Gaining Wisdom of Heart from Numbering Our Days Aright, 25th Saturday (II), September 26, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Cosmas and Damian
September 26, 2020
Eccl 11:8-12:8, Ps 90, Lk 9:43-45

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today’s readings are about death and life, about what really matters and what doesn’t, about wisdom and foolishness, about eternity and evanescence. In the Responsorial Psalm, we prayed to God, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.” It’s only when we know that we don’t have all the time in the world, it’s only when we realize that our days are numbered, it’s only when we grasp that today may be the last day in our earthly sequence, that we begin to live the right way, for what really matters. It’s only when we begin to recognize that God has given us a finite time here on earth that we begin to get our true priorities straight.
• In the first reading, we finish our brief examination of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which focuses on the vanity of living just for this world. “Vanity of vanities,” it concludes, repeating a refrain from earlier in the Book, “All things are vanity!” Vanity means worthless or futile from the Latin word vanus or “empty.” It’s common understanding of “conceited” is derivative, flowing from getting puffed up by worthless things. Through the Book of Ecclesiastes Qohelet describes the various vain things in which human beings place their treasure. Today he focuses on the vanity of youth and he counsels us to remember our Creator in the days of youth, never to forget that we will age and die, and that “God will bring [us] to judgment” for the way we lived. He was encouraging us to live for God, the one type of life that is not vain.
• Jesus teaches us this path in the Gospel by his own example. After he has worked a great miracle of curing a boy whose diabolically-induced attacks would lead him repeatedly to the brink of suicide, “all were amazed at his every deed.” It would have been the time for Jesus to ride the wave of popularity, if that’s what he was seeking. But he wasn’t. At that moment of earthly acclaim, Jesus told the disciples: “Pay attention to what I am telling you. The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.” He was telling them for the second time that he was going to die. We had the first time in yesterday’s Gospel. Right after Peter proclaimed Jesus to be the Christ or Messiah, Jesus announced to them that he would be a suffering Messiah: “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” Peter, according to St. Matthew’s eyewitness account, vainly protested, even rebuking Jesus and telling him that there was no way any such thing would happen to him. This second time they didn’t understand it any better, but “they were afraid to ask him about this saying,” because they didn’t want to know the answer, because it seemed to go against the vain desires they had for cabinet positions in his worldly messianic administration. Jesus was keeping them focused, however, on the vanity even of the gift of human life if not lived for and together with God. He, too, would die, and if they wanted to live for what mattered, they not only needed to accept that fact but live that truth. They needed to learn not to have their life taken from them but freely to lay it down (Jn 10:18) as a ransom for many (Mk 10:45). For their life to have meaning, they needed to “lose” it for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the Gospel being shared. All of the apostles except Judas eventually got that lesson.
• St. Paul would be the one who would explain it best, when he wrote to the Philippians, “I consider everything as a loss because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have accepted the loss of all things and I consider them so much rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, … depending on faith to know him and the power of his resurrection and [the] sharing of his sufferings by being conformed to his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” He recognized that everything was vain, was trash, compared to knowing Jesus and being found in him. That realization changed his life. He wrote later to the same Church that his ambition was no longer for vain things but for the fulfillment of his virtuous vocation: “Forgetting what lies behind but straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ Jesus” and he urged them to become “perfectly mature” by “join[ing] with others in being imitators of me,  and observe those who thus conduct themselves according to the model you have in us” and instead of worthlessly living as “enemies of the Cross of Christ” making their stomachs their gods and being occupied with earthly things, to live rather as friends of Christ on the Cross focused on our heavenly calling and citizenship in exile (Phil 3:20). This morning’s readings are so that we gain wisdom of heart — not just head — and learn to number our days correctly, using each day to grow in Christ-like loving imitation.
• Today the Church has the joy to celebrate two saints who had this type of practical wisdom, who spent their days well and now experience the eternal eight day. They showed and proclaimed the type of conversion God is calling each of us to make from vanity to gaining Christ. Saints Cosmas and Damian were twins, doctors and eventually martyrs under Diocletian. They were called anargyroi, “penniless ones,” or “non-mercenaries,” because they never charged for their medical services at a time when many doctors were charlatans taking people’s entire savings on one invented “remedy” after another. Cosmas’ and Damian’s goodness was renowned and it was an opportunity for them to explain why they were so generous, because of the generosity they received. We should all have a similar ambition to give and to serve out of love rather than for remuneration, even if we should happen to be remunerated. They recognized that they were receiving far more by having the opportunity to love together with Christ, to serve rather than to be served, than they ever would have received through payment.
• Today we ask them to intercede for us that we may number our days aright so that one day we, and others through our cruciform love, may be numbered with them in the Book of Life. And we make that prayer in the context of the Mass, which is the school of this wisdom and Christ-like charity.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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