Faithful and Prudent Stewards of God’s Grace for the Benefit of Others, 29th Wednesday (II), October 19, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and Companions
October 19, 2022
Eph 3:2-12, Is 12:2-6, Lk 12:39-48

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 speaks about the characteristics of a “faithful and prudent steward” whom he implicitly contrasts with an unfaithful and imprudent one. The faithful and prudent steward has two basic qualities. First, he is vigilant for the Master’s presence and lives in such a way as if the Master is always present. Second, he gives to others the Master’s food at the proper time. The unfaithful and imprudent steward is one who says “My Master is delayed in coming” and instead of nourishing others starts to abuse them, beginning to “beat the menservants and maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk.” Jesus asks, “Who, then, is the faithful and prudent steward whom the Master will put in charge of his household?,” and he wants us to be among them. He reminds us, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” None of us, in other words, has been entrusted with “little,” but “much” and “more.” But the Lord wants us to recognize the gifts we have received and be good stewards of them in giving to others of the storehouse with which he has entrusted us.
• So what are those gifts with which we’ve been entrusted and what is the type of stewardship that a faithful and prudent servant carries out with regard to them? In today’s first reading, St. Paul describes that treasure and that prudent and faithful stewardship.  “You have heard of the stewardship of God’s grace that was given to me for your benefit,” he wrote to the Christians in Ephesus. “Of this I became a minister by the gift of God’s grace… to preach to the Gentiles the inscrutable riches of Christ and to bring to light for all what is the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past in God, … so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the Church.” He was constantly in God’s presence because he was in God’s grace, which is our sharing as creatures in the life of God. And the Lord had blessed him with the gift of revelation and he needed to dispense it as food to others, lavishing them on the feast of the fact that “Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same Body, and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.” The treasure is Christ’s salvific will. St. Paul’s stewardship was to preach it to all the nations. St. Paul knew that he had been given “even more” for this task, and that’s why he was speaking “with boldness of speech and confidence of access through faith in [Christ].”
• This stewardship of the revelation of the Lord and the need to dispense it to the nations is the background for the feast we celebrate today. The eight Jesuits whom we call the North American Martyrs — Jesuit Saints Isaac Jogues, René Goupil, John de Lalande, John de Brebeuf, Anthony Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Noel Chabanel — had the task, in the early 1600s, to bring the Gospel, the treasure of the mystery hidden in times past, to New France, which encompassed most of eastern Canada as well as some of the areas of upstate New York. Practically speaking, it meant carrying the word of Jesus Christ to the native Americans — the Hurons, the Algonquins, the Mohawks, the Iroquois — who by the time the Jesuits arrived in 1625 had already earned a reputation for resisting missionaries and making them martyrs. St. Jean de Brébeuf was one of the first Jesuits to arrive in 1625 at the age of 31. Earlier, he had been rendered an invalid by tuberculosis, but having recovered his strength, he wanted to use the health he had to pass on the treasure of the faith, becoming rich in what matters to God and seeking to help the natives likewise grow in that richness. As soon as he arrived, he began to study the difficult Huron language. Over the course of three years of hard work, living alone among the Indians, with much suffering and constant danger, he did not gain a single convert. When England took over Canada in 1629, he was summoned back to France. It would have been easy for him to say he had paid his dues and to spend the rest of his life at the Jesuit institutions of Europe, but when France re-obtained title to the Canadian colonies four years later, he was on the first boat back. His faith inspired him to continue to preach the “inscrutable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for all what is the plan of the mystery hidden from ages past.” For 16 more years he labored about the Hurons, with his perilous adventures covered in detail in The Jesuit Relations. He would drag his canoe and bags over mountains and valleys for miles, going from location to location, wherever the Hurons were. His apostolate began to bear fruit, especially with the young. In 1649, the Iroquois attacked the village where he was stationed and he was sentenced to death. His death is about as gruesome as that of any missionary’s ever recorded. He was stripped naked and beaten with clubs on every part of their body. Then they cut off his hands, applied white-hot tomakawks to his armpits and groin, and fastened searing sword blades around his neck. Next, they covered him with bark soaked in pitch and resin and lit him on fire. During all of this, as the eyewitness account records in The Jesuit Relations, he continued to encourage and exhort the Christian converts around him to remain faithful. He continued to preach the riches of Christ. To stop his preaching, the savages then plugged up his mouth, tore off his lips, cut off his nose, and then, in mockery of baptism, put him in a tub of boiling water. They proceeded next to cut off his flesh, roast it and eat it in front of him. The final blow came when they sliced open his chest and ripped out his beating, valiant heart, so that they could drink his blood when it was still warm. He was a faithful and prudent steward to the very end and has been rewarded as the Lord’s good and trustworthy servant sharing his Master’s joy.
• The missionary life and death of St. Isaac Jogues are similarly inspiring examples of what it means to be a good and faithful steward giving others their food not just at the proper time but even at a time when they might not be ready for it. St. Isaac arrived in New France in 1636 at the age of 29. His hard work among the Hurons bore fruit; in 1637, he rejoiced to baptize 200. In 1642, the Iroquois attacked the village where he was. He was beaten to the ground with clubs, and then had his hair, beard and nails torn away and thumbs and forefingers bitten off. He was then made a slave. Eventually, he was rescued by the Dutch and brought to Manhattan — he was the first Catholic priest ever on this island — before being sent back to France, where he was greeted both with both pity and as a hero. Because he no longer had the fingers to hold the Sacred Host, he was technically incapable of celebrating Mass, until Pope Urban VIII gave him a special dispensation. “It would be undignified that a martyr for Christ,” Urban said, “should not drink the blood of Christ.” Despite all that he had suffered, however, when the opportunity came to return to New France in early 1644, he jumped at the chance. He was sent, first, on a Mission as an Ambassador of France to the Mohawks in Auriesville where he had been held captive and where St. Rene Goupil had been martyred next to him four years prior. That mission was a success. Months later he would return there not as an Ambassador but as a priest, to try to solidify the work he had begun. He was ambushed, however, at a meal by the Mohawks, who tomahawked him as he was entering the cabin. They cut off his head and placed it on a pole facing the direction from which he had come, as a warning to other missionaries. St. Jean de Lalande was martyred the next day. But what the Mohawks were not planning on was that the blood of Jogues, Brébeuf, Goupil, Lalande and the four other North American martyrs would soften and fertilize the Indian soil to receive the Gospel. At the very place where Jogues, Goupil and Lalande were killed in Auriesvilles, New York, ten years later Saint Kateri Tekakwitha would be born. Even though they didn’t experience massive numbers of conversions during their missionary work, the North American Martyrs’ heroic deaths, perseverance in the faith, and zeal for the salvation of their torturers would become renown not just in the Christian world, but even among the sadistic executioners, and would eventually lead to many conversions. When the next wave of courageous missionaries arrived, they would Christianize almost every tribe they encountered. The blood of the martyrs is indeed the seed of Christians. And we continue to grow in faith in the state that St. Isaac’s blood sanctified.
• “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more,” Jesus said at the end of today’s Gospel. We have been entrusted with the greatest riches of all in Jesus’ body and blood in Holy Communion. The Son of Man comes not only at an hour we do not expect but very punctually at an hour we do, each day in daily Mass. And he wishes to do in us what the North American Jesuit Martyrs allowed him to do in them, so that we who have been entrusted with much may meet the demand flowing from those great riches —  to share the “mystery of Christ” with others, to give them their food at the proper time, and to let the springs of salvation overflow.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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