Giving Generously While There’s Still Time, 33rd Sunday (B), November 14, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx, NY
33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Fifth World Day of the Poor
November 14, 2021
Dan 12:1-3, Ps 16, Heb 10:10-14.18, Mk 13:24-32

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today Jesus speaks to us in apocalyptic language about the end of the world, when he says the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give light, the stars will fall from the sky and the heavens will be shaken. He said that then everyone will see him coming with great power and glory as he sends out the angels to gather the elect from all corners of the earth. He tells us that when we see these things happening, we should know that he is near, and he suggests that we should always be ready, for no one knows the time it will take place except God the Father.
• In graphic language, Jesus is describing the truth we proclaim every Sunday in our profession of faith: “he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.” But many of us are afraid of this reality. If angels were to come in vast numbers right now to announce that the end of the world were coming today, most people, including most Catholics, rather than rejoicing, would be screaming in fear. That’s not, however, the reaction the Lord wants from us, for it shows a lack of faith and love. When the early Christians reflected on this reality of Jesus’ second coming, they used to cry out “Marana tha,” “Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20). They looked forward to this event with great expectation, because it would lead to their full unity in love with the Lord forever. Our attitude is supposed to be similar. We pray in every Mass, after the Our Father, “By the help of your mercy, may we be always free from sin … as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ!” The attitude we’re called to have versus Jesus’ second coming is “hope,” full of blessing.
• I remember once when I was preaching a retreat in Los Angeles, an elderly woman came to me, asking. “Father, is it sinful for me to look forward to my death so that I can, God-willing, be with Jesus forever in heaven?” I replied tenderly, but emphatically, “No. It’s not a sin!” Then she said to me, “Then why doesn’t anyone else seem to have this longing?” The reason, I think, has to do with the first part of that prayer from the Mass, and the link between our being “free from sin” and our ability to wait in “blessed hope” for the coming of the Lord.
• I like to illustrate this truth with a story from my childhood. When I was a kid, most days I would wait with eager expectation for the return of my dad from work about 4:15 in the afternoon. At about four, our black Labrador retriever would start pacing around the house with its tail wagging. Each of the four kids would take regular glances at the clock. Eventually we would hear the shutting of the heavy steel door of my father’s van and we would all hustle toward the back door through which he would come all wanting to be the first person to jump into his strong arms for a hug and a kiss. We loved our dad and couldn’t wait for him to return so that we could be with him. This was what happened, as I said earlier, on “most” On other days I would actually dread his return — precisely on those days when I had done something that I knew he wouldn’t appreciate of which my mother had promised to inform him on his arrival. On those days, when 4 pm came around and our dog began his excited daily ritual, I was looking for a place to hide in my bedroom.
• I think that experience is a parable for our disposition in front of the return of the Lord. If we really love the Lord, we are impatient for his return, so that we can be with him. If we’re ready to greet him, it is a time of “blessed hope” and expectation. For those of us who have “done something wrong,” however, who have not been “free from sin,” who haven’t been doing what we ought to have been doing with the gift of life, then it’s something to which we do not look forward — something even that we can dread.
• How do those of us who do fear the coming of the Lord — either at the end of time or at the end of our lives, whichever comes first (and either may come in a matter of minutes) — become those who can await his coming full of “blessed hope”? The great saints have told us the secret to this transition: it’s by living each day as if it is our last, by being ready at all times to meet the Lord so that we will never really be caught off guard when he comes.
• In Thomas à Kempis’ spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ, he urged all believers, “Very quickly will there be an end of you here; take heed therefore how it will be with you in another world. … You ought in every deed and thought so to order yourself, as if you were to die this day. … Happy is the man who has the hour of his death always before his eyes, and daily prepares himself to die. … When it is morning, reflect that you shall not see the evening, and at eventide dare not to boast yourself of the morrow. … Live so that death may never find you unprepared, … [so] that at the hour of death you may rather rejoice than fear. Learn now to die to the world, so shall you begin to live with Christ. Learn now to spurn all earthly things, and then you may freely go unto Christ. … Work now, dearly beloved, do all that you can, for you know not when you shall die nor what shall happen to you after death. While you have time, lay up for yourself undying riches. Think of nothing but your salvation; care only for the things of God. Make friends for yourself by venerating the saints of God and walking in their footsteps, so that when you die, you may be received into everlasting dwellings. … Keep your heart free and lifted up towards God, for here we have no lasting city. To Him direct your daily prayers with cries and tears, that your spirit may be found worthy to pass happily after death to its Lord.”
• Kempis’ spiritual wisdom, which has formed many saints over the last six centuries, is based on the insight that it is only when we realize that today may be our last day, that we may not have the opportunity to put off the truly important things until tomorrow, that we begin to think clearly and get our priorities straight. We act differently toward people when we realize our last interaction with them might be our last. We’re not tempted in the same way toward the harsh word, or the impure thought, or the vengeful action. We begin to look at time differently and no longer wish to waste it on diversions. We begin to have a far deeper appreciation for prayer and the Sacraments and the Church. We cease to sleepwalk spiritually and become fully alert to the meaning of every moment, thought, word and deed.
• The more alert we are to the reality that today may be our last, the more charitable we become. We don’t build grain bins to store our harvests, we don’t “eat, drink and be merry,” but we empty our grain bins and begin to feed the hungry, satiate the thirsty, and try to make them happy. I’ve always been moved by the end of the Oscar award winning movie Schindler’s List, about a nominally-Christian man, Oskar Schindler, in Germany during the Holocaust. His name was Oskar Schindler. He was a notorious womanizer and very greedy. When he discovered that Hitler was sending hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths in concentration camps, he thought that he had a chance for cheap labor. So he purchased some of them more or less to work as his slaves in his factories. One of the slaves he bought was brilliant with money and organization. Another was a pretty young woman to whom Schindler was immediately attracted. Through them, he soon realized that the people being brought to the concentration camps were not subhuman, were not slaves, were not insects to be killed industrially and incinerated, but real human beings. He had a massive conversion. And eventually he started to use all the money he had to buy Jews, not to make him money, but to save their lives. He liquidated his cash, he started to sell his property, then he put his his business interests on sale. Toward the end of the movie, he breaks down because he doesn’t have any more money to buy another, to save another’s life. As one of the Jews he’s saved reminds him that 1,100 people were alive because of him, through his tears he says, “I could have got more. … If I had made more money. I threw away so miuch money. … I didn’t do enough. … This car. … Why did I keep the car? Ten people right there. … This pin. … two people. This is gold. He would have given me two more, at least one. One more person. I could have gone one more person and I didn’t. I … I … I … I didn’t.” Like Schindler so many waste money that could help others. So many waste time. So many don’t take seriously the gift of each day to try to do the most good they can.
• Today is the fifth World Day of the Poor, started by Pope Francis in 2017, and it’s meant to help us all get very practical about the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, about loving our neighbor with the time we have like Jesus has loved us first. In his Message for this day, Pope Francis focused on Jesus’ words “The poor you will always have with you,” which Jesus said to Judas right after Judas complained about Mary of Bethany’s pouring out oil on Jesus in anticipation of his burial rather than selling it for 300 days wages and given to the poor. Pope Francis contrasts Mary’s extravagant love for Jesus versus Judas’ fake concern for the poor. Jesus’ words, “the poor you will always have with you but you will not always have me,” the Pope says, was reminding them that “he is the first of the poor, the poorest of the poor,” as he would make clear when he announced he had no place to lay his head, and also “because he represents all of them,” as he would declare when he would say that whatever we did to the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the ill or imprisoned, we would be doing to him. Pope Francis continued, “Jesus teaches that poverty is not the result of fate, but a concrete sign pointing to his presence among us. We do not find him when and where we want, but see him in the lives of the poor, in their sufferings and needs, in the often inhuman conditions in which they are forced to live. … We are called to discover Christ in them, to lend them our voice in their causes, but also to be their friends, to listen to them, to understand them. …  In short, believers, when they want to see Jesus in person and touch him with their hands, know where to turn. The poor are [like] a sacrament of Christ; they represent his person and point to him.”
• As St. Teresa of Calcutta reminded us, the best way to learn how to recognize and love Christ in the disguise of the poor in by recognizing and reverencing Christ in the Holy Eucharist. “If we recognize [Jesus] under the appearance of bread,” she explained, “we will have no difficulty recognizing him in the disguise of the suffering poor.” Our bishops this week will be in Baltimore debating a draft of a pastoral letter on the Holy Eucharist, since there is a crisis of people recognizing him under the sacramental species. But this loss of the real presence, for St. Teresa of Calcutta, would go hand-in-hand with the failure to recognize Jesus in the poor. “Today, as before,” she said, “When Jesus comes among his own, his own don’t know him. He comes in the rotting bodies of the poor. Jesus comes to you and me, and often, very often, we pass him by.” She wanted to cultivate a truly Eucharistic life in which we live the Mass as a sacrament of love. She commented, “Our lives are woven with Jesus in the Eucharist. In Holy Communion we have Christ under the appearance of bread. In our work, we find him under the appearance of flesh and blood. It is the same Christ. ‘I was hungry. I was naked. I was sick. I was homeless.’” She summarized by saying: “The Eucharist and the poor we must never separate, or the poor and the Eucharist. Then you will be a true [Missionary of Charity]. When you go to the poor, you take Jesus with you. This morning He satisfied my hunger for Him and now I go to satisfy His hunger for souls, for love.”
• As we prepare to receive Jesus now on this World Day of the Poor, we ask him who is the “first of the poor, the poorest of the poor,” to so transform us on the inside that we will recognize that though we are poor he has made us rich, and is sending us out to quench his thirst and to spread his charity. If today is indeed our last day, let us go out with the love we see in his total self-giving on Calvary and make our lives truly Eucharistic, giving our body, blood, all we are and have, out of love.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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