Giving God the Worship He Desires, Saturday of the Third Week of Lent, March 9, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish, Grand Rapids, Michigan
“Extraordinary Help for a Holy Lent:
The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”
Saturday of the Second Week of Lent
Memorial of St. Frances of Rome
March 9, 2024
Hos 6:1-6, Ps 51, Lk 18:9-14

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

The text that guided the homily was: 

• Today, as we seek to enter more deeply into the Eucharistic dimension of Lent during this Parish Retreat, the readings help us focus on the right worship of God and, in particular, the need for God’s mercy in being able to worship God as he desires. Pope Benedict once commented on the fact that at the beginning of the Last Supper Christ washed the feet of his apostles. In Jesus’ dialogue with St. Peter, when Peter first objected to having Christ do the work of a slave and wash his feet, Jesus told him that unless he allowed him to wash his feet, Peter would have no part in him. Then Peter exuberantly asked to have not just his feet washed but his hands and head as well. Jesus, however, told him that one who has been bathed has no need but to have his feet washed. In a beautiful symbolic interpretation of the scene, Pope Benedict said that the bathing to which Jesus referred was baptism and the washing of the feet — that part of us that comes into contact with the world — refers to the Sacrament of Confession. It is a prelude to how, in order to celebrate Mass well, to worship God well, we must come cleansed by God’s mercy.
• “I desire mercy!,” God says to us today through the Prophet Hosea and we repeat several times in the Responsorial Psalm. God desires mercy! He desires mercy in two ways. First, he desires to share with us his mercy. God’s greatest joy is forgiving, Pope Francis continually repeats, following upon what Jesus teaches us in the three parables of the Lost Sheep, Coin and Sons. He wants us to receive that gift of his compassionate love. But he also desires that we, having received it, be transformed so that we, too, may pass on that mercy to others. He stresses that he desires mercy instead of sacrifice, with sacrifice understood as the slaughtering of animals as an external act of repentant expiation. The type of sacrifice he wants, as we pray in today’s Psalm, is a “contrite spirit,” for “a heart contrite and humbled” God will never spurn. We seek to come before the Lord at Mass with that type of spirit and heart, made so by his mercy that wipes out our offenses, thoroughly washes us from our guilt and cleanses us of our sins.
• God wants us to grow in our receiving his mercy and our sharing in it. That’s what’s pointed to in the image of Hosea in today’s first reading. God tells us through his prophet that the piety of those in Ephraim (Samaria) and Judah is “like a morning cloud, like the dew that early passes away.” It’s a powerful simile. In context, their faithfulness to receiving and sharing God’s merciful love is like dew on the grass that just doesn’t last. It evaporates as the day draws near, the sun rises and the day goes on. It’s an indication that God’s people started out faithfully early in life but that their piety dissipated. The Lord was declaring through the prophet that he wanted to show mercy, but that they had lost the desire to receive it. The Lord had been trying to bring them to conversion, but they were superficial like the evaporating dew. Hosea therefore exhorts them, “Come, let us return to the Lord, it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence [a clear reference to how he will do it through Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection!] … He will come to us like the rain, like spring rain that waters the earth.” The upshot is that sometimes our life, sometimes our day, can begin like the beautiful refreshing dew with all types of sentiments and actions of piety and faith, with great recognition of our need for God and his merciful love, but then we allow that inner reverence and love to fade; we have the good intentions to serve God in our prayer and in our work but over time those graces wither as we begin to focus on ourselves. God wants to arouse us. As Pope Francis said during his first Angelus message 11 years ago this upcoming week, “God never tires of forgiving, but we often tire of asking for forgiveness,” before praying, “May we never tire of asking for what God never tires to give.” The Parable Jesus gives us today is a mirror by which we can examine how we’ve come here “to the temple” today at the break of dawn to pray, whether we are seeking what he values most, whether we’re open to the mercy he wants to give, whether we’re intent on worshiping according to his categories or our own.
• Jesus’ famous Parable of the Pharisee and Publican is one of his most powerful illustrations of how God’s desire is to justify us through his mercy. In the parable, Jesus describes two men who went up to the temple to pray. The first man was a Pharisee. He prayed, “Thank you, God, that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.” The man was what most people would deem today a good religious man. He was regularly climbing up to Jerusalem on foot to the temple to pray. He, like his fellow Pharisees, was doubtless going far beyond the minimum in the practice of the faith. Whereas Jews were required to fast only once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week. Whereas Jews needed to tithe only certain things, he tithed on his whole income. He was outwardly a religious role model, but inwardly there was something drastically wrong in his conception of God, his conception of the faith, and his conception of others. He didn’t relate to God as one in need of his mercy and he seemed to have little mercy for others. The first clue is that Jesus said, “He spoke this prayer to himself.” That doesn’t mean that he simply said it quietly so that he alone could hear, but rather, in a sense, he was praying that prayer to himself, as if he were something special. He thanked God that he was not like so many other spiritual “losers,” who were thieves, rogues, adulterers and publicans. He rejoiced in what he saw were his virtues, but what he failed to recognize was that he was proud, judgmental, vain, boastful and uncharitable. He failed to see his own sinfulness. He failed to ask God for mercy because he didn’t think he needed it. He was satisfied with saying his prayers, giving his tithes, completing his fasts, rather than recognizing that the Lord was trying to rend him so that he might receive mercy and then share that mercy with others, including the tax collector praying behind him. Compared to so many surrounding him, and the other person praying in the temple, the Pharisee considered himself a saint among sinners.
• The tax collector, on the other hand, was hated by his fellow Jews not just because he was collaborating with the Romans who were subjugating the Jewish people, but because in the carrying out of his duty, tax collectors would routinely rip off their people for greed. They were assessed a certain amount that needed to be collected in a given area; whatever they could get beyond that was theirs to keep, and many of the tax collectors, with the collusion of nearby Roman soldiers, were ripping off the poor in order to get rich. They were corrupt, like an ancient mafia class that the authorities with whom they were conspiring would do nothing about. We would think that someone in this circumstance, who had given his life over to this type of betrayal of his nation and betrayal of so many people who lived around him, wouldn’t pray at all. For him to pray, some might say, seemed hypocritical. But he knew that even if others might never forgive him, God could, and he saw how much he needed God’s forgiveness. With no arrogance whatsoever, no self-importance, and great humility, he stayed in the back of the temple, beat his breast and said, “O God, be merciful to me a sinner.” He was conscious that he didn’t deserve forgiveness, but knew that the Lord was kind and merciful, that the Lord’s mercy endures forever, and with profound sorrow, with a humble and contrite spirit, he prayed for that gift.
• Jesus gave a startling conclusion to the parable. He told his listeners that of the two, the good man who fasted, tithed and lived outwardly by the mosaic law, and the detested one who ripped off his own people and conspired with the pagan authorities, only one of them had their prayer heard and left the temple in a right relationship with God — and it was the publican! We’ve heard the parable so many times that we can miss the absolute shock that Jesus’ first listeners would have had in response to it. To understand their surprise, it would be like Jesus’ today substituting a religious sister for a Pharisee and a pimp, drug pusher or abortionist for the publican and said that when the two left the Church only the latter was justified, on truly good terms with God. It would be like he said a priest and a hit man went to Church to pray but the only one who left justified was the repentant assassin. Such a comment was not about the type of life they had been leading until then, but about the type of humble prayer they made and how they had arrived at the temple and were preparing to leave. Jesus is teaching us that we, too, need to learn to pray humbly and perseveringly with a deep recognition of our need for God’s mercy, which is what he desires to give us most of all and desires us to give to others.
• That ought to have practical consequences for us as we today have come to Church to pray here at Mass during this Lenten mission. Are we praying with a humble and contrite spirit like the Publican or with the self-righteousness of the Pharisee? At the beginning of Mass this morning, did we really mean the words we said, that “I have greatly sinned … through my most grievous fault.? Did we beat our breasts with sincere repentance? Did we really pour ourselves into praying “Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy! Lord, have mercy!,” filled with truthful desperation because we know how much we need it? Later in the Mass, when we pray the “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world,” will we passionately cry out, “have mercy on us, have mercy on us, and grant us peace” from our sins? And perhaps most poignantly, when that Lamb of God is elevated and we behold him, will we pray with great conviction the words, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed?” Most of us at least partially mean these words we pray. We recognize we’re sinners “just like everyone else.” We grasp God’s desire for mercy and we wish to receive it, at least a “little” or “as much as others.” We know that in the past we may have needed it more than we do today, but we recognize, because we regularly examine our consciences and go to confession, that we are sinners and the only reason we might not be notorious ones is by God’s prevenient mercy. But often we don’t persevere in this cry for mercy. Our desire for, recognition of, and sharing in God’s mercy passes, as Hosea says, “like a morning cloud, like the dew that early passes away.” God, rather, wants to help us grow.
• Today we’ve all come to Mass to pray and to learn during this mission how to know, believe in, be amazed by, love, and adore our Eucharistic Lord better and, from our encounter with him, learn to live more Eucharistic lives. We’ve all come at least with the morning dew of a desire to pray, but the Lord wants us to help us persevere so that we may be washed in the spring rain of his merciful love. Whether we’re more like the Pharisee in terms of filling our day with religious practices or like the Publican, who in action lived far from the Lord, all of us, however, want to leave this Mass and this Mission justified. On Tuesday we pondered at Mass the words from the Book of Daniel the priest prays after offering the chalice, right before his hands are washed. They dovetail with the words of today’s Responsorial Psalm and are meant to help us all make the type of sacrifice God considers pleasing: “With contrite heart and humble spirit let us be received [by you, Lord]; so let our sacrifice be in your presence today,” that it may be pleasing to you, Lord God. In the Psalm today, we prayed, “A heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn!” To worship God well, we must approach him with contrite and humble hearts, conscious of how much we need God and particularly his mercy. The Mass we offer to the Lord is in fact the greatest prayer of all for mercy. As Jesus taught St. Faustina, we offer to the Eternal Father “the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of his dearly beloved Son, in atonement for our sins and for those of the whole world.” We offer the Mass — Christ’s sacrifice from Calvary as well as our sacrifice united to his — in expiation for our sins and in reparation for the sins of the world. This is fitting worship. This is what God deserves and desires. As we prepare to receive in this Mass Mercy Incarnate, our Eucharistic Lord, let us ask him for all the help he knows we need to pray this Mass well, and to enter into communion with him who gave us his body and blood during the Last Supper and on the Cross “for the remission of sins,” so that we may leave this temple dedicated to him and his Sacred Heart, “justified,” persevering in a right relationship with him not just until the sun rises to dissipate the dew but throughout our life life until he comes for us on the clouds.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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