Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
October 13, 2019
1 Cor 1:4-8, Mt 9:1-8
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
Entering into the Gospel
Today we have one of the most powerful scenes in the Gospel, in which Jesus revealed not only his divine power but the priority of his merciful love. The same Jesus who encountered the paralyzed man comes here to St. Agnes to meet us. After the Gospel scene, St. Matthew tells us those present “were struck with awe and glorified God.” That’s what’s always supposed to happen when we meet God himself come into our world. That’s what should occur whenever we see and especially receive the outpouring of his merciful, healing love. Today in a particular way, let us enter into this scene as if we were doing so for the first time and learn the lessons it contains that should fill us with awe and praise.
Jesus’ Desire to Heal Our Souls
The most important lesson is about Jesus’ desire to heal our souls. After many days away preaching, Jesus had come to Capernaum and it was reported that he was “at home,” which almost certainly means he was at Peter’s house. St. Mark and St. Luke describe for us that there were so many people present that there was no room for the sick to get in — and no one apparently cared enough to make room for the disabled. Rather than waiting, some men did the very difficult thing of lifting their paralyzed pal up onto the roof. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to balance a paraplegic or a quadriplegic as he is lifted up to the roof on a stretcher, as the thatched branches of the roof are pulled apart, and as he is lowered down in such a way that he doesn’t fall on his head or fall on anyone else’s head. What a spectacle that must have been! It’s obvious why the friends had brought the paralyzed man to Jesus. They wanted Jesus to heal him of his physical infirmity. But Jesus had come from heaven to earth primarily not to cure us of our physical ailments, but to save us, by healing us of our spiritual cancers. That’s why the first thing Jesus did for the paralyzed man was to say, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” He only healed him of his paralysis only later, after critics presently rightly objected that only God can forgive sins, as a demonstration that he was indeed God. He showed by the physical miracle what he wishes to do to everyone spiritually: to get us to rise up from sin and share in the fruits of his resurrection and the power of the forgiveness of sins he conferred to his apostles on Easter Sunday evening. He wants to heal us so that we might walk by faith, follow in his footsteps, and cross the road. He desires that, after having been healed, we will pick up our mats and go home, looking for our family members and friends and neighbors who are themselves paralyzed by sin and, with faith like this healed man’s friends, bring them to Jesus for mercy.
Canonization of Saint John Henry Newman
Earlier this morning in Rome, the Church celebrated with jubilation the canonization of five new saints, among whom is Saint John Henry Newman, the great 19th Century British convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, Oxford don, prodigious author, poet and musician, letter writer, friend, priest, Oratorian, university founder, Cardinal, passionate lover of the truth and, we pray, future doctor of the Church. St. Paul’s words from today’s first reading aptly describe him: Because of the grace of God bestowed on him in Christ Jesus, he was enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ through him was confirmed among so many, so that they would not be lacking in any spiritual gift and might be found firm in faith on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Newman on Sin
One of the most important spiritual gifts he tried to convey to his contemporaries was a recognition of how much we need God’s mercy — and how we need to come, like the paralyzed man, to receive it. In homily notes for today’s readings, on the 18th Sunday after Pentecost in 1851, he focused on how the Lord’s healing of bodily diseases is meant to show his desire to heal our soul. Though physical infirmities like paralysis or even leprosy “are horrible,” he scribbled, “we may be sure that the various spiritual maladies are far more horrible.” In a passage from his Meditations and Devotions, published after his death, he prayed to the Lord, “Take the most hideous of diseases, under which the body wastes away and corrupts, the blood is infected; the head, the heart, the lungs, every organ disordered, the nerves unstrung and shattered; pain in every limb, thirst, restlessness, delirium—all is nothing compared with that dreadful sickness of the soul which we call sin. They all are the effects of it, they all are shadows of it. … O my God, teach me this! … Teach me what sin is. All these dreadful pains of body and soul are the fruits of sin, but they are nothing to its punishment in the world to come. The keenest and fiercest of bodily pains is nothing to the fire of hell; the most dire horror or anxiety is nothing to the never-dying worm of conscience; the greatest bereavement, loss of substance, desertion of friends, and forlorn desolation, is nothing compared to the loss of God’s countenance. Eternal punishment is the only true measure of the guilt of sin. My God, teach me this. Open my eyes and heart, I earnestly pray Thee, and make me understand.”
Newman on Mercy
But Saint John Henry didn’t stop there. He finished the prayer by asking, “And, not only teach me about it, but in Thy mercy and by Thy grace remove it.” In his homiletic notes, he jotted about this good news of mercy after the bad news of sin. “Our Lord came to destroy sin. This is the characteristic [of Christianity] above all other religions: they acknowledge sin, but they cannot cure it. [Jesus, rather,] takes away the guilt and the power [of sin] … by his death and passion.”
In an 1849 Discourse to Mixed Congregations, four years after his reception into the Church, Saint John Henry, basing himself on today’s Gospel, the episode of the Good Thief, and other episodes in which the Lord forgave sinners, passionately underlined how “our Lord, by His omnipotent grace, can make the soul as clean as if it had never been unclean. … He holds up to us, for our instruction and our comfort, what He can do, even for the most guilty, if they sincerely come to Him for a pardon and a cure. There is no limit to be put to the bounty and power of God’s grace … [if] we feel sorrow for our sins and supplicate His mercy. … He is infinitely more powerful than the foul spirit to whom the sinner has sold himself, and can cast him out. … Though your conscience witnesses against you, He can disburden it; whether you have sinned less or whether you have sinned more, He can make you as clean in His sight and as acceptable to Him as if you had never gone from Him. Gradually will He destroy your sinful habits, and at once will He restore you to His favour.”
Newman on the Sacrament of Penance
Then he clearly says how the Lord will disburden our consciences, clean us, destroy our sinful habits and restore us to favor: “Such is the power of the Sacrament of Penance, that, be your load of guilt heavier or be it lighter, it removes it, whatever it is. It is as easy to Him to wash out the many sins as the few. Do you recollect in the Old Testament the history of the cure of Naaman the Syrian, by the prophet Eliseus? He had that dreadful, incurable disease called the leprosy, which was a white crust upon the skin, making the whole person hideous, and typifying the hideousness of sin. The prophet bade him bathe in the river Jordan, and the disease disappeared; ‘his flesh,’ says the inspired writer, was ‘restored to him as the flesh of a little child.’ Here, then, we have a representation not only of what sin is, but of what God’s grace is. It can undo the past, it can realize the hopeless. No sinner, ever so odious, but may become a Saint.”
He himself had this great love for the Sacrament of Penance. On October 8, 1845, he waited at home for the arrival of Passionist Father Blessed Dominic Barberi who would receive him into the Church. Fr. Dominic needed to take a coach to Littlemore, but his coach was delayed by five hours in torrential rains. Because he was on the top of the coach, he arrived totally soaked about 11 pm. As he sat down by the fire to dry his clothes, Newman entered the room. Blessed Dominic later wrote to his superiors, “The door opened and what a spectacle it was for me to see at my feet John Henry Newman, begging me to hear his confession and admit him into the bosom of the Catholic Church! And there by the fire he began his general confession with extraordinary humility and devotion.” The confession began on October 8. It finished on October 9. Newman essentially couldn’t wait until Fr. Barberi’s clothes were dry to have him wash his sins away. Despite his fatigue and his confessor’s, he brought himself before the Lord’s mercy. Later that day he was conditionally baptized, made a profession of faith, attended Mass celebrated by Fr. Barberi and received Holy Communion as a Catholic. After his ordination as a Catholic priest 19 months later, he would have the humble privilege of doing the same for many other penitents as Fr. Barberi had done for him before the fire, a fitting symbol of the furnace of God’s merciful love.
He thought the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation was one of the greatest gifts that the Church offered. In his 1851 lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, he emphasized, “How many are the souls, in distress, anxiety or loneliness, whose one need is to find a being to whom they can pour out their feelings unheard by the world? … They want to tell them out, yet be as if they be not told; they wish to tell them to one who is strong enough to bear them, yet not too strong to despise them; they wish to tell them to one who can at once advise and can sympathize with them; they wish to relieve themselves of a load, to gain a solace, to receive the assurance that there is one who thinks of them, and one to whom in thought they can recur, to whom they can betake themselves, if necessary, from time to time, while they are in the world. How many a Protestant’s heart would leap at the news of such a benefit, … or of a grant of pardon and the conveyance of grace! If there is a heavenly idea in the Catholic Church, looking at it simply as an idea, surely, next after the Blessed Sacrament, Confession is such. … Oh what piercing, heart-subduing tranquility, provoking tears of joy, is poured, almost substantially and physically, upon the soul, the oil of gladness, as Scripture calls it, when the penitent at length rises, his God reconciled to him, his sins rolled away for ever!”
This is one of the greatest graces of the priesthood Christ himself instituted, he emphasized in one of his Discourses to Mixed Congregations. “The priests of the New Law,” he said, “are men, in order that they may ‘condole with those who are in ignorance and error, because they too are compassed with infirmity.’ Had Angels been your Priests, my brethren, they could not have condoled with you, sympathized with you, have had compassion on you, felt tenderly for you, and made allowances for you, as we can; they could not have been your patterns and guides, and have led you on from your old selves into a new life, as they can who come from the midst of you, who have been led on themselves as you are to be led, who know well your difficulties, who have had experience, at least of your temptations, who know the strength of the flesh and the wiles of the devil, even though they have baffled them, who are already disposed to take your part, and be indulgent towards you, and can advise you most practically, and warn you most seasonably and prudently. Therefore did He send you men to be the ministers of reconciliation and intercession.’”
Following Newman
So today as the Church Universal celebrates his canonization together with four others (Saints Giuseppina Vannini, Mariam Thresia Chiaramel Mankidiyan, Dulce Lopes Pontes, and Marquerite Bays), and as we ponder that the whole meaning of Christ’s incarnation, life, passion, death and resurrection, the whole purpose of the Church to make saints out of sinners through helping them make full use of the means Christ has given, we turn to Saint John Henry and ask God to let Newman’s words sink in deeply. If Newman were here today, preaching on this 18th Sunday after Pentecost like he did in 1851, he would stress the evil of sin that paralyzes us, but the incredible gift of God’s mercy that forgives us, heals us and raises us up. He would underline the beauty of the Sacrament of Penance and the wisdom of God in availing himself of ministers who are humbly able to sympathize with those who are in need of mercy because they too are in need of it. And he would encourage us all, at the earliest instant, to take advantage of this gift. This would allow us not only to be “struck with awe” and “glorify God”; it would not only make heaven erupt even more in celebration since, as Jesus says, “heaven rejoices more for one repentant sinner;” through quick and regular recourse to the “heavenly idea” and reality of the Sacrament of God’s merciful love, it would make it possible for us not to not lack in any spiritual gift, and be firm to the end, irreproachable when Christ comes. This is the way that we will come, one day, by God’s mercy, to get to know John Henry Newman personally, and with him and with the friends we carry to Christ’s mercy, glorify God forever in that kindly light that will never be extinguished as we pass from the shadows and images into the fullness of truth.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading for the First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians
I give thanks to my God always on your account for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus, that in him you were enriched in every way, with all discourse and all knowledge, as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew
Jesus entered a boat, made the crossing, and came into his own town. And there people brought to him a paralytic lying on a stretcher. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Courage, child, your sins are forgiven.” At that, some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” Jesus knew what they were thinking, and said, “Why do you harbor evil thoughts? Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise and walk’? But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic, “Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home.” He rose and went home. When the crowds saw this they were struck with awe and glorified God who had given such authority to human beings.
