Growing in Faith like St. Thomas, Third Friday (II), January 28, 2022

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. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church
January 28, 2022
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 some work, but most of the growth 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 fighting against the Ammonites and besieging Rabbah, is taking an indolent nap. When he awoke, 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, David 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 since it was thought that love-making with weaken them of vigor and valor. Instead of sleeping with his wife in his own bed and house, he slept with the troops outside the gates of the palace. And so David by Uriah’s own hand sent a note to Joab that essentially ordered Uriah’s death by raw betrayal. The seed of lust grew to physical adultery, to lying and deception, to the betrayal and murder of a virtuous and 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 would 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 obedient 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, who lived in an exemplary way the evangelical counsels and whose words and example have helped nourish the faith of so many during the past eight centuries. Early in his life we see in him both the growth of faith and purity of heart. After meeting some of the newly founded members of the Order of Preachers, popularly called the Dominicans after their founder St. Dominic, he discovered God was calling him to be one of them. But that was very much opposed by Thomas’ family, particularly his mother, who had plans for Thomas to follow her brother as Abbot of the nearby prestigious Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino, where St. Benedict and St. Scholastica are buried. She would consent for him to become a priest, but only a type of priest consistent with his noble birth. She absolutely and inflexibly didn’t want him to become a priest of a mendicant order that begged for food. Thomas, therefore, when he reached majority ran away from home, heading to Paris to join the Dominicans. His mother sent his brothers, however, on horseback to capture him and bring him home, where she had him thrown into the dungeon of their castle imprisoned so that he wouldn’t escape. It’s there that they tried to break him from his desire to become a Dominican, his brothers going so far as to send a prostitute into the dungeon to try to have him fall in chastity, a temptation he thoroughly resisted. Eventually he would escape — it seems with the help of his mother, who thought it would be less embarrassing for him to escape and follow his vocation than for the family to give him permission — and become a Dominican.
• But his imprisonment of more than a year was a time when the seed of faith grew within to a large plant. It’s one of the most important things that happened in the history of theology, because it was during that time that Thomas, to spend his confinement profitably, got a copy of the Latin New Testament and memorized it inside out, so much so that for the rest of his life, the words of Christ, the insights of the apostles, were on the tip of his tongue, something that strengthened everything he ever wrote, a contemplata that was shared with all. Even though he was humble and would have chosen to remain under a bushel basket, he couldn’t help it. Because he never answered questions in class, many of his classmates at the University of Paris called him the “Dumb Ox,” because of his size. But his professor, St. Albert the Great, who knew of his written homework, said that his “mooing” would one day echo around the world. Thomas sought to unite revelation to reason, with the help of the recently discovered texts of Aristotle, so that reason would help to deepen our understanding of the faith and faith would purify reason. Since the truths of faith and reason both come from God he knew that they could never truly be in conflict, just apparent conflict, and he began an incredibly prodigious output of writing that has influenced Christian theology and philosophy ever since.
• But as influential as his theological and philosophical corpus has been in the history of Christian thought, I believe his greatest legacy flowed out of his prayerful heart, from his pure conscience and soul. After the Eucharistic Miracle of Bolsena, Pope Urban IV asked him and St. Bonaventure to compose the Office to celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi — the hymns, the lessons, the prayers. St. Thomas won the competition against his holy Franciscan friend. And we are still very much profiting from the fruits of his contemplation. He wrote the Tantum Ergo and the O Salutaris we still sing at Eucharistic Adoration. He wrote the Panis Angelicus. He wrote the Adoro Te Devote. He penned the Lauda Sion Salvatorem we chant on Corpus Christi. They all flow from his Eucharistic piety. And these hymns all feature pleas to God to help us grow in faith. In his Adoro Te Devote, he sang,  “Fac me tibi semper magis credere,” “Make me always believe in you more and more.” In the Tantum Ergo, we cry out “Praestet fides supplementum sensuum defectui,” May faith supplement what my senses fail to grasp.” And he gives, in his Adoro Te Devote, the means by which we grow in faith, in the Eucharist and elsewhere. He sang, “Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, Sed auditu solo tuto creditur. Credo quidquid dixit Dei Filius; Nil hoc verbo veritátis verius. “Having seen, touched and tasted, we’re deceived about you. It’s only by hearing that we can believe. I believe whatever the Son of God has said because nothing is truer than the Word of Truth.” Faith comes from hearing Jesus’ words with faith, with having ears to hear and the soil to receive what the mustard seed of the Word of God and allowing it to grow.
• This growth happened throughout his life. Toward the end of short five decades God gave him on earth, he had two great mystical experiences (that we know of). In the first, he was so moved by the presence of the Lord that he stopped writing all together, recognizing everything he had written — some of the most important and penetrating theology anyone has ever written — were “like straw” compared to the experience he had of God in prayer. The second experience was when Jesus spoke to him from the Crucifix about three months before he died at the age of 49. Jesus said, “Bene scripsisti de me Thoma; quam ergo mercedem accipias?” “You have written well of me Thomas? What reward would you receive? What do you wish that I give you?” Thomas could have asked for anything, but he knew well who is treasure was. “Non aliam, Domine, nisi te ipsum,” he replied. “Nothing but you, Lord!” His whole life, his whole treasure, was the Lord. The Lord was the One he sought in his vocation even against the objections and obstacles of his family. The Lord was the One he sought in his study of Sacred Scripture and all his Sacred Theology. The Lord was the One he loved in all of his Eucharistic hymns. He only and always wanted the Lord as his reward, and now, on this feast day, we rejoice with him that with all the saints he has that “mercedem” — and from heaven, the light of the Lord that shone through him shines still.
• At the beginning of this Mass we prayed to God that he would grant us to “understand what [St. Thomas] taught and imitate what we accomplished.” Few of us will ever be able to read and understand all St. Thomas’ theology, but we can understand the most important thing he taught — about the gift of faith, the primacy of the love and worship of God and the need to believe what word of truth has said — as we pray that we may imitate what he accomplished, doing God’s holy will with abandon, so that we might be able to enjoy forever what he sang about in the last lines of the Panis Angelicus, words he prayed to God and we could pray to God and to him: “Per tuas semitas duc nos quo tendimus ad lucem quam inhabitas!” Through your footsteps, lead us on the way we are tending, to the light where you dwell!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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