Faithfully and Prayerfully Fighting, Running, and Evangelizing, 30th Sunday (C), October 23, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 23, 2022
Sir 35:12-14.16-18, Ps 34, 2 Tim 4:6-8.16-18, Lk 18:9-14

To listen to today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In retreats, there is the classic practice of praying about the last things and reflecting upon our death, since we never know the day or the hour and because remembering that we will die helps us to learn how to live, to evaluate what really matters and to prioritize what’s truly important. As helpful as that practice is, there’s an even more helpful one: to enter into the holy thoughts and fitting preparations of the saints as they prepare for death. Today in the second reading, we are able to enter into the St. Paul’s last will and testament. He was in a Roman prison writing what he thought might be his final words to his spiritual son St. Timothy. He said he was already being poured out as a sacred sacrificial offering to God and that the time of his departure from this life was near. In one phrase he summarized all that he sought to do in his life since his conversion. “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” The three things that the apostle indicated are, God-willing, three accomplishments each of us should be able to echo at the end of our life, by aiming to live them each day throughout our life.
• The first thing he says is, “I have fought the good fight.” The Christian life isn’t easy. It’s a battle. The word he uses for fight is actually the Greek word for agony. He’s agonized through what he describes as the “good and beautiful agony.” We see in St. Paul’s life that he agonized, he fought, through multiple imprisonments, beatings, stonings, shipwrecks, labors sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, anxiety for the Churches, betrayals, abandonments and more (2 Cor 11:23-28). But he never gave up the fight. In the Christian life, we have to struggle against our weaknesses and failings, we need to war against the devil and his unending attempts to turn us from God, and we also need to fight against those who make it difficult for us to live and share our faith. St. Paul competed well, he competed like a champion, he never gave up. He told St. Timothy later in today’s passage, “The Lord stood by me and gave me strength.” The same Lord will stand by us. That’s why St. Paul could write to St. Timothy at the end of his first letter, “Fight the good fight of faith” (1 Cor 12:6). The Christian life is meant to train us to be fighters, to be tough and resilient, because we recognize that God is standing by us to give us strength and that we can do all things in him who strengthens us (Phil 4:13).
• The second thing St. Paul declares is, “I have finished the race.” One of the reasons why St. Paul was able to do so much for the Lord was because he always had a sense of urgency. He recognized that the Christian life is not one where we sleep the fat morning, pass the day sitting down on a recliner, and have plenty of time to take naps in comfortable hammocks. The Christian life isn’t a leisurely saunter following in Jesus’ footsteps. It’s a race! It’s a life-long marathon. St. Paul ran that race all over the ancient world, throughout the Middle East, Asia and parts of southern Europe. Most of us are not called to anywhere near the same total on the pedometer as he amassed, but we are called to live our faith with similar urgency. We’re called to hasten to God, to hasten to serve others, to hasten to grow in and share our faith. Just as the love of Christ impelled him, so we’re called to say and show, caritas Christi urget nos. The love of Christ and of others in Christ is meant to motivate us to persevere in the marathon of Christian life, up hills and down into dark valleys. The same Lord who gave St. Paul spiritual stamina will sustain us, because he’s running the race right alongside of us to the heavenly Jerusalem.
• St. Paul states, third, is, “I have kept the faith.” This expression means far more than that the apostle was rejoicing that he hadn’t in the end become a heretic or an atheist. Rather, he looked upon his greatest triumph as keeping the faith he regarded as the greatest gift of his life. He had remained faithful. He remained true to the Lord who stood by and strengthened him. St. Paul preserved the faith by sharing it. He wrote to the Corinthians, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I myself received” (1 Cor 15:3). He said to St. Timothy in today’s passage that his goal was that through him “the proclamation might be completed and all the Gentiles might hear it.” Pope Francis commented a few years ago: “How did St. Paul preserve the faith? Not in a safe! He didn’t hide it underground, like the lazy servant who buried the talent. … He kept the faith because he didn’t limit himself to defending it, but proclaimed it, spread it, brought it to the farthest reaches of the world. … He preserved the faith because, just as he received it, he passed it on, throwing himself into the peripheries without hiding behind bunkers.” Pope Francis urged us not to try to keep our faith like a private possession in a bank account, but to share it with words and witness. This will happen, he said, if we recognize the treasure of our faith and seek to share that treasure with those we know and love. To keep the faith through sharing it was St. Paul’s greatest boast. He wants it to be ours, so that as we in draw each day one day closer to the finish line of life, we may be prepared to secure that “crown of righteousness” that St. Paul assured will await any of us who have “longed” for the coming of the “Just Judge.”
• To fight the good fight, to finish the race and to keep the faith are three prisms with which we could look at all aspects of our Christian life. In today’s Gospel, however, Jesus speaks to us once again about prayer, and so it’s important for us to re-read the Gospel in the light of St. Paul’s words and re-read St. Paul’s words in light of Jesus’ instructions on prayer. We know that prayer is a battle. The Catechism tells us that sometimes prayer is like Jacob’s struggle all night against the angel of God (Gen 32:25-32). We’re called to fight the good fight of prayer. Likewise, we must never stop running to God in prayer and must persevere in that marathon, as Jesus taught us all last Sunday in the Parable of the Persistent Widow. And if we’re going to keep the faith, we need to preserve a life of intense prayer, because, as Pope Benedict never ceased to say, prayer is faith in action. So today let’s learn from the Lord how to pray well so that we may be strengthened by the Lord standing with us to fight, to run, and to stay faithful.
• In the first reading, Sirach reminds us that God doesn’t play favorites. He’s not “unduly partial to the weak” or the strong, “yet he hears the cry of the oppressed, … the orphan, …the widow, … the lowly, … the one who serves God willingly.” As the Psalm reminds us, “when the just cry out, the Lord hears them,” for he is “close to the brokenhearted,” those “crushed in spirit,” those who “take refuge in him” and the “poor.” Yet while God hears the prayers of everyone and seeks to respond, each of us has to be open to him and receptive to his gifts. Our prayer must be humble, because pride can close us off to what God seeks to give. The surest way to help us lose the good fight, to quit the race and lose the faith is through pride. We see that in the parable Jesus teaches about the two men who went up to the temple to pray.
• The first man was a Pharisee. He prayed, “Thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” The man was what most people would deem a religious man. He was going up to Jerusalem to the temple to pray. He, like his fellow Pharisees, never sought to do the minimum in the practice of the faith but as much as they could. Whereas Jews were required to fast only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week, every Monday and Thursday. Whereas Jews needed to tithe only certain items, he tithed his whole income. Outwardly he was a role model. But there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, of the faith, and of others. The first clue is that Jesus said about him, “He spoke this prayer to himself.” That doesn’t mean that he simply said it quietly so that he alone could hear, but, in a sense, he was praying the prayer to himself, as if he were God. He was more informing God of his goodness than turning to him with praise, thanks, contrition, intercession and petition. The man rejoiced that he was not like so many others, whom he said were losers, exulting in what he saw was his virtue, but failing to recognize that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He didn’t ask God for mercy or in fact for anything, because he didn’t think he needed mercy or really even needed God. Compared to so many around him, and to the other person praying at that time in the temple, he considered himself a saint among sinners. He had come to the temple not to worship God or beseech him, but essentially to allow God to applaud him.
• Jesus contrasts this man’s prayer with that of a tax collector. Tax collectors or publicans were hated by their fellow Jews not just because they were collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in carrying out their duty, they would routinely rip off their people for greed. They were assessed a certain amount that needed to be collected; whatever they could get beyond that was theirs to keep, and many of the tax collectors were swindling the poor precisely in order to support a sumptuous lifestyle. They were corrupt, similar to an ancient mafia class that the authorities with whom they were conspiring would do nothing to stop. One would think that someone in such circumstances who had given his life over to this type of betrayal of his nation and his people wouldn’t pray at all. For him to pray, some might have argued, was hypocritical. But he realized that even if others might never forgive him, God might, and he knew he needed God’s forgiveness. With no arrogance, no self-importance, and great humility, he stayed in the back of the temple, beat his breast and cried, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” In fact the Greek is even clearer. He prayed, “O God, be merciful to me the ” He considered himself the greatest sinner around. He was totally conscious that he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but knew that the Lord was kind and merciful, that the Lord’s mercy endures forever, and with great repentance prayed for that gift.
• Jesus gave a startling conclusion to the parable. He told his listeners that of the two, the good man who fasted, tithed and lived outwardly by the mosaic law, and the despicable one who conspired with pagan authorities and shook down his own people, only one of them had their prayer heard and left the temple in a right relationship with God — and it was the publican! We’ve heard the parable so many times that we can miss the absolute shock that Jesus’ first listeners would have had in response to it. To understand their surprise, it would as if Jesus substituted a pope for the Pharisee and a drug lord for the tax collector and said that when the two left the Church only the drug lord was justified, on good terms with God. Such a comment was obviously not about the type of life the Pharisee and publican were leading until then, but about the type of prayer they made. The take-away is that no matter what type of life we have been leading until now, we are called to pray well, which means to pray humbly with a deep recognition of our need for God and his mercy. This parable points to what Jesus taught elsewhere, “I have come not to call the self-righteous, but sinners!” If we wish to go to pray on the Lord’s day and leave on good terms with the Lord, we must humbly recognize we need God, that we’re sinners in need of his mercy, ask for it and seek to live by it. Only those who pray for mercy, who open themselves to it, will be able to receive it. Only the truly humble will be exalted because they’re the only one who will allow the Lord to lift them up.
• Jesus told the parable, St. Luke tells us, to “those who were convinced of their own righteousness and despised everyone else.” Pride not only separates us from God and his assistance, but also from others. We begin to look down on others, including, for the Pharisee, not just tax collectors but other Pharisees and even Jesus. Such self-righteousness remains a great problem today. There are some in the Church who, when they look at themselves in the mirror, deem that, even though they may have their weaknesses and problems, at least they’re not like those who have “really sinned.” They might admit that, sure, like “everyone,” they, too, have some “peccadilloes,” they need need a “little” of God’s mercy, but nothing near what others need. They don’t think, as we pray at the beginning of every Mass, that they have “greatly sinned” by their own “most grievous fault.” Jesus gives this parable as a wake-up call, because such an attitude can incapacitate not only our prayer but our perseverance in the life of faith. Such self-righteousness, however, isn’t just a problem for those who, like the Pharisees, actually try to live religiously. It can also afflict those who live like the publican, something that’s popular today in our culture and even in some places in the Church. Those who are clearly violating the Lord’s commandments left and right — by engaging in lifestyles totally incompatible with the Gospel, never coming to the temple for Mass, never praying at all, advocating things diametrically opposed to what God has revealed — rather than repenting and coming to ask for God’s forgiveness, sometimes can glory in their shame and attack the Church or anyone seeking to help them to convert. They can pray like this, “I thank you, Lord, because I am not one of those hypocritical and judgmental modern Pharisees, who worry about fasting, who are obsessed about coming to Church and praying, who are guilt-tripped into tithing, who are neurotic about sin and think that everyone needs confession, but who in real life are much worse than I am!” Jesus is proclaiming the Parable to everyone who is convinced of his or her own righteousness, whether the person has been religiously observant up until now or not. He is teaching us all about the importance of humility before him, in prayer and in life.
• We finish by returning to St. Paul’s words and life. We remember that he used to kill Christians for a living, but he converted. Even though he became a great apostle, he always openly confessed that he was worst and least of all, because he had persecuted God’s Church (1 Cor 15:9). He discovered, however, that God was rich in mercy, so rich in fact that he called Paul himself to be an ambassador of that mercy, calling people throughout the whole world to be reconciled to God. All Saint Paul did, he did by the mercy of God, for the Merciful Lord stood by him and gave him strength. At the end of his life, he was able to pray with humble gratitude to God that he had fought the good fight, finished the race and kept the faith. As we enter at Mass into Jesus’ last will and testament, as we together with him receive his blood poured out like a libation, as we participate in his agonizing the good agony, the baptism with which he anguished to be baptized, the race along the Via Crucis he hastened to fulfill, we ask for the grace to imitate Jesus and St. Paul in humbly fighting the good combat of the faith until the end, finishing the race, treasuring, keeping and spreading the faith, and persevering in prayer to the one who stands by and strengthens us. That is the way by which, like St. Paul, we will receive the crown of righteousness that awaits us as we long for Christ’s appearance not just at the finish line of life in the heavenly Jerusalem but and even now here on the altar.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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