Following the King and Lamb Wherever He Goes, 34th Monday (II), November 23, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life
Monday of the 34th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed Miguel Pro, as well as St. Clement and St. Columban
November 23, 2020
Rev 14:1-5, Ps 24, Lk 21:1-4

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we have the privilege to be able to continue reflecting on the reality of Christ’s kingdom we celebrated yesterday and on the reality of how to enter it, remain in it, and draw others to seize it.
• In the Gospel, we see how to seize the Kingdom as the pearl of great price. Jesus had said at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To enter into the kingdom we must treasure God and his kingdom above all other things. In the Gospel, we see someone who did. After Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, he began to “people watch,” in order to continue to instruct his apostles about how to put what he taught into action. They saw the stream of people putting money in the temple treasury, which was a tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure money box. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coin would resonate as it rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Luke tells us, were putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury trumpet. But then a poor widow came and put in two lepta, two small coins which together were worth less than a penny and likely barely made a sound. Then Jesus gave a surprising lesson that obviously the disciples never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all them, for they “gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on.” This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. She could have easily chosen to drop into the trumpet only one of the coins and kept the other for herself. But she didn’t. She gave it all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain until the end of time. Jesus had said elsewhere that we could not be his disciple, we could not really enter his kingdom, unless we valued him and his kingdom more than family members, possessions and even our very life. That’s what characterized this poor wisdom. She believed so much in God and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God’s house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding that work of salvation. She accounted the continuance and expansion of that work even more than her own life.  That’s living for the kingdom. This woman sacrificed her entire livelihood, spending herself and what she had in the service of the Lord. We should always seek to give in such a way that Christ the King would be tempted to pull the saints aside in heaven and point out the way we are spending ourselves in his service, seeking to build up his Kingdom.
• In the first reading from the Book of Revelation and in the Psalm, we see other characteristics of the Kingdom and other examples of those who, like the widow, give all to the God who has given all to us. The 144,000 dressed in white, whose garments were washed in the blood of the Lamb, are a snapshot of the redeemed. The number 144,000 is a symbolic, not a literal one (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and some fundamentalist Protestants claim). 12 is one of the magic numbers in Hebrew, flowing from the 12 tribes. 144 is a sign of the multiplication of the descendants of the 12 tribes and the spiritual progeny of the 12 apostles times 1,000, all meant to describe a vast multitude. We see about them that first they had the Lamb’s and the Father’s name written on their foreheads. They were thinking as God the Father and God the Son think; they were filled with God’s wisdom; and they also weren’t ashamed to live by that wisdom publicly. They were singing before the throne what seemed to St. John to be a “new hymn,” a hymn only they could sing, because doubtless that knowledge came from the experience of their life of love for the God, from their suffering for him, from their being “ransomed from the earth.” Third, they are described as those who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes,” which is a beautiful description for how every Christian is meant to behave, of what life in the kingdom consists. To live in the kingdom means to respond to Jesus’ call to follow him through life all the way to heaven, to follow him across the road as Good Samaritans, to follow him to the Father in prayer, to follow him to reconcile with someone who has sinned against him and us. At the end of the passage, St. John says that “no deceit was found on their lips” and that they were “unblemished.” They were living and speaking the truth, which is the way to live in the Kingdom of Truth with Christ the Truth incarnate, attributes of the kingdom expanded upon in the Psalm. The answer to the question, “Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord? Or who may stand in his holy place?,” is, “He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. … Such is the race that seeks for him, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.” Those who follow the Lamb wherever he goes are those who seek God, who desire to see him face-to-face. That desire leads them to keep their hands sinless of all bribes but to use their hands to pray, for generosity toward God and charity toward other, for honest work, for embracing and helping others; it leads them to keep their heart clean of all that can lead it to become hardened toward God and toward others; and it keeps them from desiring what is vain, and mammon is certainly among a vanity of vanities. For us to enter into the Lord’s kingdom here on earth and in the celestial Jerusalem we must align our desires, hearts and hands to the Kingdom, we must set our eyes on the Lord’s face and seek to follow him wherever he leaves, free of deceit, free of moral blemish.
• Today we celebrate the feast of three who lived this way, who longed to see God’s face, who sought to give God all and inspired others to the same generosity, who followed the Lamb wherever he led and tried to guided so many others to that same divine, living GPS, whose lips, hands and hearts were all consecrated to the King.
• The first is Blessed Miguel Pro. His story is one of the most powerful for me in hagiography. In 1910, there was a revolution in Mexico against the “old order” and one of the first results was anti-clerical persecution based on a militant atheism. Religious orders were banned. Many priests, brothers and nuns needed to flee across the border into the United States. Churches, monasteries, convents and other religious buildings were confiscated by the State. To survive, the Church needed to go underground. Many Catholic priests, at the risk of their lives, donned various disguises to try to bring the sacraments to those who were dying, to celebrate Mass and confessions in people’s homes, to teach the catechism to young children, to attend to the needs of the poor and destitute, and to care for the many orphans the government was making by the summary executions of parents. Fr. Miguel was a thirty-six year-old Jesuit priest who used his younger brother’s bicycle to crisscross the city, doing all of these things and more. He was eventually identified as a cleric and a warrant was issued for his arrest. For almost a year he evaded the authorities so that he could continue his priestly ministrations, but he knew that eventually he would be caught and killed. 93 years ago today, November 23, 1927, Fr. Miguel was arrested and sentenced to death by the Mexican dictator, Plutarco Calles, without a trial. Calles wanted to use Fr. Pro as an example, to teach other clandestine Catholic priests and the Catholic faithful who sought their pastoral care what would happen to those who continued to try to practice the Catholic faith in defiance of the government’s dictates. So Calles sent out his henchmen to assemble a crowd and photograph the event. They crowd gathered and Fr. Miguel Pro was brought before the firing squad. He was asked if he had any dying wishes. He requested two minutes to pray. After he was done, he stood up and said to those who were about to end his life, “May God have mercy on you. May God bless you.” Then he turned to the one who would give him his life back and said, “You know, O Lord, that I am innocent. With all my heart I forgive my enemies.” As the firing squad raised their rifles and took aim, in a firm, clear voice, Fr. Miguel Pro said his last words, “Viva Cristo Rey!” — “Long live Christ the King!” “Viva Cristo Rey!” Those words — the song of the Lamb! — began to echo throughout Mexico. The photographs of the execution, taken at Calles’ instigation to terrify Christians, emboldened them. The photographs spread so fast as a witness to Pro’s faith and Calles’ brutality that the dictator soon banned their publication and use. But it was too late. The following day about ten thousand Mexicans, at the risk of their lives, accompanied Fr. Pro’s body to Dolores Cemetery. They had learned from him how to follow the Lord wherever he led, even to death, and they courageously followed his remains. They had learned from him how to keep the name of Jesus and of his Father on their foreheads and unabashed they processed. The cortège diverted itself by the Dictator’s home so that they could be sure he saw it, and as they processed, the Mexicans echoed the message Pro preached so effectively in life and in death: “Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Cristo Rey!” These ordinary Christians, and the valiant priest they had come to honor, were all giving witness to a truth that no amount of firing squads could kill: the truth that there is a God, that that God sent his Son into the World, and that he, their Creator and Redeemer, is Lord and King of all and worth their very lives.
• The second example is St. Clement, the fourth Pope, whom the Church likewise celebrates today. He seems to have been a slave early in life who heard the Gospel from Peter and Paul and eventually became their successor as Rock and teacher of the nations. He led the Church to remain true to God during the ferocious persecution not only of Nero but later, during his papacy, of Domitian, as so many had their garments washed in the Lamb’s blood. After the persecution had abated, he wrote a letter to the Church of Corinth, which had deposed their priests because the priests were challenging them to follow the Lamb in ways they didn’t want. In the first exercise of papal primacy by the bishop of Rome outside of Rome, he wrote a letter to the Corinthians telling them they needed to take back their priests, which they did. Eventually St. Clement was sent into exile and died a martyr, a genuine witness to his willingness to follow the Lord all the way.
• The third example of widow-like generosity is St. Columban, a Celtic monk and abbot in the sixth and seven centuries who called people, by his example and his words, to total commitment to God. Even though he had a beautiful life in the monastery, he left it to try to reevangelize Europe, starting from France. Along the way initiated the practice of individual auricular confession after centuries where confession happened in public before the Bishop and the Church. They also attracted multitudes through their prayer, community life, study and sober work. Pope Benedict focused on St. Columban’s courage in facing persecution from both the Church and state in helping people overcome spiritual compromises in a Catechesis about him back in 2008. He said, “Columban introduced Confession and private and frequent penance on the Continent. It was known as ‘tariffed’ penance because of the proportion established between the gravity of the sin and the type of penance imposed by the confessor. These innovations roused the suspicion of local Bishops, a suspicion that became hostile when Columban had the courage to rebuke them openly for the practices of some of them. … Intransigent as he was in every moral matter, Columban then came into conflict with the royal house for having harshly reprimanded King Theuderic for his adulterous relations. This created a whole network of personal, religious and political intrigues and manoeuvres which, in 610, culminated in a Decree of expulsion banishing Columban and all the monks of Irish origin from Luxeuil and condemning them to definitive exile. But that was a witness too.” His lips spoke of God, his hands extended his mercy, his heart was perpetually lifted upward.
• All three point us to the Kingdom and to the King.
• Today we turn to God through their intercession and ask the Lord to grant us the grace to follow him, like them, wherever He leads, to seek his face in all circumstances, and to try to use all our life to bring others to seek his face with us. We ask him to help us, like he helped them, to learn how to sing that “new song” of the kingdom here on earth with honest lips, raised hands, and lifted hearts, so that we might join them in the chorus of the “144,000” singing forever to God’s glory in Christ’s eternal kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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