Entering into and Announcing the Kingdom of our Living Redeemer, 26th Thursday (II), October 4, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi
October 4, 2018
Job 19:21-27, Ps 27, Lk 10:1-12

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• We spoke yesterday about Jesus’ having fixed his face on Jerusalem, on Calvary, on his redemptive passion, and how everything thereafter in St. Luke’s Gospel is meant to be understood with Jesus’ focus — and the same focus he wants in us — in mind. That’s what grounds today’s commission of the 72 to proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom, who was heading toward his coronation (with thorns). They were to be the heralds of the Kingdom, which means that that King is present, the King is alive, the King provides, the King brings peace. All of the instructions Jesus gives is with that in mind. There’s an urgency to the task: they’re to pray for fellow laborers for the harvest, because the harvest is ripe, and greet no one along the way; they’re being sent not as assassins but as lambs, to announce meekly to others’ freedom, rather than compel them; they’re to show their trust in God’s providence by not taking money, a sack of food, a second pair of sandals; they’re to announce the peace that the Prince of Peace has brought through the forgiveness of sins; they’re to eat whatever is set before them, whether served by Pharisees or by Publicans, whether kosher or not, because the King created it all and it’s not a forbidden fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; they’re to stay in the same place, grateful to God and to their hosts, and not looking for a better one; they’re cure the sick as a sign of the cure of the soul that the King is bringing about. All of these flow from a living relationship with the King.
• We see the same relationship with a living King in Job. After his friends failed to persuade him that his sufferings were a result of sin, after his arguments likewise failed to persuade them, after he was experiencing profound pain and sorrow, he made an extraordinary profession of faith. That even should he die and return to the dust from which he came, “I know that my Vindicator lives and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust.” He knew that his Redeemer is alive and would live on after his death — and not only that but “I myself shall see Him … with my own eyes … from my flesh,” something that filled his inmost being with longing. As he was in great pain throughout his body, his innards were longing not for “relief” but for his Redeemer!
• The second great example of a living relationship with the Redeemer is seen in the life of the great St. Francis of Assisi, whom the Church celebrates today. He is someone who for the first 25 years of his life lived mostly distant from God. In his own Testament at the end of his life, he said he regarded the first 25 years of his life as a time when he was “in sin,” living a care-free life in which he was head of the fraternity, or as his friends called him, the “king of feasts.” But the true King of the unending feast never stopped calling him, and he called him through four great stages of conversion, or increased intimacy. When Pope Benedict went to Assisi in 1207, he pondered the four stages of Francis’ conversion, which involves not just turning away from sin but turning toward and eventually with the Lord. Insofar as Christ “came to call sinners” with a summons to ever deeper “turning with the Lord,” we can learn so much from these four stages how to live in greater communion with the King whose kingdom we’re first called to enter and then to announce.
• The first stage of his conversion and call to deeper communion happened through charity and compassion. It took place when he was riding his horse outside the city and met a leper who came out from a leper colony to ask him for an alm. Francis dropped him something and sped away, not being able to stand the sight and smell of the leper and also phobic about catching the disease. But a short distance away he was pierced to the heart by his lack of genuine love. He turned around, sped to the leper, dismounted, and then embrace him and kiss the lands he wouldn’t touch earlier when dropping coins. It was a conversion to charity. “After 25 years of a mediocre life full of dreams, spent in the pursuit of worldly pleasures and success,” Pope Benedict described, Francis “opened himself to grace, came to his senses and gradually recognized Christ as the ideal of his life.” He was able to meet his living Redeemer and to love him in the disguise of the leper.
• The second vocational stage of conversion and deeper communion with Christ the King happened in the Church of St. Damian on the slope of Assisi. As Francis was praying in front of the Crucifix in the run down Church, Jesus spoke to him from the Cross and summoned him, “Francis, rebuild my Church which you can see is falling into ruin.” Francis, at first, took the Lord literally and, selling some of his father’s precious fabrics, with the proceeds began to reconstruct the dilapidated house of God. But the Lord had a far bigger building project in mind. Later Pope Innocent III had a dream in which he saw Francis, whom he would meet for the first time the following day, holding up the Cathedral of St. John Lateran, the Pope’s principal Church, a sign that the renovation project God had in mind was the Church as a whole, which is not built of marble, wood, bricks and glass, but men, women, boys and girls, living stones built on Christ the cornerstone. That’s the building project Francis would undertake for God, one living stone at a time, beginning with his Franciscan brothers, and then the Poor Clares, and then the lay Franciscans, and through them in the Church as a whole. St. Clare would run away from home at 18 to “live according to the manner of the holy Gospel,” and that type of evangelical living is precisely what the Lord was asking for, what Francis would eventually inspire. That was the second stage of his calling. Each of us is called in a similar way to participate in that constant renovation project which is the Church made out of living stones.
• The third stage of his continual version to deeper communion happened in the courtyard of the bishop’s residence after Francis’ Father had denounced him to the bishop for stealing his fabrics to sell them to rebuilt the Church. What Pietro Bernardone was really hoping for was far more than the restitution of his sold property, but the restitution of his son whom he thought was losing his mind seeking to unite himself to Christ in radical poverty, chastity and obedience. When Pietro told Bishop Guido what his son had done, Francis readily confessed, promised to return the money, but then grasped that the clothes he was wearing were also the fruit of his father’s generosity. So he stripped naked in the bishop’s courtyard, gave the clothes back to his Father, and then said he was finally able to live fully dependent on the generosity of his Father in heaven to whom he prayed, “Padre nostro, che sei nei coeli,” “Our Father, who art in heaven.” That was the third stage, to take Jesus’ words seriously that just as the Father takes care of the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky, so he will always care for our food, drink, clothing and housing. He was to live totally by God’s providence and mercy. The Lord would take care of him. We, too, are called to respond to our identity as beloved sons and daughters of God and live in accordance with that dignity.
• And the fourth and final stage of his deepening conversion happened when the Lord appeared to him once more from a Crucifix, a Crucifix in LaVerna, two years before he died, and from his wounds pierced Francis’ hands, feet and side with his Sacred stigmata, so that Francis could bear in his own flesh Christ’s wounds. This was the culmination, so to speak, of his journey of conversion and holiness, which was, as Pope Benedict said in 2007, a “daily effort to put on Christ.” This itinerary culminated with the appearance of the stigmata, which enabled him to experience fully what St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Before he had received the visible wounds of Christ in his body, Pope Benedict stressed, Francis had received the wounds of Christ on his heart. He had been touched by the way his own sins had offended the Lord and had been moved with the same love for God and others that pierced Christ’s heart. This was his total conversion to Christ, “to the point that he sought to be ‘transformed’ into him, becoming his total image.” The Lord calls us, too, to become other Christ’s through our entering into the kingdom. The Redeemer lives and stands on the dust of the old Adam so that the New Adam might raise us from the dead.
• He and the Franciscans he founded have in a particular way lived today’s Gospel. They were the laborers the Lord needed to bring in his harvest and they have been laboring hard for eight centuries. They’ve proclaimed the Gospel in poverty and trust in Providence. They have announced “pax et bonum,” peace and all good to those they’ve met, knowing that true peace comes from God and the greatest good is “every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” They have announced with the same Passion as Francis — the former troubadour —  the love of the Creator and his presence always, as Francis did when he “actualized” the presence of the King at Christmas in a living Nativity. Pope Benedict summarized all of this in 2007, when he said about Francis’ conversion and ours: “Speaking of conversion means going to the heart of the Christian message, and at the same time to the roots of human existence. … Since the time when the faces of lepers, loved through love of God, made him understand in a certain way the mystery of kenosis (cf. Phil 2: 7) – the humbling of God in the flesh of the Son of Man -, from the time when the voice of the Crucifix in San Damiano put in his heart the program for his life, ‘Go, Francis, repair my house’ (2 Cel I, 6, 10), his journey was none other than the daily effort to put on Christ. … My dear brothers and sisters, what was the life of the converted Francis if not a great act of love? This is revealed by his passionate prayers, rich in contemplation and praise, his tender embrace of the Divine Child at Greccio, his contemplation of the Passion at La Verna, his living ‘according to the form of the Holy Gospel’ (2 Test. 14), his choice of poverty and his quest for Christ in the faces of the poor. This was his conversion to Christ, to the point that he sought to be ‘transformed’ into him, becoming his total image; and this explains his typical way of life by virtue of which he appears to us to be so modern. … May Francis of Assisi obtain the grace of an authentic and full conversion to the love of Christ!” That’s a prayer to help us respond fully to our Christian calling!
• Each of us is called to “relive the interior journey of Francis.” Each of us is called to hear the Lord’s voice to repair his Church, parts of whose living stones in every generation “falling into ruins” through sin. Each of us is called to let Christ fully come alive in us through being “crucified with Christ,” which means denying ourselves, picking up whatever hardships or crosses we are given, and following Christ (see Mt 16:24). Each of us is called, in short, to offer our lives in love for God and for others. “In a word,” Pope Benedict summarized, “Francis was truly in love with Jesus.” That love for Jesus shone throughout his converted life and still shines 800 years later. It is a love that was so strong as to rebuild the Church. It is a love that is still powerful enough to rebuild the Church in our time, if we are able to experience that love through a conversion as profound as Francis’. To strengthen us in this continued assimilation of the life of Christ, Jesus is going to do something even greater for us than he did for Francis in the cave of LaVerna. We’re not just going to receive in our flesh his sacred stigmata, but we’re going to receive within his whole body, blood, soul and divinity, something that will help us from the inside to live a converted life, to live according to the manner of the Holy Gospel, to live fully in God’s kingdom and announce it, so that others, in seeing our response to Christ’s perpetual call might join us in that Kingdom laboring for the King!

The readings for today’s Mass were: