Holding Fast to the Weightier Things, Encouraged and Strengthened by Christ, 21st Tuesday (II), August 27, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Monica
August 27, 2024
2 Thes 2:1-3.14-17, Ps 96, Mt 23:23-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, at the beginning of a new academic year, the readings the Church gives us and the saint we celebrate have much to teach us about how to order our life and be strengthened and encouraged by the Lord properly to prioritize and live.
• In the first reading, we see that the Christians in Thessalonika were worried about the end of the world happening imminently, something that left them paralyzed and petrified. They weren’t working. Some didn’t seem to be eating. They basically thought what was the point if today was going to be the last day of their life. They were basing their life on hysteria and hype, “shaken out of [their] minds suddenly, … alarmed by a ‘spirit’ or by an oral statement or by a letter allegedly from [Paul] to the effect that the day of the Lord is at hand.” St. Paul stressed, “Let no one deceive you in any way.” Still today many are caught up in rumors, they’re able to be misled by videos on youtube, podcasts, books and websites about supposedly imminent apocalyptic events predicted by some sage or seer. Others are enslaved by rumors they pick up from secular sources, like tabloid papers and programs, by politicians, or by their neighbors. St. Paul wanted the people of his time, instead, to be basing their lives solidly on the truth that had been revealed to them. “Stand firm, brothers and sisters, and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.” This is always the antidote, to stand firm on the rock of God’s word in revelation and in the oral traditions passed down in the Church, both of which constitute what we call the “deposit of faith.” The better we know that revelation, the better we’ll be able to hold fast to it and not be swayed by the deceptions and manipulative hype of the age. In the particular question at hand, about the end of time, Jesus told us that we know not the day or the hour, that the end of the world may happen today but we will never know that it will happen today or thousands of years from now; anyone claiming to know is deceived and is deceiving others. What we do know Jesus also revealed: that we’re called to be vigilant in striving to live every day as if it is our last, not in dread, but behaving in a way that will lead us to eternity: praying, forgiving and asking for forgiveness, doing acts of charity, receiving the sacraments. At the end of the passage, St. Paul prayed that God would “encourage [their] hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word,” the good deeds and words that we should be doing every day, so that we’ll be doing them on the day that will turn out to be our last or the world’s last.
• In the Gospel, Jesus was fighting a different type of confusion and deception, one given by hypocritical lifestyle of the Scribes and Pharisees. Today we hear the fourth and the fifth of the seven woes, the ferocious denunciations, Jesus makes of the behavior of the Scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23. Today Jesus called the Scribes and Pharisees once again “actors” (the literal translation of hypocrites) for neglecting the weightier things of the law in an obsession for the tiniest things. He says that they’re neurotic about paying tithes on garden herbs (mint, dill and cummin) that will always be in very short supply, obsessing about whether they owe perhaps two or three tiny leaves from a garden plant to the Temple, while totally overlooking justice, mercy and fidelity. There are so many examples of their injustice, mercilessness and infidelity: injustice, for example, in their refusing to care for their elderly relatives by saying all they had was given to God; mercilessness, in wanting to stone the adulterous woman or in resenting the fact that Jesus talked with sinners and ate with them; infidelity shown in their swearing oaths seemingly calling on God as the guarantor of their truthfulness while all the while intending to deceive. Jesus says that they “strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.” Both gnats and camels were unclean and would make any food they touched unclean. The Jews used to use filters over their wine to make sure no microscopic gnats were in it rendering it unfit to drink, but at the same time as doing that, Jesus was saying, they were eating huge camels. While obsessing about eliminating venial sins and imperfections, they were committing mortal sins, cleansing the “outside of the cup and dish” while inside being “full of plunder and self-indulgence.” We see how right Jesus was insofar as these people with a reputation for great holiness were those who conspired to have Jesus, an innocent man, framed by false testimony and publicly murdered by the same foreign authorities they thought had no legitimacy. Jesus was calling them out, calling them to conversion, and calling them to focus on the most important things, on cleansing their insides, on doing the weightier more important aspects of the law.
• Jesus continues to call each of us to do the same. Sometimes we can be consumed about little things and miss the biggest. We can say a whole bunch of vocal prayers but mercilessly hold a grudge against a family member. We can book Masses for all types of holy intentions but then watch lustful films. We can dress with the finest clothes on Sunday but on the inside be a cesspool of judgements rather than love vis-a-vis our neighbor. If we’re not going to be actors like the Pharisees, if we’re not boing to be “blind guides,” we need humbly to receive Jesus’ help in the Sacrament of Confession to cleanse our insides and then focus on living in and extending God’s justice, mercy and fidelity.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of someone who focused on the weightier things of the law, someone who was a good guide to her husband and famous son in the ways of faith, someone who was encouraged and strengthened by the Lord to so many good deeds that remain known today, more than 1600 years later. St. Monica is one of the most endearing figures in history. Whereas many saints have inimitable qualities, she is one of the most relatable, approachable and practical of them all. As a Christian wife, her chief role was to sanctify her husband, who was a violent and dissolute pagan named Patricius. Though he was rich, he could not stand Monica’s generosity to the poor. Though she was as faithful and loving to him as she sought to be toward God, he constantly chastised her piety. If all of that was not hard enough to bear, her cantankerous mother-in-law lived with them and daily multiplied the insults. All of this could have driven Monica to divorce and despair, but instead it propelled her to even greater devotion to God and them. For 17 years, she joined her sufferings to prayers for their conversion. Eventually, the power of God’s grace and the example of her Christian virtues penetrated their hardened hearts and they both received baptism. For her husband it was just in time — Patricius would die a holy death in the hands of the Divine Thief less than a year later. But that work as a wife was just a warm-up for her labors as a mother. The oldest of her three children, Augustine, was then a brilliant teenage rhetoric student living away from home in Carthage. She hoped that he would follow the example of his father’s conversion, but, instead, especially after his father’s death, he went full-steam in the opposite direction. He joined the Manichean heretics. He invited a woman to cohabitate with him and fathered a child out-of-wedlock. When he would come home, he would intentionally blaspheme so much that Monica prevented him from eating or sleeping at home until the budding rhetorician learned to discipline his tongue. Monica prayed unceasingly for her son’s conversion, beseeching that he would turn in time. She fasted. She got friends to intercede. She arranged for priests to argue with him. She flooded her pillow and various churches with her tears. When Augustine decided he was going to Rome, Monica, fearing lest he never convert, decided to go with him. While waiting in port before their departure across the Mediterranean, however, Augustine lied to his mother about the departure time and left without her, caring so little about her as to leave his own mother helpless in a busy metropolis, without any word as to his whereabouts. But she didn’t “quit her job,” she didn’t give up. A bishop, seeing her weeping, assured her on behalf of God, “It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish.” So she boarded a ship to Rome to look for Augustine there. She eventually received word that he was among the rhetoricians in Milan, and that’s where she and the Good Shepherd at last found their lost sheep. Thanks to the help of the bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, who captivated Augustine first by his oratory and then by his faith and charity, Augustine renounced Manicheanism, accepted the Christian faith, made a promise of celibacy and received the gift of baptism at the age of 32. But it wasn’t just Ambrose whom God used for this great miracle. It was the example of the simple. As St. Augustine says it in his Confession, he turned to his friend Alypius and declared, “The unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and we with our learning, and without heart, … we wallow in flesh and blood! Are we ashamed to follow, because others are gone before, and not ashamed not even to follow?” The example of the weak, the foolish, the ignoble of birth by human standards — those like his mother! — pushed him over the limit, led him into the back yard, where he heard God telling him through an angel to take up and read, where he picked up Sacred Scripture and there heard the words that would change him forever: “I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence. No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”
• Mother and son decided to return home to Africa, but Monica would not make it. She took ill in the Roman port of Ostia and was soon on her deathbed. Augustine was now the one full of tears, but Monica replied, “Son, my hopes in this world are now fulfilled. All I wished to live for was that I might see you a Catholic and a child of heaven. God has granted me more than this in making you despise earthly felicity and consecrate yourself to his service.” What a beautiful testimony of a mother’s chief work, and she rejoiced not just at his baptism but that he had decided to become a celibate to serve God and to strive to become the Lord’s faithful and prudent servant. Monica became a saint precisely because of the way she was a faithful and prudent servant of her family, especially in difficult times. Her prayers, her tears, her fastings, her intercessions, caused because of the problems her family members made for her, ultimately not only helped them get to heaven, but helped her to become even more rich with every spiritual gift.
• She was likewise one who was always ready for the last things out of a desire for God and for heaven. As her other son was weeping that she would die outside of her native Africa making it impossible for them to bury her in her native land, she said, “Bury my body wherever you will; let not care of it cause you any concern. One thing only I ask you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be.” What a powerful preparation that thought is for Mass. Little did she know at the time that her son Augustine would become a priest and a bishop and be able to celebrate Mass for her at the altar. Little did she know that ordained son would keep the fourth commandment by honoring his mother’s faith and tears by eventually becoming one of the most famous Christian theologians of all time. But perhaps most of all, little did she grasp that today, 1637 years later, we would all be remembering her at the altar of the Lord in a continent that no one during her age would have even guessed existed. And all of this happened because she was faithful to her work as a spouse and a mother, even when it was excruciating. All of this happened because she was conscious of God’s presence, of the vocation to holiness not just for her but for her husband, son and mother-in-law, of her prudence in always giving an example of faith and offering an abundance of prayers for them at every time. It was here at Mass where she would bring her ceaseless prayers and where God responded in a way far greater to her good work than she could have ever imagined. Today as we come to pray at Mass as well, we recognize that the Lord comes here not as a thief but humbly, in order to sanctify us, encourage us and strengthen us for every good work. Today he comes to help reward us for prioritizing the weightiest thing of all. Today he’s here to hear, through St. Monica’s intercession, the prayers we make for the conversion and holiness of all our family members.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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