Exuberantly Doing God’s Will, 3rd Tuesday (II), January 28, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 3rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor
January 28, 2020
2 Sam 6:12-15.17-19, Ps 24, Mk 3:31-35

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today in the Gospel Jesus teaches us about what constitutes true familiarity with him. It’s not blood or genes, like Mary or his male and female cousins in today’s Gospel shared with him. We would say it’s also not merely his own blood flowing through us through our becoming one body with Him in Baptism. He says that his mother and brothers and sisters are “anyone who does the will of God.” This is, of course, what characterized the Blessed Mother above all, someone who par excellence heard the Word of God and let her entire life become a fiat in response to that word. It’s also what is supposed to characterize us. Jesus said that those who do his Father’s will will not merely be his spiritual siblings but also his spiritual mother. He doesn’t say “Father” because that is the principle of generation and he has one Father in eternity, something not added to in the least when he assumed human nature. But motherhood — in the mentality of Jesus’ day when it was believed that life came totally from the father and the mother just nursed the new life the dad inseminated within — was what nurtured, and Jesus was saying that we could nurture the life of Jesus by our own doing the will of the Father. We could clearly do so for others, helping, as St. Paul did among so many early Christians, to bring Christ to birth in them. We could also mysteriously do so for Christ within us, conceiving him through our ears by faith, becoming “impregnated” with him, letting him grow so much within that we eventually must give him to the light, as the Spanish say, and share him with others. This is what St. Ambrose used to teach about how all of us can become mothers of Jesus according to the faith.
• Doing the Father’s will can sometimes be arduous and against the grain. Jesus himself experienced this in the Garden of Gethsemane when he asked three times for the chalice of suffering to be taken away from him but prayed, “Not my will, but yours (Father) be done.” But for us marked by original sin, the contrast between God’s will and ours can sometimes be excruciating. Even and especially when it’s hard, it’s obviously right and just that we do it. But over the course of time, we hope to do so with enthusiasm and vigor. We see an expression of that in today’s first reading when David is bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence, into Jerusalem. He danced before the ark “with abandon.” Even though his wife Mychal, the daughter of Saul, would mock him for doing so, even though doubtless many others were too prim and proper to love the Lord with the abandon of David, he danced before the ark. He was rejoicing to do the Lord’s will and bring him into the Lord’s city. His witness should help us to overcome any hesitation or shame in doing the Lord’s will. Many times we are dutiful, but not joyful in the faith, because it’s possible to fulfill our duties without real love for God and for those we’re serving. It’s good to fulfill our responsibilities, but God wants to make that light and sweet. He wants us to put love into it.
• Today these teachings about doing the will of God with unabashed enthusiasm and joy are exemplified by the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. It was very costly for him to do God’s will because he was opposed by his family. After meeting some of the newly founded members of the Order of Preachers, popularly called the Dominicans after their founder St. Dominic, he discovered God was calling him to be one of them. But that was very much opposed by Thomas’ family, particularly his mother, who had plans for Thomas to follow her own brother as Abbot of the nearby prestigious Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino, where St. Benedict and St. Scholastica are buried. She would allow him to become a priest, but only a type of priest consistent with his noble birth. She absolutely didn’t want him to become a priest of a mendicant order that begged for food. She was inflexible. Thomas, therefore, when he reached majority ran away from home, heading to Paris to join the Dominicans. His mother sent his brothers, however, on horseback to capture him and bring him home, where she had him thrown into the dungeon of their castle imprisoned so that he wouldn’t escape. It’s there that they tried to break him from his desire to become a Dominican, his brothers going so far as to send a prostitute into the dungeon to try to have him fall in chastity, a temptation he thoroughly resisted. Eventually he would escape — it seems with the help of his mother, who thought it would be less embarrassing for him to escape and follow his vocation than for the family to give him permission — and head to become a Dominican. But his imprisonment of more than a year was one of the most important things that happened in the history of theology, because it was during that time that Thomas, to spend his imprisonment profitably, got a copy of the Latin New Testament and memorized it inside out, so much so that for the rest of his life, the words of Christ, the insights of the apostles, were on the tip of his tongue, something that strengthened all that he every wrote. This is a beautiful follow-up to the first Sunday of the Word of God, which we marked two days ago. St. Thomas took advantage of his incarceration to do the will of God by learning the word of God so that his life could be a commentary of it.
• Thomas was a phenomenal, and humble, student. Because he never answered questions in class, many of his classmates called him the “Dumb Ox,” because of his size. But his professor, St. Albert, who knew of his written work, said that his “mooing” would one day echo around the world. Thomas sought to united revelation to reason, with the help of the recently discovered texts of Aristotle, so that reason would help to deepen our understanding of the faith and faith would purify reason. Since the truths of faith and reason both come from God he knew that they could never truly be in conflict, just apparent conflict, and he began an incredibly prodigious output of writing that has influenced Christian theology and philosophy ever since. But as influential as his theological and philosophical corpus has been in the history of Christian thought, I believe his greatest legacy flowed out of his prayerful heart. After the Eucharistic Miracle of Bolsena, Pope Urban IV asked him and St. Bonaventure to compose the Office to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi — the hymns, the lessons, the prayers. St. Thomas won the competition against his holy Franciscan friend. And we are still very much profiting from the fruits of his contemplation. He wrote the Tantum Ergo and the O Salutaris we still sing at Eucharistic Adoration. He wrote the Panis Angelicus. He wrote the Adoro Te Devote and the Lauda Sion Salvatorem.  They all flow from his Eucharistic piety. I’ve always been very impacted by one of his lines from the Sacris Solemnis, the last two verses of which form the Panis Angelicus: “O Res mirabilis, manducat Dominum, pauper servus et humilis.” “O what an unbelievable reality: a poor and humble servant eats his Lord” and in the Lauda Sion, “Quantum potes, tantum aude,” “Dare to do all you can” in praising the great mystery of the Eucharist. Thomas in his Eucharistic writings did all he could, and exemplified the same spirit we see in King David in today’s first reading, when he danced before the Ark of the Lord with abandon. Thomas let out all of his love for the Lord in his Eucharistic hymns. And he’s been forming all of us ever since in that same love for the Lord and same wonder for the miraculous reality that the Lord we devoutly worship before this so great a Sacrament we actually are given the privilege to consume.
• That leads to the last point I’d like to say about St. Thomas, which sums up his entire life. He was a man who took care of the Word of God and the God of that word. Toward the end of his life he had two great mystical experiences (that we know of). In the first, he was so moved by the presence of the Lord that he stopped writing all together, recognizing everything he had written — some of the most important and penetrating theology anyone has ever written — were “like straw” compared to the experience he had of God in prayer. The second experience was when Jesus spoke to him from the Crucifix about three months before he died at the age of 49. Jesus said, “Bene scripsisti de me Thoma; quam ergo mercedem accipias?” “You have written well of me Thomas? What reward would you receive? What do you wish that I give you?” Thomas could have asked for anything, but he knew well who is treasure was. “Non aliam, Domine, nisi te ipsum,” he replied. “Nothing but you, Lord!” His whole life, his whole treasure, was the Lord. The Lord was the One he sought in his vocation even against the objections and obstacles of his family. The Lord was the One he sought in his study of Sacred Scripture and all his Sacred Theology. The Lord was the One he loved in all of his Eucharistic hymns. He only and always wanted the Lord as his reward, and now, on this feast day, we rejoice with him that with all the saints he has that “mercedem” — and from heaven, the light of the Lord that shone through him shines still.
• At the beginning of this Mass we prayed to God that he would grant us to “understand what [St. Thomas] taught and imitate what we accomplished.” Few of us will ever be able to read and understand all St. Thomas’ theology, but we can understand the most important thing he taught — about the primacy of the love and worship of God and the need to believe what the word of truth has said — as we pray that we may imitate what he accomplished, doing God’s holy will with abandon, so that we might be able to enjoy forever with him the “res mirabilis” of eternal life!

The readings for today’s Mass were: