Generously Following the King and Lamb Wherever He Goes, 34th Monday (II), November 25, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 34th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Catharine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
November 25, 2024
Rev 14:1-5, Ps 24, Lk 21:1-4

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we have the privilege to be able to continue reflecting on the reality of Christ’s kingdom we celebrated yesterday and on the reality of how to enter it, remain in it, and draw others to seize it.
• In the Gospel, we see how to seize the Kingdom as the pearl of great price. Jesus had said at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To enter into the kingdom we must treasure God and his kingdom above all other things. In the Gospel, we see someone who did. After Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, he began to “people watch,” in order to continue to instruct his apostles about how to put what he taught into action. He and they saw the stream of people putting money in the temple treasury, which was a tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure money box. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coin would resonate as it rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Luke tells us, we’re putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury trumpet. But then a poor widow came and put in two lepta, two small coins which together were worth less than a penny and likely barely made a sound. Then Jesus gave a surprising lesson that obviously the disciples never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all them, for they “gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on.” This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. She could have easily chosen to drop into the trumpet only one of the coins and kept the other for herself. But she didn’t. She gave it all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain until the end of time. Jesus had said elsewhere that we could not be his disciple, we could not really enter his kingdom, unless we valued him and his kingdom more than family members, possessions and even our very life. That’s what characterized this poor wisdom. She believed so much in God and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God’s house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding that work of salvation.  She accounted the continuance and expansion of that work even more than her own life. That’s living for the kingdom. This woman sacrificed her entire livelihood, spending herself and what she had in the service of the Lord. We should always seek to give in such a way that Christ the King would be tempted to pull the saints aside in heaven and point out the way we are spending ourselves in his service, seeking to build up his Kingdom.
• In the first reading from the Book of Revelation and in the Psalm, we see other characteristics of the Kingdom and other examples of those who, like the widow, give all to the God who has given all to us. The 144,000 dressed in white, whose garments were washed in the blood of the Lamb, are a snapshot of the redeemed. The number 144,000 is a symbolic, not a literal one (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and some fundamentalist Protestants claim). 12 is one of the magic numbers in Hebrew, flowing from the 12 tribes of Israel. 144 is a sign of the multiplication of the descendants of the 12 tribes and the spiritual progeny of the 12 apostles times 1,000, all meant to describe a vast multitude. We see about them that, first, they had the Lamb’s and the Father’s name written on their foreheads. They were thinking as God the Father and God the Son think; they were filled with God’s wisdom; and they also weren’t ashamed to live by that wisdom publicly. They were singing before the throne what seemed to St. John to be a “new hymn,” a hymn only they could sing, because doubtless that knowledge came from the experience of their life of love for the God, from their suffering for him, from their being “ransomed from the earth.” Third, they are described as those who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes,” which is a beautiful description for how every Christian is meant to behave, of what life in the kingdom consists. To live in the kingdom means to respond to Jesus’ call to follow him through day-to-day life all the way to heaven, to follow him across the road as Good Samaritans, to follow him to the Father in prayer, to follow him to reconcile with someone who has sinned against him and us. At the end of the passage, St. John says that “no deceit was found on their lips” and that they were “unblemished.” They were living and speaking the truth, which is the way to live in the Kingdom of Truth with Christ the Truth incarnate, attributes of the kingdom expanded upon in the Psalm. The answer to the question, “Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord? Or who may stand in his holy place?,” is, “He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. … Such is the race that seeks for him, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.” Those who follow the Lamb wherever he goes are those who seek God, who desire to see him face-to-face. That desire leads them to keep their hands sinless of all bribes but to use their hands to pray, for generosity toward God and charity toward others, for honest work, for embracing and helping others; it leads them to keep their heart clean of all that can lead it to become hardened toward God and toward others; and it keeps them from desiring what is vain, and mammon is certainly among a vanity of vanities. For us to enter into the Lord’s kingdom here on earth and in the celestial Jerusalem we must align our desires, hearts and hands to the Kingdom, we must set our eyes on the Lord’s face and seek to follow him wherever he leaves, free of deceit, free of moral blemish.
• Today we celebrate the feast of someone who lived this way, who longed to see God’s face, who sought to give God all and inspired others to the same generosity, who followed the Lamb wherever he led and tried to guided so many others to that same divine, living GPS, whose lips, hands and hearts were all consecrated to the King. St. Catharine of Alexandria is a very influential early virgin martyr. According to the legend of her martyrdom, she, trusting in God, triumphed in a contest of wits over the emperor Maxentius and 50 of the greatest philosophers he had in his court, and in the process converted members of his family and others. After that she showed by her courage in the face of threats, torture and death that nothing could get her to be terrified, nothing could get her to distrust that God would care for her. She was eventually killed by being crushed by a spiked wheel before she was beheaded, but she approached both knowing that the same Father who raised Jesus from the dead would raise her. She was generous to the end, giving her whole life to God. She was willing to follow the Lamb even to Martyrdom. She consecrated her hips, hands, hearts and her entire body to Christ and, seeking his face, saw it at the moment of her martyrdom. We prayed in the opening prayer of this Mass that God would grant us through St. Catharine’s intercession to “be strengthened in faith and constancy” so that we may “spend ourselves without reserve” for Christ and the Church. The type of faith and constancy we see in her is what we see in the widow in the Gospel and what God wants to give us.
• Today we turn to God through her intercession and ask the Lord to grant us the grace to follow him, like she did, wherever He leads, to seek his face in all circumstances, and to try to use all our life to bring others to seek his face with us. We ask him to help us, like he helped he, to learn how to sing that “new song” of the kingdom here on earth with honest lips, raised hands, and lifted hearts, so that we might join her in the chorus of the “144,000” singing forever to God’s glory in Christ’s eternal kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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