God’s Suitable Helper, 5th Thursday (I), February 14, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of SS. Cyril and Methodius, Memorial of St. Valentine, Martyr
February 14, 2019
Gen 2:18-25, Ps 128, Mk 7:24-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Since the Eternal entered time, and since that incarnate word promised to be with us each day until the end of time, every day takes on eternal significance. But certain days are special because they hold special memories, like we mark in the liturgical cycle. Certain anniversaries are similarly celebrated with greater significance. Today is one of those days. Today we mark the 1750th anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Valentine and the 1150th anniversary of the death of St. Cyril. And because there are no coincidences in God, how fitting it is that we have today’s first reading from the book of Genesis, which encapsulates so much of the truth for which St. Valentine was martyred and gives a fitting frame for the work of St. Cyril and his brother St. Methodius.
• “It is not good for the man to be alone.” These words from today’s first reading come in the Genesis account after God says, throughout creation, “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,” and with the creation of the human person,  “It is very good.” Finally God exclaims,  “It is not good for the man to be alone,” but he waited to make this judgment, we can say, until man himself had had this awareness. Even though man was in relation with God and with the animals he had named, there was still something missing. He needed a “suitable partner,” a “fitting helper” for him. And that’s what he did in the creation of Eve. God created such a fitting helper, so that the two of them could help each other as the image of God, live in true communion, and grow more and more into God’s loving image. This points to two existential realities: first, each of us needs help and it’s not good for us to be without this help; second, we are created as a helper for others. We are created as fitting helpers likewise always in need of suitable help.
• On this feast of St. Valentine, we see in the passage is the basic complementarity at work in this helping and being helped. God didn’t create merely someone to kill time with, or even a generic helper, but rather a “suitable helper,” a “partner,” someone who makes up for our weaknesses with strength and someone who draws from us our strength to remedy his or her weaknesses. God created Eve out of Adam’s side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. The rib symbolizes what covers the heart (the loving center of the person) and the lungs (what is necessary to breathe and survive). Adam exclaims, “Finally this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” a Hebrew expression meaning “strength of my strength and weakness of my weakness,” that they are like each other in strengths and weaknesses and need to help each other. The type of help that is needed is not just in terms of a “hand” in ordinary life, but with regard to their living as the image and likeness of God. They can’t grow in love without each other and without the analogy of human love, Adam had already discovered that he couldn’t really receive and reciprocate (however asymmetrically) divine love. The most suitable help given is with regard to their living in a fully human way in the divine image. That’s what human marriage, par excellence, is supposed to be, when a man and a woman, like Adam and Eve, fittingly help each other to become who they are. That’s why Christ raised marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament, to give his help so that they might resemble the love in the heart of the Trinity, which Christ came as Bridegroom to make possible anew. St. Valentine was martyred because he was exposed for helping Christians get married to other Christians, so that their love would be brought into the spousal love of Christ for his Church. That activity exposed him as a Christian and he was arrested and killed. Today is not meant to be a celebration of just any type of romantic love, but of the type of love that is a help to enter more profoundly into the love of God.
• But the help we need extends to more than marriage. It’s not good for any of us to be alone, we all need fitting helpers, and we all need, to some degree, the complementarity between man and woman to remedy the ways in which, by original differentiation, we are not fully human. St. John Paul II talked about the “archetypical masculine” and the “archetypical feminine” and the way that men receive love by giving love and women give love by receiving love and how man’s relative strengths in complementarity to woman’s relative weaknesses, and woman’s relative strengths to man’s relative weaknesses provide the support we need to grow as God’s image. This applies to agape (Christ-like sacrificial love) and philia (love of true friendship) just as must as to eros (romantic love). Man’s courage confronting fears and the unknown, for example, can encourage women to similar boldness and women’s receptivity to the person can complement man’s task-oriented personality. This type of normal, healthy interaction takes place among brothers and sisters in the family, among dads and daughters, moms and sons, among friends of opposite sexes and in ordinary daily interactions. For those of us who are priests and religious, living ordinarily solely among men or solely among women, we cannot forget the importance of this complementarity for full human thriving in the divine image and must resist any attempt to pretend that faithful chastity means no or minimal interaction with those of the opposite sex. There are certain institutes of priests in the Church that have fundamentally formed their seminarians not to look at women in the eyes lest their be any lack of custody of the heart, eyes and soul; that basically treats every woman as a post-Fall Eve or potential temptress like Salome rather than as a Mary, as a sister, the only worthy response to him is chaste love. There are similarly institutes of women who basically discourage anything but the most antiseptic relations with priests with whom they interact, calling everyone just “Father” without first or last name lest any personal bond form. This isn’t chastity, because chastity forms us to love with charity (sacrifice), purity (seeing God in the other)  and piety (reverencing God in the other); this is a total defect of basic humanity not to mention authentic agape and philia. None of this is to pretend that the devil doesn’t tempt or to deny that we may be vulnerable; we need to have appropriate boundaries; but there’s a difference between a fence and a huge wall constructed several zip codes away. Without chaste friendships with women, priests risk becoming cold, insensitive functionaries; without chaste friendships with men, religious women risk becoming overly sentimental and petty. And when chaste, non-exclusive friendships form between religious men or priests and religious women, their complementary spiritual gifts can help each other too; religious woman teach religious men how to be alone before God, how to be receptive rather than Pelagian before his graces, how to build communion in depth rather than in superficial activity or pleasures; religious men teach religious women how to wipe the dust off their feet and move on rather than nurse injuries and how to take risks for Christ and the faith. While acknowledging how the devil always wants and strives to corrupt something good and holy, at the same time we have to acknowledge that priests and religious are not exceptions to God’s statement “It is not good for the human person to be alone,” and “I will make for the person a fitting helper.”
• We see an aspect of this complementarity in the beautiful interaction in today’s Gospel. At first glance it seems a little harsh, but Jesus in an almost brutally masculine way was helping the Syro-Phoenician woman to grow in faith and truth, and she, with her beautiful femininity, not only drew forth the Lord’s loving and miraculous generosity, but his extraordinary compliment for her receptive faith. St. Matthew’s account of this scene gives us many more details than St. Mark does today. When this Canaanite woman first approaches Jesus asking her for a miracle for her daughter, the Lord ignores her. When she harasses the apostles begging for their intervention and they ask Jesus on her behalf, Jesus stresses he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, not to pagan women in Phoenicia. When she continues to pursue and falls down begging, “Please, Lord!,” he replies by saying, “It’s not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” But she still doesn’t give up. She retorts, “But even the little dogs eat the scraps that comes from their master’s table.” She reminded him that he was the Good Shepherd even of puppies. “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”  At this, Jesus replies, “Woman, great is your faith” and performs an immediate exorcism on her daughter at a distance. Jesus behaved in this way precisely because he loved the woman and was helping her to grow in the type of persevering faith and prayer that God wants to develop and see in all of us. Her feminine, maternal persistence led to one of the greatest compliments Jesus is ever recorded giving. And that woman’s great feminine faith was a means to draw greater faith from the apostles.
• Today’s feast of SS. Cyril and Methodius show another angle about the suitable help we need. They were brothers, with Methodius being 12 years older. Methodius was a military man and was highly organized. Cyril was a brilliant scholar. When there was a need to evangelize Moravia, they were asked to go. Together they evangelized the whole region. Methodius had the administrative and political skills to help the mission; Cyril brilliantly invented a new alphabet to be able to be able to write the Bible and liturgical texts in the language of the people and lead people more effectively in prayer. They couldn’t have really succeeded without the other, not just the way that their God-given talents complemented each other, but in the simple fraternity they had, which allowed them to endure the many trials they had, both physical and ecclesiastical, with perseverance. Cyril died 1150 years ago today while visiting Rome and his remains are enshrined in the Church of St. Clement, whose relics the two brothers had discovered and brought with them to Rome. They were elevated by St. John Paul II in 1980 to be co-patrons with St. Benedict of Europe, because they are considered great patrons of Eastern Christianity. St. John Paul II recognized that for the Church to be what God wants it to be, East and West must help each other, the Church must pray with both lungs, we must work together like Cyril and Methodius. John Paul II wrote in Slavorum Apostoli (1985): “Ever since the ninth century, when in Christian Europe a new organization was emerging, Saints Cyril and Methodius have held out to us a message clearly of great relevance for our own age, which precisely by reason of the many complex problems of a religious, cultural, civil and international nature, is seeking a vital unity in the real communion of its various elements. It can be said of the two evangelizers that characteristic of them was their love for the communion of the universal Church both in the East and in the West, and, within the universal Church, love for the particular Church that was coming into being in the Slav nations. From them also comes for the Christians and-people of our time the invitation to build communion together. … Cyril and Methodius are as it were the connecting links or spiritual bridge between the Eastern and Western traditions, which both come together in the one great Tradition of the universal Church. For us they are the champions and also the patrons of the ecumenical endeavor of the sister Churches of East and West, for the rediscovery through prayer and dialogue of visible Unity in perfect and total communion, ‘the unity which,’ as I said on the occasion of my visit to Bari, ‘is neither absorption nor fusion.’ Unity is a meeting in truth and love, granted to us by the Spirit. Cyril and Methodius, in their personality and their work, are figures that awaken in all Christians a great ‘longing for union’ and for unity between the two sister Churches of East and West.”
• “It is not good for man to be alone.” And the suitable help God made for Adam was not just Eve. God made himself a suitable helper, entering into the human race, in order by his humanity to restore us to the divine image and make us partakers in his divinity. And where he carries that out each day is here at the altar. We know that Jesus in the Gospel quoted the words of the Book of Genesis after Adam rejoiced at the creation of his wife, “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh.” St. Paul, after citing that phrase, will tell us in the fifth chapter of his letter to the Ephesians “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.” Human marriage is based on Christ’s marriage to his Bride the Church; because Christ will never abandon us, sacramental marriage is indissoluble; because Christ is faithful, human marriage is faithful; because Christ’s marriage with us is fruitful, generating newborn Christians in the baptismal womb of the Church, so human marriage increases and multiplies. To understand what happens in the Eucharist, we need to look at it in this spousal key. The early Christians used to illustrate this reality between marriage and the Eucharist in their architecture — as we’ll see when we get to Rome — covering the altars with a baldachin just like ancient beds were covered, to communicate that the altar is the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. It’s here on this altar that we, Christ’s bride, in the supreme of love, receive within ourselves the body, the blood, of the divine Bridegroom, becoming one-flesh with him and made capable of bearing fruit with him in acts of love. This is the means by which we enter into one flesh union with Christ. This is the way by which we receive within Christ’s love for us and become more capable of sharing that type of love with each other. This is the greatest help of all and something that leads us to say, with the words of today’s Psalm, “Blessed are those who hold the Lord in awe!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: