Courage to Bring the Gospel to Everyone, Friday after Epiphany, January 11, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Retreat on Courage in the Christian and Priestly Life
Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary, Emmitsburg, Maryland
Friday after Epiphany
January 11, 2019
1 Jn 5:5-13, Ps 147, Lk 5:12-16

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• In the Gospel, the most physically disgusting and repulsive human being imaginable came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away at their flesh and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for life apart from the rest of the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them — except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from their jobs, from the synagogue and from the temple, from love and mercy. They were outcasts, ostracized from all things human. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them more easily. Whenever they needed to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law, to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!” They were forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. Anyone who touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, unclean. That the man in today’s Gospel broke all convention to come close to Jesus was already a sign of his desperation.
• What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature on his knees before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch the contagion. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. He stretched out his hand and touched the leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched him in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “Be made clean!” After the leprosy miraculously left him, Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure of leprosy so that he, so long an outcast, could return to the human community.
• This is the Jesus we’re called to imitate. The Lord turns to each of us today and says, “Come, follow me!” We’re not called, necessarily, to imitate Jesus in caring for those with Hansen’s disease, because, thanks be to God and to the gift of modern medicine, leprosy has been eradicated in the United States and in most of the world. Most of us — as far as I know — are not gifted with the Lord’s divine power to work stupendous miracles of healing, so we’re not called to imitate Christ the thaumaturgos. But what Christ is calling us to do is to love the outcasts with the same love that he does, the love which would make him go to the Cross again for them if he needed to. And to do this, we need courage! This is the courage that St. John describes in the first reading today that flows from believing that Jesus is the Son of God, the faith that makes us through, with and in him, a victor over the world, a champion over fear, a winner over the hardness of heart that can lead us to turn away from others rather than turn toward them with Christ-like love.
• Christ wants us to love with a special predilection the many other types of lepers today, all those who are modern outcasts, everyone whom Pope Francis says is on the existential peripheries: those who are still bodily lepers, those with AIDS, those whom the world considers ugly or unattractive, or those whose illnesses are too long-lasting that few want to care for them; the psychological lepers, those with mental illness or mental disabilities, about whom others make jokes but for whom they make no time; the spiritual or moral lepers, drug addicts, prostitutes, pedophiles, transvestites, death-row inmates, those who have committed very public and embarrassing sins, and those who think that their sins cannot be forgiven; the economic lepers like the homeless and the very poor, who are shut off from society and the things most of the rest of society take for granted; the racial lepers like the gypsies or, depending upon where one lives, those of a particular skin color, be it black, or brown, or yellow; and the emotional lepers, those who, because of their own psyche or others’ actions, feel completely alone and abandoned. These are among the ones Jesus wants us to reach out and heal through our very human touch, to bring back from the margins into communion with us and with him.
• We see in the lives of the saints that very often their path to deep sanctity occurred when they cared for an outcast. St. Francis of Assisi was a carefree young man riding around on his horse preparing to seek glory as a soldier in battle. He was leaving his hometown and galloping toward the plain of Assisi. He saw a leper on the path near the outskirts who came out from a leper colony behind the bushes. Francis’ horse jerked out of repugnance. Francis looked at the leper for what seemed like an eternity and, in response to the petition for alms, dropped some coins around the man’s hand and sped off. But soon the voice of the Lord started thundering in his conscience. He stopped the horse, turned around, sped back, dismounted, went to the man and took his emaciated, cold and inert hand and placed within it a coin. Then he lifted that hand up to his lips and kissed the lacerated flesh of the abject man and embraced him. A wave of emotion rushed over Francis, as he was filled with the exhilaration that comes when we abandon all fears and conventions and really love others as Christ loves us. As the leper withdrew his hand, Francis raised his head to look at him in the eyes, but the man miraculously was no longer there. Neither was the old Francis. Everything had changed.
• Likewise for us, the path to our sanctity begins with our loving those whom the world finds unlovable. As we learn from St. Francis’ example, every time we care for an outcast, we are caring for Christ. The Lord himself told us that everything we do or fail to do to “one of the least of [his] brothers and sisters” we do, or fail to do, to him (cf. Mt 25:31-46). Christ takes on the disguise of the pariah and the amount of love we show the castaway is the amount of love we have for him. It’s easy to love those who are lovable, Jesus told us in the Sermon on the Mount. “Even pagans do as much” (Mt 5:46). But it’s hard to love those who are unlovable, and that’s the standard Jesus gives us. Like a leper, he himself became full of disgusting, open bodily wounds, was cast out of the city and left abandoned with other outcasts on crosses. As Isaiah wrote about him 700 years earlier, “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. … The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is 53:2-6).” If we would draw near to Christ, he waits for us on a modern Calvary in the disguise of modern outcasts. To “possess” Christ, as St. John says at the end of today’s epistle, we must possess him in the disguise of those who come to us in need. But if we, the apostle promises, we will have life, because “whoever possesses the Son has life,” the eternal life that God the Father gives us in his Son.
• But as we come to the end of this retreat on courage in the Christian and priestly life, having examined many aspects of our life as disciples, apostles, and future apostles from the perspective of the holy parrhesia needed, we may recognize just how much courage we lack. We know we need courage. We know that courage doesn’t mean we have no fears, but that we do what we ought despite those fears. But we also know that far too often those fears win, rather than faith and courage. If a leper, or a priest pedophile were to come and sit next to us in the pew, many of us, despite this Gospel, would battle the temptation to move away rather than draw close with Christ-like love. What are we to do? In the face of the courage needed, and the fears we have, are we up for it?
• Christ knows our hearts. He knows our fears. He knows our weaknesses. He knows our longings. His first apostles were good men, but all of them had fears and all of them abandoned him in the Garden and eleven of the twelve were still fugitives as he was dying. But their failures led them to turn to him anew and the power of the Holy Spirit coming down on Pentecost, and the Spirit’s gift of Courage, emboldened them. For us, knowing our frailties, we need to approach him like the leper in today’s Gospel and simply say to him, with trusting faith, “Lord, if you will it, you can make me bold!” And we know that Jesus will never give us a stone when we ask for bread, or a poisonous eel when we ask for a fish. He will say, we can be absolutely sure, “I do will it. Be made strong!” And he will, in giving us that grace, give us plenty of opportunities to put that gift of courage into action despite our fears. He will say to each of us, “Do not be afraid. It is I. Take Courage. I have conquered the world!”
• Each day when we come to Mass we can say to Jesus, prostrate before him, “If you will it, make me bold!” And he will come within us to embolden us from the inside. It’s here that his strengthens with his word. It’s hear that we receive the triple witness of the fulfillment of the water of baptism, the blood of Calvary, and the Spirit of Pentecost, to make us audacious in our divine filiation, in his triumph over sin and death, and in the courage that comes to us from above. All three “testify,the Spirit, the water, and the Blood, and the three are of one accord,” as John tells us. In possessing the Eucharistic Lord, we have life and we have courage. That’s what makes us in him victors over the world!

The readings for today’s Mass are: