Honoring the God Who Dwells On Earth With Hearts Close and Clinging to Him, Fifth Tuesday (II), February 8, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Josephine Bakhita
February 8, 2022
1 Kings 8:22-23.27-30, Ps 84, Mk 7:1-13

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In the first reading, King Solomon, at the long-awaited dedication of the Temple, after they had sacrificed “sheep and oxen too many to number or to count,” after they had seen the cloud of the Lord’s glory come down to fill the temple, prayed on behalf of the whole people, speaking to God directly: “Lord, God of Israel, there is no God like you in heaven above or on earth below you keep your covenant of mercy with your servants who are faithful to you with their whole heart.” He praised God for his fidelity, for being faithful to his promises. And Solomon emphasizes that, while God keeps his covenant with everyone because he is faithful, those who  keep their end of the covenant with him, who are faithful to him with their whole heart, loving him in an undivided way, are able to experience how he keeps his covenant of mercy with them to every generation. Solomon then expresses total wonder, “Can it indeed be that God dwells on earth?” He went on: “If the heavens and the highest heavens cannot contain you, how much less this temple which I have built!” And finally he makes a petition: “Look kindly on the prayer and petition of your servant, O Lord, my God, and listen to the cry of supplication which I, your servant, utter before you this day. May your eyes watch night and day over this temple, the place where you have decreed you shall be honored; may you heed the prayer which I, your servant, offer in this place. Listen to the petitions of your servant and of your people Israel which they offer in this place. Listen from your heavenly dwelling and grant pardon.” We find there three aspects of prayer, three ways to approach the Lord God: the first is with praise; the second with a conscious awareness of God’s presence leading to overflowing gratitude; and third, we bring to him our needs with humility, begging for his mercy. Those who are faithful to the Lord with their whole heart will experience the fruit and fulfillment of these prayers. The whole approach is summarized in the Psalm when we praise the Lord, saying, “How lovely is your dwelling place,” and then attest, “My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.” We begin with God  and his loveliness and then how he has made us to hanker for him.
• Those attitudes of before God are contrasted by Jesus in the Gospel to the spiritual approach of the Pharisees. St. Mark describes the complicated and rigorous practice of Jewish ceremonial washings, something that God had not revealed that he wanted done but something that the Scribes in the fourth and fifth centuries BC had developed to foster ritual purity. They needed to wash their hands in two directions with one-and-a-half egg shells of clean water, first from the fingertips down and then with the fingertips at the bottom. This was the worship they obsessed about, as if these things were what helped them to keep God’s covenant and grow in God’s image and live in love with each other. They did similar washings of cups, jugs, kettles and beds and questioned why Jesus and his disciples did “not follow the tradition of the elders but instead eat a meal with unclean hands.” Jesus responded with force, calling them hypocrites and applying to them Isaiah’s words, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.” Their hearts were far from God. They were not clinging to God or his covenant but instead to man-made laws. They were neglecting the fourth commandment, nullifying the word of God, and in essence nullifying their identity in God’s image and likeness. Christ came to restore that identity. He came to draw our hearts not just close to God but to unite them with God’s love and restore human beings to God in a new and everlasting covenant, so that their heart and flesh crying out for the living God would meet him.
• Someone who illustrates the lessons of today’s readings, whose heart and lacerated flesh cried out for God, who was faithful to the covenant of love, serving God as our true Master, is the great Sudanese saint the Church celebrates today: Saint Josephine Bakhita, who died 75 years ago today. St.  Josephine Bakhita was born in the Darfur region of Sudan about 1869 (there were no records and no one knew for sure). When he was 9, she was kidnapped by Arab Muslim bandits, forced to convert to Islam, and then sold into slavery on five different occasions to six different owners. As was the custom with Sudanese slaveowners at the time, she was repeatedly beaten as a little girl even when she was prompt in doing what was commanded. On one occasion, one or her masters showed up with flour, salt and razor blades to brand her. With the flour, the owner sketched on her breasts, belly and arms 114 intricate designs and then with the razor blades cut into her skin according to those patterns. While she was bleeding and in enormous pain, the master then poured salt into the wounds so that they would never heal and she would always be branded. To those wounds were added another 30 indelible scars over the course of her enslavement. She was eventually sold to the Italian consul in Khartoum. This was the first time she wasn’t beaten when she was told to do things. When the political situation destabilized, the consul needed to leave the country and he took along with him Bakhita — a name that means “fortunate,” given to her by one of her owners, because she couldn’t remember the name her parents had given her, so great was the trauma of her capture and her beatings. He gave her to the service of friends when he arrived back in Italy, where she helped to raise a baby as a nanny. When the owners were preparing to return to the Sudan after the political situation had improved, they temporarily entrusted Bakhita and the little girl to the care of the Canossian Sisters in town. It was there that Bakhita was really exposed to Christianity for the first time. Her reaction to seeing a bloody Italian crucifix was unforgettable. She recognized that the one whom Christians adored as Lord and Master must be able to understand her pain, since he had been lacerated in his scourging just as severely as she had been repeatedly whipped and then sliced up with razor blades. When the family returned from the Sudan to take Bakhita and their daughter with them to Africa, Bakhita refused. A lawsuit followed that under Italian law in general and under a law freeing Sudanese slaves in particular, the tribunal declared her to be free. Insofar as she was now over 18, she could stay. She was baptized with the name Josephine Margaret and confirmed, made her first Communion from the hands of the future St. Pius X, and was eventually accepted as a Canossian Sister, where she served for the next 44 years as a cook, sacristan and portress. She was always so grateful for the teaching of her new true Parón or “Master” — not a slave master but a Magister, or teacher, teaching her the wisdom of how to live, love and die so as to live forever —  and she always sought not only to live according to that wisdom but to pass it on to others. Even though she had never received much education, the school girls used to line up at the door of the school just for her to pat them on the head, because she was able to teach them the wisdom of life, love and trust. The greatest lesson she taught, however, is the treasure we have in the Redeemer and his love. She was asked by one of the students what she would say to her slave masters if she were to encounter them. She replied unhesitatingly, “If I were to meet the slave-traders who kidnapped me and even those who tortured me, I would kneel and kiss their hands, for if that did not happen, I would not be a Christian and religious today.” She looked at everything through the eyes of the wondrous treasure of faith, and the gift we receive is so great that it justified, she implied, many years in brutal slavery. Christ has come into the world to set us free precisely so that we can be free for this type of mercy, this type of gratitude, this type of love. Last year Archbishop Caccia and I traveled to the Diocese of Metuchen, to St. Augustine of Canterbury Parish in Kendall Park, to dedicate a new stained glass window to St. Josephine. There’s a beautiful image of her that dominates the stained glass. But there are three small window panes. One has her native Sudan in relief against the continent of Africa. Another is of handcuffs, chains and a key to set her free. And the third is a quotation that highlights the essential message of her life and the gift of the redemption we’ve received. “The Lord has loved me so much. We must love everyone. We must be compassionate!” She used her freedom precisely for the spreading of the love of that loving Lord and helping those whom he loves. As Pope Benedict wrote about her in his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope Spe Salvi, “She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme ‘Paron,’ before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. … The hope born in her which had ‘redeemed’ her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.” With wonder like that which filled Solomon at the Temple, St. Josephine recognized that indeed God still dwells on earth and she sought to be faithful him to him with her whole heart, which always yearned, pined and cried out for the God of life.
• Today at Mass, we’re called to be filled with awe like Solomon, to praise God, to thank him with awe for his presence, to bring our petitions to him. Because he wants to fill us with himself, he wants us to love him not with part of our heart but all of it, and that heart is transfixed by the gift of wonder. Last year at the Mass I concelebrated in Kendall Park, at communion they sang the Panis Angelicus. The cover of the program had a painting of Saint Josephine. As we were singing the beautiful words, “O Res Mirabilis, manducat Dominum pauper et servus humilis,” they took on new meaning. She was a poor and humble former slave (servus) who not only became rich and free each time she ate her Lord but became the temple of God’s dwelling on earth. O what a “Res Mirabilis,” a wondrous reality, this is. We poor and humble servants receive the Paron, the Master, fully within. May we, like the young Solomon, like St. Josephine, never cease to praise him, seek to cling to him and his commandments, and love him with all our heart, mind, soul and strength.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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