God’s Choosing Us Before the Foundation of the World, 28th Thursday (II), October 17, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr
October 17, 2024
Eph 1:1-10, Ps 98, Lk 11:47-54

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Today we begin two weeks of study of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, which is one of the most uplifting and synthetic of all the great apostle’s teaching of the early Church, in which he makes plain God the Father’s plan and will to bring all things into a union of love through the work of Christ his Son continued and carried out in his body the Church. At the very beginning of the letter, which we have today, St. Paul describes what God has done for us and what he asks of us. It’s important for us to ponder these truths often, especially when we are having a bad day or are tempted to forget who we are.
  • St. Paul begins by reminding us of how blessed we are to be Christians: the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens.” God held nothing back. There are no blessings we haven’t been given. And we’ve been given those blessings not just through Christ but in Christ, who is the greatest blessing of all.
  • He then reminds us of our vocation: God chose us in Christ, “before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him.” Before God said, “Let there be light” and “Let us make man in our image,” he not only had us in mind but chose us and he gave us the vocation to be saints, to be holy and immaculate before him. If he’s given us this vocation, he will provide the means, and those means are the every spiritual blessing in Christ his Son.
  • He then reminds us of our filiation and inheritance: “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ, in accord with the favor of his will, for the praise of the glory of his grace that he granted us in the beloved.” In St. Paul’s day, when someone was adopted, he was treated identically to a biologically child; if he were older than the oldest biological child, he received all the rights of primogeniture. For St. Paul to talk about our being adopted, he means that we have received the full inheritance of Jesus! How can we not praise the glory of this grace?
  • But obviously we’re sinners and fallen, but God has taken that into consideration as well from before the creation of the world. “In Christ, we have redemption by his Blood, the forgiveness of transgressions, in accord with the riches of his grace that he has lavished upon us.” He has lavished his mercy upon us in Christ as part of every spiritual blessing.
  • And he has also made plain his plan so that we can cooperate freely and fully with it: “In all wisdom and insight, he has made known to us the mystery of his will in accord with his favor that he set forth in him as a plan for the fullness of times, to sum up all things in Christ, in heaven and on earth.” The mystery is now an open secret: God wants to bring us into communion, communion with God, communion with each other. He wants us to grasp that all of creation is part of God’s plan of love. Christ’s mission is to restore to unity the various divisions that entered through sin.
• That’s God’s blessing, calling, help, mercy and plan, but he has made us free and each of us needs to respond to that plan by embracing it and letting our whole life develop in accordance with it. As we prayed in today’s Psalm, “The Lord has made known his salvation,” but we’re called to “sing a new song to the Lord for he has done wondrous deeds.” That’s obviously what the saints do, letting God’s blessing in Christ develop within them so that, redeemed and forgiven by his blood, they might become holy and immaculate. But unfortunately not everyone has received the Lord’s love in that way. Others have rejected it.
• We glimpse that rejection in the way the scribes and Pharisees in today’s Gospel responded to Jesus. Jesus says to them, “Woe to you who build the memorials of the prophets whom your fathers killed. Consequently, you bear witness and give consent to the deeds of your ancestors, for they killed them and you do the building.” God never ceases to send prophets, apostles, and messengers to his people in every age to reveal “the mystery of his will,” but God-himself-made-man was saying that the people that he had chosen to be his own, the people he had prepared in order to accomplish his plan in the fullness of time to bring his salvation as a light to the nations, only would honor prophets after they rejected and killed them. A dead prophet was safe; a living prophet was a challenge. In building these memorials, they would delude themselves into thinking they had embraced God and his messenger, whereas they were repeating the same faults as their ancestors, by rejecting those whom God continued to send, something seen in the life of St. John the Baptist and especially in Jesus’ own life as they “began to act with hostility toward him” and “were plotting to catch him at something he might say.” Their lack of receptivity is meant to be a warning to us, lest we just build memorials for the prophets the Jews killed or, worse, just build a static memorial for Jesus — and not receive God’s spiritual blessings, not be holy and without blame before him, not behave as his children, not bathe in his blood, and not enter into communion and let our whole life be summed up by Christ. Do we really follow Jesus or do just have sacred images around our house or dorm room? Do we put just put a Crucifix on the wall or do we deny ourselves, pick up our Cross each day and follow Jesus?
• Today we celebrate a saint who, redeemed by Jesus’ blood, eventually become holy and without blemish before him.  He did not seek to build a monument to Christ but to become like Christ not just in name but in fact. St. Ignatius of Antioch is one of the greatest human beings who has ever lived. He sought to become pure alms to be given to God and to make up what was lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the Church. He knew his vocation from before the foundation of the world and strove to become holy, he knew the blessing Christ is and gives, he knew his divine filiation, he was grateful for the redemption of Christ’s blood and sought not only to rejoice in it but help so many others to do so too, and in his preaching he sought to sum up everything in the light of Christ. He learned the Gospel at the feet of St. John the Apostle and that strengthened him to give witness by his life and even by his death.  As we read this morning in the breviary from his letter to the Christians in Rome, written as he was being brought to Rome from Syria in order to be executed for the Christian faith: “No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms of this world can benefit me in any way. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.” He wasn’t ashamed to die ignominiously in the eyes of the world for the sake of Christ who had died for him. He was sought to becoming a living memorial to Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. He didn’t fear death in the least, as if life in this world were more important than life in the next. He wrote, “I am writing to all the churches to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way. I plead with you: show me no untimely kindness. Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God. I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by their teeth so that I may become Christ’s pure bread. Pray to Christ for me that the animals will be the means of making me a sacrificial victim for God. … The time for my birth is close at hand. Forgive me, my brothers. Do not stand in the way of my birth to real life; do not wish me stillborn. My desire is to belong to God. Do not, then, hand me back to the world. Do not try to tempt me with material things. Let me attain pure light. Only on my arrival there can I be fully a human being. Give me the privilege of imitating the passion of my God. If you have him in your heart, you will understand what I wish.” He was aware of the draw of the prince of this world and the spirits of disobedience seeking to draw him to deny the Gospel, to deny Christ. “The prince of this world is determined to lay hold of me and to undermine my will which is intent on God. Let none of you here help him; instead show yourselves on my side, which is also God’s side. Do not talk about Jesus Christ as long as you love this world. Do not harbour envious thoughts. And supposing I should see you, if then I should beg you to intervene on my behalf, do not believe what I say. Believe instead what I am now writing to you. For though I am alive as I write to you, still my real desire is to die. My love of this life has been crucified, and there is no yearning in me for any earthly thing. Rather within me is the living water which says deep inside me: ‘Come to the Father.’ I no longer take pleasure in perishable food or in the delights of this world. I want only God’s bread, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, formed of the seed of David, and for drink I crave his blood, which is love that cannot perish. I am no longer willing to live a merely human life. … Pray for me that I may obtain my desire. I have not written to you as a mere man would, but as one who knows the mind of God.” He saw his martyrdom as the time he would become a Christian not just in name but in deed.
• St. Ignatius drew his strength from the Eucharist. He saw his life, as we just noted, as being ground into wheat so that he could become in Christ pure bread, united and transubstantiated in the Eucharistic sacrifice. He called Jesus in the Eucharist God’s great gift and the medicine of immorality, given for the forgiveness of sins, which makes real and eternal life possible. We don’t need lions to grind us into wheat; we have ordinary life. But all of that is meant to be a preparation for this sacrifice. We prepare now not to build for Jesus a memorial of wood or stone, but to enter into his new and eternal memorial, his zikkaron, “do[ing] this in memory of” him. He is the one who is every spiritual blessing in the heavens, the one who transforms us into “sons in the Son,” the one who seeks to redeem us by his precious blood, the one who wishes to bring us in communion and confirm us in our vocation and mission to the praise of his glory. We ask him to send the Holy Spirit so that we will respond like St. Ignatius of Antioch and through the Eucharistic transformation that Jesus wishes to work within us,  become holy and without blemish before him and come at last with Ignatius to that place that God has planned for us since before the foundation of the world!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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