Doing, Like Mary, The Will of the Heavenly Father, 16th Tuesday (II), July 19, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Monica Parish, Kalamazoo, MI
Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
July 19, 2022
Mic 7:14-15.18-20, Ps 85, Mt 12:46-50

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• As we conclude the parish Mission this morning, celebrating the 20 years of perpetual Eucharistic adoration here at St. Monica’s and asking the Lord, at the beginning of the new national Eucharistic revival, not to help expand Eucharistic love here in this parish but to allow the Eucharistic faith, amazement and love present here to radiate infectiously to other parishes across the Diocese and country, the readings the Church gives us in the Liturgy of the Word today help us to focus on a couple crucial realities to our Eucharistic faith.
• In the first reading, we conclude our biennial three-day focus on the Book of the Prophet Micah, through whom God sought to bring to conversion around 730 BC. The people of Judah had lost their way. They were doing their will, rather than God’s. Rather than worshipping the Lord, they were adoring idols. Rather than loving their neighbor, they were treating them with hardened hearts and defrauding them. They weren’t keeping the commandments or being faithful to the covenant. They were not doing justice, loving mercy, or walking humbly with God, as we pondered yesterday. God’s response to Judah’s infidelity was fidelity and mercy. On behalf of the people, Micah turns to God and prays, “Who is there like you, the God who removes guilt and pardons sin for the remnant of his inheritance; who does not persist in anger forever, but delights rather in clemency and will again have compassion on us, treading underfoot our guilt? You will cast into the depths of the sea all our sins; you will show faithfulness to Jacob, and grace to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from days of old.” God responded by showing his mercy and love. Even after the people continued to disobey him and do their own thing, such that they were vulnerable to attack by the Babylonians and were taken into exile, God “brought back the captives of Jacob,” as we prayed in the Psalm. Eventually God sent his only Son as the incarnation of his kindness, named “Yeshua” in Hebrew, literally “God saves.” For us we see that even though we are living through a period of widespread ingratitude, indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, as he himself described to St. Margaret Mary, God has remained faithful, and continues humbly to give himself to us on the altar. That is an extraordinary witness of his merciful love and desire to save. In response to his fidelity, we are moved to reply to widespread ingratitude by always and everywhere giving him thanks and praise, to indifference by making him in the Eucharist the greatest difference in our life, to irreverence by approaching him with awe and piety, to coldness by treating him with ardent love, to sacrilege by constantly purifying ourselves through the gift of the Sacrament of Confession to receive him well, to scorn by showering him with praise.
• In the Gospel, when people tell Jesus that his mother and his relatives (the Hebrew and Aramaic words for brother was used for all relatives) were outside the crowded house where he was teaching and were hoping to speak to him, he used it to stress an important point of what he in mercy had come down from heaven to establish. Stretching out his hands toward his disciples, Jesus said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister and mother.” Jesus had come down from heaven to found a family and his family was constituted by those who, unlike in Micah’s time, do God’s will, not as some begrudging external imposition but as the means to true happiness, since God’s will is for us to live with him forever in glory. Some have thought that Jesus by his words was denigrating his mother, but he was doing precisely the opposite. He was pointing out the real source of his mother’s greatness, because she was one whose whole life was summarized by her words to Gabriel, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.” He made the same point when an anonymous woman shouted from a crowd, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!,” and he replied, “Blessed, rather, are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” More than anyone in history, Mary was one who heard the word of God and observed it with so much loving adhesion that that word actually took on her flesh and dwelled among us.
• That family Jesus came to establish through doing the will of God is what he brings about through the celebration of the Eucharist, as we do this in memory of him. As I mentioned briefly last night, the end of the Sacrament of the Eucharist is not just the miracle of transubstantiation and the real presence of Jesus Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity on the altar, but, through the worthy reception of him in holy communion, for us to become “one Body, one Spirit in Christ.” God’s family is formed by faithfulness to him in living a truly Eucharistic existence. This is what makes us brothers and sisters of Jesus, and also brothers and sisters of each other. But it also wondrously makes us more. Jesus says in the Gospel that “whoever does the will of my heavenly Father” is not just his brother or sister but also his “mother.” What does this mean? A saint who should be very dear to the parishioners of Saint Monica has helped the Church to understand this great mystery. Saint Ambrose, the great convert and bishop of Milan, was the one who gave Saint Monica hope as she worried about her son Augustine’s then wayward ways, and he was the one, by his words and example, who helped bring Augustine to conversion and to the sacraments. Saint Ambrose taught that even though Jesus has only one mother according to the flesh, in faith Christ is called to be the progeny of us all. He focused first on Sacred Scripture. We are called to conceive the word we hear interiorly and let that word gestate and grow to be so big that eventually — as if we were “ten months pregnant” — we need to give birth to the word, together with our flesh, in the midst of the world. But what he said about the words of God can also be said of the Word made Flesh, Jesus in the Eucharist. The same Jesus whom Mary nourished with love in her womb for nine months comes to abide in us. But just like he grew in her from a one-cell embryo to a baby whom after birth she would wrap in swaddling clothes, so he is supposed to grow in us, not just within our belly but throughout our body and soul, impacting our entire life, so that we cannot keep him within but are bursting to give him to others. And in a similar way that Mary’s maternity of Jesus led to her becoming the mother of Jesus’ whole mystical Body, embraced in St. John at the foot of the Cross, so our spiritually becoming Jesus’ mother through obeying God’s word, especially his command to do this in memory of him, is meant to lead us to take true responsibility in charity, like a loving parent, of all the others who are brothers and sisters of Jesus. This is a wondrous mystery, but it is true. The Eucharist makes the Church. The Eucharist makes the family of God. The Eucharist is the foretaste of heaven, when all those who do the will of the heavenly father will be united around Mary in loving and praising God forever.
• Therefore, today we listen to the word of God as a word to be done. The alleluia verse reminds us of what Jesus said during the Last Supper, that “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him and we will come to him.” With love, we seek to keep his word, to welcome that word, to allow it to take root in us, to grow within us and to bear great fruit. Like Micah we cry out to God for mercy for all those times we and others haven’t listened and observed it, and for his grace that we may make up for lost time. And as a family we seek today to welcome him within us with a generous heart like Mary did, to have our heart beat in synchrony with his like hers did, and to live our whole life in accordance with the blessed fruit of her and the blessed guest and love of our souls. This is the means by which, together with Mary and all of the saints, our spiritual siblings, we will come one day to the familial house of the Father Jesus has prepared for us, where God’s will is done in heaven as it is done on earth.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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