully loving the Creator through all of those blessings. That’s a Christian virtue. The vice is when we love the world in a way in which we make it or the things of the world an idol. An example of the difference is that there are some Christians who when there’s a beautiful sunny day will immediately thank God for the gift of the great weather. There are others who will see a sunny day and, instead of going to Church, will go out and work on their tan. When we love the world in a disordered way, it will lead us to having enmity toward God and to making ourselves enemies of God, because our passions will lead us to say “my will be done!,” “my desires be fulfilled!” rather than “God’s will be done.”
• What’s he remedy? St. James mentions it at the end of the reading, when he gives us nine verbs, nine actions that we should do to overcome these disordered passions, to have holy ambition rather than selfish, to have true love for God rather than enmity and become his friend and beloved child rather than enemy. You could have a whole retreat on this set of verbs, but we’ll cover them very briefly:
  • Submit yourselves to God — The first step is that we need to cease being dominated by our passions but submit ourselves to God’s holy law, throwing our cares on the Lord as we pray in the Responsorial Psalm. All sinful desire contains within in the demonic echo, “I will not serve.” The initial step to holiness is allowing God to be in charge.
  • Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you — Next, we need to recognize that the devil is seeking to draw us away from God through the aspects of the good not ordered to the Lord. We need actively to resist all of these temptations. We need to pray, “Deliver us from evil,” and the Prayer of St. Michael. We need to recognize the devil’s empty promises and evil works and seek to stomp on him with both feed. 
    
  • Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you — Third, we need to draw closer to God in prayer, in the Sacraments, in charity toward others (like little children). The more we seek to draw closer to God the more we will sense his own proximity and help.
    
  • Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you of two minds — Fourth and fifth, we need to purify our external actions and what leads to them, both the fruit and the tree. It’s not enough just to wash our hands — the Pharisees did that, but many were whitewashed sepulchers, Jesus said —  but we have to wash our hearts, our passions. That’s what should start happening somewhat naturally once we do the first three steps. 
  • Begin to lament, to mourn, to weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection — Sixth through eighth, once we wash our hands and hearts, we will recognize more easily how many times through our hands and our hearts we have committed adultery against God and that should lead us to perfect contrition out of love for God. St. James uses three different related verbs here to symbolize just how profound this contrition should be. That’s part of the cleansing process! 
    
  • Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you — Lastly, we need to humble ourselves before God, to recognize how much we need him, to be grateful at the loving care of the King of Kings who adopts as us his children. The way we humble ourselves before him is not just prostrating ourselves before him in prayer but learning precisely what Jesus teaches us today in the Gospel, to make ourselves the least and the servant of all. That’s the path to eternal exaltation!
• The Holy Spirit is sent to us to cleanse us in all of these ways so that Jesus’ work in us, bringing us to greatness, will come about. The Holy Spirit seeks to help us do what St. Paul wrote about to the first Christians in Corinth, so that we might be ambitious about the greatest spiritual gifts, which is precisely the fullness of Christian love.
• One saint who lived this way is the one we fête today, St. Rita of Cascia (1381-1457). From her earliest days she desired to become a nun, but her larger desire was to do God’s will in whatever circumstances she found herself, and she was given by her elderly parents in marriage at the age of 12 to a man, Paolo Mancini, who was cruel, harsh and immoral. She gave birth to her first child within a year. She endured 18 very difficult years of marriage — of verbal abuse, physical abuse and infidelity — until her husband was violently stabbed to death by a rival family. She had to work to prevent her sons from exacting revenge. Eventually they, too, died. She tried to enter the Augustinian Convent in Cascia, but they refused her because — having been a mother — she was not a physical virgin and they required that at the time (a sign that often man-made laws, contrary to God’s way of looking at things, can invade religious life). The Augustinians were also desirous of not being associated with the scandal of her husband’s death and the possibility that it might inflame the Chiqui family who had murdered him. She persisted, however, and the nuns gave her a condition for her acceptance: to reconcile and resolve the conflicts between the Mancinis and the rival Chiqui family. She prayed that her sons be taken by God before they had a chance to exact revenge and got her brother-in-law Bernardo to relinquish his desire to continue the feud. In 1417, at the age of 36, she was able to enter the monastery, where she became renowned for her charity, prayer, austerity and mortified life. Her ambition was whatever God wanted and she showed it in the way she loved her neighbor, loved God in prayer, and was able to make sure she didn’t have a passion for the things of this world, as St. James said. At the beginning of Mass we prayed to God to bestow on us “the wisdom and strength of the cross, with which [he was] pleased to endow Saint Rita, so that, suffering in every tribulation with Christ, we may participate ever more deeply in his Paschal Mystery.” She suffered everything with Christ and she shows us how to do the same, participating in his paschal mystery but uniting ourselves to him, by the power of the Holy Spirit, in every circumstance. Because of the example of her faith in trial, she has become a patron saint of desperate causes. We ask through her intercession that we may share her holy ambition to do God’s will, and to pick up our Cross each day as our power, glory and boast, and follow him all the way to where she now rejoices with God.
• We finish by humbly approaching the Lord Jesus here. He turned the greatest evil out of our own selfish ambition that led to his betrayal, being tortured, crucified and killed into the greatest good ever. It’s here at Mass that we experience the triumph of his resurrection, in which all of us say, “O happy fault that brought us such a great redeemer.” Let’s ask him to strengthen us today so that we may share his holy ambitions for the salvation of the world as he strengthens us from the inside to go and become great by announcing the Gospel and putting into practice by serving all those whom he loved so much that he died for them!

The readings for today’s Mass were: