Fullness of Redemption, 28th Thursday (I), October 19, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of SS. John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues and Companions
October 19, 2023
Rom 3:21-30, Ps 130, Lk 11:47-54

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus has very sharp words about those Pharisees who for all their conspicuous religious practices turn out to be murderers on the inside: in imitation of the way their ancestors killed the prophets, they would conspire to have Jesus himself killed. Their essential defect in the understanding of their relationship with God was a focus on their own external actions in fulfillment of the law of the Covenant rather than on God’s actions and whether they were branches attached to God the Vine, whether they were in fact loving God with all they had and loving their neighbor to the extreme or whether they were opposing God and hating or slaying their neighbor. They had become, as Pope Francis has said many times throughout his pontificate, ideologues, those who were living by “moral principles” or by the “law” but were no longer truly living in a relationship with God. Jesus said they had thrown away the key of knowledge — the real, living relationship with God himself, a God who changes us — and had both failed to enter the kingdom themselves but were preventing others from entering.
• St. Paul used to be a Pharisee and lived by a principle that one became right with God — justified — precisely through one’s own deeds. Through and after his conversion, however, he grasped, as he writes today, that we are, first, “justified freely by [God’s] grace” (which means by God’s action, unmerited by us) and, second, through the way we respond to it, “by faith, apart from works of the law.” He writes about the proper ground of justification by grace through faith working through love today because it was an issue for the Church in Rome, where there were many “Judaized Christians,” baptized believers influenced by a Pharisaical mentality that said in order to be a good Christian, one first needed to be a good Jew, and to be a good Jew meant to keep the Mosaic law in its entirety. The emphasis in justification in their conception was on fidelity to the Mosaic law; St. Paul was stressing, rather, that it’s faith in God — not just a belief that he exists but a trust in Him to whom we commit our entire lives — that saves both Greek and Jew, uncircumcised and circumcised. That doesn’t mean our deeds aren’t important. God’s grace received with faith is supposed to be transformative and performative: it’s supposed to change us and that change can’t help but be seen in the way we behave, as we strive and struggle to live more and more according to God’s grace with faith. St. James says, “Faith without works is dead” (James 2:26) and St. Paul would write in his letter to the Galatians that the goal is “faith working through love”: our faith is supposed to overflow in charity toward God and neighbor. That’s why we can say that, while we’re not saved by our deeds, we are judged by our deeds — see Mt 25:31-46 and the way we respond to the poor, the hungry, the sick, the stranger, the imprisoned — because the way we treat our neighbor is an indication of the type of faith we have and whether we’ve responded in faith to the grace of God. If we have truly received God’s self-gift with faith, if we have been changed by his love, we want to love him back and to love others as he loves them. We need to see first God’s gift and then respond with active, living faith.
• A great example of those who lived this way we have in the North American Martyrs. Conscious of the gift they had received from God, they responded in faith working through love, leading them to tremendous deeds of heroism and self-sacrifice to bring the faith to those who hadn’t yet heard God’s saving news. The eight Jesuits whom we call the North American Martyrs — Jesuit Saints René Goupil, Isaac Jogues, John de Lalande, Anthony Daniel, John de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, and Noel Chabanel — in the early 1600s, zealously brought the Gospel to New France, which encompassed most of eastern Canada as well as some of the areas of upstate New York. Practically speaking, their mission was to bring Jesus Christ to the native Americans — the Hurons, the Mohawks, the Iroquois — who by the time the Jesuits arrived in 1625 had already earned a reputation for resisting missionaries and making them martyrs. St. Jean de Brébeuf was one of the first Jesuits to arrive in 1625 at the age of 31. Earlier, he had been rendered an invalid by tuberculosis, but having recovered his strength, he wanted to use the health he had to pass on the treasure of the faith. As soon as he arrived, he began to study the difficult Huron language. Over the course of three years of hard work, living alone among the Indians, with much suffering and constant danger, he did not gain a single convert. When England took over Canada in 1629, he was summoned back to France. It would have been easy for him to say he had paid his dues and spend the rest of his life at the Jesuit institutions of Europe, but when France re-obtained title to the Canadian colonies four years later, he was on the first boat back. For 16 more years he labored about the Hurons, with his perilous adventures covered in detail in The Jesuit Relations. He would drag his canoe and bags over mountains and valleys for miles, going from location to location, wherever the Hurons were. His apostolate began to bear fruit, especially with the young. In 1649, the Iroquois attacked the village where he was stationed and he was sentenced to death. His death is about as gruesome as that of any missionary ever recorded. He was stripped naked and beaten with clubs on every part of their body. Then they cut off his hands, applied white-hot tomakawks to his armpits and groin, and fastened searing sword blades around his neck. Next, they covered him with bark soaked in pitch and resin and lit him on fire. During all of this, as the eyewitness account records in The Jesuit Relations, he continued to encourage and exhort the Christian converts around him to remain faithful. To stop his preaching, the savages then plugged up his mouth, tore off his lips, cut off his nose, and then, in mockery of baptism, put him in a tub of boiling water. They proceeded next to cut off his flesh, roast it and eat it in front of him. The final blow came when they sliced open his chest and ripped out his beating, valiant heart, so that they could drink his blood when it was still warm. This was the faith working through love that radiated through his life. The missionary life and death of Isaac Jogues is a similarly inspiring example of what that faith looks like. He arrived in New France in 1636 at the age of 29. His hard work among the Hurons bore fruit; in 1637, he rejoiced to baptize 200. In 1642, he was captured by the Mohawks when returning from a supply run and brought to modern day Auriesville, New York, where the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs is to this day. There, with St. Rene Goupil, captured with him, he was forced to run the gauntlet, was further beaten with clubs, and then had his hair, beard and nails torn away and forefingers bitten off. He was then made a slave. Eventually, he was rescued by the Dutch and brought to New York City, becoming the first recorded priest ever here. He was sent back to France, where he was greeted both with both pity and as a hero. Because he no longer had the fingers to hold the Sacred Host, he was technically incapable of celebrating Mass, until Pope Urban VIII gave him a special dispensation. “It would be unjust that a martyr for Christ,” Urban said, “should not drink the blood of Christ.” Despite all that he had suffered, however, when the opportunity came to return to New France in early 1644, he jumped at the chance. It didn’t take long for him to receive his imperishable wreath and cash in the great portfolio of faith he had amassed through so many deeds of faith. He was ambushed at a meal by the Mohawks, who tomahawked him as he was entering the cabin. They cut off his head and placed it on a pole facing the direction from which he had come, as a warning to other missionaries.  But what the Mohawks were not planning on was that the blood of Jogues, Brébeuf and the six other North American martyrs would soften and fertilize the Indian soil to receive the Gospel. At the very place where Jogues, Goupil and Lalande were killed in Auriesville, ten years later Saint Kateri Tekakwitha would be born. Even though they didn’t experience many conversions during their missionary work, the North American Martyrs’ heroic deaths, perseverance in the faith, and zeal for the salvation of their torturers would become renown not just in the Christian world, but even among the sadistic executioners. When the next wave of courageous missionaries arrived, they would Christianize the tribes they encountered far more easily. The blood of the martyrs is indeed the seed of Christians. And we continue to grow in faith in the state that St. Isaac’s blood sanctified.
• When we look at their martyrdoms, though, we can often focus so much on their actions, their faith, their heroism to the point of death. But that’s not the way they looked at it. They looked at it as a gift. This morning, in the lesson from the Office of Readings that the Church ponders on their feast, we pondered St. John de Brebeuf’s approach to martyrdom, which he looked at as a great grace. This is what he wrote in his diary: “For two days now I have experienced a great desire to be a martyr and to endure all the torments the martyrs suffered. Jesus, my Lord and Savior, what can I give you in return for all the favors you have first conferred on me? … I vow before your eternal Father and the Holy Spirit, before your most holy Mother and her most chaste spouse, before the angels, apostles and martyrs, before my blessed fathers Saint Ignatius and Saint Francis Xavier—in truth I vow to you, Jesus my Savior, that as far as I have the strength I will never fail to accept the grace of martyrdom, if some day you in your infinite mercy would offer it to me, your most unworthy servant. … On receiving the blow of death, I shall accept it from your hands with the fullest delight and joy of spirit. … May I die only for you, if you will grant me this grace, since you willingly died for me. Let me so live that you may grant me the gift of such a happy death. In this way, my God and Savior, I will take from your hand the cup of your sufferings and call on your name: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” He and they looked even at martyrdom as a grace, as a gift, to which they responded with faith overflowing through love.
• Today as we come to Mass we have a chance to focus on God’s continuous work of sanctification that flows from justification. We see the same interplay between grace, faith and works. We begin by God’s grace: “Blessed are you, O Lord, God of all creation, for through your goodness we have this bread [wine] we offer you, fruit of the earth .” We receive it with faith working through love: “and work of human hands.” God’s self-gift in the Eucharist is, together with the grace of baptism, the greatest grace in life, and we come here saying our “Amen!,” and then seeking to receive from God’s generous and unmerited loving action the strength to make our whole life a commentary on the words of consecration, giving our body and blood out of love for God and others, imitating the faith-filled love of the North American Martyrs in whichever way God graciously will allow.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
ROM 3:21-30

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