Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
May 25, 2021
Sir 35:1-12, Ps 50, Mk 10:28-31
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily please click below:
The following points were attempted in the homily:
- Today as we enter into Ordinary Time and try to put into practice Life according to the Spirit, the Holy Spirit through the Book of Sirach teaches us a lot about how to live well and make sacrifices most pleasing to God. Sirach lists this wisdom about fitting oblations that we can worship God aright. For the Jews, when they thought about sacrifices to God, they generally thought of the temple rites and a holocaust of animals, the offering of showbread, cereals, and tithes. Today God through Sirach helps them to see that the sacrifice he most wants is a life of holiness, virtue, goodness, and charity. He specifies keeping the law, observing the commandments, carrying out works of charity, giving alms, refraining from evil, and avoiding injustice. He says that God seeks the pleasing offering of a just person, given with a generous spirit, cheerful countenance and a joyful heart. This is the way by which we will appear before the Lord, not empty handed, but with a pleasing gift. This is the way our whole being will rise as a sweet odor of incense before Him. This is the way we give back to the Lord as he has generously given to us.
- The spirituality of self-offering Sirach describes is not, therefore, one of de facto offering bribes or extorting from God. It’s not giving to God in order to obtain something back. The reality is that God has given us everything so that, as we empty ourselves and cheerfully give everything back to him, we open ourselves to receive from him an even greater gift. The Lord, Sirach says, is one “who repays” and who “always gives back seven-f0ld.” And that seven-fold rumuneration continues to multiply as we continue to give ourselves back to him with all of his gifts.
- This spirituality of sacrifice is the proper introduction to understand better today’s Gospel, which is the continuation of the scene with the Rich Young Man and Jesus’ words about how hard it is to be saved. The apostles were astonished by Jesus’ description of the human impossibility of salvation — that it would be easier for a camel to fit through a needle’s eye — and replied with the words, “We have given up everything and followed you.” In Matthew’s account, Peter adds, “What will there be for us?” The apostles had in fact done what the Rich Young Man wouldn’t do: they left their boats, their homes, their families, in order to give themselves and all they had to the poor and follow Jesus. They were beginning to wonder whether it was just going to be a waste if salvation were truly impossible. Jesus consoled Peter and the apostles by promising something far greater than the seven-fold of Sirach: “Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has given up house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times more now in this present age: houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come.” That’s an astonishing promise on various levels. The first is the munificent return, something they will experience in the new family of the Church when the Church lives out her life as the early Church did. The second is the promise of persecution. Because of our union with Christ — the 100 fold gift and Giver! — we, too, will experience what he experienced, but this is a blessing that helps us to empty ourselves of everything, including sometimes our own life, so that his life may reign. But he doesn’t promise us a timescale or show us exactly how we will receive that 100-fold. Some may experience it in this world. Some may experience it only in guaranteed promise, like Abraham’s looking up and counting the stars in broad daylight. That’s why Jesus says, “Many that are first will be last, and the last will be first,” because some will receive it in one way and others in another and not always according to our expectation.
- Today the Church celebrates three saints who lived by this standard, who left everything to follow the Lord, who offered to the Lord the sacrifice of a holy life and now experience the Lord’s bountiful repayment. The first is Saint Bede, the great eighth century Irish monk, historian and writer. The second is St. Gregory VII, the courageous, ascetical 11th-century reformer of the papacy and the Church. But insofar as I’m preaching to women religious, I’d like to focus today on the holy Carmelite, St. Mary Magdalene dei Pazzi (1566-1607). At the age of 16, in 1582, she entered the convent and when she took the habit a year later, when the priest placed the crucifix in her hands, he said to her, “God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ by which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world” (Gal 6:14). She was filled with joy and an ardent desire to suffer together with Christ for the salvation of the world. to make a sacrifice of her life together with his. She ate only bread and water, except Sundays and solemnities. Her sufferings in life were severe, from migraines, to the dark night, to intense pains at even a light touch, eventually to paralysis. When another sister asked how she could bear so much pain without complaining, she pointed to the crucifix and said, “See what the infinite love of God has suffered for my salvation. That same love sees my weakness and gives me courage. Those who call to mind the sufferings of Christ and who offer up their own to God through His passion find their pains sweet and pleasant.” The greater her suffering, the greater her desire for it. “O Lord,” she once prayed, “let me suffer or let me die, or rather let me live on so that I may suffer more.” She heroically wanted to drink the chalice of suffering to the dregs. At the end of her life, as she was preparing to die at 41, she said to her superior and to the sisters who were at her bedside, “Reverend mother and dear sisters, I am about to leave you, and the last thing I ask of you — and I ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ — is that you love Him alone, that you trust implicitly in Him and that you encourage one another continually to suffer out of love for Him!” To love and trust in Jesus enough to suffer out of love for Him who suffered out of love for us, who emptied himself, took on the form of a slave and became obedient even unto death on the Cross. Her whole life was like a sweet odor of incense before God; it was most pleasing and, as we mark her spiritual birthday today, God fulfills his promise that it will never be forgotten even on earth!
- This whole mystery of how we receive from God to give back to God is summarized in the offertory of the Mass. We take his gift of bread and wine and offer it back to him and he gives us Himself, his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. And then we offer ourselves with Him to the Father as our logike latreia, “fitting worship” (Rom 12:1-2), and he sends us the Holy Spirit. This is the daily illustration of what he said in St. Luke’s Gospel: “Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” Christ measures out all. We give all. He gives more. We give more. And we exist forever in this spiral of asymmetrical giving! Today we come detaching ourselves from mammon and giving ourselves to God in such a way that he may make us this day capable of keeping his law, observing his commandments, doing works of charity, giving alms, refraining from evil, avoiding injustice, offering the pleasing sacrifice of just persons, generously, cheerfully, joyfully, with our hands open to receive and share his generosity and our whole being becoming a sweet odor of incense before Him in this world so that, after the 100-fold, we may continue to praise and glorify him in eternal life!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading One
