Following Jesus Along the Holy Way, Second Monday of Advent, December 7, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of St. Ambrose, Bishop and Doctor
December 7, 2020
Is 35:1-10, Ps 85, Lk 5:17-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Throughout the first week of Advent, we’ve been speaking of the triple dynamism of Christ’s coming to us, our going to meet him, and, having been transformed by the encounter, traveling with him forward. Yesterday, St. John the Baptist reminded us of our need to prepare the way for this encounter and make straight the paths. On Saturday, Isaiah prophesied that the Messiah who will feed us, quench our thirst and teach us will speak to us from behind and say, “This is the path. Walk in it!” Today the Prophet Isaiah tells us that this path Jesus will come into our world to indicate is a special one: it’s a highway called “the holy way.” And Isaiah says that this way of sanctity has several characteristics:
  • First,  “no one unclean may pass over it.” It’s not only for those who desire holiness, but those who have been cleansed. God’s mercy, in other words, precedes our repentance, our making straight the paths.
  • Second, it’s “for those with a journey to make.” It’s not for the inert who desire to remain exactly where they are, who don’t want to change, who don’t want to move.
  • Third, it’s an exodus route on which “the redeemed will walk.” Even when we’re redeemed that is not the end of the journey, but in a sense the beginning. Once we’ve been redeemed, now we can begin that journey. “Salvation,” as we prayed in the Psalm, is “along the way of his steps.”
• But this journey along the highway of holiness is something that sometimes we don’t have the strength to journey on our own. Jesus said elsewhere in the Gospel that the road that leads to life is narrow and few find it but the way that leads to perdition is broad and there are many on it. The highway to hell, in other words, is congested and the eternal express has little traffic. Many of us need the help not only of God but of others to get on the path of holiness. We can think of those who first taught us the faith, those who nourished us in faith, those who continue to pray for us, and guide us, and inspire us, correct us with love, and set the example for us. We can think about those people who really helped us when we couldn’t move, when we were neck-deep in uncleanness. We can think about those who are constantly picking us up as we fall and helping us anew. And we can think about the way as Catholics we’re called to assist others to come to God’s mercy, to gain the strength for the journey, and to walk with us on the pilgrimage of the redeemed.
• Today’s Gospel is about that. We see how the friends of the paralyzed man perseveringly and faithfully overcame every obstacle to bring their friend to Jesus. When they couldn’t get him in through the front door, they did what was very difficult — keep him balanced on his stretcher as they lifted him up on the roof and then lowered him right on top of Jesus. In the case of the paralyzed man, he needed more than to fill in valleys and level mountains. He needed friends to help him overcome the obstacle of too many people in the way and to climb roofs. But he got that help. And when Jesus saw him, he helped him with the first condition: he made him clean, saying to him, on account of the true friends’ faith, “Your sins are forgiven.” To show in the face of criticism he had that power and that desire to make us all clean, he cured him of his paralysis and sent him on a journey: “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.” He began the journey of the redeemed: St. Luke tells us, “He stood up immediately before them, picked up what he had been lying on, and went home, glorifying God.” And that praise was contagious. St. Luke adds: “Astonishment seized them all and they glorified God, and, struck with awe, they said, ‘We have seen incredible things today.’”
• During this Advent season, we need not only to thank God for all those who have brought us to Jesus so that we may be cleansed, healed, strengthened, and begin the walk of the redeemed following the Redeemer, but become true friends of others, bringing them to Jesus in our prayers, through our invitations, even in our cars or other ways of transportation. Like the friends of the paralytic, we have to be willing to break social convention, to do something others might consider crazy, in order to help them come to Jesus. We need to allow others, including each other, to carry us in this way rather than out of shame prefer to stay paralyzed in our own problems. Jesus came into the world to transform and change us, but sometimes to receive what he wants to give, we need to allow others to help us. Jesus has the power to make deserts, parched lands and steppes bloom with abundant flowers, and shine like the splendor of the forests of Lebanon. He has the power and desires to strengthen feeble hands, make firm weak knees, embolden frightened hearts, open blind eyes, clear deaf ears, make the lame leap and the mute sing. No matter how injured we or others are, he wants to touch us and make it possible for us to journey with the redeemed along the highway of holiness, the way of the saints.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a great saint who received God’s mercy and was so transformed by it that he was able to lead for Christ many people along the holy way of the redeemed. In his young 30s, in the early 370s, the future St. Ambrose was prefect of Gaul — an enormous responsibility. He was intrigued by the Christian faith, we could say he even believed it, but he really hadn’t met Christ in a way that could get him to change his priorities and get baptized. After the death of the Bishop of Milan, he went to where the election was to take place to make sure that there were no fights between the Orthodox Catholics of the time and the heretical Arians (who believed that Jesus was the greatest man who ever lived and chosen by God but not God). He gave a little speech reminding everyone of Christ’s teachings on peace and mutual love, at which point someone in the crowd began to shout “Ambrose, Bishop!” It soon started to be echoed by everyone, Catholics and Arians alike. He tried to run away from what these responsibilities would mean, but when the emperor Valentinian heard of the election, he consented to it, proud that he had chosen as Prefect someone with the virtues capable of serving as a Bishop. Eventually Ambrose was baptized, then ordained a deacon, a priest, and then, on this day in 374, a bishop. Having been made clean, after his ordinations, he set himself to going out to meet Christ who had chosen him in every way so that he could follow every step and help others to walk in the way Jesus had indicated. He sought to learn the Christian faith in such detail that he could really guide others by word and example — becoming eventually a doctor of the Church, one of the greatest teachers in the history of the faith. This required a great deal of study under the tutelage of a priest, Simplicianus. He was already a superb administrator and leader, but he needed to become a real man of God and prayer, study and charity — as he met Christ in the tabernacle, in Scripture, in others. I’ll focus on one thing he taught the Church, which is about the mercy we see in Jesus in today’s Gospel. The phrase, “O Felix Culpa,” “O Happy Fault,” is normally attributed to St. Augustine, whom St. Ambrose converted first by his rhetoric and then the substance of what he taught and enfleshed, but it’s a really a paraphrase of what St. Augustine said. The spiritual son of St. Ambrose had actually said, “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” And it’s likely that he was influenced not only by his experience of the multitude of happy sins of his youth that eventually brought him such a great Redeemer and led him to write about it in his famous “Confession,” but by the preaching of the St. Ambrose who had helped bring him to conversion in Milan. St. Ambrose from different angles would often stress this theme, something that may have helped St. Augustine realize that God wanted to transform the manure of his past into fertilizer for new growth. “The Lord knew that Adam would fall and then be redeemed by Christ,” St. Ambrose declared. “Happy ruin, which has such a beautiful reparation!” (Commentary on Psalm 39, 20). Elsewhere he said, “We who have sinned more have gained more, because your grace [of mercy, Lord] makes us more blessed than our absence of fault does” (Commentary on Ps 37, 47). And in one of the Prefaces of the Ambrosian Liturgical rite, the priest sings to God, “You bent down over our wounds and healed us, giving us a medicine stronger than our afflictions, a mercy greater than our fault. In this way even sin, by virtue of your invincible love, served to elevate us to the divine life” (Sunday XVI per annum). Jesus, the Divine Physician, comes to us with medicine more powerful than any of our afflictions. We run out to him to receive it and then, like Ambrose, we’re called to bring Jesus and that medicine to others, because the harvest is great but the laborers are few.
• That journey of the redeemed always leads to and from the altar, where we meet the same Jesus who healed the paralyzed man. It’s here that we bring all our loved ones in our prayers. It’s here that they bring us. It’s to get here that we should overcome every obstacle. It’s here that the Lord wants to strengthen our hands in prayer and in work, fortify our knees for kneeling in adoration and in service, make our frightened hearts steadfast in love, our eyes see him in others, our ears hear his voice and the cries of those in need, and help us to sing and to leap with joy. It’s here that kindness and truth meet, that justice and peace kiss. It’s here that the Lord wants to help us rise with his Risen Body, pick up our stretcher rather that continue to use it as a crutch, and go not only home but throughout the world proclaiming God’s glory to every creature and helping them to join us on the road of the redeemed. It’s here that astonishment should seize us all as we glorify God and, struck with awe, say, “We have seen incredible things today,” and “heard incredible things,” and most amazing of all, we have received within the one who not only has power on earth to forgive sins, but power to make us saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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