Hungering for the Perfection of Charity, First Monday of Lent, March 10, 2014

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Bernadette Parish, Fall River, MA
Monday of the First Week of Lent
March 10, 2014
Lev 19:1-2.11-18, Ps 19, Mt 25:31-46

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Friday and Saturday, the Church had us ponder what God wants from our fasting. He wants us to fast for the things for which he hungers. He wants us to share his hunger. Through the Prophet Isaiah he described various of the things for which he hungers. Today he continues to describe those hunger pains. He begins with the Code of Holiness in the Book of Leviticus. He calls us to “be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” To be holy is to share God’s deepest hungers and desires, for us and for others. To be holy is to be perfect as our Father is perfect. And since God is love, the perfection for which God hungers in us is the perfection of charity. Today he describes for us in two moments the path to that charity.
• In Leviticus he continues the Old Testament emphasis on “negative commandments,” or “thou shalt nots.” St. Paul called the Old Testament a “pedagogue,” a “disciplinarian,” something that God had given us precisely to prepare for the New. Just like a parent begins to instruct a child morally through describing what they shouldn’t do — “don’t stick the key into the electric outlet,” “don’t put your hand on the fire,” “don’t hit your little sister,” “don’t cross the road without looking both ways first” — because these are much clearer for children to understand than larger positive commands that require some interpretation and application, God does the same thing with training us toward holiness. He gives us first what we shouldn’t do.
• Through Moses in the Book of Leviticus, he tells us not to steal, not to lie or speak falsely, not to defraud or rob, not to withhold wages, not to curse the deaf, not to trip up the blind, not to make dishonest judgments, not to play favorites, not to spread slander, not to stand idly by when our neighbor’s life is threatened, not to bear hatred, not to take revenge and not to cherish grudges. All of this is summarized at the end in the positively phrased “Golden Rule,” “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” but in practice in Old Testament morality, this was understood as “Do not do to your neighbor what you would not want him to do to you.” This was the way God was training them in the perfection of holiness, by first clearly indicating to them behaviors that were contrary to charity.
• Throughout the Gospels, Jesus would himself teach us and show us what the perfection of charity was in his own care for the poor, hungry, grieving, abandoned, and all others in need. He called us to love others as he has loved us first to the point of washing their feet, crossing the road to care for their wounds, forgiving them and praying for them even when they were making themselves our enemies. But not even that was enough for Jesus. In today’s Gospel he gives us in a sense the pinnacle of his teaching on charity by identifying so much with others that he says that he takes personally whatever we do or fail to do to them. St. John wrote in his first epistle that we cannot love the God we have not seen if we don’t love the brother or sister we do see. And Jesus wants to help us to grow in the capacity for love by making it “easier” for us, calling us to treat others the way we would treat him, since he presumes that if we knew we were caring for him directly most of us would give it our best.
• And so the questions come for us:
• When we see someone who’s hungry or thirsty, do we try to help get him food or do we tell him to go get a job? And if we know that Jesus identifies with the hungry, is it enough for us to wait for someone who is hungry to approach us for food — a somewhat frequent occurrence for someone in big cities, especially outside of Churches, but a relatively rare one here in Fall River — or do we go out in search of Jesus in the disguise of the man or woman or child with hunger pains?
• Do we welcome strangers or do we resent their presence? There is a terrible xenophobia (a fear of the stranger) present in some parts of our country, including among Catholics, with regard to immigrants. Many of us don’t see them as brothers and sisters and we certainly don’t see them as Jesus Christ. If we did, would we ever ask to see Jesus’ green card? Would we ever fight to have Jesus deported? Yet this is what many Catholics clamor for with regard to immigrants who entered or stayed in our country illegally. Jesus tells us that they way we treat them is the way we treat him. We can see the same dynamic on a lesser scale happen in Catholic parishes. When a stranger comes to Church, do we welcome him or her the way we would embrace Jesus, or do we ignore the person, or even make the person feel unwelcome if he or she doesn’t know when to stand or sit or kneel at the appropriate times, or takes our pew, or has come from the street. A few months ago I saw a FaceBook post of a new Protestant Pastor who, the week before he began his work, with the permission of the elders, came to the Church secretly dressed as a homeless person. Few of the Sunday worshippers treated him at all with Christian charity. They didn’t sit near him. They didn’t welcome him the way they treated the well-dressed. In the reception after the service almost no one came to talk to him. The next week, when he was well-dressed and giving his first Sermon, he talked about charity and asked whether it was true that the Congregation had a well-deserved reputation for charity. Many heads nodded in agreement. Then he took out the broken glasses he was wearing the previous week. Then the wig. Then the fake beard and mustache. Then the worn down coat and put on the soiled pants. And he asked them whether anyone recognize him. The people were startled. They thought that they were charitable because of some of the causes they supported, but when a stranger came into their midst, most failed to give welcome, the welcome they would have given to their new minister, the welcome they would have given to Christ. It’s a lesson for us all.
• Do we clothe the naked or do we take advantage of their nudity? Today we’re living in an age of rampant pornography where so many are trained not to clothe the naked but strip them with their eyes and minds. So many fuel and fund the porn industry despite the fact that Jesus identifies with every person violated and objectified in this way. Similarly when we see someone without proper clothing, do we seek to help or do we leave the person on his own? I saw a FaceBook post last week of a student project in Denmark where a boy was sitting in a thin t-shirt on a bus bench shivering in the winter cold. There was a hidden camera filming people’s reactions. Many just ignored him. Others looked at him and wondered, probably, how the boy’s parents could send him out without a winter coat. But it was beautiful to see the reaction of a few. They took off their own jackets so that he could have it, either for the time they were waiting for the bus or permanently. If you were to leave Church today and see someone without no jacket, would you give the person yours? If the person had no shoes, and was your size, would you give the person your shoes or sneakers? If the person had no winter hat, would you volunteer yours? I have no doubt that if we left Church today and saw Christ without a shirt, or with no shoes, or with no hat, we would immediately give him ours. But Christ is calling us to do the same with each person.
• Do we a preferential care for those who are sick or do we ignore them lest we catch what they have? Do we go out of our way to visit those who are in hospitals and nursing homes, rehab centers or homebound? Sickness is one of the most vulnerable times of life, a time not only of pain but also of occasional desperation when one has to suffer alone. Jesus had a special care for the sick and he wants all of us to do so remembering that when we see anyone ill, we should recognize that Jesus is saying to us, “I am ill and I need you to care for me.”
• Do we care for prisoners at all or just think of them as a bunch of thugs of whom our only reaction should be fear? Not everyone is called to prison ministry to strangers, but when we know someone in prison, do we seek to write that person and visit? Do we pray for those who are incarcerated? Do we seek to send Rosary Beads or Bibles to help the time of imprisonment be a time of conversion rather than of hardening of hearts? When someone is released from prison and we meet the person in Church, do we continue to treat him mainly as an ex-con or do we try to help him get back on his feet?
• Jesus identified with the needy because he himself on the Cross experienced all of the attributes he describes. He was hungry on the Cross and cried out in his fifth words, “I thirst!” He was stripped totally naked (the loin cloth with which he’s vested on the Crucifix is merely for our sense of decorum). He was a stranger even in the world he created, kicked out of his own city of Jerusalem to die as a malefactor at the place of the skull. He was sick and wounded, having had his flesh ripped open by a brutal Roman scourging, having been beaten and crowned with thorns. He was imprisoned not only in the high priest’s dungeon but pinned to the cross not by chains but by nails. He continues to live out his crucifixion when people don’t care for him in others.
• If we’re going to grow into the perfection of charity, Jesus wants us to grow in our recognition of just how much he identifies with the poor and needy and identifies with us in those same circumstances. When he appeared to St. Paul on the road to Damascus, he didn’t say to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting my Church?,” but rather, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” When St. Martin of Tours met the poor shivering man at the gates of Amiens and dismounted his horse and evaginated his Roman lance, the poor man thought that his life was about to end. But Martin instead severed his great Roman cape in two and covered the poor man with half of it. Later that night, Jesus appeared to him in a dream wearing the other half of Martin’s cape saying that Martin had clothed him. And on Saturday, we commemorated the feast of St. John of God, the great Spanish saint who cared so much for the poor and sick. Once, when a poor man asked him for some alms and St. John of God was reaching into his pocket to give him what he had, he noticed that the man’s bare feet had holes in them. The Lord helped him to see that every time he was caring for a poor man, he was caring for Christ himself.
• These are all very important lessons for us. This Lent the Lord wants us to hunger for what he hungers for, and to inspire us to recognize that in every hungry stomach we Christ who wants to say, “I was hungry and you fed me.” Last Sunday we had the Gospel in which Jesus said that we shouldn’t worry about what we are to eat, drink, wear or sleep, because our heavenly Father knows our needs and will provide for us, but the way he seeks to provide is through true sons and daughters who share his own paternal charity.
• Today as we come to this Mass, we ask the Lord Jesus, who we behold under the appearances of simple bread and wine here, to help us to recognize him in the disguise of the poor we’ll meet later in the day. We ask him to help us to hunger and thirst for the charity toward others for which he hungers and thirsts. We ask him to recognize that we, too, are strangers on pilgrimage together with him and that just as he has provided for us, we’re called to share that generosity. He wants us to recognize we’re ill because of our sins and need a doctor and that he’s always been there. He desires us to recognize we’re naked and transparent before him but that he wants to clothe us in his virtues. He wants us to recognize that we’re imprisoned in our own worldly logic that rationalizes the lack of charity and that he wants to help us to use our freedom to do as much good as we can, to love as much as we can, to grow to do for others what he has first done for us. Let us ask him for all those gifts as we now prepare to receive him!

The readings for today’s Mass were: