Entering By Name into the Personal Relationship God Wants To Have With Each of Us, Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 14, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 14, 2024
1 Sam 3:3-10.19, Ps 40, 1 Cor 6:13-15.17-20, Jn 1:35-42

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• After having finished the Christmas Season and entered into the period of so-called “Ordinary Time,” the Church has us focus on the extraordinary, mind-blowing truth that God wants to enter into a deep, intimate, personal relationship with each of us. He wants us to do more than know about him and believe in his existence. He wants us to know him personally, to enter into friendship, to receive and reciprocate his love, and then in that bond to recognize who we really are, not only created in his image and likeness but summoned to flourish by living up to that origin and destiny. As we marked thorughout the Christmas season, prayed for specifically on Christmas morning, and reiterate every Mass as the chalice is prepared, Christ took on our humanity so that we might enter into his divinity. But this is accomplished not just by his birth, life, passion, death and resurrection, but through a loving personal bond, not just through his agape but through mutual agape, philia and even eros. Today’s readings all help us to focus on this astounding reality, gift and task.
• In today’s first reading, we see God’s desire for a personal relationship with each of us. We meet the young Samuel. Samuel, we remember, was conceived after God heard Hannah’s fervent prayers and tears in the Temple of Shiloh. After he was weaned, Hannah with faith brought up to the Temple so that he might be dedicated to the Lord’s service. He grew up in the Temple through his childhood up through his adolescence. Despite his being in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s holy accompaniment of Israel through the desert and into the Holy Land, the text tells us he was still “not familiar with the Lord.” He was there serving the Lord but didn’t know him. That wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t just because “the Lord had not revealed anything to him as yet,” but because Eli and his sons who should have known the Lord and trained him to enter into personal relationship with him were “sleeping” in the Temple rather than vigilant and awake in God’s presence. The Lord, however, was about to change all of that.
• Three successive times, God called out to young soon-to-be prophet by name, “Samuel, Samuel.” That very moniker already indicates the personal relationship God desired of him. “Shem” means name. The verb “Shema” means “to hear.” “El” refers to God. And so Shemu’el in Hebrew means both “name of God” and “God has heard.” It’s an indication that the Lord wants us to invoke his name in prayer and that he wants to hear our invocations. Samuel was destined, we could say, to become the personification of prayer, of the Lord’s desire to enter into a life-changing and life-sustaining dialogue with him. So during the night, each time the Lord called out to the boy, Samuel promptly ran to Eli, who was sleeping, rather than praying, in the house of the Lord. The first two times, Eli just told Samuel to imitate his priorities and go back to bed. But the third time God called Samuel and the boy awakened Eli, the priest finally snapped out of his storper, recognized that the Lord had to be the one calling the boy, and helpfully told him to reply the next time, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” That’s what Samuel did and that’s when the Lord began to speak to him. In the dialogue of prayer that immediately followed, God revealed to Samuel the evil that would come to Eli’s house as a result of their corruption. Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phineas, out of gluttony had been extorting and confiscating the sacrifices people would bring to God and had also been using their offices to sexually abuse the women who were trying to serve God at the entrance of the Temple. Yet Eli, who had been repeatedly informed of their sins and hypocrisy, merely told them they should stop but did nothing more. God’s first conversation with Samuel was this difficult one in which he told him that Eli’s family would be punished for what he called their “blaspheming God”: rather than praising God in his holy place, they were desecrating it, themselves and the women they were exploiting. The young prophet was reluctant to share the contents of his conversation with Eli the following morning, but when Eli insisted, he held nothing back. That was the first of a lifetime of conversations God would have with Samuel so that through him God might enter into dialogue, guide and help his people. God would reveal to Samuel to anoint Saul, then to reprove him for his infidelity, then to go to Jesse’s house and anoint David, and so much more. Just as much as God called Samuel by name to prayerful conversation, so he calls us. But for that to occur, we need help. Many of us are not trained to listen, to tune into God’s frequency, even when we are in God’s presence. We need someone to teach us that prayer is not principally, “Be quiet, Lord, here is the list of things I want to ask you,” but “Speak, Lord, I am listening and want to be your servant.” We need those who can help us us learn how to be still and silent before God, how to perceive his voice, how to converse with him, how to develop through prayer that intimate friendship, that truly familiar and familial bond that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — who calls us by name — wants to have with us. And once we have learned through divine grace and good habit the art of prayer, we are all called to assist others to learn how to open up to the existential heart-to-heart dialogue God wants to have with them, too.
• In the Gospel, we see how St. John the Baptist played the role of Eli in the life of two of John’s disciples. When he saw Jesus walk by, he immediately pointed out, “Behold the Lamb of God.” Out of their trust in John, these two disciples — Andrew and almost certainly John the Evangelist, the author of the account — followed Jesus. They were tailing him at a distance, observing him. But God desires something far more intimate. Jesus turned to these two fishermen (who would never have made good private investigators!) and said, “What are you looking for?” “What do you seek?” “What do you really want?” Whether their answer was small talk or a question as to how far they’d need to journey if they were to keep stalking him, they replied, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Then Jesus, who had come for more than small talk, who had taken on our nature to enter into relationship with us, invited them, “Come and you will see.” That’s what they did. St. John notes, “It was about four in the afternoon,” which is not just a sign that he remembered the exact moment he met Jesus for the first time, but also, as many Scripture scholars attest based on the Gospel account, an indication of how long they spent with him. The text says, “They stayed with him that day,” which means not just that they hung around, for example, until midnight; rather, as various scholars of St. John’s Gospel teaches us through various indications at the beginning of his Gospel, it was almost certainly 4 pm on the sixth day of the Jewish week, or about sundown on Friday, which meant that the Sabbath was about to begin and therefore travel would be impossible. So when they went and saw where Jesus was staying and “stayed with him that day,” St. John means that they stayed the whole Sabbath with Jesus. They did an entire Retreat Day or Day of Recollection. They rested with the same Lord who rested at the end of creation and who created the Sabbath so that we might be restored in our relationship with him. That’s when their intense, life-changing friendship with Jesus began. It had such an immediate impact on them that, as soon as the sabbath was over and they were once again able to travel, Andrew ran to get his brother Simon to introduce him to Jesus, saying, “We have found the Messiah!” They had been able in that day of prayer to recognize all their desires had been fulfilled and that the long-awaited One had finally come. And when Jesus met Simon, he showed how he wishes to have an I-Thou relationship with each of us, changing Simon’s name to Cephas — “rock” or “Peter” — giving him the vocation and responsibility in the Church his Bride and Body that his personal, prayerful relationship with Jesus would make possible. In a similar way, after we have met the Lord, after we have entered into intimate friendship with him, we are impelled within to introduce those we know and love and care about, in fact everyone, to a similar relationship with him. We never know what the Lord will do once we make the introduction, just as John the Baptist didn’t know, just as Andrew didn’t know. But the greatest gift we can give to others is to introduce them to Jesus, to point him out, to help them to learn how to converse with him, to be and stay with him, to follow him, to discover in him the fulfillment of their longings, and to be transformed by him.
• The other readings today show two consequences of the personal encounter with God to which we’re called in prayer and in life. In the Psalm, which flowed from the prayer of King David whom God had had Samuel anoint, we see what’s supposed to happen from our perspective in our prayer and friendship with God. In prayer, we wait for the Lord and he stoops down to hear our cries whenever we are in need. He gives us ears open to obedience, docile to his will, and places his law into our hearts. He puts a new song, a new hymn to God, in our heart and mouth and we are spurred to sing that hymn, to follow his will, to live by his law. The refrain teaches us three central aspects of prayer. “Here I am, Lord.” The first thing we need to do is to show up. Second, we need to make it personal, calling on the Lord by name just as he speaks to us one-on-one. And then we pray in order fundamentally to do his will. In prayer, we seek God, find God, come to know God, come to love God, and in loving him, we love what he loves and therefore seek to do what he wills. So we first make ourselves present, “Behold I come.” Then we call upon him, speaking to him directly. “To do your will, O Lord, is my delight.” Then we seek to do that will we have discerned, and because of the love that flows in our relationship with God, we find delight in doing his will. The result of the entire process, as we pray at the end of the Psalm, is that we’re moved to give God praise and glory not just privately but publicly. We announce his justice, his goodness, his holiness before the multitudes. Our whole life begins to point people to him. Our whole existence becomes an extension of our prayer, a part of our prayer, and a means by which we draw people to meet the same source of justice, goodness and holiness.
• That leads us to the second consequence of prayer that we find in the readings: that we seek to live our whole life in communion with God, conscious that the earth is the Lord’s and that no matter where we are, we are in his presence and are meant to say, in words and body language, “Here I am, Lord. I have come to do your will.” In today’s epistle, St. Paul reminds us that the place of the conversation with God is not just supposed to be a Temple in Shiloh, or later in Jerusalem, or even here in the Bronx. The place of our dialogue is not merely meant to be in Jesus himself, the Word of God who tabernacled himself among us, the temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt on the third day. Through the sacraments, God seeks to make each of us his dwelling place, where he desires to carry out a living dialogue. St. Paul asks with a certain pained astonishment to the Christians in Corinth, “Do you not know that your body” — the body that, as St. John Paul II told us, is the sacrament of the human person, body and soul — “is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” Our body is meant to be the temple of God’s holy presence. That theological and sacramental fact is meant to lead to a moral response, and St. Paul makes it clear: “Therefore, glorify God in your body.” Our whole existence is supposed to be a house of prayer, a loving, intimate friendship with God, in which we glorify him, praise him, thank him, ask for his mercy and his help for others and ourselves. We’re supposed to be in communion with God, in other words, not just when we go to pray — whether in a Church, a chapel, or even the corner of our room — but full-time, wherever we are. That’s why St. Paul tells the Corinthians that it’s such a contradiction when we begin to live in the body like the sons of Eli did in the temple precincts of Shiloh. “The body is not for immorality,” he says, “but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” Our body is meant to be the dwelling place of God, not a den of thieves or immorality. St. Paul was addressing specifically the sexual sins for which the Corinthians were sadly infamous, but his words are indeed broader. The Lord has given us our body and soul to glorify him, to enter into and remain in communion with Christ, to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, to live not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. We have indeed been purchased at a great price and the Holy Spirit wants to help us to live according to that value and dignity. We are the Lord’s, St. Paul reminds us, and are meant to live always for, with, and in the Lord, just as in Jesus, God is for us; and if God is for us, who can be against us?
• The greatest divine conversation of all that happens in human life is at Mass, when God gives us ears open to obedience so that we may hear God’s word and live it. It’s where he calls each of us by name not just to come and see where he dwells but takes up his dwelling within us. It’s where we behold the Lamb of God and he illustrates for us just how much the Lord is for the body as Jesus says, “This is my body given for you.” It’s where we say, “Behold, I come” and are strengthened to announce his justice to others, indeed to go out and announce the Gospel to the whole world. It’s here where we find the Messiah and Son of God who wants us to spend not just a day with him but the whole of our life all the way into eternity. As we prepare to receive him, we ask the help of the Holy Spirit, so that in our prayer, in our words, and in all of our actions, we may glorify God in the body, live and show that we are for the Lord, and draw many others to join us in this liturgy of life so that in heaven, we may sing the new love song, the hymn to our God he has placed within us, in the vast assembly of all the angels and saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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