Fixing Our Eyes Together With Jesus on Our Vocation, 26th Wednesday (II), September 30, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Jerome on the 1600th Anniversary of His Death
September 30, 2020
Job 9:1-12.14-16, Ps 88, Lk 9:57-62

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Yesterday, if we didn’t have the feast of the Archangels, we would have heard the fulcrum of St. Luke’s Gospel, which is verse 9:51: Jesus “fixed his face toward Jerusalem,” toward Golgotha, toward the fulfillment of his Messianic mission. Everything for the rest of St. Luke’s Gospel needs to be interpreted within that context. And as he was heading there, he met three different people, two of whom volunteered to follow him and one of whom Jesus directly called. But to all of them, Jesus described what it would mean to follow him. What he taught them is crucial for us to know in order for us to follow Christ faithfully and help others to become his true disciples.
• In the first vocation story, a man runs up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus had come into the world to make disciples and many would refuse to follow him, so we would have expected this man who wanted to follow Jesus to fill Jesus with joy. Instead Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus wanted him to know the cost of discipleship, especially at a time in which messianic expectations had hyped up the Jews to think that the Messiah would kick out the Romans and set up a political administration in which there would be plenty of patronage. Jesus wanted the man to grasp that to follow him wherever he went meant to go after someone who was basically homeless, to value him more than one’s own home and one’s own bed, to realize that you wouldn’t even have what foxes and birds take for granted. We, too, need to ponder the radical nature of God’s call. Are we willing to follow Jesus wherever he goes? If he asks us, like God asked Abraham, to leave our own native place at 75 and go to a place he would eventually show us, would we follow him, or would we value our home, our bed, our old habits more than we do the Lord?
• The second scene involves a man to whom Jesus said, “Follow me!” But this man replied, “Lord, let me go first to bury my father.” When we hear this, we can presume that the person’s dad had just died and he just wanted to go home for the funeral and then immediately return. The text doesn’t say that, however. What’s much more likely was that the man’s father was very much alive and might live for decades still. What the interlocutor was likely communicating was, “Jesus, I’d like to follow you, but my father comes first. As soon as I’ve fulfilled all of my obligations to him, then I’ll be free to come and follow.” Jesus’ reply was strong: “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” As Jesus would say a little later at the raising of Lazarus, he is the Resurrection and the Life and everyone who lives and believes in him will never die, even if he dies (Jn 11:25-26). For us to become alive in the most important sense of all, we need to be in a living relationship to him. If we’re not following him, if we’re not allowing his life to reign within us, we’re dead, even if all our corporeal vital signs are healthy. He was calling this man to become fully alive and was seeking to give him a participation in the Resurrection. He was giving him a choice between life and death, between living and dying even while breathing, and Jesus was encouraging him to let those who are “dead,” who don’t have this relationship, bury their confrères. Jesus doesn’t call most people to make a strict choice between him and their family members. He calls us, after all, to honor our father and mother. He calls the family to be an image of the Church and the communion of persons who is God. Burying the dead is and will always remain a spiritual work of mercy. But at the same time he is reminding us that he must come first, so that our family life will become the life of the living rather than the walking dead. Our vocation is to a new type of familial life that will last forever and Jesus wants us to seize it, as he called this man in the Gospel.
• The third vocation scene is another one that involves the family. After being summoned by Jesus, this person replied, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” This was almost identical to what Elisha had said to Elijah and Elijah gave him permission. Jesus, who could see what was in the heart of the one with whom he was speaking, grasped what the request symbolized. The person simply was oblivious to the greatness of the request he had received to follow Jesus. As we prayed in the Alleluia verse, God wants to help us, like he helped St. Paul, to recognize that everything else is “rubbish” compared to the unsurpassable worth of “knowing Christ Jesus” and being found in him. The young man was giving a condition on the call to follow Jesus. He was placing human respect, human courtesy, and family above that summons. Very likely Jesus also suspected that this man’s family members might have objected to his leaving them behind to follow Jesus fully. So Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.” He was saying, “Don’t look to what you’re leaving,” but rather, “Look ahead to what you’re gaining, to the work you’re called to do with me.”
• This “gain,” this life, this trust in God instead of material possessions, is what allowed Job in today’s first reading to respond with faith to the temptations he was suffering and the tests he was enduring, especially at the hands of his well-meaning but wrongly-reasoning friends. Job’s real love was for God, not for cattle, sheep and camels, family members or even health, and Job framed his response considering everything else as rubbish compared to his relationship with God. In today’s first reading he gives a powerful witness to God’s work in the world and in him, with trust in God’s wisdom. His words are inspired by God; God himself would almost repeat them later in the Chapter when Job, broken down, begins to ask God to explain the reasons behind what he was doing. But we can see here that Job trusts in God more than he trusts in himself and keeps his eyes forward on God rather than on what he has lost. That’s how he was able to respond constantly as God’s servant.
• These three lessons about the meaning of vocation, about setting our eyes where Jesus has set us, on trusting in the Lord, play out in the life of the saint we mark today. Today we mark the 1600th anniversary of the death of St. Jerome (September 30, 420). He converted at the age of 19, but only partially. He had an intellectual conversion, but didn’t want to put the Lord above his studies, he didn’t want to put the Lord above some of the desires of his flesh, he didn’t want to focus on the gift of the Lord rather than what he was leaving behind. He was a brilliant student from Dalmatia (modern day Croatia/Bosnia) who went to study under a famous pagan orator in Rome. There his childhood faith became lukewarm as he continued to read the Greco-Roman classics. He traveled with close friends to learn from the various masters. Both of the friends died and he himself became very ill. During his sickness he had a dream in which he was at his judgment and when he said to Christ that he was a Christian, Jesus replied that he was, rather, a Ciceronian, because he knew far more about Cicero and his writings than he did about Christ and what he said. It struck Jerome to the core. He recognized that he wasn’t fixing his face on Jesus and with him on the Father. He grasped that he wasn’t opening his ears and heart to the Lord and that he needed to change. When he recovered, he began to study the Scriptures, learning Hebrew at first as a penance to gain self-mastery in his fight to have a pure heart. Eventually returning to Rome, Pope St. Damasus made Jerome his secretary and asked him to translate the Bible from its original languages into the common language of the people, which he did. After St. Damasus’ death, because by his pungent personality and writing he had alienated many, he went to Bethlehem to pray, translate and write, surrounded by a bunch of female spiritual directees who were in essence proto-religious women. He built a monastery for men and two for women next to the place where Christ was born. In all of his work, St. Jerome recognized an essential point, that to know Christ better, to fix our face on his coordinates, to follow him as he desires and deserves to be followed, we must know Sacred Scripture better. St. Jerome is the patron saint of Biblical studies. He is famous for his saying, quoted in the Catechism, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” To fix our eyes where Jesus has fixed his, we must treasure God’s word. We must treat every word that comes from his mouth with the same type of loving reverence as we would every particle of the Sacred Host on the altar. If we haven’t always prioritized Sacred Scripture in this way, if we don’t follow what God calls us to in Sacred Scripture, we can gain confidence for conversion in the life of St. Jerome. He shows us that if we’re not paying assiduous attention to what Christ has said in the Gospels, what the Prophets foretold about him and he fulfilled, what the Apostles announced about him, his words and his calling, then we don’t really know Christ. Today’s feast day is an opportunity for us precisely to focus on the role of Sacred Scripture in our life and whether we recognize that we have God speaking to us from those holy pages. That’s what Pope Francis called us to do in his beautiful letter on the 1600th anniversary of the death of St. Jerome, Scripturae Sacrae Affectus, released this morning. At the beginning of Mass, we turned to God and asked Him that as he “gave the priest St. Jerome a living and tender love for Sacred Scripture,” he would likewise grant that we “be ever more fruitfully nourished by your Word and find in it the fount of life.” We need a living and tender love, not a dead and cold one; we also need to grasp that Jesus has the words of eternal life and to know him through Sacred Scripture is the source of eternity. We’ll pray at the end of Mass, “May these holy gifts we have received, O Lord, as we rejoice in celebrating Saint Jerome, stir up the hearts of your faithful so that, attentive to sacred teachings, they may understand the path they are to follow and, by following it, obtain life everlasting!” Sacred Scripture indicates to us the path we must follow — to follow Christ who has no place to lay his head, to let the dead bury the dead, and to set our hand to the plow in his vineyard — and God wants to help us follow it all the way to eternity!
• The same Jesus who called in the Gospel and called Saint Jerome calls us anew today. He reminds of the cost of discipleship but wants to strengthen us by himself on the inside to help us to follow him wherever he goes, to keep our hands and eyes ahead, fixed on Jerusalem, fixed on Him on the Cross, so that we may be strengthened to respond in faith like Job should we have to suffer economic, familial and personal hardship. On this 1600th anniversary of the birth of St. Jerome into eternity, let us ask God to strengthen us with his ferocious spirit so that we like St. Jerome can fix our eyes on Calvary and beyond to the heavenly Jerusalem and, knowing him in Sacred Scripture, follow Christ faithfully until the end.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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