Courage in Sharing God’s Mercy, Tuesday after Epiphany, January 8, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Retreat on Courage in the Christian and Priestly Life
Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary, Emmitsburg, Maryland
Tuesday after Epiphany
(Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus)
January 8, 2019
1 Jn 4:7-10, Ps 72, Mk 6:34-44

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, we are able to peer into the heart of Jesus. St. Mark tells us, “When Jesus saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” This pity, this merciful love, is what defines God’s whole approach to us. St. John describes it in today’s first reading and throughout his first letter. “In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as expiation for our sins.” This is a love that God not only wants us to recognize and receive, but remain in and ultimately share. He who is love and created us in his image and likeness wants us to love like he loves. The beloved disciple, who experienced God’s love, preached and wrote about it, and sought to share it, appeals to us, “Beloved, let us love one another because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God; whoever is without love does not know God for God is love.” God wants us to know him, not merely in an objective way but a personal one. And we do first by receiving his love and then paying it forward. We come to deepen our knowledge of God who is love by participating in his love for others.
• Love requires courage because loving makes us vulnerable. True love, as Jesus told us during the celebration of the first Mass, is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. True love is sacrificial, even to the point of death. That takes guts. But love gives us the motivation to be courageous. When God gives himself to us, when he abides in us loving us from the inside, then we are emboldened to love each other. When we receive him whose heart was moved with pity for us and for others, our heart is changed. When as good sheep we welcome within the Good Shepherd who compassionately looks on the crowd as sheep without a shepherd, we are able to make the transition from good sheep to good shepherds after his own heart, willing even to die for the sheep and lambs he entrusts to us to feed and tend.
• In today’s Gospel we see two of the actions that Jesus does when his heart is moved with pity for the crowds. There are actually five responses the synoptic evangelists recount for us when they use the verb Splagchna, the noun, refers to our guts, our viscera, our peritoneum area, and splagchnizomai means more literally that Jesus was sick to his stomach, that his innards were erupting.Jesus did five different things in response to these intense cramps of compassion, things that the Church continues to do, every Christian is called to do, and every priest and future priests is likewise called to specialize in.
• The first, as we see today, was to teach. St. Mark tells us, “When he saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things” (Mk 6:34). How much we need the truth! We pray in the Psalms, “Teach me your ways, O Lord, so that I may walk in your truth” (Ps 86) and Jesus came into the world as the answer to that prayer. Jesus — who identified himself as the Truth and said he had come had come to “witness to the truth” and to “proclaim the Gospel to the poor” — through his preaching and teaching sought mercifully to cure us of our spiritual cluelessness. The Church has always carried out the spiritual work of mercy of “instructing the ignorant,” through the teaching of the magisterium, through schools, universities, catechetical programs, daily and Sunday homilies and more. This ministry of the truth is not adequately appreciated in a relativistic age, but Jesus wants us to receive the mercy of his astonishing, amazing and authoritative teaching and learn it well enough so that we can mercifully pass it on.
• The second thing, we see in today’s Gospel and others, was to feed. God always responds to our prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and Jesus wants us to continue that ministry of feeding, commanding us to invite beggars, the blind, and the crippled to our dinner parties and to see him in the hungry. The Church continues that mission of mercy in soup kitchens, pantries, St. Vincent de Paul Conference work, Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services and more. As his close collaborators, Jesus is hoping that we will be sick to our stomachs that so many go to bed with empty stomachs.
• The third action flowing from his splanchna was to heal. The evangelists tell us often that Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for the multitudes and he “cured their sick” one-by-one (Mk 14:14; Mk 9:27; Mt 20:34; Mk 1:41; Lk 7:13). He healed lepers, cripples, the blind, the deaf, hemorrhaging women, the possessed, even raising the dead. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the term splanchnizomai is used to describe why the Samaritan drew near the dying man. The Church continues this work of mercy, caring for the sick, founding hospitals, clinics and nursing homes, ministering to the infirm in parishes and so many other ways. We’re all called to a similar compassion, recognizing that in every ill man or woman, Jesus is saying, “I was sick and you cared for me.”
• Fourth, Jesus forgave. In Jesus’ famous parable, the verbsplanchnizomai is used to describe how the Father, “filled with compassion,” forgave his Prodigal Son. Filled with that compassion, Jesus forgave the paralyzed man, the sinful woman who with tears washed his feet, the tax collector Zacchaeus, the Samaritan Woman, the woman caught in adultery, St. Peter, the Good Thief and many others. The Lamb of God, who had come to take away the sins of the world, was denigrated as a “friend of tax collectors and sinners,” and proved his love by dying for them, begging the Father’s pardon from the Cross. The Church continues this work of God’s mercy, reconciling sinners through the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation, and helping people to learn how to forgive those who have wronged them. This work of forgiveness, receiving it from God and giving it toward others, is the most essential of all the works of mercy, because, as Pope Francis once said in a July 2013 homily, “When Jesus healed a sick man he was not only a healer. When he taught people — let us think of the Beatitudes — he was not only a catechist, a preacher of morals. When he remonstrated against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees, he was not a revolutionary who wanted to drive out the Romans. No, these things that Jesus did, healing, teaching and speaking out against hypocrisy, were only a sign of something greater that Jesus was doing: he was forgiving sins.” Reconciling the world in Christ in the name of the Father: “this is Jesus’ mission. Everything else — healing, teaching, reprimands — are only signs of that deeper miracle which is the re-creation of the world. … The most profound mission of Jesus is the redemption of all of us sinners.” We’ll have a chance to ponder this more tonight.
• The last act of mercy is not as conspicuous as the others, and it’s actually two-fold. When Jesus’ heart was moved with pity for the crowds because, as St. Matthew tells us, they were “mangled and abandoned like sheep without a shepherd,” he told his disciples, “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few, so pray the Master of the Harvest to send out laborers for his harvest” (Mt 9:36). Then Jesus immediately called from among those same praying disciples twelve whom he would send out as apostles. Praying for vocations to continue Jesus’ saving mission, and then responding to Jesus when he calls us, is an essential work of mercy. God wants, and the suffering world needs, “laborers” of mercy, hard-workers who, sick to their stomach over the needs of others, will carry out together with Jesus his continued work of teaching, healing, feeding, forgiving, praying and calling. During this retreat, Jesus is calling us to see that we’re the response to the prayers of the saints and sinners across the centuries until the present day.
• Each of us is called to open ourselves to receive God’s mercy in the way that he teaches us, feeds us each day, heals us, forgives us, hears our prayers and makes us his merciful collaborators. Each of us is called, together with others and the whole Church, to examine ourselves on whether we love others as Christ has loved us, whether the love of Christ compels us to learn our faith so as to teach it with fire, to hunger for what God hungers and feed his starving children, to care with compassion for all those sick and wounded, to forgive others who have wronged us, bring others to receive God’s mercy and become, God-willing, a fully generous minister of that extraordinary gift, and to pray for laborers to join us in the vineyards to take it the enormous harvest that is white and ripe.
• Today is the 10^thanniversary of the death and, we pray, birth into eternal life of someone who experienced this Lord’s stomach-bursting mercy and sought to share it as a priest, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a convert from Lutheranism, the founder of First Thingsmagazine and author of 36 books, the catalyst of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, and a good friend to me and mentor during my seminary years at the North American College and beyond. I remember with great gratitude his time in Rome as a papal appointee to the Synod on America. Almost every night, Father Raymond de Souza and I were invited to join him, George Weigel, and Fr. Paul Mankowski in Fr. Neuhaus’ room to talk about the Synod and so many other things. It was one of the great seminars of my life. After my ordination, when I would travel to New York, I would stop by to see him, to pray with him, to share a meal with him, and to profit from his profound and accessible wisdom on almost everything: the faith, the culture, the future. He had experienced the Lord’s mercy and it had changed him and he wanted the whole world to meet that merciful Lord.
• In a March 2000 article in First Things, he wrote about the love of God we encounter in the Triduum. About Holy Thursday he said that Maundy Thursday gets its name “because that night before [Jesus] was betrayed he gave the command, the mandatum, that we should love one another. Not necessarily with the love of our desire but with a demanding love, even a demeaning love—as in washing the feet of faithless friends who will run away and leave you naked to your enemies.” Jesus would wash all of us ultimately with his blood, the crimson detergent that is the spiritual bleach of every stained soul in the history of the world. As Jesus’ blood was dripping from the Cross, Jesus, the heart pumping that blood still moved with pity, he cried out, not in pain, but in mercy, “Father, forgive them.” Father Neuhaus comments, “For whom does he pray forgiveness? For the leaders of his own people, a fragile, frightened establishment that could not abide the threat of the presence of a love so long delayed. For pitiable Pilate, forever wringing his hands forever soiled. For the soldiers who did the deed, who wielded the whip, who drove the nails, who thrust the spear, it all being but a day’s work on foreign assignment, far from home. And for us he asks forgiveness, for we were there.”
• Talking about the expiation that St. John tells us in the today’s first reading was the manifestation, the epiphany of divine love, Fr. Neuhaus says, “Reconciliation must do justice to what went wrong. It will not do to merely overlook the wrong. We could not bear to live in a world where wrong is taken lightly, where right and wrong finally make no difference. In such a world, we—what we do and what we are—would make no difference. Spare me a gospel of easy love that makes of my life a thing without consequence. … Atonement is not an accountant’s trick, it is not a kindly overlooking, it is not a not counting of what must count if anything in heaven or on earth is to matter. God could not simply decide not to count without declaring that we do not count. … Forgiveness [rather] costs. Forgiveness costs dearly. There are theories of atonement saying that Christ paid the price. His death appeased God’s wrath and satisfied God’s justice. That way of putting it appeals to biblical witness and venerable tradition, and no doubt contains great truth. Yet for many in the past and at present that way of speaking poses great problems. The subtlety of the theory is overwhelmed by the cartoon picture of an angry Father who demands the death of His Son, maybe even kills His Son, in order to appease His own wrath. In its vulgar form—which means the form most common—it is a matter of settling scores, a drama vengeful and vindictive, more worthy of  The Godfather than of the Father of whom it is said, ‘God is love.’ … If we cannot set things right, if we cannot even set ourselves, never mind the world, right—who, then, is to do it? It must be someone who is in no way responsible for what has gone wrong. It must be done by an act that is perfectly gratuitous, that is not driven by necessity, by an act that is perfectly free. The act must be by one who embodies everything, whose life is not one life among many but is life itself—a life that is our life and the life of all who have ever lived and ever will live. … St. John writes of the night before [Jesus] died, ‘Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that the hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.’ He loved them to the end that they, too, might learn the way that is on the far side of outraged justice. That same night he told them, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.’ And then he prayed for his friends.” We pray that Jesus’ prayers for the one who preached those words have come to fulfillment and that Father Neuhaus is experiencing the fulfillment of the mercy that endures forever.
• Today in this Chapel, Jesus looks with pity on all of us. He has taught us in Sacred Scripture. He is about to feed us on himself with the medicine of immortality capable of doing far more for us than Advil. He gives us his blood for the remission of our sins and those of the world. And he prays for us, and asks us to pray, to become the upset stomach of the Mystical Body and laborers of mercy the world so much needs.

The readings for today’s Mass were: