Converting to the Better Part and One Thing Necessary, 27th Tuesday (I), October 8, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
21st Anniversary of My Ordination to the Diaconate
October 8, 2019
Jon 3:1-10, Ps 130, Lk 10:38-42

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

• In today’s first reading, we have the famous scene of the preaching of Jonah in Nineveh, a frightening thing for him that, as we saw yesterday, got him to try to flee to the most western part of the known planet. The image was a powerful reminder to the post-exilic Jews about the rebuilding of not merely the Temple but the faith of the Jews after the return from Babylon, which is one of the reasons why Jesus used the story of Jonah to refer to his own death and resurrection. When Jonah began to preach, there was extraordinary response. People converted on day one of hearing him say, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed.” It spread immediately through a city it would take three days to traverse, and every creature, from the King to the animals, repented in sackcloth and ashes. We should remember, when we’re intimidated to proclaim the Gospel to others, that while some may refuse and reject it, others may respond in ways far greater than we could have imagined. As we contemplate this scene, we should also remember how Jesus used it in the Gospel with regard to the cities of Chorazin, Capernaum and Bethsaida, reminding them that “There is a greater than Jonah here,” and summoning them to a conversion even more profound.
• That leads us to today’s Gospel, as the Lord gently brings Martha to conversion. On July 29 each year, we celebrate Saint Martha’s feast day, but she still needed conversion. While she was seeking to love the Lord, working hard to prepare a meal for him, she was “anxious and worried about many things.” Jesus reminded her, “Only one thing is necessary,” and then told her to choose that “better part” as her sister Mary had done. Often we are worried and anxious about many good things, but we have to choose the one thing necessary and better, namely, to do everything for, with, through, and in Jesus, beginning by letting him do what he wants to do in us. What Mary grasped that Martha didn’t is that Jesus had come to their home primarily to feed and not to be fed, to serve rather than to be served, and it was Mary who grasped that and sat at his feet as he not only fed her with the nourishment of his word and presence. Similarly as we look at our day and all the good things we need to do, Jesus, the-greater-than-Jonah, is calling us to remember the “one thing” and choose it. He’s calling us to unity of life. He’s summoning us to keep our attention on him, rather than on all of the other good things we we think we have to do, if we really have to do them. For all of us in our Christian lives, we are interiorly drawn and quartered by so many different aims, projects, tasks, hopes, etc. Jesus is calling us to convert to simplicity, to know that he cares for us, to know that his Father provides, to know that whatever we do, in word or in deed, we’re called to do in his name.
• Today’s readings provide a proper context for the call to continual conversion and fidelity the Lord is making to me today, on the 21st anniversary of my Diaconal Ordination at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. We remember that the chief qualification for the selection of the first deacons is that they would be men “full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom.” They would be more than social workers, or superb administrators, or good waiters at table, but men suffused with God as they exercised charity or, like St. Stephen and St. Philip the Deacon, gave witness to the faith in martyrdom or evangelization. To become filled with the Holy Spirit and divine wisdom is to be a man of prayer and at the Diaconal Ordination the candidate says that he is “resolved to maintain and deepen a spirit of prayer appropriate to your way of life and, in keeping with what is required of you, to celebrate faithfully the liturgy of the hours for the Church and for the whole world.” Next he is a man called to preach by both word and deed, calling others to conversion and faith, to repent and believe. He is instructed that he must “not only listen to God’s word but also preach it … [and to] express in action what you proclaim by word of mouth.” At what for me is one of the most powerful aspects of the ordination rite, the Bishop (as Cardinal Edmund Szoka did to me) places the Book of the Gospel in our hands, and says, “Receive the Word of God whose herald you have become. Believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you teach.” Those four verbs are so important not just for deacons but for all Christians. We need to receive this Word of God as a tremendous treasure. To believe it. To pass it on. And to put it into practice. That’s why, in the Alleluia verse today, we have, “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” And the fruit of receiving, believing and teaching the word of God is always charity.
• But the application I’d like to comment on most is the promise the future candidate for the priesthood makes as he enters into Holy Orders at the Diaconal Ordination: the promise of lifelong priestly celibacy. This is sadly being questioned today, including by Cardinal Claudio Hummes yesterday at the beginning of the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon Region, as a means by which to ordain married men to celebrate the Sacraments in the small villages throughout the Amazon. During the Ordination of Transitional Deacons, before the deacon makes the commitment “in the presence of God and the Church, …  as a sign of your interior dedication to Christ, to remain celibate for the sake of the kingdom and in lifelong service to God and mankind,” he is instructed by the ordaining prelate: “You shall exercise this ministry in the celibate state for celibacy is both a sign and a motive of pastoral charity, and a special source of spiritual fruitfulness in the world. By living in this state with total dedication, moved by a sincere love for Christ the Lord, you are consecrated to him in a new and special way. By this consecration you will adhere more easily to Christ with an undivided heart; you will be more freely at the service of God and mankind, and you will be more untrammeled in the ministry of Christian conversion and rebirth.  By your life and character you will give witness to your brothers and sisters in faith that God must be loved above all else, and that it is he whom you serve in others.” It’s that last part that I want to ponder: the chaste celibacy of transitional deacons and priests is a witness that God must be loved above all else, that he is the better part, that he is the one thing necessary and the pearl of great price. Priests and religious proclaim that Christ is worth everything, even forsaking the great divinely-instituted good of marriage and family, to serve Christ undecidedly and permit us to preach “untrammeled” conversion and rebirth. We need to pray more that this sign of the preeminence of the love of God be more widely appreciated and so that the truly Catholic solution to the lack of priestly vocations in the Amazon — prayer to the Harvest Master for laborers for his harvest, and a true missionary zeal across the Church to bring the Gospel to the Amazon until the Church there is strong enough to raise up an indigenous celibate and chaste clergy of its own — may be chosen and wholeheartedly embarked upon.
• Today we come here to sit at the feet of Jesus in the Mass, to listen to him and be fed by him, as our one thing necessary and the part better than all other parts of life combined. Here we’re strengthened by him here to go out and serve him and others with the diligence of Martha and the contemplative heart of Mary, to carry out the diakonia of charity filled with the Holy Spirit and with wisdom to help bring modern Ninevehs to conversion and faith.