Giving God Our Best and Becoming Our Brothers’ Keeper, Sixth Monday (I), February 13, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Blessed James Miller, Martyr
February 13, 2023
Gen 4:1-15.25, Ps 50, Mk 8:11-13

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, as the Church has us ponder Cain’s killing his brother Abel, we remember that that sacrifice is a type, a foreshadowing, of the killing of Christ, “whose blood speaks more eloquently than that of Abel” (Heb 12:24). We see the start of that fratricide and attempted Deicide in today’s Gospel in the way that the Pharisees were asking Jesus for a sign in order to test him. Jesus had already worked many signs — healings, exorcisms, multiplications of loaves and fish, calming the winds and the sea — but they didn’t want to accept any of them. In fact they opposed all the signs he was doing on the Sabbath. They would similarly reject the one sign he elsewhere said he would give them, the sign of Jonah — his spending three days in the belly of the earth and then being raised from the dead — in which they themselves would participate in playing the role of Cain. Today they, although outwardly religious, were trying to entrap Christ so that they could put him to death. Rather than opening themselves to him, they closed themselves and the murder of this Innocent One was only the conclusion of a process that began with their rejection and envy.
• As Jesus said yesterday from the Sermon on the Mount, murder always flows from within us, from anger, insult, hatred. The Book of Wisdom highlights this process when it prophesies about what was going on in the hearts of those who conspired against Jesus: “Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he opposes our actions, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the Lord. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us. Because his life is not like that of others, and different are his ways. He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. He calls blest the destiny of the righteous and boasts that God is his Father. Let us see whether his words be true; let us find out what will happen to him in the end. For if the righteous one is the son of God, God will help him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With violence and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience.Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him. These were their thoughts, but they erred; for their wickedness blinded them. And they did not know the hidden counsels of God; neither did they count on a recompense for holiness nor discern the innocent souls’ reward” (Wis 2:10-22).
• The inaugural example in history of this type of murderous envy is in today’s first reading, when Cain slew his brother Abel. On Friday, we saw the typical structure of sin. If we didn’t have the patronal Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes on Saturday, we would have seen its effects. Today we are able to look at those truths from another angle. There are several steps involved:
  • Abel “brought one of the best firstlings of his flock” to sacrifice to God whereas Cain simply brought “an offering,” and God looked with favor on the first and not on the second. The first step in not sinning but rather in growing in relationship with God is to give him our best, to love him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. We don’t have to love him necessarily “more” than someone else, but just give him all we can. God’s favor toward Abel’s sacrifice was not because he was a carnivore; it was because of the spirit with which the sacrifice was given. Cain was just giving “something,” rather than something great. He wasn’t doing “well,” as God will say later. We always need to examine, in our Christian life as a whole as well as in our practices of piety, whether we’re really trying to give God the best we can.
  • The second stop was Cain’s becoming “resentful and crestfallen.” When we give our best, we are filled with intrinsic satisfaction; even if the recipient doesn’t adequately appreciate our gift, we at least have the knowledge that we did well. When we don’t give our best, we’re looking far more for affirmation, because we’re essentially faking total commitment and want others to tell us whether the con worked. We make excuses and look for others to excuse us, or, better, to say that even at 50 percent, we still hit a home run. When we don’t get that affirmation, we resent it. We become dejected, depressed, and lose our enthusiasm. The antidote, of course, is to seek to do things as well as we can. God says, “If you do well, you can hold up your head; but if not, sin is a demon lurking at the door: his urge is toward you, yet you can be his master.” The devil is at the door and seeks to enter whenever we don’t do well and can’t honesty hold up our head. To conquer him, to master him, we need to give God our best.
  • The third step was Cain’s rejection of God’s advice. He was obsessed that Abel had gotten God’s favor for his offering and he hadn’t, even though Abel deserved it and Cain didn’t. He was eaten alive by the comparative sense rather than focused on doing well. And so he entrapped his brother, calling him out into the fields where doubtless they had often played as kids, and there ambushed and killed him. He failed to love his brother and this was the consequence of that refusal. He hadn’t done well and had allowed the devil not only in the door but to set up shop in his heart. He did not recognize that his brother was in God’s image and in his parents’ image. Cutting himself from every relationship, he ended the life of his brother, the archetype of every murder.
  • God responded to the situation. He first asked, “Where is your brother?” God well knew where he was, but like his question to Adam and Eve, “Where are you?,” he wanted Cain to come to know what God knew, to acknowledge his relationship of fraternity and the responsibility that came with it. Cain continued to refuse God, in this case lying: “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” The point is that we are our brother’s keepers, not out of duty but out of love. We need to care for each other. Cain had gone from caring for his baby brother to killing him. But God was Abel’s keeper and could hear Abel’s blood crying from the soil. Cain was deaf to what God was saying to him, and what his brother was saying to him. Cain should have been happy at his brother’s goodness. But instead he bathed the soil in his brother’s blood.
  • God could have treated Cain by the standard with which he had treated his brother, but God responded with mercy because he was Cain’s keeper. God first, mercifully and medicinally, prevented Cain from harvesting from the soil irrigated by his brother’s blood. He couldn’t let him profit from his sin. If Cain wasn’t going to use the soil to love God and others, to give God and others service through it, it wouldn’t produce for him. He would wander as a means to find himself and the real meaning of life, to make him dependent on others’ becoming his keeper. Cain, of course, responded with the fear coming from his own corrupt heart. He responded according to his own laziness, saying that his punishment was too hard to bear, even though he had rejected the medicinal punishment for his parents’ original sin, which was to work by the toil of one’s hands and the sweat of one’s brow. If he were a wanderer, he feared, then others would treat him just as someone trying to steal and eat their produce, and that’s why he was afraid for his life. God, however, promised to put a mark on his brow. What was this mark? Was it a sign saying, “Thou shalt not kill?” Was it simply a more conspicuous sign that Cain was in God’s image? We don’t know, but God would protect Cain even though Cain hadn’t protected his brother. God would go out into the fields with Cain not to kill but to save.
• Someone who shows us how to do well before the Lord and to become our brothers’ keeper is the American blessed we celebrate today for the fourth time:  Blessed James Miller, a native of Stevens Point, Wisconsin and LaSalle Brother who was martyred for the faith in Guatemala 41 years ago today. He was a very hardworking guy who, at his first school in Minnesota, in addition to teaching Spanish, English and religion and coaching football, supervised school maintenance, earning the nickname “Brother Fix-it.” When he was transferred to teach in Nicaragua, he repaired one residence, built an industrial arts complex, auditorium and science center, and served as janitor. When his life was endangered, he returned to Minnesota before being sent to Guatemala, where he trained indigenous Mayans in agricultural techniques and worked to prevent their being illegally conscripted by the Guatemalan government. That got him on the list of a death squad. He was assassinated while on a ladder repairing a broken lamp on the outer wall of a school. He was a living example of giving the Lord the best he had and caring for his brothers and sisters as he taught, built, coached and repaired out of love for God and for the students the Lord entrusted to him.
• What will we give God today? At Mass, we have the chance to present to God a sacrifice similar to Abel’s, presenting our bodies as a holy and acceptable sacrifice, our spiritual worship (Rom 12:1-2). We offer our first fruits, and the best we have to offer God the Father is his Son together with ourselves. We’ll pray in Eucharistic Prayer I that God the Father accept this as he “accepted the gifts of [his] servant Abel the Just.” And as the Blood of Christ is about to be poured out, we ask him to nourish the soil of our hearts so that we might always give him the best we have, today, tomorrow and forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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