Fixing Our Face with Jesus On the Goal of Our Calling, 26th Wednesday (II), October 3, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Theodore Guerin
October 3, 2018
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 Guardian Angels, 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 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 for him to respond with joy. Instead he 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 him to know that to follow him wherever he went meant to follow someone who was basically homeless, to follow him meant to value him more than one’s own home and one’s own bed, to follow him meant 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 him 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 return immediately. 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 man 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 come fully alive and seeking to give him a participation in the Resurrection. He was giving him a choice between life and death, living and dying even while breathing, and 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 break between him and our 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 needs to 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 following Jesus, was placing human respect, human courtesy, and family above the call to follow Jesus. 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” 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. His real love was for God, not for cattle, sheep and camels or even health, and he framed everything within the context of 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, to God’s wisdom. These are words inspired by God that God himself will almost repeat later in the Chapter and, when broken down, Job begins to ask God to explain the reasons behind what he was doing in his case. 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.
• These lessons play out in the life of the saint we mark today. Mother Theodore Guerin, the foundress of the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Indiana, who was baptized on this day back in 1798 in France. (She died on May 14 in 1856, but May 14 is the Feast of St. Matthias and so the Church celebrates the day of her baptism). As a young girl she distinguished herself by her love for God and those God had made her neighbor. When she made her first communion at the age of 10, she confided to the priest that she was being called to religious life, but after her father was murdered by bandits when she was 15, she cared for her mother for the next ten years. Her mother didn’t want her to leave her side and little Anne-Therese was patient and kind with her. Eventually, seeing her daughter’s devotion, Isabelle Guerin permitted her daughter to follow her vocation and draw near to others with the same mercy with which she had been caring for her. She entered the Sisters of Providence of Ruille-sur-Loir and taught in schools and visited the poor and the sick. Eventually, when she was 42, her community responded to the request of the Bishop of Vincennes, Indiana, to send sisters to teach the children in the woods of Indiana. She was asked to be the superior, which was a request for her who had become a teaching sister to be a missionary. She prayed about it for a long time, before recognizing that she had committed herself to a Constitution that said, “The Congregation being obliged to work with zeal for the sanctification of souls, the sisters will be disposed to go to whatsoever part of the world obedience calls them,” and that convinced her to answer the call to America. It was a real Cross for her, but she set her heart resolutely on the will of God and followed Christ to Calvary-in-Indiana. After a four month journey she arrived, founded the new Congregation (since they wouldn’t be able to communicate back with France) and began the work, bringing people the Gospel, an education, loving mercy in founding orphanages and even medicine in establishing various pharmacies. There are still 300 Sisters of her order in Indiana, who are helping so many young people through their word and example to respond to the call of God.
• The same Jesus who called in the Gospel and called Mother Theodore 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 on the plow and our 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, like St. Theodore Guerin. Let us ask Him to strengthen us with the spirit that can help us like her to be faithful to the end.

The readings for today’s Mass were: