Getting Up from the Consumerist Marketplace to Go To and Go With Christ, Second Friday of Advent, December 13, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Advent
Memorial of St. Lucy
Votive Mass for the Pope (50th Anniversary of his Priestly Ordination)
December 13, 2019
Is 48, Ps 1, Mt 11:16-19

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• As we have been pondering, Advent involves a triple dynamism: the Lord comes, we go out to meet him with lighted lamps, and then transformed by the encounter with the Bridegroom we continue to journey with him and finish together with him his mission.
• When we go out to meet him, it’s not just to shake his hand but to have him shake us up and transform us. In the Gospel today, Jesus says that many of us don’t encounter him with that conversion  in mind. He describes his generation — and frankly every generation — like children in marketplaces “sitting,” in other words, not wanting to move. They’re playing different music and want everyone to respond to that music: if they play the flute, they want people to dance; if they play a dirge, they want people to mourn. The key is that they want to set the terms of the interaction. They want the others to move and change. That’s what Jesus was saying they were doing with God’s messenger and God himself. They criticized John the Baptist for his ascetically fasting; and when Jesus wasn’t fasting because he was showing us how to rejoice because the Bridegroom was with us, they criticized him for drawing close in mercy to the hedonists like the tax collectors and other sinners, who were enjoying the things of this world in a disordered way. They failed to grasp that it’s we who should be dancing to the Lord’s music and not the other way around. They were classifying-and-conquering not only the principle figure of preparation for the Messiah’s Advent, St. John the Baptist, but the Messiah himself.
• I also think it’s significant that Jesus describes them as sitting in the “marketplace.” The marketplace is where we go to buy things according to our preferences. Today this is an issue because in the marketplace we learn a type of “consumerism” that can then come to impact our faith. We like things to happen according to our pleasures and preferences: we like certain Mass times and not others, certain liturgical forms, certain music or none, certain popes, bishops or priests, certain Psalm tones, certain Eucharistic prayers, certain lengths of homily, certain messages, certain styles. This consumerism can cause us to behave much like the children in the marketplace, trying to play the music for our relationship with the Lord. We play soft, sentimental hits and want the Lord just to touch our emotions. We’ll play marches and want the Lord to ship others around us into shape and boss them around like a drill sergeant. We’ll play horror movie music to try to “scare the hell” out of people. We’ll play heavy metal and drown out the Lord’s whisper. We won’t play any music at all, because we’re in a bad mood, or hate music, or can’t sing, or anything else. The point is that we need to attune ourselves to what the Lord is playing.
• In the first reading, God tells us through Isaiah, “I, the Lord, your God, teach you what is for your good, and lead you on the way you should go.” We need to allow him to teach and guide us, rather than our seeking to teach him how the world, our life and the lives of those around us should run. We need to follow him rather than, like Peter when Jesus called him “Satan,” try to lead him. We prayed in the Psalm, “Those who follow you Lord will have the light of life,” a phase taken from Jesus’ words in St. John’s Gospel. Those who don’t follow the Lord, we infer from these words and confirm from personal experience, wander in darkness. The Psalmist describes the type of fruit we’ll produce when we align ourselves to the Lord’s music, when we delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on his law day and night: we will be like a tree planted near running water, that yields its fruit in due season, and whose leaves never fade. When we listen to what the Lord teaches us for our own good and allow him to lead us on the way we should go, hearkening to his commandments, as Isaiah tells us, we will spiritually prosper like a river. But if we don’t, if we want to remain in control, the Psalmist tells us we will be like chaff, dead airy matter with no holy solidity, blown away by our whims.
• Today we can focus on two people who help us to see what it is to get up from a situation of our whims, adjust our lives to the Lord’s tune, and follow the Lord with the light of life. The first is St. Lucy. From her youngest days, she loved the Lord to the extent that she wanted to align herself totally to his movements in her life. She offered her virginity to God young in life, but her mother Eutychia had already made plans to marry her off to a rich pagan. After her spurned suitor grasped that her vow of virginity likely meant that she was a Christian and turned her over to Diocletian’s persecutorial administration, she was condemned to death in Syracuse, Sicily. She was willing to continue dancing not only to the Lord’s tune but together with the Lord even in suffering and death so that she could join in the music of the saints and angels. The love song of virginity for the sake of the kingdom of heaven was a tune of her life and strengthened her for martyrdom. What St. Ambrose said of St. Agnes’ virginity we could likewise say of St. Lucy’s: “Virginity is not praiseworthy because it is found in martyrs, but because it itself makes martyrs.” The type of love that leads one to consecrate herself totally to God in response to his love, to turn to him and to seek his face above all, is what makes a person strong in loving him to the end, loving him despite suffering, torture and even execution. She walked, she ran, she danced, she died with the light of life. Her name Lucy — which derives from the word Lux, Lucis for light — is not just because she is the patron saint of those with eye maladies, especially those at risk of blindness, but also because her whole life was radiant with the light of Christ turning her into light for the world.
• The second example of someone who got up from the marketplace to follow Christ in light is Pope Francis, who was ordained a priest 50 years ago today by Archbishop Ramón José Castellano in the chapel of the Jesuit’s Colegio Máximo. He had been planning as a boy to become a chemist, but on September 21, 1953, when he went to confession to Fr. Carlos Duarte Ibarra in the Church of San Jose in Flores, and had the experience that the Lord had been waiting for him there, he left the confessional with the conviction that God was calling him through his mercy to be a priest (an insight that eventually he chose as his papal motto, miserando atque eligendo, from St. Bede’s commentary on the calling of St. Matthew) and he danced to that tune. He followed the Lord. 16 years later, he was ordained a Jesuit priest, and since has been trying, through continuous discernment, to adjust his life to what the Lord was asking and help others to learn how to do so and actually to do so. In preparation for this day, he made an eight-day retreat during which he wrote a personal credo. It’s a beautiful testimony as to how he wanted his whole life to march to the Lord’s beat. “I want to believe in God the Father who loves me like a child, and in Jesus, the Lord who infused my life with His Spirit, to make me smile and so carry me to the eternal Kingdom of life. I believe in the Church. I believe in my life story, which was pierced by God’s loving gaze, who on that spring day of 21st September, came out to meet me to invite me to follow him. I believe in my pain, made fruitless by the egotism in which I take refuge. I believe in the stinginess of my soul, which seeks to take without giving. I believe in the goodness of others, and that I must love them without fear and without betraying them, never seeking my own security. I believe in the religious life. I believe I wish to love a lot. I believe in the burning death of each day, from which I flee but which smiles at me, inviting me to accept her. I believe in God’s patience, as good and as welcoming as a summer’s night. I believe that Dad is with the Lord in heaven. I believe that Fr. Duarte is there, too, interceding for my priesthood. I believe in Mary, my Mother, who loves me and will never leave me alone. And I believe in the surprise of each day, in which will be manifest love, strength, betrayal, and sin, which will be always with me until that definitive encounter with that marvelous face which I do not know, which always escapes me, but which I wish to know and love. Amen.”
• Today we ask the Lord to help us to learn from St. Lucy and Pope Francis how to leave behind our desire to sing at our speed, at our pitch, with our version of the lyrics, with the melody that might please us most, to singing the Lord’s Song which is ever new. We ask him to help us, like them, to synchronize ourselves to the Lord’s music so that as we go out to meet the Lord who is coming we can live by the light of faith, by lux and credo, and come one day to the definitive encounter with that Marvelous Face whom we wish to know and love smiling on us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 11:16-19

Jesus said to the crowds:
“To what shall I compare this generation?
It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another,
‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance,
we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’
For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they said,
‘He is possessed by a demon.’
The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they said,
‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard,
a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’
But wisdom is vindicated by her works.”