Demonstrating Faith through Cruciform Love, Sixth Friday (II), February 18, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
February 18, 2022
James 2:14-24.26, Ps 112, Mk 8:34-9:1

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today St. James gets our attention with a highly provocative vocative, asking, “Do you want proof, you ignoramus, that faith without works is useless?” His whole point is to stress that living faith leads to charity. There was an idea at the time, popular among gnostics, that all one needed to have was special knowledge of salvation, to know the right things, and to hold them; our deeds didn’t really matter. In later centuries, some Christians tried to make the case that that’s what St. Paul said in his Letter to the Romans, “We are saved by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:28), which is true, that we’re saved by God’s grace received in faith and not by our own actions. But while we’re saved by God’s gratuitous love, we need to receive that gift, open it up and live by it. St. Paul would call it “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). St. John the Baptist would describe it to the Pharisees, “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance” (Matt 3:8). Jesus himself would say clearly that we’re judged by our acts in his depiction of the Last Judgment, saying that to be saved, we must care for the poor and needy, the hungry and thirsty, the ill and imprisoned, the naked and the stranger (Mt 25:31-46). That’s precisely what St. James was describing in his letter, that we can’t say we have faith, that we grasp the presence of the Lord in our world, within us, within our neighbor, if we don’t lift a finger to help those we see in need. Our faith, as St. James says, must be demonstrated through our works, it must be active in our works, like Abraham’s was in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. If our faith is living, it will show in the way it impacts our life.
• Popes Benedict and Francis have a beautiful section in the encyclical by four hands, Lumen Fidei, in which they underline how the truth of faith must overflow into charity. “Faith transforms the whole person precisely to the extent that he or she becomes open to love. Through this blending of faith and love we come to see the kind of knowledge that faith entails, its power to convince and its ability to illumine our steps. Faith knows because it is tied to love, because love itself brings enlightenment” (LF 26).
• In the Gospel today, Jesus describes some of the most important acts of living faith. Faith is meant to bring us alive and Jesus shows us the way to save our lives. He tells us, “Whoever wishes to come after me,” in other words, whoever believes in me and wants to be my disciple, “must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel will save it.” These are very difficult works that require faith because they go against worldly ways. We live in a self-affirming age and Jesus calls us to self-denial so that we might have self-mastery and be capable of self-gift. We live in a hedonistic age that is addicted to pleasure and phobic about pain and Jesus calls us to take up or seize (rather than reluctantly accept) the Cross, the instrument on which we will die to ourselves, so that he in turn may live. Then he calls us to follow him as he sets the example of washing others’ feet, of becoming the servant of all, of giving his life as a ransom for others’. These are the works that flow from true faith in Jesus. Without these works, our faith is dead and we will lose our life, he states. Yet this is the living faith that defines the martyrs, that marks the saints.
• Today Jesus wants to help us pass from “ignoramuses” to disciples and apostles who have learned Christ’s way of cruciform love and become teachers of others through action. We deny ourselves, pick up our cross and learn how to follow Christ precisely through the Mass where we enter the Last Supper, receive his body and blood from Calvary, and enter into his risen life. It’s through the Mass that we are strengthened to “do this” in his memory, giving our body and blood out of love for others, as the fruit of living Eucharistic faith.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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