Faithfully and Prudently Deploying Ourselves as Weapons of Righteousness, 29th Wednesday (I), October 23, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. John of Capistrano
October 23, 2019
Rom 6:12-18, Ps 124, Lk 12:39-48

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

• Peter today asks Jesus, “Is this parable meant for us or for everyone?” There was the implication that the apostles or others might be exempt from the lessons. Sometimes we can think ourselves exempt from really paying attention to what the Lord is asking, as if the Lord’s call to conversion is primarily directed to others. But the Lord is always speaking for us and for others, and we need to listen to everything as words to be done, so that we can become what he describes later in this passage, faithful and prudent stewards investing his word and passing this way of life on to others.
• To understand today’s Gospel better, we can begin with yesterday’s, when Jesus spoke to us of the two essential Christian dispositions and actions: to be vigilant with lamps lit for his perpetual coming and to have our loins girt, ready to work and to be sent out by him to finish the job he started of the salvation of the world. Today he reemphasizes these two points in the Gospel when he speaks about the qualities of a faithful and prudent steward. First about lamps lit, he tells us to “be prepared, for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.” The Lord is, as Mary of Bethany said before Jesus raised her brother from the dead, constantly “coming into the world.” The unfaithful disciple says, “My master is delayed in coming,” and the devil is constantly trying to get us to think that the Master is delayed, that he’s not already here. But he is here and the good and faithful steward acts as if he were aware of this continual divine accompaniment. Second about loins girt, Jesus says that the faithful and prudent steward “distribute[s] the food at the proper time.” God has fed us, he’s enriched us, and he wants us to love others with those gifts. The devil, after he’s seduced us to think that our life is meant to be lived apart from the Master, gets us instead to “beat the men servants and the maidservants,” “to get drunk,” in short to sin. Rather than serving others and caring for their needs, both spiritual and material, he tries to get us to hurt them. He’s also trying to get us to forget that we’re really stewards called to account.
• St. Paul picks up these themes in the first reading. He talks about two types of slavery: slavery to sin, featured by presenting our “bodies to sin as weapons of wickedness”; and consecration to God whereby we present ourselves to God “as raised from the dead to life and the parts of your bodies as weapons for righteousness.” I love this phrase. Our bodies, which are sacraments of who we are body-and-soul, are meant to glorify God, to be given to God and in God to others. So often, however, we allow our bodies to be slaves to sin, as we give ourselves to sinfulness. We see this when people get drunk. We see it when people are addicted to pleasure or sex or power or their egos. By Jesus’ action, he has set us free from this slavery. We can’t be passive, however, to this gift: Jesus, risen from the dead, has brought us fully alive through baptism; he wants us in return to present our bodies to him as risen from the dead, living a new life.
• St. Paul helps us to see that our lives are meant to be weapons. Our thoughts, words and actions can be  “weapons of wickedness,” making ours and others’ lives worse or miserable; or we can use them as “weapons of righteousness,” lifting people up. What’s it going to be? In Psalm 36, which we prayed this morning in Morning Prayer, we pondered the evil one who sits on his bed at night plotting the defeat of goodness. We’re called to plot the triumph of goodness, to seek to use our lives, together with and in response to God’s action, to build up his kingdom. Our charity is not supposed to be just “spontaneous,” even though random acts of kindness are good. It ought to be planned. It should be “plotted.” Our life is a weapon that we can and should use for good. It’s important for us to be practical about creating havoc for the devil each day, by thinking God’s thoughts, by lavishing true compliments and praise to others, by serving them with love in our deeds and helping them to feel the tender caress of God. God wants us to be a weapon in this way.
• The devil, moreover, if he can’t get us to serve in his army, is at least going to tempt us to think that all we’re playing with is a cap gun, that we don’t have much to offer. But Jesus addresses that at the end of the parable when he says, not, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and little will be demanded of the person entrusted with little.” Rather he says, “Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” We’ve all been entrusted with lavish gifts, filled to overflowing. Others may have more than we think we have, but we’ve still be blessed with much. To use the Parable of the Talents, some may be blessed with five talents, others two, and we one, but every talent is the equivalent in today’s money of $600,000 (if we were making $100 a day). Others, in other words, may be multibillionaires, but we’re still millionaires. And God wants us to spend what he’s given us! Sometimes people are tempted to think that they’re, “useless,” that they have nothing to offer. Today Jesus and St. Paul are both telling us we have a lot to offer.
• Today we have a great example of someone prudently and faithfully used his life as a weapon of righteousness, who knew he had received a treasure from God and wanted to pay it forward. St. John of Capistrano (1386-1456) was a brilliant young man who became mayor of his town at 26. He was used to being in charge. But he was vain and occasionally vicious. He had a major conversion and discerned that the Lord was calling him to be a Franciscan despite his marriage and personal weaknesses. The day he presented himself to the Franciscans, he mounted a donkey, sat backward toward the tail, put a paper on his back listing all his sins, and then let the donkey be led to the Franciscan monastery as the people of the town, especially the kids, pelted him with filth and epithets. He was accepted, but the Franciscan who was put in charge of him knew how difficult it would be to get him to obey the Holy Spirit after he was used to being in charge. He was therefore brutal with him. Eventually, however, with the help of prayer, the Holy Spirit and lots of mortification, God strengthened him to become an instrument of so much good within the Franciscan order, in Italy and even in various countries where he was sent to reconcile. He became an extraordinary preacher bringing vast multitudes to conversion and inspiring them to seek what really matters. He was such an effective preacher that he was sent to Hungary to inspire people to raise up and defend the treasure of the faith against the invading Muslim Turks. He eventually was a leading voice at the Council of Ferrara-Florence that tried to bring the Church back to unity, so that the Church Christ founded, east and west, might collaborate to invest what God had given. He was a prudent and faithful steward who fed his people with the Gospel, with the sacraments, and with faith, hope and love at the proper time — and the Church still remembers him more than five and a half centuries after his death.
• As we prepare this Mass to meet Christ who is constantly coming, we know that he has offered us his body, blood, soul and divinity as a weapon against the work of the devil to make us righteous. He wants us to meet him by presenting our bodies as risen from the dead and as a weapon for him to use to destroy the kingdom of darkness and bring about his kingdom of light. Later on in the Letter to the Romans, St. Paul will tell us, “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable, your spiritual worship” (Rom 12:1-2). That’s exactly what we seek to do at Mass. Pope Benedict once said to the young people of the world that what happens in the Mass can be compared to a nuclear explosion — and that idea is not hyperbole but even still short of the mark, because what happens at Mass has far more energy even than all the nuclear bombs on the planet. But we can stick with the image. What happens here is a nuclear detonation. The Lord seeks to fill us with his energy, and then he sends us out, with loins gift, as faithful and prudent stewards, as weapons of righteousness, to blow up the world! Let’s get strengthened and get started.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
ROM 6:12-18