God’s Mercy and the Opposition It Often Faces, 14th Thursday (II), July 2, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Mercy of God
July 2, 2020
Amos 7:10-17, Ps 19, Mt 9:1-8

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, we see the priority of mercy in Jesus’ saving mission. Friends bring their paralyzed pal to Jesus obviously with faith and hope that Jesus could and would cure his paralysis. But Jesus instead forgives him his sins. Some scholars will argue that this is because Jewish mentality was that every physical illness was the result of some type of sin and that Jesus was addressing the cause and not just the symptoms. But the likelier reason is because Jesus wanted to demonstrate that he had come as far more than a free wonder-doctor curing sick bodies, but had come precisely to heal the whole person, soul and body, and especially of the worst illness of all, which would be the cancer of sin and the communion it attacks with God, others and within oneself. Pope Francis said in 2013 in a homily based on this Gospel that everything Jesus did was connected to his mission of mercy: “When Jesus healed a sick man he was not only a healer. When he taught people — let us think of the Beatitudes — he was not only a catechist, a preacher of morals. When he remonstrated against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees, he was not a revolutionary who wanted to drive out the Romans. No, these things that Jesus did, healing, teaching and speaking out against hypocrisy, were only a sign of something greater that Jesus was doing: he was forgiving sins.” He went on to say, basing himself St. Paul’s words in today’s Gospel verse, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation,” that reconciling the world in Christ in the name of the Father “is Jesus’ mission. Everything else — healing, teaching, reprimands — are only signs of that deeper miracle which is the re-creation of the world. Thus reconciliation is the re-creation of the world; and the most profound mission of Jesus is the redemption of all of us sinners. And Jesus did not do this with words, with actions or by walking on the road, no! He did it with his flesh. It is truly he, God, who becomes one of us, a man, to heal us from within.” It was only to prove that he had the authority on earth to forgive sins that Jesus cured the paralysis. He had already given him a far greater gift!
• The key for us is to cooperate with Jesus’ mission. Tomorrow, if we didn’t have the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, we would have the Gospel of Jesus’ calling St. Matthew and his fellow sinners, and his words to the Pharisees who were complaining about Jesus’ keeping company with sinners just like the Scribes were complaining about his “blasphemously” forgiving sins, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. … I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.” To receive Jesus, to receive his greatest miracle, we have to recognize we’re sick in need of a doctor. We have to recognize we’re sinners. Today we have three examples of those who didn’t.
• The first were the Scribes in the Gospel. They were opposed to Jesus’ mission of the forgiveness of sins. They objected ostensibly based on the truth that only God can forgive sins against God. But after Jesus demonstrated through healing the paralyzed man that he had divine authority to do so, they still refused to accept him, eventually ascribing such behavior to the evil one.
• The second are Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes. There’s a very subtle reference at the beginning of today’s Gospel that Jesus, “after entering a boat, Jesus made the crossing, and came into his own town.” Now Nazareth didn’t have a port on the Sea of Galilee. St. Matthew was talking about Capernaum. During Jesus’ public ministry he was an itinerant preacher and didn’t have a place to lay his head (Lk 9:58). But he spent a lot of time preaching and working miracles in Capernaum, almost certainly staying in St. Peter’s house, and people — certainly there in Capernaum — began to refer to it as his home base. The reason is because Jesus had already been exiled from Nazareth, where they had tried to kill him after he preached in their Synagogue. As St. John says in his Prologue, Jesus came unto his own and his own people did not accept him (Jn 1:11). Jesus couldn’t work many miracles there — physical miracles, exorcisms, multiplications of food, and what they all pointed to, reconciliation! — because of their lack of faith.
• The third rejection of God’s mercy is the Kingdom of Israel at the time of Amos the prophet (and of Hosea, whom we will consider next week.) Amos was called by God from his place in Tekoa, ten miles south of Jerusalem, to go to the north, where the Kingdom of Israel was, and preach conversion against the rampant injustice that was taking place among those who claimed to worship God in the sanctuaries, like at Bethel, but were not giving God and others the justice and love they deserved. People had become corrupt in multiple ways and Amos was sent to expose that corruption and call people to conversion. But he was opposed. Today we see the opposition of Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, who sought to turn King Jeroboam II against Amos and get him booted from Israel. Israel at this time was very prosperous, the King was wealthy, the priests were wealthy, the upper class was wealthy, but so many were suffering in their midst. Amaziah didn’t want the boat rocked and the status quo upended. We can see a little bit of his corruption through money when he tells Amos, to flee to the land of Judah and “there earn your bread by prophesying.” To “earn one’s bread” is a Hebrew idiom for making money, and he thought Amos was there for the money. In Amos’ brief vocation story, we see how false that was. Amos replied, “I was no prophet, nor have I belonged to a company of prophets. I was a shepherd and a dresser of sycamores. The Lord took me from following the flock, and said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.’” At the time there were professional prophets, trained in schools, and they made money much like “seers” or tarot card readers do, by giving predictions based on the future, and they knew they would do better if they prophesied in a way that would make themselves useful and tickle the ears of those who paid them, like the king. Amos was a “herdsman” (that’s the first word, translated shepherd, meaning he had cattle), would care for sycamore trees and the fruit they produced, and also had a flock of sheep. He was, in other words, a well-to-do mixed farmer with various animals. He was a layman who had a job, but God said to him in the midst of his word, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel” in the north, and he did. But Amaziah’s response, Amos said, was “You say: ‘prophesy not against Israel, preach not against the house of Isaac.'” Amaziah was utterly opposed to the call to conversion God was giving him and all of Israel and he wanted him expelled from the kingdom. Amos therefore prophesied the ruin that would come to such a false prophet and corrupt priest and to his family as a result of the sinfulness of their husband and father.
• What do we learn from these rejections? We learn to trust in the power and believe in the desire of God to forgive sins. We learn of the need to respond to God’s help to make of ourselves Jesus’ home, as he cleanses us interiorly to be able to receive him. We learn of the importance of heeding and announcing God’s message of mercy. By our baptism and confirmation — and more so by my priestly ordination and your religious profession — we have become prophets in the school of prophets that is the Church. In the book of Numbers, Moses says, “Would that all God’s people were prophets!” He wants us all to prophesy, to actualize, God’s message, at the forefront of which is his desire for our reconciliation through mercy and conversion.
• That process begins here at Mass, as we offer to the Eternal Father his dearly beloved Son’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, in expiation for our sins and the sins of the whole world. It’s here that Mercy incarnate seeks, in healing us, to strengthen us to pick up our mat and go home where we can be ambassadors of his merciful love. It’s here that we should be repeatedly “struck with awe” and glorify God” who has given us this message of reconciliation and given such authority to forgive sins to the same men through whom he gives us his Body and Blood.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 9:1-8

After entering a boat, Jesus 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 men.

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