Hearing and Acting on the Word of God, Like Our Lady of Mercy, 25th Tuesday (II), September 24, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Our Lady of Mercy
September 24, 2024
Prov 21:1-6.10-13, Ps 119, Lk 8:19-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Last Saturday, if we didn’t have the proper Gospel for the Feast of St. Matthew of the Apostle, we would have heard Jesus preach to us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, which is a means by which to assess our receptivity and responsiveness to Christ’s words and work in our life. Today we see a beautiful illustration of that parable in the reference to Jesus’ mother, who not only conceived the Word-made-flesh in her womb, but conceived the Word of God in faith. When the people told Jesus that his mother and his relatives (there’s no separate word in Aramaic and Hebrew to distinguish siblings from cousins) were outside wishing to see him, he replied, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” This was not a violation of the fourth commandment or a denigration of his mother, but, like we’ll hear later in St. Luke’s Gospel in the scene of the anonymous woman from the crowd blessing the mother who bore and nursed him, Jesus was giving the real secret to his mother’s greatness: she was the first of all those who would “hear the word of God and act on it,” someone whose whole life developed secundum verbum tuum,  in accordance with God’s word. Jesus came from heaven to earth to found a family and that family would be constituted by loving obedience to God’s will, in communion with Jesus’ obedience. St. John in his prologue focused on the connection between these two realities as well: that Jesus came unto his own, but his own did not receive him, but to those who did receive him, he gave power to become children of God. As we accept Jesus by his own grace, like Mary did, he constitutes and confirms us as children of God.
• So the first thing we need to ponder today is how we hear and act on the word of God. In Hebrew there is no distinction between “hear” and “obey.” It’s the same word. To hear God is to will to obey him. To listen to him and then to question the truthfulness or goodness or helpfulness of what he says would be contradictory. There wasn’t fully developed by this time St. Paul’s later distinction about the difficulty of doing the good — of not doing the good we desire or not avoiding the sin we detest (Rom 7:19) — but I think it’s still helpful for us to have an attitude that when we listen to God’s word, we listen to it as words to be done. That’s what it means to receive the word on good and fruitful soil. That’s what it means to hear the word of God and obey it.
• In the Psalm today, we see the attitude we should have before God’s word: We want to walk in the Lord’s law, to understand the way of his precepts, to meditate on his wondrous deeds, to choose the way of truth, to observe his law and keep it with all our heart, to delight in the path of God’s commands and to keep his law continually. This is a life without blame, we say at the beginning of the Psalm. This is the path on which God himself wants to guide us. God’s word is the GPS of our life, and so much more.
• In the first reading — the second of only three days in two years in which the Church ponders the Book of Proverbs — I’d like to focus on two of the most relevant pearls of wisdom. The first is, “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” The way we please the Lord most is not by “knowing” but by “doing” what is right and just, by living in right relationship with him and others. The Lord wants to praise us like he praised Mary for hearing and acting on God’s word. The second passage is, “The just man appraises the house of the wicked: there is one who brings down the wicked to ruin.” At the end of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus talked about the two houses, he said that the wise man builds on the rock of hearing his word and acting upon it, while the foolish one builds upon the sand of hearing his word and not acting on it. The just man is the one who recognizes that the wicked may have built an earthly mansion but, because it has no firm foundation, it will collapse when the storms of life come. The just man is able to foresee that ruin from his house built of stone by firmly rooting himself in God’s word. Today we’re called to follow our Lady and become wise like her through doing what we hear Jesus say, doing what is right and just, walking in the law of the Lord, choosing the way of truth and observing it with 100 percent of our mind, heart, soul and strength.
• The second application of today’s Gospel reading is about communion. Jesus says about the family that he has come from heaven to earth to form that it will be a fruit of hearing and doing the Lord’s word. The communion he prayed for during the Last Supper — that we all may be one as the Father and he are one by the Holy Spirit — will come from obedience to God. There is no other way to have the true union for which God has made us all long. Without this shared desire to know and do God’s word and will, there may be a superficial harmony, but there will never be a communion that will last — and when there’s clear disobedience, there may very well be great division. During my time as a high school chaplain, there was great division among the faculty that overflowed into the school. Pretty much everyone recognized it, knew it was a big problem and lamented it. But they didn’t really want to confront the source of it: that there was huge division with regard to people’s approach to the Catholic faith. Some strove to live it; others pretended to stand above it, criticizing it and trying to change it. Part of the reason for this situation in a Catholic high school was because in previous decades some of the priests from the religious order who had served in the school had formed the faculty basically in a theology of dissent that when my Diocese took over, there were huge struggles whenever people talked about fidelity to the teaching of the Church about Mass, confession, the Ten Commandments, etc. At a faculty meeting in which the question of the divisions among the faculty arose, I said that if we really wanted a familial union at the school, it would start by building all that we were doing on two books: the Bible and the Catechism. Some immediately agreed; others angrily rejected the suggestion. It was sad. The lack of communion was flowing from a lack of “one faith.” I have seen the same thing when parishes, or presbyterates, religious houses, or seminaries or families are divided by those who are faithful disciples and others who do not teach in doctrinal communion or live in moral communion. Today Jesus is helping all of us to recognize his great desire for unity and that the deep desire for it that he has planted within us will be fulfilled only by our and others’ hearing and doing the word of God.
• As Jesus mentions in the Gospel, our Lady is someone who shows us how to live this way and as mother is praying for us to live this way. Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of Our Lady of Mercy. It’s always had a special meaning for me not only because I love our Lady and am so grateful for her motherly mercy for me in various ways I’m aware of and in the many ways she’s prayed for me before I even knew I had a need. It also has great meaning because the prayers for the Mass, approved by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, were written from the contemplative heart and scholarly head of one of my great friends, Sr. Esther Mary Nickel, of the Religious Sisters of Mercy of Alma. To turn to “Our Lady of Mercy” is to understand her not just as “Mother of Mercy,” as we pray in the Salve Regina, but also as “Daughter of Mercy,” “Spouse of Mercy,” “Disciple of Mercy, “Apostle of Mercy,” “Virgin most merciful,” and so many other angles. She is one who heard the words of mercy throughout Sacred Scripture as words to be interiorized and lived. We see how deeply they impacted her entire world view in her Magnificat, when her soul joyfully proclaimed the greatness of the Lord whose “mercy is from age to age,” who helped Israel his servant, “remembering his mercy,” and who out of mercy looked on her lowliness and blessed her such that all generations would recognize the great things he has done for her, who has lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things. She experienced God’s mercy at the Annunciation when God’s plans were fulfilled. She saw God’s mercy on full display on Calvary. She instigated his public manifestations of his merciful love in Cana. And she’s praying now that we will hear as efficaciously as she did Jesus’ words about mercy, come to him to receive it, build our life on it, and help others to build their lives on it.
• Today as we under her watchful gaze celebrate this Mass, the Lord wants us to do what is “right and just,” to “do this in memory” of him, to sow his word in our ears, minds and generous hearts, so that we, like Mary, can become his “mother” in the faith, conceiving that word within and allowing it to grow until we give birth to it in loving deeds; so that we, as his siblings, might imitate and cooperate with his holy obedience. As Jesus sows himself within us today, we ask him to help us to stay united as one Body, one Spirit, in him, and, like Mary, mercifully run out to help others enter into a similar two-fold communion!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download