Filling Up What Lacks in the Work of Christ, 23rd Monday (I), September 6, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 23rd Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Mass for the Sanctification of Human Labor
September 6, 2021
Col 1:24-2:3, Ps 62, Lk 6:6-11

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, on which our country marks Labor Day during this Year of St. Joseph, it is particularly important for us to focus on the Gospel of Work that Saint Joseph epitomizes and that Jesus came to restore. We remember that in the beginning God gave us a three-fold vocation to work: to increase and multiple, to fill the earth and subdue it, and to have dominion over creatures. Each part of this vocation was impacted by the original sin, in which childbirth would now take place with labor pains, subduing the earth with sweat and exercising stewardship with toil. But the Son of God entered the through and took on the human work as a tekton (builder) to make work a part of the redemption. Through the pains, sweat and toil, we would be overcoming selfishness through love. Through our work, we would be cooperating with him as he seeks to bring his work in us to completion, since we would not only be doing something objective — like making dinner, or a table, or a new piece of clothing — but making ourselves in the process through the virtues and love we brought to our labor. It is essential for us to learn this deeper meaning of human work in an age in which so many look at work begrudgingly and as something to be escaped. Bishop John Barres of the Diocese of Rockville Centre has just published an excellent new pastoral letter on Saint Joseph the Worker in which he sketches, based on the through of St. John Paul II and Pope Francis, the salvific meaning of work in the context of many false philosophies of human labor. I’d highly recommend it.
• In today’s Gospel, the miracle Jesus works of the man with the withered hand was not only a corrective of false ideas with regard to the meaning of the sabbath among his contemporaries but also, we can say, an allegory of how Jesus wanted to restore the meaning of work. Jesus had gone to a synagogue on the Sabbath to preach and teach. The Scribes and the Pharisees were in attendance not with open ears to listen to his word, not with hearts seeking to adore the Lord, but intent on “watching him closely to see if he would cure on the Sabbath so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.” They were already scandalized by Jesus’ whole approach to the Sabbath, which was in opposition to the distortion, to the idol, they had made of it, because they had lost sight not only of the principal work of God but also the way the Sabbath was to restore us in the work of the true love of God and love of neighbor in God, to liberate us from slavery and lead us on an exodus to God and in him rediscover the freedom to work in service to God and for the salvation of others. Jesus saw the man present with a withered hand and called him up to stand in the presence of everyone. And he asked those with a distorted notion of the work God was asking of them, whether is was lawful to do good on the Sabbath rather than evil, to save life rather to destroy it? Jesus was asking this question seeing their hearts, because it was on the Sabbath, in God’s own house, that they were plotting evil precisely against him, that they would leave the synagogue, supposedly out of the scandal of what Jesus was about to do, precisely in order to violate their own standards and work to plot Jesus’ own death! They didn’t grasp that the Sabbath was the day par excellence to restore people to health, that it was a day to become the Good Samaritan, that it was a time to do good, to save life, to love. Even though Jesus in the version of this episode in the other Synoptic Gospels got them to admit that if their sheep had fallen into a trap on the Sabbath, they could do the work to get the sheep out, in this case they couldn’t care less if the man with the withered man needed to wait any longer for liberation. The apocryphal Gospel of the Hebrews said that this man’s hand had become injured precisely through working as a mason and that this man could no longer work and provide for his family. He had come to the synagogue that day precisely praying for God’s help. And he would get it through faith. Jesus said to him, “Stretch out your hand.” Notice that Jesus was asking for the man’s cooperation. He didn’t merely say, “I’ve healed your hand, now shake mine!” He asked the man with a dead hand to cooperate in the miracle by faith, to try to do what for him at that moment seemed impossible. The man went through the gesture of trying to stretch out his hand and it was in that very gesture that the hand was restored. Jesus is constantly asking all of us to stretch out, to expand our categories of understanding, and to reach out our hands, our hearts, our minds, our whole lives to him so that he might give us, like he gave this mason, the ability to work in his kingdom.
• In the first reading, we see something that brings us very deeply into the whole mystery of our collaboration in the Lord’s work. St. Paul was in a Roman prison cell dictating a letter to the Christians in Colossae. As we’ve been hearing over the last few days, he was battling against the Gnostic heresy that was spreading among them. But in all of what he was doing to try to help them as best he could from afar, he said that he was making up what was lacking in his own flesh of the sufferings of Christ for the sake of Christ’s Body the Church. He was pointing to an important theological truth that is often hidden by bad translations of this very important massage. He was saying that Christ’s sufferings, Christ’s saving work, need to be perfected in each of us. There’s nothing lacking objectively in what Christ suffered for us, but subjectively, there is a need for us to allow those sufferings, that work, to be brought to perfection. That happens through our own work of allowing Christ to work in us. St. Paul said that he was “laboring and struggling” — literally agonizing — in accordance with the “exercise of [Christ’s] power working within him” so that all of them might come to know the “mystery hidden from ages and generations past but … manifested to his holy ones … among the Gentiles.” The he described exactly what that great mystery was: “Christ in you.” The pinnacle of the great mystery of God’s saving love is to experience what St. Paul was experiencing in his sufferings, “Christ in you,” Christ the Worker’s working in us, Christ’s incorporating us through our own sufferings, the contractions of spiritual motherhood, the toil and sweat of spiritual fatherhood, into his own redemptive work as members of his body. This is the fundamental work of our redemption. No matter what type of work we’re doing, it’s meant to be an experience of “Christ in us,” of Christ working through us, together with us, helping us to do the leitourgos — the fundamental praise of the Father, who will be glorified through our good work — and Christ working in us and we serve others with love.
• The greatest way the Lord accomplishes this work is here at Mass. This is not just his work but ours. He comes to this house of worship to do the work of preaching and teaching, but he also wants us to respond with the work of faith, of active hearing with the ears of the heart, of seeking to assimilate every word as a word to be done. And then, so that we might experience the full revelation of God’s great hidden mystery — and the Latin word for the Greek mysterion is sacramentum — he literally unites himself to us in Holy Communion. For this great sacrifice, Jesus didn’t begin with grains and grapes, but with bread and wine, which is the fruit of his gift but also “the work of human hands.” The bread and wine, prepared by crushing of the grains and grapes, is a sign of all of the work we do — the offering of our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, our logike latreia, the only worship that makes sense — that we seek to unite to the work of the Lord on the altar. Hence the greatest way that we celebrate Labor Day is to unite ourselves to Christ’s continued Eucharistic labor so that we might indeed become strengthened to be real laborers in his harvest. We thank the Lord for this great grace as now we lift up our hearts and stretch out our hands and lives in faith to him who comes to stretch himself out totally in his body, blood, soul and divinity to empower us to do his work in the world and fulfill the hidden, mysterious plan for which he came into the world, to give his his life and help us to have it to the full.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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