“Great Sorrow and Constant Anguish,” 30th Friday (I), October 29, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
October 29, 2021
Rom 9:1-5, Ps 147, Lk 14:1-6

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we have a shift in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans which we have been praying for almost three weeks. We turn to the second part of this epistle. In the first 8 chapters, we’ve pondered what it means to be justified before God and how the Holy Spirit seeks to bring that about. Chapters 9-11 are about God’s plan for the justification of the Jews, particularly those who — unlike Mary, Mary Magdalene, the disciples and apostles — have rejected Jesus as Messiah, but unfortunately the Church gives us only two days to ponder these three important chapters! St. Paul describes his suffering for the Jews: “I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie; my conscience joins with the Holy Spirit in bearing me witness that I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.” Just like Christ died for us, St. Paul loved his fellow Jews so much that he was willing even to be cut off from Christ that the Jews come to salvation. His heart was filled with anguish and sorrow because of their state, even though some of them were seeking to kill him as others had plotted — with all sinners of all time — to kill Christ. He loved them with the heart of Christ. He pondered all that God had given them: descendancy from Jacob, adoption as God’s children, his holy shekinah or glory, the covenants (with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David), the law, the worship at the Temple written out by him in Leviticus, the promises, the patriarchs and the genealogy of the Messiah. But his heart was filled with anguish because despite all that preparation, they had not embraced the fulfillment in Christ, in whom their is filiation, glory, the new and eternal covenant, the Legislator, true worship and the down payment on all God’s promises and all the hopes God had given the Jews. This anguish is what led him to become all things to all people, including to his fellow Jews, so that each might come to Christ. Later in these three chapters he will describe God’s plans for the salvation of the Jews, and it’s fundamentally, through seeing God’s goodness working among the Gentiles, they might come to embrace it and all will be saved. But Paul, and God, wishes all of us have a similar anguish of heart for the salvation of others, the anguish that beat in Paul’s heart and in Christ’s Sacred Heart.
• We see a similar anguish in Jesus in the Gospel and it led Jesus to urgent action. Someone with dropsy — an edema, or swelling caused by fluid retention — was there as a plant, to test whether Jesus would cure him on the Sabbath. We see that there was something going on in how the man was placed before Jesus at the meal and St. Luke tells us that Jesus said to the hosts “in reply” to this man’s being in front of him. Jesus took the bait and didn’t hesitate to teach about the importance of every person and the urgency that we should have to love him or her. After asking whether it was lawful to cure on the Sabbath or not — whether it was possible to do good deeds on the Lord’s day! — he healed the man. The principle Jesus gave was no one would ever allow one of their children or even animals who fell into a cistern to remain in there on the Sabbath but would work on the Sabbath to rescue him. Jesus, with merciful affection, wouldn’t allow this man one more day to remain with dropsy. Jesus’ analogy highlights that we always do something with urgency for someone or something we really care about, who matters to us, whom we love, and we all recognize that such authentic love for that person would not be a violation of God’s will or law. The problem for the Pharisees was that they just didn’t really care about the man with dropsy. They didn’t love him at all, not to mention with affection or mercy. Jesus acts with the same urgency urgency for us and our salvation, because he cares for us more than a parent cares for a child or a farmer cares for his animals. And he wants us to imitate that loving concern, that urgency, since many times we procrastinate on charity toward our neighbor because we really don’t love.
• This type of anguish is essential to the life of the Church. The Church’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, entitled Gaudium et Spes, begins: “Gaudium et spes, luctus et angor hominum huius temporis, pauperum praesertim et quorumvis afflictorum, gaudium sunt et spes, luctus et angor etiam Christi discipulorum, nihilque vere humanum invenitur, quod in corde eorum non resonate,” which can be translated, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ; indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.” I’d just like to pull out those words “luctus et angor,” because those are precisely taken from St. Paul today, the sorrow and anguish, because that — with the joy and hope that comes from the Gospel — is how we as Christians are supposed to respond pastorally to the world. That’s what leads us to urgent action.
• Today at this Mass, Jesus wants to inspire us with urgency, with holy sorrow and anguish, so that we might go out to fulfill his plan of salvation for everyone, so that they might come to experience the fullness of God’s love and be healed of whatever keeps them from rejoicing forever in the eternal Lord’s day.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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