Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Bruno and of Bl. Marie Rose Durocher
October 6, 2021
Jon 4:1-11, Ps 86, Lk 11:1-4
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following points were attempted in the homily:
- Yesterday we pondered the example of Mary of Bethany sitting at Jesus’ feet, allowing him to feed her. She had chosen the better part and the one thing necessary, the activity more important than all others. Today we see Jesus sitting at the feet of his Father in prayer. His example of prayer brought the disciples to ask him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John [the Baptist] taught his disciples.” Jesus had already taught them much about prayer by his parables describing the need to pray with perseverance, patience, humility, purity of intention, faith, without show and in his name. He had taught them much by his example of prayer, constantly going out at night or early in the morning to pray. But they were asking for some direct instruction, to have Jesus open up to them the mystery of intimacy with God.
- It’s noteworthy that Jesus didn’t reply to their request by teaching them a posture of prayer, telling them to kneel, close their eyes and fold their hands. He didn’t instruct them to go through breathing exercises or other techniques to empty themselves of distractions. He didn’t indicate how to listen to God, like Eli taught Samuel to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” He didn’t give them a meditation method. He didn’t even given them a formula of vocal prayer, something seen by the fact that Luke’s rendition of the Lord’s Prayer is different from Matthew’s, a sign that Jesus wasn’t passing out “magic words” as much as trying to pass on an attitude, a whole approach to prayer; he wasn’t imparting a quid ores (a what you are to say when you pray) but a qualis ores (a who you are as you pray), as St. Augustine was wont to say. And what was that approach?
- Everything can be summarized by the first word he taught them: Abba! He taught them to turn not to some cosmic life-force way out in the heavens, or to some slavemaster or judge or apathetic Creator, but to a “Father.” This is the open secret of what Jesus teaches us about prayer. We see his own prayers: “I give you praise, Father, … for having revealed these things to the merest of children.” “I thank you, Father, for having heard me. I know that you always hear me.” “Father, glorify your name!” “Father, take this chalice away from me!” “Father, forgive them!” “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.” Jesus’ prayers were all to the Father, to whom he turned with great trust and love. In teaching us how to pray, Jesus was trying to form us to enter into his own divine filiation and to pray with loving confidence. He told us in the Sermon on the Plain that if earthly parents aren’t sadists but know how to give good things to their children, so God the Father won’t give us a stone when we ask for bread, or a poisonous eel when we ask for fish, but will give himself — the Holy Spirit — no matter what we ask for. To pray as Jesus taught is to enter into that relationship of love with the Father. Everything else Jesus taught us about prayer flows from that.
- He instructs us to pray, “Hallowed by thy name,” and “Your Kingdom come,” which means that we are seeking God’s glory not our own, his kingdom not ours. St. Matthew’s inclusion of Jesus’ words “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is just a magnification of seeking God’s kingdom and the glory of his name. Jesus is helping us to remember that prayer should first be about God, not about ourselves.
- But precisely because prayer is about God and God loves and cares for us, Jesus gives us some indications about how we should bring our needs to God in prayer. When we grasp that God is a loving Father, we should trust in his Providence. He knows what we need even before we ask it and he cares for us more than the lilies of the field or the sparrows in the sky. So Jesus says we should ask, “Give us each day our daily bread.” We don’t ask for security in material possessions or big grain bins. Instead, we trust in him to provide every day out of love. We trust in him not to forget us. And unlike the Jews in the desert who complained about the daily Manna, we’re called to be satisfied with the Father’s continued provisions. The word for “daily” is “epiousios,” which means “super-substantial,” which for the Fathers of the Church always pointed to Jesus in the Eucharist, the daily True Manna that the Father gives us.
- Then he helps us to relate to him with regard to his mercy, teaching us to say, “Forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.” We’re all prodigal sons and daughters, but the Father never ceases to forgive us. Jesus wants us to relate to God in those terms and never to forget that, first, we need his mercy, and then second, we’re supposed to become like him in sharing that mercy with others. If we don’t see ourselves as in need of his mercy, we can’t relate to him because we don’t know who he is or who we are. And if we’re not sharing that mercy with others, then our hearts will be closed to receive God’s mercy, too, for as Jesus indicated in the parable of the two debtors, what others owe us on account of their sins against us is nothing compared to the debts we owe God for our sins against him. But he wants to envelope us in that mercy. We’ll return to this in a moment.
- The final petition is, “Do not subject us to the final test.” We recognize our weakness and ask God not to test us beyond our strength. We know that God often tests us in order to help us grow. Every time we’re tempted to impatience but behave as patiently toward others as God is toward us, we grow in patience. We pass the test. Likewise every time we sacrifice for others and overcome our selfishness, we grow in the virtue of generosity and become more and more like God who lets us rain fall on the fields of the good and bad. In humbly asking God not to test us beyond our strength, we are precisely acknowledging that, because he will never refuse prayers made in Jesus’ name, whatever tests we do face are within our strength when we’re weak enough to rely on God’s strength (Phil 4:13). It’s a beautiful summary of the entire attitude Jesus instructions us to assume in the dialogue of persons that is prayer. We’re asking God’s grace to relate to him as beloved sons and daughters, to seek his glory and kingdom, to trust he will always provide what we truly need and never turn his merciful heart away from us when we sincerely beg him for mercy. To pray is to enter into this love of the Father!
- Today we can ponder in a particular way the petition about mercy, since it is central to the story of Jonah and the Psalm. We are nearing the end of three weeks of focus on the post-exilic writings that were all about the rebuilding of the Temple and the mercy of God that made it possible. In the story of Nineveh, the great pagan city of Assyria, we see an image of the type of conversion God wanted to see from his chosen people in Jerusalem and the type of mercy that gave this fresh start. God, we praise in the Psalm, is “merciful and gracious,” “good and forgiving, abounding in kindness to all who call upon” him, which is why together with the Psalmist we have confidence to ask, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, for to you I call all the day.” But this healing balm was something Jonah didn’t appreciate. God’s mercy, in fact, angered him. “Jonah was greatly displeased,” we read, “and became angry that God did not carry out the evil he threatened against Nineveh.” Whether his anger flowed from pride that God didn’t carry out the destruction Jonah had announced to the Ninevites, or indignation that he had been inconvenienced to leave his home and come to Nineveh to preach, we don’t know. But he claims that God’s mercy was the reason “why I fled at first to Tarshish,” as if he was running away from God’s goodness, which is totally revisionist history! (He fled because he was afraid of announcing harsh words, that they would attack the messenger, rather than embrace the message as they did.) Jonah says, “I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loath to punish. And now, Lord, please take my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.” It’s funny: the only reason why he was alive in the first place is because God is merciful and gracious, forgave him his desertion and saved his life. Jonah thought that his complaining to the Lord might have an impact, however, and so went outside the city to wait to see if God would in fact destroy the city. The Lord used a gourd plant to teach him an important lesson: that just Jonah didn’t want to lose the gourd plant, which had grown up just for a day, so God didn’t want to lose the Ninevites, 120,000 of whom he was still raising even though spiritually they could not “distinguish their right hand from their left.” To pray to the Father is to ask to become like the Father and Jesus’ whole work was that we might become merciful as our Father is merciful. And we have a greater than Jonah teaching us that lesson.
- Today the Church celebrates two holy ones who learned from Christ how to pray and who have for centuries been teaching the Church how to pray better. The first is St. Bruno, the founder of the Carthusians, who are the strictest male religious order in the Church, whose whole lives prioritize prayer as the one thing necessary. When Pope Benedict visited a Carthusian monastery in 2011, he called the way of life founded by St. Bruno “an oasis in which the deep well, from which to draw ‘living water’ to quench our deepest thirst, is constantly being dug with prayer and meditation.” The charterhouse is a special oasis in which silence and solitude are preserved with special care, in accordance with the form of life founded by St Bruno and which has remained unchanged down the centuries. Quoting Saint Bruno, he said, that “‘in a divine and persevering vigilance [monks] await the return of their Lord so that they might be able to open the door to him as soon as he knocks’ and the beauty of [their] vocation … consists precisely in this: giving God time to act with his Spirit and to one’s own humanity to form itself, to grow in that particular state of life according to the measure of the maturity of Christ.” Similarly today we have Blessed Marie Rose Durocher, the foundress of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, who in French Canada responded to the Lord’s call and founded a new religious order in Canada and the US (including one parish where I was pastor) to teach countless generations of children how to prioritize him in all aspects of their life. She had lived a hidden life for 13 years in her brother Theophile’s rectory — he was a priest — because her poor health prevented her entry into the only two female congregations then existing in Quebec. At his suggestion, and the new bishop of Montreal’s, following the example of the Brothers of Christian Schools, she converted her contemplative work into a foundation of teaching sisters, to train others to prioritize Jesus in imitation of Mary’s worth in Bethlehem, Nazareth and Calvary. John Paul II said at her 1982 beatification (together with St. André Bessette), “Her secret resided in prayer and self-forgetting.” Each of us, responding to Jesus’ example and invitation, need to lose ourselves in a similar way.
- The Mass is one long prayer to God the Father through Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit who helps us to cry out “Abba!” It was in the first Mass — from the Last Supper to Calvary — in which Jesus begged for the glorification of his Father’s name, inaugurated his kingdom, gave us our daily supersubstantial nourishment, died to take away the sins of the world, prayed that the Father would keep us from the evil one, and expressed his desire that all of us would be as united as he and the Father are united. Today we don’t seek solace under a gourd plant, but do so here before the altar, where God the Father’s merciful design reaches its culmination, as we prepare to receive his Son’s body and blood shed on Calvary for the forgiveness of sins, an even greater gift than God gave to the Ninevites. Today let us dare to enter into this prayer of Jesus at the altar as he continues to teach us both how to pray and become merciful like the Father!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 JON 4:1-11
Jonah was greatly displeased
and became angry that God did not carry out the evil
he threatened against Nineveh.
He prayed, “I beseech you, LORD,
is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?
This is why I fled at first to Tarshish.
I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God,
slow to anger, rich in clemency, loath to punish.
And now, LORD, please take my life from me;
for it is better for me to die than to live.”
But the LORD asked, “Have you reason to be angry?”
Jonah then left the city for a place to the east of it,
where he built himself a hut and waited under it in the shade,
to see what would happen to the city.
And when the LORD God provided a gourd plant
that grew up over Jonah’s head,
giving shade that relieved him of any discomfort,
Jonah was very happy over the plant.
But the next morning at dawn
God sent a worm that attacked the plant,
so that it withered.
And when the sun arose, God sent a burning east wind;
and the sun beat upon Jonah’s head till he became faint.
Then Jonah asked for death, saying,
“I would be better off dead than alive.”
But God said to Jonah,
“Have you reason to be angry over the plant?”
“I have reason to be angry,” Jonah answered, “angry enough to die.”
Then the LORD said,
“You are concerned over the plant which cost you no labor
and which you did not raise;
it came up in one night and in one night it perished.
And should I not be concerned over Nineveh, the great city,
in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons
who cannot distinguish their right hand from their left,
not to mention the many cattle?”
Responsorial Psalm PS 86:3-4, 5-6, 9-10
R. (15) Lord, you are merciful and gracious.
Have mercy on me, O Lord,
for to you I call all the day.
Gladden the soul of your servant,
for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
R. Lord, you are merciful and gracious.
For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
abounding in kindness to all who call upon you.
Hearken, O LORD, to my prayer
and attend to the sound of my pleading.
R. Lord, you are merciful and gracious.
All the nations you have made shall come
and worship you, O Lord,
and glorify your name.
For you are great, and you do wondrous deeds;
you alone are God.
R. Lord, you are merciful and gracious.
AlleluiaROM 8:15BC
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
You have received a spirit of adoption as sons
through which we cry: Abba! Father!
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 11:1-4
Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished,
one of his disciples said to him,
“Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.”
He said to them, “When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name,
your Kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread
and forgive us our sins
for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us,
and do not subject us to the final test.”
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