Growing in the Hope In Which We’re Saved, 30th Tuesday (I), October 26, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass of Mary, Mother of Divine Hope
October 26, 2021
Rom 8:18-25, Ps 126, Lk 13:18-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The Kingdom of God is both now and not yet. Jesus says it’s already among us (because the king is with us) but something that we must also pray will come (because we, others and creation have not yet fully entered into it). Like a mustard seed, the kingdom is meant to grow. The kingdom is here, but it’s basically in embryonic form and is meant to grow to full stature. Like leaven, it has a power within to lift up every other reality.
• Once we understand this dynamic of the Kingdom we can more easily grasp what St. Paul is saying in the first reading. Yesterday, he affirmed that through baptism we have already “received a spirit of adoption,” but today he informs us that “we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption.” He describes the whole process as “groaning in labor pains,” and labor is an appropriate image. There’s a child waiting to be born; the child is the same before and after, but there is a massive change between the womb and the light. Likewise the mother remains a mother to the child, but there is a massive growth in that relationship after birth. All of this goes back to his question at the end of the seventh chapter, which we heard last Friday about who would save him from his mortal body in which he does not do the good he desires and doesn’t avoid the evil he seeks to evade. The answer is that God the Holy Spirit will do this and this is what the “redemption of the body” means: we groan within as we await the full flourishing of the spirit of adoption and full freedom of the children of God.
• This is why St. Paul says that “in hope we were saved,” which means we are saved as we hope — what Pope Benedict would call in Spe Salvi “living with Christ in the world” — and are saved through hope, meaning by faith in the fulfillment of Christ’s promises. In Spe Salvi Pope Benedict, basing himself on the Letter to the Hebrews, and echoing what St. Paul said today that hope is “for what we do not see,” said that faith/hope is the substance of things hoped for and the guarantee of things not seen: there’s already something present that is meant to grow. And because of that substance, that mustard seed of what will flourish later, the early Christians were willing to suffer the plundering of their property because they had a better possession: namely the treasure of the faith that they already had, even if unfulfilled. The suffering we endure is like those labor pains.
• Because the kingdom of God is a kingdom of hope, we are called to grow in hope as from a mustard seed to a bush and to allow our hope to be leaven for the whole world. In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict mentioned four settings to grow in hope. The first is prayer, in which, “living with Christ in the world,” we turn to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit, asking for things we and others need conscious of how often the Lord has heard our prayers and the prayers of his people over the centuries, for which we praise him in Psalm 136 and so many other places. The second setting is action, in which we work “with Christ in the world,” and seek to build his kingdom. The third setting is suffering, which helps us learn how to depend on and hope in God more, whether it’s we who are suffering or those we love. The final setting is judgment, which is not meant to fill us with dread but with “blessed hope, as we await the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ,” as St. Paul wrote to Titus and we pray every Mass after the Our Father. These four settings are all occasions for us to grow in life according to the Spirit who fills us with hope.
• Someone who illustrates these truths is our Lady, whom we venerate today with this Votive Mass under the title of “Mother of Divine Hope.” Her hope for God in prayer, in her action, in her multiple sufferings, helped save the world and make it possible for us to look at Judgment with hope because of the mercy of the Blessed Fruit of her Womb. She is interceding for us now that we may be filled with hope.
• In the Psalm today, we pray, “The Lord has done marvels for us,” while recognizing that greater marvels await. And the greatest down payment of all is Christ in the Eucharist. To live with him, to be conscious of his Eucharistic presence, is to live with hope in the world, which is the path of salvation. Let’s take this truth and this “substance” and let it grow in us so that we might be like mustard seeds or leaven in making Christ’s kingdom come in the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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