Growing in Faith like Don Bosco, 3rd Friday (II), January 31, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the 3rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Bosco
January 31, 2020
2 Sam 11:1-10.13-17, Ps 51, Mk 4:26-34

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus continues to speak to us about the growth in faith he desires. On Wednesday, he gave us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed and focused on faith-filled receptivity, which he said features hearing the Word, actively accepting it, and bearing fruit 30, 60 and 100-fold. Yesterday he said true faith can’t be hidden, but shines like the light of a lamp placed on a lamp stand, and that the more we exercise the spiritual muscle of the theological virtue of faith, the more it will grow. Today he gives us two images to teach us two more aspects about the increase in faith that is meant to happen when we enter and live in his kingdom.
• Jesus says, first, that faith grows like a mustard seed. “When it is sown in the ground,” Jesus says, “it is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.” Even a little bit of faith is enough, Jesus would say elsewhere, to move mountains. Even when it seems small, we should know that it contains within the power to grow to be enormous. And by another image Jesus describes one of the most important parts of that growth. It’s God’s work. Jesus compares the growth in faith to what happens with a farmer scattering seed in the Holy Land, turning it over once, and then allowing the growth. “It is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.” The farmer certainly does a little of the work, but most of the work happens by what is contained in the seed, what is contained in the soil, and the water that comes. So it is with growth in faith. God has given us that seed, he’ll provide the water, and he’ll give so many of the nutrients necessary for us to be rich, fruitful soil. And so we should have great confidence in God’s work.
• But as Jesus will describe in other agricultural images, the soil of our receptivity can also receive other seeds in it, seeds of thorn bushes and darnel that can suck the nutrients out of the soil and even prevent choke the growth Christ wants to do in us. We see that type of seed in the first reading. David, rather than working in the afternoon while his troops are righting against the Ammonites and besieging Rabbah, is taking a nap. When he awakened, he strolled about the roof of the palace and saw a neighbor, Bathsheba, bathing. And the seed of lust in David’s eyes and heart began to grow. After having committed adultery with her in his heart, he summoned her and committed adultery with her in the flesh. And the destructive seed of sin continued to grow larger even still. After Bathsheba told him she was pregnant, he summoned her husband, David’s trusted armor bearer Uriah, home from the battle lines in the hope that he might go home, have relations with Bathsheba and cover up David’s sin. But it didn’t work. Uriah was too loyal to David even to visit his wife because it was the custom that soldiers would have no relations with their wives during battle because it was thought that love-making with weaken them of vigor and valor. He slept with the troops outside the gates of the palace instead of in his own house with his wife. And so David by Uriah’s own hand sent a note to Joab that essentially ordered Uriah’s death by total betrayal. The seed of lust grew to physical adultery, to lying and deception, to the betrayal and murder of an innocent man.
• We need to grasp the types of seeds that are battling for the garden of our souls. On the one hand, the three-fold lust battles for the human heart, what St. John calls in his letter concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life, what interpreters have generally interpreted as lust proper, greed and pride. These seeds are growing like toxic weeds in the lives of so many today through hedonism, materialism, and autonomous individualism. Against them the Lord Jesus plants the mustard seeds of the evangelical counsels that distinguish consecrated life, chastity, poverty and obedience. Jesus says against lust of the flesh, “The lamp of the body is your eye. When your eye is sound, then your whole body is filled with light, but when it is bad, then your body is in darkness.” Chastity is the virtue, united to purity, that helps us to see God in others and to reverence them. Against materialism, Jesus reminds us, “Take care to guard against all greed, for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions” and “You cannot serve God and mammon.” Poverty is the means by which we can place our heart in the true treasure of the kingdom that moths can’t consume, rust can’t destroy and thieves can’t steal. Against pride, Jesus reminds us by his own words and witness that happiness comes from saying to God, “Thy will, not mine be done,” and from “becoming obedient even to death… on a Cross.” In David’s fall, we see the lack of these virtues. The lamp of his eye became corrupted. He lacked spiritual poverty, such that, even though he had a whole “flock” he wanted his neighbor’s solitary “ewe lamb,” as Nathan will tell him later. And he refused to obey God’s clear commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery” and even “Thou shall not kill,” perhaps allowing his being king to corrupt his judgment such that he thought he no longer had to obey anyone. In him we see the terrible consequence of a failure to respond to God’s gift of poverty, chastity and obedience. The Lord, however, continues to plant his good seed in us and then seeks to send us out as seeds in the middle of the world. Those living in union with the poor, chaste, and obedience Lord Jesus might seem small in comparison with the porn industry, the greedy worship of the golden calf in many sectors of the economy, and the radical autonomy so many trumpet by glorying in disobedience to God’s explicit commands. But even if we’re a mustard seed, God can and will give us growth, so that, if we persevere faithfully, we will become, individually and together, shrubs in which all of the birds of the air, all those who seek to fly to the Lord, will be able to find refuge. And the stricter poverty, chastity and obedience of consecrated men and women makes it possible for all Christians to live these counsels according to their state in life.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of someone who had great soil for the growth of faith and who cultivated the soil of so many others, so that they might eradicate the toxics and allow God’s growth to occur. St. John Bosco was born in 1815 in the small village of Becchi close to Turin in northern Italy. When he was just two, his father died leaving his mother Margherita to care for the three young boys as a peasant farmer during a time of great drought and social unrest. She was a woman who passed on to her boys her great faith and tilled their soil. In other areas, Margherita did all she could, but even at a young age he needed to be apprenticed to an uncle. And he was one of the lucky ones that he had an uncle to whom he could be sent when his mother no longer could feed him. When he was nine, he had a dream that changed his life. In it, he was surrounded by a group of children who were fighting, swearing and blaspheming. He tried to calm them down, first by reasoning, then with force, but to no avail. Finally a lady appeared to him — whom he later concluded was the Blessed Mother — and said, “Softly, softly, if you wish to win them! Take your shepherd’s staff and lead them to pasture.” As he gently invited and encouraged them to follow him, he saw them transformed from wild beasts into lambs. When he awoke, he knew that his duty was to help poor boys, beginning with those in his own village, to undergo such a transformation. He first sought the kids who were hanging out and causing trouble in the city squares. He did his best to teach them the catechism and invite them to Church, but there were initially few takers. He noticed, how much they were fascinated, however, by the various jugglers, magicians and gymnasts who would come through town seeking their adulation and money. So he began to learn those arts — and master them. Soon he was challenging the other jugglers, conjurers and acrobats to competition and beating them. His prize was the attention of the young ruffians, whom he promised to teach them his newfound skills after they had a catechism lesson or came to Church. But he readily saw that there were limits to what he could give them as a poor and poorly-educated shepherd boy. He desired to become a priest. Eventually a priest, too, recognized in him signs of a priestly vocation. He was taught how to read so that he would be able to go to school and seminary. His upkeep and his clothes were provided by charity, the mayor paid for his hat, the pastor his coat, one parishioner his cassock another a pair of shoes. During Seminary he would continue to go out on Sundays to draw the boys to Mass and make sure these waifs would be taken care of. It was during Seminary that St. Joseph Cafasso, the seminary rector just a few years his senior, recognized his vocation to give his entire life to the care of these abandoned, lost sheep, seeking to love them with the love of Christ and bring them to live by faith truly Christian lives. St. John Bosco organized activities on Sundays but very few people wanted hundreds of street kids around them, and so he struggled to find a permanent place. Eventually he got a big barn and began to build it up. He founded schools to train them as shoemakers, tailors and printers. He began to give them accommodations so they weren’t sleeping on the streets and entrusted their care to his mother Margherita who came to live with them. His orphanage would grow to house more than 800 boys for whom he would beg for food. Some of the bright boys he would eventually begin training to be priests to serve young people like these in the Salesian order God would lead him to found. On May 30, 1862, when he was 46 years old, he told all the orphans he was housing a dream he had had a few nights before in which he had seen a huge naval battle in which a big ship guided by the Pope with a flotilla of other boats led by bishops, was being attached by so many opposing forces, who were trying to ram and sink the barque of Peter. The winds and the ferocious waves were against the papal fleet. But then he saw two huge pillars coming out of the sea. At the top of one stood Mary, Help of Christians, and at the top of the other was a huge Host underneath which was the inscription “Salvation of the Faithful.” Don Bosco saw in his dream that the Pope and the boats in his flotilla labored to anchor themselves to these two pillars and once they did, the opposing ships were scattered and broken to pieces. St. John Bosco interpreted the dream as an indication of the types of attacks, the opposing winds and seas, the salvos of enemies that would try to sink the Church, but he also saw the remedy: anchoring oneself to Jesus in the Eucharist and to the Mother who gave us that blessed Fruit of her womb and shows us how to relate to him in faith. These are the means for true growth: Christ gives himself as a seed to us and Mary shows the type of good and fruitful soil we’re called to have. God gives the growth and Mary’s fiat was a leaven that helped to lift up the whole world. Today anchor ourselves to Jesus and Mary, together with Don Bosco.

The readings for today’s Mass were: