Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, New York
Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
September 12, 2021
Eph 3:13-21, Lk 14:1-11
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
- Today, by means of a parable on seats at a dinner gathering, Jesus teaches us about the humility necessary for us to come to the eternal banquet. The parable flat contradicts the way many in the world, including sometimes many of us Christians, behave. We see it in the ever-growing number of award shows indulging the egos of those in film, television and music, all giving out awards for best actors, actresses, directors, producers, graphic artists, costume designers, film editors, hairstylists, production designer, sound mixers, screen play writers, you name it. We see it in the honors we give to the students who are “Most Popular” “Most Friendly, and “Most Likely to Succeed,” to the “Best Looking” women in pageants, to the “Most Successful” sales representatives, to the “Most Valuable Player” not just of the year but of the week, and even to the “best groomed” dogs. So many of us have been raised with the desire not only tobe the best, but to be acknowledged as the best. And if we recognize begrudgingly that we’re not the best, we at least want to be better than those with whom we come into contact. We want to get our own way, rather than conceding to the wishes of another. We want everyone to acknowledge our rights and their responsibilities. We want to get the last word, rather than concede it to someone else. We want to be the ones noticed and thanked, and resent it if others get the credit we think we deserve. In short, we hunger to be noticed, esteemed, and exalted. We want the places of honor at table, first class seats on airplanes and front row seats and back stage passes at concerts. We want waiters and butlers to serve us, chauffeurs to drive us, and the rich, famous and important to call us. We long for positions of power and influence and titles of status and worldly honor.
- Today, however, Jesus calls us to a different standard, a higher standard that is at the same time, paradoxically, a lower one. He tell us, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” He who elsewhere in the Gospel told us, “Learn from me, for I am meek andhumble of heart”(Mt 11:29), whose whole life was a lesson in humility, wants to help us learn from him how to serve rather than to be served, to seek the lowest place rather than the highest, to treasure God’s esteem rather than others’ adulation so that God may say to us, in this world and the next, “My friend, come up higher!” The way to be exalted at Jesus’ right side forever is humbly to serve at Jesus’ side here on earth, and to follow him not just in seeking the lowest places at table but in getting up from the table like he did at the Last Supper, picking up the basin and towel to wash others’ feet, and serving them in such self-effacing ways.
- Paul describes Jesus’ humility best in his letter to the Philippians, grounding our humility on the unbelievable humility the Son of God: “Do nothing,” he tells us, “from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, butemptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:3-11).
- Jesus, St. Paul emphasizes, humbled himself to assume our human nature, to take upon the form of a slave to serve us (Mt 20:28), to become obedient to human authority, and even to allow himself to be mistreated, manhandled and murdered by his own creatures, all so that he might save us. He humbled himself and God the Father exalted him forever. St. Peter said that Jesus did all of this to leave us an example, so that we would follow in his footsteps (1Pet 2:21). To enter into Jesus’ exaltation we first must enter into his humility.
- That’s easier said than done. To become humble in a proud and self-exalting age, we must first know what humility is and then know and choose the means by which we can grow in humility.
- Let’s begin with what humility means. Humility comes from the Latin word, humus, which means ground or dirt. It has various connected spiritual meanings. It means, first, that we have both of our feet on the ground, that we have a deep sense of who we are. As we hear every year on Ash Wednesday, we recognize we’re dust and unto dust we shall return. We acknowledge our human weaknesses, frailties and limitations. At the same time, however, humility means that even though know we’re dust, we also recognize that God has breathed into us the breath of life, that he calls us through a humble life to greatness, to a communion of love with him and others. To use St. Paul’s image, we’re vessels of clay carrying within an immense treasure; (2 Cor 4:7). To be humble, we need to keep both of these things in mind. To be humble doesn’t mean that we think that we’re losers. Consistent with the overall message of the Gospel, it means, rather, that we’re ex-slaves who have been liberated by Jesus who have become adopted children of the King. Humility means never forgetting where we have come from, but also remembering the greatness that our relationship with God confers on us.
- If that’s what humility is, we can now turn to how to grow in humility. I’d like to mention five practices.
- The first is to recognize and treasure the love God has for us. Today in the first reading, St. Paul drops to his knees and prays that the Christians in Ephesus would come to comprehend with all the saints the breadth, length, height and depth of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that they would know the love of God the Father from whom all fatherly and familial love in the world flows, that the might be strengthened by the Spirit of Love in their inner self so that they might all be “rooted and grounded in love” and have that “power” come to “work within” them. One of the things that spawns pride, that drives us to prop ourselves up and seek better places at tables, is that we don’t always remember who we are already in God and the greatness we bear as his beloved children. We seek worldly honors, esteem, and perches because we don’t recognize how much God esteems and loves us, how much he’s honored us by adopting us into the royal family, and how he already has ready for us the greatest seats of all in heaven, provided that we’re able to abase ourselves on earth enough to be exalted to take those exalted places at the eternal banquet. We seek after human respect, worldly titles and positions because, psychologically, we think we need them. The more we focus on who we are in God’s eyes, the more we will see that worldly honors are a vanity of vanities — and sometimes even a millstone.
- The second practice is truly prioritizing the love of others. Paul, as we heard a little earlier in his reflections on Jesus’ humility, taught us, “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Look not to your own interests but to the interests of others.” The more we grow in our awareness of God’s love for us, the more we will grow in awareness of God’s love for others, and that will help us to prioritize their interests over ours.One of the reasons why we fight for seats at tables rather than for towels to wash others’ feet is because we struggle truly to love others because of exaggerated self-love and self-protection. When we love someone, however, we want them to have the best seats, even if that means we sit behind them. When we love someone, we want them to be praised, well-fed, helped, and happy. That’s why when we grow in love of others such that we serve them willingly, we become humbler without often even knowing it. This is a lesson that those at the dinner party in the Gospel didn’t grasp. Someone with dropsy — and edema, or swelling caused by fluid retention — was there, perhaps as a plant, to test whether Jesus would cure him on the Sabbath. Jesus didn’t hesitate. After asking whether it was lawful to cure on the Sabbath or not — whether it was possible to do good deeds on the Lord’s day! — he healed the man. The principle Jesus gave was no one would ever allow one of their children or even animals who fell into a cistern to remain in there on the Sabbath but would work on the Sabbath to rescue him. Jesus, therefore, with merciful affection, wouldn’t allow this man one more day to remain with dropsy. Jesus’ analogy highlights that we always do something with urgency for someone or something we really care about, who matters to us, whom we love, and we would see that such authentic love for that person would not be a violation of God’s will or law. The problem for the Pharisees was that they just didn’t really care about the man with dropsy. They didn’t love him at all, not to mention with affection or mercy. Jesus did. Jesus acts with the same urgency urgency for us and our salvation, because he cares for us more than a parent cares for a child or a farmer cares for his animals. And he wants us to imitate that loving concern, that same urgency. The more we do, the greater and the faster we will progress in humility, provided we act with love for others rather than a desire to be noticed. On this weekend on which we mark the 20thanniversary of the diabolical terrorist attacks of 9/11 and pray for all those who died and their families who continue to mourn their loved ones’ absence, we recall with admiration and gratitude all those who gave their lives trying to save others, the heroic first responders, the valiant passengers on United 93, the multitudes who lined up to give blood, the boat owners who formed a flotilla to rescue people from lower Manhattan, the soldiers who went to Afghanistan in the hunt for the terrorists and to attack their capacity to recapitulate these horrors and so many others who were humble enough to sacrifice themselves with urgency for the sake of others. And we pray that God exalt them for their humble, loving, Christ-like service.
- The third practice to grow in humility is humble prayer. Not all prayer is humble. Jesus told a parable of the two men who went up to the temple to pray, one a despised tax collector and the other a respected Pharisee. The tax collector sat in the back beating his chest and crying, “Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.” The Pharisee, on the other hand, sat in the front to be noticed and prayed aloud thanking God for not making him a loser like so many others, but rather one who said his prayers, paid his tithes, and did his fasts and so on — forgetting all the while that he was full of pride, judgmentalism, and arrogance, sins perhaps more deadly than the sins of the publican to whom he was comparing himself. Jesus tells us that only one of the two left the Temple in a right relationship with God, the humble tax collector, not the self-righteous proud Pharisee. We, too, are called to pray humbly and to pray specifically for the gift of humility. One of the most helpful prayers I’ve ever found to do this is Cardinal Merry del Val’s Litany of Humility. Merry del Val was only 38 when Pope St. Pius X gave him these responsibilities in 1903. He was highly capable, fluent in many languages, the son of a union between Spanish and English nobles, with many spiritual gifts. It was unsurprising that many were slotting him for even greater things as the leading papabilein the next conclave. It was easy for all of this to go to his head. So he composed a Litany of Humility, one of the most daring prayers ever written. The prayer begins by turning Jesus and begging, “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, hear me.” Then the Litany begins by asking Jesus to free us from our proud desires. “Deliver me, Jesus,” we pray, “from the desire of being loved, …extolled, …honored, …praised, …preferred to others, …consulted, …approved.” When we’re not conscious of how much God loves, extol, and honors us, we seek these things from others. The prayer continues by asking Jesus to free us from the fears that impede humility: “Deliver me, Jesus, from the fear of being humiliated, …despised, …rebuked, … calumniated, … forgotten, … ridiculed, …wronged, … being suspected.” Even though Jesus endured of these things throughout in his public ministry and particularly in his passion, and despite our looking to him on the Cross as the happiest man who has ever lived and claiming to be following him along that path, we flee from what he himself endured. That’s why we need to pray to Jesus, meek and humble of heart, to free us from the fear of being humble and from the fear of the path that will help us become humble. The final part of the Litany prays for the good desires that should fill our hearts in order to become more like Jesus. We pray, “Jesus grant me the grace to desire… that others may be esteemed more than I, that in the opinion of the world others may increase and I may decrease, that others may be chosen and I set aside, that others may be praised and I unnoticed, that others may be preferred to me in everything, that others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should.” That is basically a prayer to help us to love as God calls us to love. When we love others, we lose ourselves in this love and want the best for them.
- The fourth practice Christ teaches us is to accept sufferings and humiliations well. We can’t be human without experiencing suffering, embarrassment, put downs, and other highly unpleasant circumstances. But these things can make us bitter or better, depending on whether we relate them to the Lord and give him permission to draw good out of them for us. When a proud, self-reliant man, for example, gets hospitalized and becomes so dependent that a nurse even has to change his bedpans, it can make him humble really quick if he responds to the help with gratitude rather than grumbling. When a couple or a family experiences a job loss and has to ask family members, or neighbors, or the Church, or even the government for help, it can be a great opportunity to grow in humility and appreciation for the love of others. When we’ve got a critic who just thinks we can never do anything right, who rides us, always assuming the worst, it can make us either proud or rebellious or it can be a chance for us to grow in humility, because even if they’re off on the actual things for which they’re criticizing us, there could be many other things they don’t know for which we’d be able to be justly criticized. The cross of suffering and humiliations help us to die to our ego, and one of the reasons why God allows us to endure such things is precisely because they can help us grow in humility, and growth in this virtue far outweighs whatever we “lose” in such circumstances. Today in Poland Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, the great mentor of Saint John Paul II and defender of Poland under communism, was beatified. He was imprisoned for three years by the communists, but used that time to grow in the strength of Christian humility to help his fellow Poles suffering humiliating indignities to unite everything to Christ, meek and humble of heart. Here in Auriesville, we can think about the humiliations endured by Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and Jean de Lalande in their confinements and martyrdoms, we can think about the suffering endured by Saint Kateri from the fellow members of her tribe, and acknowledge now how God used those abasements not only to sanctify them, but to help sanctify us. God wants us similarly to unite whatever we have to endure to him.
- The fifth and last practice I’ll mention are the sacraments. Every sacrament is an admission that we are not self-sufficient, that we need God and his grace. In each Sacrament we go to God with empty hands and ask him to give us himself in the way we need. But we can highlight two Sacraments that God allows us to receive over and again that help us grow in humility. The first is the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. We recognize our sins and failings but, even more importantly, we recognize the infinite treasure of God’s mercy and go humbly to ask him for forgiveness and help. There’s no better way to fight against pride than humbly to examine our consciences and to see that we’re not who we ought to be, that in our thoughts, words, acts and omissions, we have “greatly sinned” and strayed big time from the path of Christ’s footsteps, and come to God for mercy. The fact that we kneel when we go to confession is itself a practice that helps us to mature in humility. The fact that we often have to confess the same sins over and over again — that no matter how hard we try, we still have a temper, or give in to impatience, or walk straight back into occasions of sin — likewise helps us to remember both our weakness as well as the treasure of God’s patience and paternal kindness. If we’re not regularly going to confession, it’s likely that one of the reasons is a lack of humility, a pride that convinces us that we don’t really have any sins or that our sins aren’t “that bad,” or a pride that says, “I’ll confess my sins directly to God,” rather than confess our sins in the way Jesus himself established through his Church. To grow in humility, Jesus wants to teach us one-on-one in the Sacrament of Mercy, but we need to go to him as we learn humility of heart as his heart opens with blood and water to cleanse us from our sins.
- The second Sacrament is the Holy Eucharist, which is the perhaps greatest means of all that we can learn from Jesus who is meek and humble of heart. This morning in Budapest, Hungary, Pope Francis concluded the International Eucharistic Congress, in which the Church throughout the world came together to thank God for this wondrous gift. St. Paul, as we heard earlier, marveled that even though Jesus was God, he didn’t grasp onto this identity but emptied himself, took on our nature and the form of a slave, and in humility became obedient even to death on a Cross. Here in the Eucharist his humility goes even further. On Calvary he hid only his divinity; here he hides even his humanity under the appearances of simple bread and wine. He abases himself this much because he loves us this much. He becomes so small in order to feed us, to serve us, to change us, to make us holy from the inside. It’s here that we learn from him likewise how to become small and humble, how to decrease so that he and others can increase, so that together with him we can go out to serve others in such a way that through us and our Christian example, they might themselves follow us on thevia humilitatis and be exalted by God forever. As we come to receive Jesus in Holy Communion, let us ask him, for others first and for ourselves second, “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts humble like yours!” Amen!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians
Brothers and Sisters, I ask you not to lose heart over my afflictions for you; this is your glory. For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he may grant you in accord with the riches of his glory to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner self, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the holy ones what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to accomplish far more than all we ask or imagine, by the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.
The Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Luke
On a sabbath he went to dine at the home of one of the leading Pharisees, and the people there were observing him carefully. In front of him there was a man suffering from dropsy. Jesus spoke to the scholars of the law and Pharisees in reply, asking, “Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath or not?” But they kept silent; so he took the man and, after he had healed him, dismissed him. Then he said to them, “Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern, would not immediately pull him out on the sabbath day?” But they were unable to answer his question. He told a parable to those who had been invited, noticing how they were choosing the places of honor at the table. “When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not recline at table in the place of honor. A more distinguished guest than you may have been invited by him, and the host who invited both of you may approach you and say, ‘Give your place to this man,’ and then you would proceed with embarrassment to take the lowest place. Rather, when you are invited, go and take the lowest place so that when the host comes to you he may say, ‘My friend, move up to a higher position.’ Then you will enjoy the esteem of your companions at the table. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
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