God’s Strong Mercy, 1st Thursday (II), January 14, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the First Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Mercy of God
January 14, 2016
1 Sam 4:1-11, Ps 44, Mk 1:40-45

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In human beings, there can be a conflict between justice and mercy, but not in God. Because God is simple, he doesn’t “have” qualities, he “is” the adjectives we use to describe him. He is justice. He is mercy. His justice is merciful and his mercy just. That explains the Crucifixion. Our sins brought the death penalty in justice, but out of mercy God took on our flesh to take our place on death row.
• I explain this because in this Jubilee Year of Mercy, there is a tendency among some to try to separate mercy and justice so as to understand mercy as a form of cheap indulgence, as if God’s mercy means that we get into messes and he simply comes to clean up after us. But God loves us too much to allow that to happen. He is too merciful.
• We see this lesson in today’s first reading. The Israelites, who were not being faithful to God, were fighting against the Philistines. The Israelites suffered a defeat but then immediately said, “Let us fetch the ark of the Lord from Shiloh, that it may go into battle among us and save us from the grasp of our enemies.” They wanted to use the Ark of Covenant as a magical object to bring them earthly victory. They essentially wanted to use God for their ends, rather than stopping with reverence to ask what were God’s ends. And when they came to the Temple to “fetch” the Ark, Phinehas and Hophni, the two sons of Eli, just let them take it. They were supposed to be guardians of the Ark, but we know that their presence in the Temple of Shiloh, there proximity to this great reminder and instantiation of God’s saving power in the history of the people of Israel, didn’t really sink deeply into them. They were corrupt, sexually abusing women who had come to adore at the temple, and seeking to profit financially from people’s desire to serve God. And so everyone was just trying to use God for their own purposes rather than seeking and doing his will. And God allowed the Philistines to triumph, we can say at his own expense, out of a just mercy meant to bring the Israelites to conversion rather than allow them to persevere in such manipulation. Since the Israelites had brought the Ark into battle, “God” himself was being defeated as 30,000 Israelites were slain and the ark was stolen. But just like on Good Friday, God permitted it in order ultimately to convert and save. We see a little bit of what God mercifully allowed in the Responsorial Psalm, which is kind of a summary of many of Israel’s interactions with God throughout the periods of infidelity. They would sin and then call on God to defend them for the honor of his name. In today’s Psalm, as they pray for God to redeem them because of his mercy, they say, “Now you have cast us off and put us in disgrace, and you go not forth with our armies. You have let us be driven back by our foes; those who hated us plundered us at will. You made us the reproach of our neighbors, the mockery and the scorn of those around us. You made us a byword among the nations, a laughingstock among the peoples. Why do you hide your face, forgetting our woe and our oppression?” They’re trying to guilt trip God to act, when it was their own sins that divided them from the Lord. They wanted him to do their will without their doing his. And God permitted their disgrace, their being plundered, their reproach, scorn and mockery, precisely to bring them to conversion, precisely out of a strong mercy.
• The problem that afflicted the Israelites is perennial. It’s often we can seek to establish our relationship with God on our own terms and not on his, and when we persevere in it, God often needs to let us see how we’ve distanced ourselves from him in order to get us to choose to receive the mercy he always wants to offer us as his children. We see part of this drama in today’s powerful Gospel.
• In the first part of the Gospel, we witness the classic, easy-to-receive expression of God’s mercy. The most physically disgusting and repulsive human being imaginable came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away at their flesh and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for life apart from the rest of the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them — except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from their jobs, from the synagogue and from the temple, from love and mercy. They were outcasts, ostracized from all things human. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them more easily. Whenever they needed to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law, as we see in the first reading, to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!” They were forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. Anyone who touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, unclean. That the man in today’s Gospel broke all convention to come close to Jesus was already a sign of his desperation. What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature on his knees before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch the contagion. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. He stretched out his hand and touched the leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched him in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “Be made clean!” After the leprosy miraculously left him, Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure of leprosy so that he, so long an outcast, could return to the human community. This is a classic expression of the Lord’s soft and tender mercy, something the leper was desperately grateful to receive.
• But that’s where the leper’s faith that had brought him to Jesus in the first place ended. Jesus “warning him sternly,” instructed him, “See that you tell no one anything.” Jesus well knew that if news of the miracle became widespread, everyone would be coming to him first as a free medical doctor and secondly as the long-awaited Messiah whom they would interpret in political terms, as someone who would boot the Romans and reinstitute a Davidic temporal kingdom. Jesus wanted to avoid those misconceptions because he had come not as a new political candidate or primarily as a new Hippocrates but as a Savior. What was the former leper’s response to Jesus’ stern warning not to tell anyone anything? He totally ignored it. St. Mark says, “The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere,” exactly validating Jesus’ concerns that underlined his warning and command. While the man was cured of the leprosy of his skin and body parts, he wasn’t cured of the leprosy of a partially hardened heart. When he heard the voice of the Lord telling him not to do something, he simply ignored it and did what he wanted to do. He likely thought he had justification for doing so: after all, Jesus had given him the greatest gift of his life and what would it hurt, he probably asked himself, publicly to praise him for it? But the simple fact of the matter is that he responded to the Lord’s command with disobedience. He had gotten what he wanted from the Lord and then he was just going to do what he wanted from that point forward, instead of what the Lord had sternly commanded. To a degree like the Israelites, he had been in the presence of the Lord, he had heard the Lord’s words, he had received his liberating actions, but none of that had transformed him to want what God wants. He had used the Lord for his own advantage, but then he went off as if he were in charge, rather than a grateful follower of the one he called, “Lord.” For us, the leprosy of a partially hardened heart — a heart that hears the Lord’s voice but responds selectively, according to our own desires, needs, and categories — is often our condition as well. We may listen attentively and put into practice Jesus’ words about praying always, but harden our heart to his words about confessing our sins to those whom he has sent with the power to forgive and retain sins in his name. We may seek to enflesh his words about crossing the road to help someone in need when we feel like it, but harden our hearts to Jesus’ word about welcoming strangers as we would welcome him when we don’t feel like it. We may faithfully keep the commandment to honor our parents but violate his command to forgive our siblings who have wronged us. We may faithfully heed his word about the Mass, to eat his flesh and drink his blood, but totally ignore his commission to go to every creature we know and proclaim the Gospel. We may follow him with a good heart when he asks us to love one person but then harden it totally toward loving someone whom we don’t like. Part of our heart is open and docile and part of it is full of stone. Part of us listens to the Lord and part of us ignores him and does our own thing: whether our heart is opened to the Lord or hardened depends on what the voice of the Lord says to us. If God speaks to us a word we want to hear, then often we’ll do it; but if the Lord challenges us to do something we don’t want to do, often we’ll ignore God’s voice and listen to our own. And many times, just like the leper in the Gospel, we’ll feel justified in doing so because we think we’re doing something good with a good motivation, but in fact we’re hardening our hearts to the Lord’s voice. The real test is  how we respond when God asks us to do something that goes against the grain for us. Do we hear his voice and do it? Do we receive his commands as the merciful imperatives they are, or do we only receive the mercy we think we need and close ourselves off to the other expressions of that divine love?
• Today at this Mass, we ponder that we have something far greater here than the Israelites had in the Temple of Shiloh. We have the real presence of God and not just various symbols of his presence. God wants to make us his Temple and come and abide with us. He wants to make us clean and keep us clean. He wants to fill us with his mercy according to his omniscient determination as to how we need it. Today we ask him for the grace to hear his voice and do it, to say and mean, “Thy will be done!” and then act on his command to us at the end of today’s Mass. He won’t tell us, like he told the former leper, not to tell anyone anything. He’ll tell us, rather, “Go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature!” He’ll tell us, “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord!” May we, having been healed by God, and having receive the Mercy Incarnate within during Holy Communion, not spend the rest of our day doing our own thing, but rather telling everybody about the miracles God continues to do for us out of merciful love.

The readings for today’s Mass were: