Endowed with Every Spiritual Blessing in the Heavens, 28th Thursday (II), October 13, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
99th Anniversary of the last of the Apparitions in Fatima
October 13, 2016
Eph 1:1-10, Ps 98, Lk 11:47-54

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Today we begin two weeks of study of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which is one of the most uplifting and synthetic of all the great apostle’s teaching of the early Church, in which he makes plain God the Father’s plan and will to bring all things into a union of love through the work of Christ his Son continued and carried out in his body the Church. At the very beginning of the letter, which we have today, St. Paul describes what God has done for us and what he asks of us. It’s important for us to ponder these truths often, especially when we are having a bad day or are tempted to forget who we are.
  • St. Paul begins by reminding us of how blessed we are to be Christians: the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” God held nothing back. There are no blessings we haven’t been given. And we’ve been given those blessings not just through Christ but in Christ who is the greatest blessing of all.
  • He then reminds us of our vocation: God chose us in Christ, “before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him.” Before God said, “Let there be light” and “Let us make man in our image,” he not only had us in mind but chose us and he gave us the vocation to be saints, to be holy and immaculate before him. If he’s given us this vocation, he will provide the means, and those means are the every spiritual blessing in Christ his Son.
  • He then reminds us of our filiation and inheritance: “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved.” In St. Paul’s day, when someone was adopted, he was treated identically to a biologically child; if he were older than the oldest biological child, he received all the rights of primogeniture. For St. Paul to talk about our being adopted, he means that we have received the full inheritance of Jesus! How can we not praise the glory of this grace?
  • But obviously we’re sinners and fallen, but God has taken that into consideration as well from before the creation of the world. “In Christ, we have redemption by his Blood, the forgiveness of transgressions, in accord with the riches of his grace that he has lavished upon us.” He has lavished his mercy upon us in Christ as part of every spiritual blessing.
  • And he has also made plain his plan so that we can cooperate freely and fully with it: “In all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favor that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.” The mystery is now an open secret: God wants to bring us into communion, communion with God, communion with each other. He wants us to grasp that all of creation is part of God’s plan of love. Christ’s mission is to restore to unity the various divisions that entered through sin.
• That’s God’s blessing, calling, help and plan, but he has made us free and we need to respond to that plan by embracing it and letting our whole life develop in accordance with it. As we prayed in the Psalm, “The Lord has made known his salvation,” but we’re called to “sing a new song to the Lord for he has done wondrous deeds.” That’s obviously what the Blessed Virgin did and so many of the saints have done, letting God’s blessing in Christ develop within them so that, redeemed and forgiven by his blood, they might become holy and immaculate. But unfortunately not everyone has received the Lord’s love in that way. Others have rejected it. We glimpse that rejection in the rejection of Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel. Jesus says to them, “Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets whom your fathers killed. Consequently, you bear witness and give consent to the deeds of your ancestors, for they killed them and you do the building.” God never ceases to send prophets to his people to reveal “the mystery of his will,” but Jesus was saying that the people that God had chosen to be his own, the people he had prepared in order to accomplish his plan in the fullness of time to bring his salvation as a light to the nations, only would honor prophets after they rejected and killed them. A dead prophet was safe; a live prophet was a challenge. In building these memorials, they would delude themselves into thinking they had embraced God and his messenger, whereas they were repeating the same faults by rejecting those whom God continued to send, something seen in the life of St. John the Baptist and especially in Jesus’ own life as they “began to act with hostility toward him” and “were plotting to catch him at something he might say.”
• It’s important for us, however, not just to build memorials for the prophets the Jews killed, or even to build a memorial for Jesus. It’s still quite possible for us, like those in Jesus’ generation, not to receive God’s spiritual blessings, not to be holy and without blame before him, not to behave as his children, not to bathe in his blood, not to enter into communion and let our whole life be summed up by Christ. It’s a perennial temptation. Today as we celebrate a votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to mark the 99th anniversary of the sixth and last apparition of Our Lady to the three shepherd children in Fatima, we’re given the means by which to live holy and immaculate in God’s sight, to rejoice in our having received God’s every blessing in Christ, to respond to God’s mercy and live as his beloved children: it’s through consecration to Mary’s immaculate heart. God wants to help us to build this type of living memory of the Lord within our hearts, treasuring and contemplating all those blessings within so that our life may in turn become a Magnificat. Mary asked the three shepherd children to consecrate themselves to her as the remedy for the three evils she showed them in visions — the evil of Hell, the march of atheistic communism, and the persecution of the Church — and what they flow from, sin. A heart consecrated to her is a heart that says fiat to God, a heart that’s pure and sees God in others, a heart that allows God’s own love to beat within and that pumps it outward in love to others. This is the type of living memorial God wants.
• And to help us live that memorial and make that consecration, the Lord gives us the great gift of the Mass. So instead of building memorials of stone or wood, Jesus wants us to “do this in memory of” him. He is the one who is every spiritual blessing in the heavens, the one who transforms us into “sons in the Son,” the one who seeks to redeem us by his precious blood, the one who wishes to bring us in communion and confirm us in our vocation and mission to the praise of his glory. But we need to respond to this loving, exhaustive action of the Lord differently from those in the Gospel who reject God’s action. We need to respond like Mary did.  Today through her intercession we ask for that gift so that through the Eucharistic transformation that Jesus wishes to work within us, we may become holy and without blemish before him and come at last with her to that place that God has planned for us since before the foundation of the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: