Following the Lord Like Abraham, The Apostles and Ireneus, 13th Monday (I), June 28, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of the Martyrs, Auriesville, New York
Monday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Ireneus, Doctor and Martyr
June 28, 2021
Gen 18:16-33, Ps 103, Mt 8:18-22

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today there’s a dramatic scene in the Gospel, and once we ponder what’s really happening we see it’s a drama that also involves us. The eighth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel is fundamentally a chapter about miracles. Jesus heals a leper, a servant of a centurion, Peter’s mother-in-law, many of those who were possessed, calms a storm, work more exorcisms and even does one in which a whole herd of swine cast itself into the sea. And in the middle of this chapter St. Matthew places something else that he evidently treats as miraculous: a scribe comes up to Jesus and promises to follow him wherever he goes. The scribes were among the most arrogant class of Jews. They normally were criticizing Jesus with condescension. They were the scholars of the Mosaic Law, had studied Sacred Scripture inside out and were the definitive commentators on what God had revealed. Among those who comprised the Sanhedrin, they generally were Jesus’ biggest and most powerful opposition because Jesus did not fit into their rigid categories as he sought to go beyond the law of Moses and the various fences they had drawn around the Mosaic law to prevent its violation. This scholar came to Jesus and said that he was willing to go with Jesus wherever he went. The Gospel scene begins with Jesus’ giving orders to his closest followers to cross over to the other shore. The actual Greek expression is he told them to put out “into the beyond,” to go past their own limited horizons and expectations. This scribe seemed to be willing to do this, to give Jesus basically a blank check with his life.
• But Jesus wanted to make sure he knew what the cost would be. “Foxes,” he said, “have dens and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” There’s a lot in that sentence. First, Jesus uses the expression “Son of Man,” which was a Messianic phrase, something that the scribe would readily have grasped. While the man professed a willingness to follow Jesus wherever he went because he had surmised based on his knowledge of Sacred Scripture that Jesus was already doing all of the works of the Messiah and was about to bring about the long-awaited Messianic kingdom, Jesus wanted him to grasp that his kingdom would not involve palaces and earthly power, material spoils or prestige. As Messiah, Jesus was saying, he wouldn’t even have a pillow to call his own, he wouldn’t even have what birds and foxes take for granted. Was the scribe willing to sign up for that? We don’t know what the Scribe’s answer was, whether he continued to follow Jesus into the “beyond.” Jesus was leading him not so much to a place but to a union with him and we don’t know whether the scribe would unite himself to Jesus’ personification of the Messianic kingdom. We hope that he did, but the lesson for us is the same. Jesus asks us to go with him into the beyond, to follow him wherever he goes even if it means giving up in this world fame, fortune, and family. But we need to be willing to center our entire existence on him.
• We see that illustrated very powerfully in the second dialogue from the Gospel scene, when one of the disciples, hearing Jesus order everyone with him to the beyond, said, “Lord, let me go first and bury my father.” Jesus’ response at first seems a little brutal: “Follow me and let the dead bury the dead.” We have to grasp what was really happening in the scene, however. Jesus obviously took seriously — and elsewhere verbally affirmed — the Fourth Commandment, to honor one’s father and mother. To allow a parent to go unburied would be an incredible disgrace and dishonor. Burying the dead has always been considered a spiritual work of mercy not just for family members but even for strangers; the Book of Tobit is all about God’s rewarding Raguel for his courage in burying a dead man whose body was left in the open. So Jesus was not communicating that filial piety is somehow not a good thing or important. But there is absolutely no sign that this disciple’s father had died and was about to be buried. There’s no indication that his father wasn’t in full vigor and had another 20 years to live. The man was essentially saying to Jesus, “Jesus, my familial duties are more important than my following you. Let me fulfill those duties first and after my dad has died and I’ve fulfilled my filial duty to bury him — however long that takes — then I can come and follow you to the beyond.” That’s why Jesus responded as he did. Our primary task is to follow him who is the Source of Life. We can’t really be his disciple unless we’re willing to follow him wherever he goes, unless we’re willing to relativize everything else — a home of our own, a bed, even our beloved family members, friends and careers — to be with Him wherever he is. To keep the Fourth Commandment well, to maintain the work of mercy of burying the dead appropriately, we must first keep the First Commandment and put God in first place.
• When we think about following God “into the beyond,” it’s easy to think of Abraham, who left Ur of the Chaldeans at 75 to journey to a place God would eventually indicate. God challenged Abraham to go into the beyond believing that at his age — and his wife Sara’s — he would become not just a father of a son but of many nations. He challenged him to go into the beyond eventually to be willing to sacrifice that son of the promise, knowing in faith God would provide. But in today’s first reading he challenged him to go into the depth of the Lord’s mercy and saving plan. God had chosen Abraham to be a father in faith to a people through whom his salvation would reach the ends of the earth. Through the dialogue about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to stop the evil being committed there, he allowed Abraham to enter into the divine logic of salvation. Ten years ago, on May 18, 2011, Pope Benedict gave a beautiful catechesis on the prayer of Abraham, in which he said that God led Abraham on an exodus to see, first, that  the destruction of the innocent on account of the guilty, was not consistent with who God is as a God of Justice. He appealed to him to save the whole city, including the unjust, on account of the just, if only he could find, ultimately, ten just people there. Based on the certainty that God is, as we prayed in the Psalm, “kind and merciful,” that God’s desire is not punishment and death, but forgiveness, salvation and life, Abraham put out into the beyond through intercessory prayer. But we know that not even ten just people were found who could transform the evil into good. Abraham discovered, Pope Benedict taught, that “to be saved does not mean simply to flee from punishment, but to be liberated from the evil that dwells in us. It is not the punishment that must be eliminated, but sin.” God would later tell the Prophet Jeremiah to run through Jerusalem to find “one man who does justice and seeks truth” that he might pardon the whole city (Jer 5:1), but Jeremiah came back empty-handed. Eventually, God himself became that righteous man through the mystery of the incarnation, so that all of the guilty might be saved with the Innocent One. The same God who invited Abraham on the journey into that mystery of mercy invites us, and he invites us to dedicate ourselves to it, even if we, like the just one, may not have a place to lay our head.
• Someone who grasped this mystery and dedicated his whole life to it is the great martyr and doctor of the Church whom the Church honors today, St. Ireneus of Lyons. He lived during the second century, dying about the year 202. He had been taught the Gospel in Smyrna, learning it at the feet of the great St. Polycarp, who himself learned it at the feet of St. John, who himself learned it by leaning on the heart of Jesus. St. Ireneus, early in his life, was sent as a missionary to Gaul and was eventually ordained a priest for the Church of Lyons, France. Much like our own era, the second century was a time of great difficulties for the Church, both from the outside and from the inside. On the outside, Christianity was still very much illegal and Christians, under the implementation of the Emperor Trajan’s Letter, could die just for being Christians. In 177, hundreds of Christians were massacred in Lyons for their faith. The only reason why St. Ireneus was not martyred with his bishop and his flock then was because he had been providentially sent on a peace mission to Rome. There were also huge problems inside the persecuted and young Church, in the form of heresies that were tearing the Church asunder. There were heresies from the “right,” like Montanism, a rigorist understanding of the faith which held, among other things, that serious sins committed after baptism could never be forgiven, and hence kicked serious sinners out of the Church rather than to try to allow the Lord who is kind and merciful to save them through the continuation of the mission of God who incarnated himself for a mission of salvation. There were also several heresies from the “left,” including gnosticism, which believed not in God’s revelation, not in a Christ who saves and handed on all the means necessary for salvation to the apostles and their successors, but in a “special knowledge” that was needed for salvation; this bears a striking resemblance to modern day new age cults. There was also docetism, which believed that Jesus was never incarnate, but only appeared to have a human body. Hence, since Jesus didn’t have a body, they believed, he couldn’t have suffered and died hammered to the Cross, he couldn’t give us his flesh and blood, he didn’t really save. Against all of these, St. Ireneus fought and wrote his famous work Adversus Haereses, but St. Irenaeus wrote and fought in a particular way. True to his name, which means peaceful, he first listened intently to understand completely the arguments of his opponents. Then, with great moderation and courtesy, and an unembarrassing sense of humor, he pointed out their errors and tried to lead them to the truth. Unlike, for example, the great Montanist minds like Tertullian, who skillfully ridiculed the positions of those with whom he disagreed, Ireneus loved those who were in so much error. Against those in the Church who might have thought that error had no rights and consequently wanted to deal harshly with heretics, Irenaeus believed that persons in errors did have rights and dignity, and should be loved with the love of Christ. Hence he went to Rome in 177 to try to intercede with Pope Eleutherius so that he would not deal too harshly with the Montanists — and this deed of love and kindness was what God used to save him from an early martyrdom with the others in Lyons — and 14 years late he interceded with Pope Victor to lift a sentence of excommunication of the Quartodecimans, who celebrated Easter on the fixed date related to the 14th day of the month of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar. And his kind, patient, gentle work, and holiness, faithful, loving, peaceful, and contagious relationship with Christ had an enormous impact. He’s credited with finishing the gnostic heresy and setting the groundwork for the elimination of others. He was, after St. Paul, the first great systematic theologian in Church history. He’s most famous for a great sound byte on which the Church meditates every year on his feast. He says in Latin, gloria Dei vivens homo et vita hominis visio Dei: “The glory of God is man fully alive and the life of man is the vision of God.” The purpose of our existence is to glorify God, which happens when we become fully alive through seeing God in all the ways he manifests himself: in the Eucharist, in prayer, in others, in daily events, and others can eventually see him in us. The way we see God is not by human eyes, but by grace and faith. Once we begin, with purity of heart, to share Jesus’ vision, to look at things the way they really are, to see how everything is meant to be related to God — or his absence in sin and evil — then the more we will come fully alive, because seeing the Lord allows us to unite ourselves to him who is the life.
• As we prepare to receive Jesus today, we, like St. Ireneus, like Abraham our Father in Faith, like Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil, Jean Lalande and Kateri Tekakwitha, we wish to tell him today sincerely, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go!” Today, Jesus continues to teach us with the words of eternal life and seeks to have us nest ourselves in him, resting our head on his breast. It’s here where we cease to be walking cadavers but men and women who see him, love him, embrace him and become fully alive in him. It’s here where he strengthens us to follow him into the beyond. As we pray at this Mass in intercession that our Eternal Father, on account of his Son, the one Just One’s body, blood, soul and divinity, he might have mercy on us and on the whole world, we ask him for the grace to follow the Lamb wherever he goes, and help others to do so, until with St. Ireneus, the Saints of Auriesville, and all the Saints, come fully alive beholding him in the beatific vision!

These were the readings for the Mass: 

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