Divine Mercy Versus Human Hardness of Heart, 19th Friday (I), August 13, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed Michael McGivney
August 13, 2021
Joshua 24:1-13, Ps 136, Mt 19:3-12

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the past two days, we’ve been hearing about mercy and reconciliation, making the first move to go correct and reconcile those who have sinned against us so that we might have union with them, and a willingness to do this 70 x 7 times, to forgive others what they have done to us because God has forgiven us so much more. Reconciliation is necessary for God’s plan for us to be united with him and with each other forever in love.
• Today’s readings continue and build on that theme. In today’s Responsorial Psalm, we list all that God did for the Jews because his mercy endures forever, a list of things that Joshua himself describes in today’s first reading. In the Gospel Jesus points to God’s plan from the beginning in creating us as male and female in God’s image to be a loving communion of persons, how divorce and remarriage contradicts that plan, and how God calls us, like he called the Pharisees, to a conversion from hardness of heart to doing even hard things for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let’s enter into that drama, which will also help us to appreciate much more the holy one whose feast day the Church celebrates today.
• When the Pharisees approached Jesus in the area across the Jordan from the Holy Land and asked him a question about marriage, it wasn’t a question of curiosity or even to learn. It was likely meant to be a trap. Jesus was in the area where John the Baptist had been preaching and baptizing and to ask him about the lawfulness of marriage was to ask him a political question for which John the Baptist had been killed by Herod Antipas. John had said to Herod that it was not lawful for him to be married to the wife of his brother Philip, not just because this incest by affinity was contrary to God’s plan but because marrying another person’s wife certainly was. Herod thought that Jesus was John risen from the dead. To ask Jesus about marriage was potentially to invite him to criticize the same king and suffer the same consequence.
• Jesus’ reply began in a telling way: “Have you not read…?” The Pharisees, who were scholars of the law and sought to live by every dot in it, obviously had read the Book of Genesis many times, but Jesus was seeking to humble them because they obviously had missed its meaning. Then he described with words that were not just citing Genesis but invoking, in a sense, his own memory of how things were in the beginning when ” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” that “from the beginning God ‘made them male and female and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate.” God’s plan from the beginning of time was for marriage to be the greatest image of God, God who is a loving communion of persons, who seeks to unite man and woman in a faithful, indissoluble, fruitful union that would image the way he would engage the human race by become “one flesh” with us.
• The Pharisees then asked, and we ought to pay attention to the verb they used, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss her?” They were trying to pit Jesus against Moses and thereby against God. But Moses had never commanded man to divorce a wife, as if this was the 11th part of the Decalogue. Jesus described what Moses did and why: “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives,” but he said “from the beginning it was not so,” it was not part of God’s plan. Moses permitted it for a time. He didn’t command it. And Jesus then clarified that “whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful [unless it is not a marriage in the first place, like marrying someone who was married to someone else, like marrying a child or a parent, etc.]) and marries another commits adultery.” And adultery is the classic sin of the Old Covenant. God clarified that all sins are adultery against the loving union God had sought to establish with the human race, which was described in Hosea and Isaiah, pointed to in the Song of Songs, and would culminate with the advent of the Bridegroom, Jesus.
• In response to that sin, God’s mercy endures forever. Just like God led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the promised land, so Jesus wants to lead us on an exodus from sin into his kingdom. It’s an exodus from a hardened heart that stubbornly persists in sin to what many of the saints call a “liquid heart,” one that sacrifices its own fleshly desires, sexual instinct and instinct for self-preservation and pours itself out for others. It’s a passover from hardness of heart to purity of heart, which sees God (Mt 5:8) and seeks to do everything “for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus’ passage about the eunuchs is a passage about the possibility of chaste continence out of love for, and in fidelity to, God. Jesus describes three types of eunuchs: some who are incapable of marriage because of the way they were born, and we could incorporate into this category those who believe and feel that they were “born gay”; others who were “made so by others,” and we can think about those who were made this way through their spouses abandoning them; and others who have “renounced marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of heaven,” and we can think of those, like us, sisters and priests, who have made public promises of chaste celibacy in imitation of Christ’s chaste celibacy. Jesus says “Not all can accept this word,” meaning many will not grasp his teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, that one marries for life, for better or worse, for richer or poor, in sickness and in health, and one only gets one shot at it while the other spouse is alive, something that can be scary; but he says those “to whom [it] is granted” can indeed accept it, and God always provides the grace to live in a holy way even when we may be asked to live carrying a heavy Cross. “Whoever can accept this ought to accept it,” and Jesus will give us the grace to accept it all.
• Today the Church celebrates for the first time the feast day of Blessed Michael McGivney, who out of tremendous appreciation for marriage and the family — not only to form husbands and dads but care for their widows and children should they die or become incapacitated suddenly — founded in 1882 the Knights of Columbus. He was a minister of God’s mercy in the confessional and in so many corporal and spiritual works. He was an excellent catechist, like Joshua, in reminding everyone of the great and continuously merciful works of God. He reminded them that they had ears to hear God’s word and helped them to become doers of the word. In the Collect of this Mass, we summarized the message of today’s readings, focus on how Blessed Michael enfleshed them and then prayed for us to do similarly: “God of eternal mercy, who set your Priest Blessed Michael in the Church to comfort the suffering and the weary, the lonely and the oppressed with works of charity [mercy] and a gentle heart, grant that, through his intercession, we too may become vessels of mercy in our day and so enter into our heavenly inheritance.” As we prepare to enter into the consummation of the spousal union between Christ and his Bride the Church, in which the Bride becomes one flesh with the Bridegroom, a loving bond from after which human marriage is patterned, let us ask Blessed Michael to intercede for all of us so that we might pass from hardness of heart to purity of heart, from hardness of heart to gentle hearts full of mercy that overflow in corporeal and spiritual works, so that we might recognize with Blessed Michael in heaven how the Lord’s mercy endures forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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