Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Extraordinary Form
January 30, 2022
Rom 13:8-10, Mt 8:23-27
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
- Today’s readings help us to contemplate two of the most important things in Christian life, faith and love: faith in the face of our most existential fears; love even in circumstances when others don’t love us.
- vJesus’ whole life, of course, is an answer to that question. He did care that we were about to die and that was the reason why the Son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, took our human nature and was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He cared enough that he spent himself to the point of exhaustion teaching, healing the sick and comforting the afflicted. He cared enough ultimately to take our place on death row, giving his life so that we might survive. Like Jonah, who was tossed into the sea in order to calm the ferocious storm of the sea, so Jesus tossed himself overboard to quell the tempests that were causing us to die. As he hurled himself into the abyss from the Cross, he calmed the storm of sin so that we might reach the eternal shore. His entire life was a demonstration of the depth of his loving care.
- The problem was that the apostles doubted that saving concern. Just like the serpent in the desert had seduced Eve and Adam to doubt in God’s love for them, so here again he was tempting the apostles. The twelve were like the twelve tribes of Israel 1300 years before. After they had witnessed God’s hand in the ten plagues of Egypt, after they had seen him part the Red Sea, after they had seen Pharaoh’s horsemen and chariots perish in the sea, after they had witnessed Moses’ strike the rock to provide them water, after they had been fed miraculously with manna and then quails from heaven, after they had seen the thunder and lightening of Moses’ conversations with God on the top of Mt. Sinai, the Israelites continued to doubt in God’s love for them. They obviously knew that God had the power — he had already shown them this power on all these occasions — but they didn’t have faith that he would continue to use that power to help them. “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt,” they complained to Moses, “that you have taken us away to die in the desert?” (Ex 14:11). Whenever anything got difficult, they grumbled. They doubted. They began to question whether God’s solicitude had an expiration date. His past actions didn’t factor into their equation.
- The same thing was happening with their descendents in the boat. They had witnessed Jesus’ power and his goodness on so many occasions, but they began to wonder whether his love — not his power — had a limit. They began to question whether he was indifferent to their plight. It was, simply put, a lack of faith in who he was, based on a failure to grasp the meaning of all he had done up until then. That’s why Jesus, as soon as he had awakened turned to his followers and said, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?”
- The same lack of faith that happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden, to the Jews in the desert and to the apostles on the Sea of Galilee can happen to all of us. Generally, few of us question whether God has the power to work a miracle, but very often we begin to wonder whether he has the will. When we’re assailed by the storms of sorrow, the downpours of doubt, the twisters of uncertainty, the hail of anxiety, and the blizzards of loneliness, we can start to imagine that he is having sweet dreams while we’re experiencing nightmares. We can start to reckon that he’s snoring while we’re screaming for help. This doubting of the Lord’s love for us happens when we, like the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles, begin to forget all that the Lord has done for us up until now and what that reveals about who he is and how loved we are by him. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans, “If God didn’t even spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, would he not give us everything else along with him? (Rom 8:32). If God the Father was willing to allow his Son to be brutally killed so that we might live, he is going to respond with love in every circumstance, by giving us what he knows we need. But we need to have faith in him and in the power of his love. The apostles were anxious in the boat because they were paying more attention to the waves and to the winds around them than to the presence of Jesus with in the boat. The same thing happens with us. This scene is a reminder to us of the need to focus more on Christ than on our problems. This is the mark of a life of faith. Jesus turns to us in the midst of whatever hardship we are experiencing, and with regard to our most basic human fears, and says, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?” To believe in him means not just to trust in his power, but to have faith in his goodness and love and that that goodness and love will never end. Just like Jesus permitted the apostles to endure this ferocious tempest on the Sea of Galilee to strengthen them in faith, so sometimes he allows us to experience great difficulty, so that we can grow in faith precisely through confronting our fears together with him
- This is the lesson Pope Francis famously drew in perhaps the most watched and listened to papal homily of all time, on March 27, 2020, when at the beginning of the pandemic, in the midst of a powerful downpour in an empty St. Peter’s Square, he led the whole world in prayer. He preached on today’s scene of Jesus in the boat with the disciples, when Jesus asks them why they are afraid and whether it is because the have no faith. The Holy Father states, “In what does the lack of the disciples’ faith consist, as contrasted with Jesus’ trust? They had not stopped believing in him; in fact, they called on him. But we see how they call on him: “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” (v. 38). Do you not care: they think that Jesus is not interested in them, does not care about them. … Jesus, more than anyone, cares about us. Indeed, once they have called on him, he saves his disciples from their discouragement” not to mention the storm. The Holy Father said that in calling them and us to faith, that means more than “believing that [God] exist[s], but coming to [him] and trusting in [him]. … Faith begins,” he concluded, “when we realize we are in need of salvation. We are not self-sufficient; by ourselves we founder: we need the Lord, like ancient navigators needed the stars. Let us invite Jesus into the boats of our lives. Let us hand over our fears to him so that he can conquer them. Like the disciples, we will experience that with him on board there will be no shipwreck. … He brings serenity into our storms, because with God life never dies.”
- But faith alone is not enough. As St. James reminds us, faith without works is dead (James 2:26). A living faith, St. Paul tells us, overflows with works of love (Gal 5:6). That’s why St. Paul, in the first reading from his Letter to the Romans, states, “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.” Not only is this a statement against amassing financial debt — words that are very important today in a culture that doesn’t save but charges beyond personal savings on credit cards, and borrows way beyond our means as a national government — but it is a reminder for us that we do have a debtto love one another. Loving one another is not a “good suggestion” by Jesus. It’s not even merely a command. It’s a debt to pay, it’s a real duty, something we owe others. This might seem strange at first to think we owe everyone a debt of love, but when we take seriously Jesus’ words that whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him (Mt 25:31-46), then it’s easier to understand: because we owe a debt to Jesus for everything — not just for our gifts but for saving us from the storms of sin and death — we pay that debt in the way we love each other. He didn’t say, “Love me as I have loved you,” but “love another.” St. Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, wrote in Love and Responsibility that the other is someone before whom the only worthy response is love.
- How do we pay this debt? First, by keeping the commandments. Today St. Paul lists the “second tablet” of the Decalogue, focused on love of neighbor, reminding us that the “one who loves one another has fulfilled the law,” because “love is the fulfillment of the law.” Jesus said something similar in St. Matthew’s Gospel when he reminded us that all the law and the prophets, including obviously the Ten Commandments, hinges on loving God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. We can’t really love our parents if we’re dishonoring them. We can’t love someone if we’re hating them or ending their life, or using them for our own sexual pleasure, or ripping them off, or lying to them, or envious about their blessings. We begin to pay the debt of love when we reverence our parents despite their shortcomings, when we risk our lives to save others, when we sacrifice the desires of the flesh out of love for others’ souls, when we give them what we have rather than steal from them, when we tell them the truth even if we should have to suffer as a result, when we rejoice at what they have rather than seek it selfishly for ourselves. But even though keeping the commandments with love is the fulfillment of the law, we are called to go beyond the minimum of the law to the full standard of the love of Christ. Christ calls us to love by his standard, which involves willing the good even of our enemies, unselfish self-sacrifice, patience, kindness, humility, perseverance, sincerity, devotion, fervor, fidelity, and affection, as we see in the list of attributes for love St. Paul gives us in Rom 12 and 1 Corinthians 13. God pours his love into our hearts precisely so that, filled with his love, we can love others not just with our finite love but with his infinite love.
- Jesus’ abiding presence is for us a reminder of just how much he loves and cares. In his last words before ascending into heaven, when he gave us the mission to sail through the whole world, proclaiming the Gospel, baptizing and celebrating the sacraments, and putting the word of God into practice, he told us “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” — that same authority that he used to quell the storm. Then he reminded us of his presence with us in this ship: “Know that I am with you always until the end of time.” Jesus remains with us — and he dwells with us in a special way here in Church. The early Christians, as soon as they started to build churches, used to call the body of the Church the “nave,” from the Latin word navis for “ship.” Here, just like 2,000 years ago, Jesus is in the boat, at its bow in the tabernacle, even if at times he is quiet and seemingly asleep. Today he wishes to do more for us today than he did even for his disciples on the sea of Galilee. He will awaken not only to speak a word to calm the seas around us, but rather he will say, “This is my body… This is the chalice of my blood… Take and eat … Take and drink,” so that from the inside he can feed us, calm whatever storms we bear within and take us from little faith to great love. As we prepare to receive him now, the fullest response to our prayer, “Lord, save us!,” we ask him to take away our fears and to increase our faith, so that we may rejoice in the gift of his presence here in this nave of the Church, believe in his power, trust in his love, and with the other members of the Church carry out the rescue mission as his spiritual coast guard all the way until we land at the eternal dock!
The readings for this Mass were:
A reading from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans
Brothers and Sisters, Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this saying, [namely] “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.
The continuation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew
Jesus got into a boat and his disciples followed him. Suddenly a violent storm came up on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by waves; but he was asleep. They came and woke him, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” He said to them, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?” Then he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm. The men were amazed and said, “What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?
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