Freely Doing What the Lord Asks of Us, 19th Monday (I), August 9, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 19th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, Martyr
Dt 10:12-22, Ps 147, Mt 17:22-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, Peter is approached by those collecting the annual Temple tax that all Jewish males over 20 were expected to pay each year not only to support the liturgical needs of the temple but to remind them that God ransomed them (literally redeemed them or “bought them back” from slavery). When they asked Peter if Jesus paid the Temple Tax, Peter was too much of a slave to human respect and replied that he did and sent the collectors away. When Peter returned to the house, Jesus, aware of the conversation, asked him whether it was foreigners or subjects, citizens or members of the royal family that paid taxes. Peter replied, in accordance with his knowledge of the customs of the times, that members of the royal family or citizens of an occupying power were free of the taxes. Peter got the initial point that Jesus knew he was exempt from the Temple Tax. Jesus had mentioned to his mother and foster father when they rediscovered him in the Temple after three days that he was in his “Father’s house” and for that reason would be exempt, because he was a Son of the King. But he was exempt for a more important reason: He identified himself as the Temple that would be destroyed and in three days rebuilt. The temple was a sign that was pointing to Him and it would be absurd for the Signified to pay taxes to the sign. By the same logic, because we have been made sons in the Son and have been made Temples of God’s presence, we are free of the requirement, too.
• But Jesus then pointed to a higher understanding of freedom than a freedom from responsibility. The purpose of our freedom is so that we can choose to love God and others. And so Jesus said that lest they scandalize anyone out of their duties to God, they should pay the temple tax and Jesus instructed Peter on how to do so, through catching a fish that Jesus somehow either knew or arranged was carrying a coin worth twice the tax, to pay for Christ and Peter both. Jesus was teaching Peter and all of us that we should focus more on our freedom for than our freedom from. Jesus was free from sin, yet he took on all our sins. He was free from the consequences of sin, death, but he freely underwent death so that we might live, allowing himself as he foretold at the beginning of today’s Gospel to be betrayed into the hands of men who would kill him. He didn’t stand on his dignity and his privileges, but with his dignity privileged others. We’re supposed to use our freedom in the same way. To be a son in the Son, to be templed with him (contemplative), means to be someone who passed onto others the gift we have received in God. Jesus has united himself to us in paying everything we owe.
• The entire arc of salvation history, all that we have in the Old Testament, was to prepare the Jewish people to use their freedom properly to follow God. Moses, as he gives his farewell discourse to the Israelites in the desert, focuses on their using their freedom to “love and serve the Lord, your God, with all your heart and soul,” to “follow his ways exactly,” “to keep the commandments and statues of the Lord,” to “befriend the alien,” and to be just to “the orphan and the widow.” God had freed them from slavery precisely so that they could use their freedom for this form of love of God and neighbor.
• Today we celebrate the feast day of a woman  who was a citizen of the Temple, who would come to see herself joined to Christ in a particular way on the Cross, and who used her freedom to seek to love and serve the Lord with all her heart and soul. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was born into a devout Jewish family on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement in 1891 in Breslau, Germany, a prophetic day insofar as she would eventually freely offer her whole life, together with Jesus and so many of their fellow Jews, in expiation for their salvation and the salvation of the world. Her father died when she was two and her mother heroically sought to raise the family of 11 and run the family business on her own. As much as her mom sought to pass on her deep Jewish piety, Edith never really connected with God, she never truly encountered him or came to have a personal relationship with him or even to believe in his existence, and so at the age of 14, she made the deliberate decision to stop praying. For 16 years, study became her pseudo-religion. She was brilliant and easily obtained university degrees in history and German, while spending most of her free time learning philosophy at the feet of the famous phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Under his tutelage she eventually wrote her doctorate summa cum laude and embarked on a university teaching career. She eventually became one of the first female professors in the history of her country.
• Her conversion to a life of faith through spiritual childhood happened in various stages. The first was a simple occurrence that happened in downtown Frankfurt. She saw an ordinary Catholic woman with a shopping basket enter Frankfurt’s cathedral, kneel down and pray. “This was something totally new to me,” she wrote later in an unfinished autobiography. “In the synagogues and in Protestant churches I had visited, people simply went to the services. Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace into this empty church, as if she was going to have an intimate conversation. It was something I never forgot.” At least for that simple woman, God was real. He was someone you could talk to. He was someone to whom you could bring your prayers, your loved ones, your day.
• The second stage happened later when she went to console the widow of a fellow philosopher, Adolf Reinach, who had just died. Edith was dreading what to say to the widow, but she was overwhelmed by the widow’s peace flowing from her Protestant Christian faith in the power of the Cross and Resurrection. “This was my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it,” she remarked. “It was the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ began to shine his light on me — Christ in the mystery of the Cross.” Mrs. Reinach had received even the death of her beloved husband with childlike faith and it struck Edith.
• The third stage happened four years later, when Edith was 29. While vacationing at the home of a fellow professor, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, one night she pulled a copy of St. Teresa of Avila’s Life from their bookshelves. She could not put it down the rest of the night. When she had finished the great Spanish mystic’s autobiography, she said simply, “This is the truth.” She never said what was it in the writings of St. Teresa that had moved her — she always said it was her secret — but I’m convinced it had something to do with the obvious fact that for St. Teresa, God was very much alive, someone to whom we not only could pray, but someone who responded with himself. Through St. Teresa’s help, she discovered that the truth for which she had been searching for years had a name — and from that moment on, she dedicated herself to Truth Incarnate. She went to the local Catholic parish the next day and asked the priest to be baptized, something that would happen a few months later.
• She wanted to enter a Carmelite convent immediately but her spiritual director encouraged her freely to unite herself to God, to love and serve him in the midst of her day-to-day life, in the midst of work as a teacher, a writer and a lecturer on women’s issues. That’s what she did, growing in childlike faith over the course of the next 12 years. She eventually developed the most profound theology of woman in the history of the Church and the world until now, all the while developing deep philosophical insights into being and especially into empathy. She began to pass on so many of her insights to others, especially other women, so that they, too, might grow in faith in the midst of ordinary life. This wasn’t an easy time for her because she longed to be in the convent but she grasped during his time that to live by faith, to be just, you didn’t have to run away to Carmel but could experience that as a child of God in the midst of the world as well.
• When Hitler rose to power and it became impossible for her, with Jewish blood, to remain teaching in Germany, when friends were suggesting she immigrate to South America where she would never see her mother again, she saw that if that would be the case, she should enter the Convent finally, which she did. There she became a bride of Christ and, since she knew with clarity that her one-flesh union with Divine Bridegroom would lead her to the Cross, asked for and received the name of “Teresa Blessed of the Cross.”  She saw her blessing in her vocation “to be wedded to the Lord in the sign of the Cross.” She began to grasp that to live by faith means to live crucified to the world, to live in a spousal union with Christ crucified. St. Paul had written to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live by Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me.” The only way to live by faith is to crucify our relationship with the things of the world, so that they are no longer idols. That’s why St. Paul would eventually say that he boasted of nothing but the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world was crucified to him and him to the world. He would encourage the early Christians to learn how to become friends of the Cross of Christ, because the vast majority lived as enemies of the Cross, making their bellies their god and glorying in sins that should bring them shame. These are all lessons that St. Edith Stein pondered and sought freely to embrace. When it became too dangerous for her to remain in a monastery in Cologne, the sisters smuggled her to Echt in the Netherlands, soon followed by her blood sister Rosa, a third-order Carmelite, who came after their mother died. “I understood the cross as the destiny of God’s people,” she wrote. “I felt that those who understood the Cross of Christ should take it upon themselves on everybody’s behalf.” That’s one of the most profound truths of the faith, one she accepted with childlike faith. No one would take her life from her, as Jesus said in his Good Shepherd discourse (Jn 10:18); she would freely lay it down.
• As her understanding grew — shown in her most famous theological work, “The Science of the Cross” — so did her willingness to take it upon herself for her Jewish people. “Ave, Crux, Spes Unica,” she repeated: “I welcome you, O Cross, our only hope.”  Her welcome and knowledge of the Cross in faith would soon become a Biblical embrace of her crucified Spouse. After the Dutch bishops publicly condemned Nazism, the Gestapo retaliated by deporting all Jewish converts in the Netherlands to the concentration camps. “Come, we are going for our people,” she said as she was being rounded up in Echt. She was bringing to Jesus on the Cross her entire people. She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber 79 years ago today, the final culmination of her life in faith, knowing that moments after the poison gas would suffocate her in the gas chamber that she would be smelling forever the beautiful fragrance of Christ.
• Jesus had had Peter catch a fish with a stater in its mouth to pay the Tax for them both. Jesus could have easily had him catch a fish with two coins rather than one with twice the value, but he was emphasizing the union between Christ and Peter. Christ seeks that same union with us. And today he will put himself under the appearance of a host about the size of a stater within our mouths in order to bring about that communion and make us truly his Temple as he yokes himself to us on Calvary. This is a communion with the fruit of the Tree of Life that we, with St. Teresa Blessed by the Cross, say “This is the truth!” It’s here that we ask the Lord to be crucified with him and live by faith in the Son of God who loves us, gave his life for us, and now feeds us, as he consummates his union with his Body and Bride on the wedding bed of the Cross, our only hope!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
DT 10:12-22

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