Insistent Prayer for Mercy and for Sight, 33rd Monday (I), November 18, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
November 18, 2019
1 Mc 1:10-15.41-43.54-57.62-63, Ps 119, Lk 18:35-43

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Saturday Jesus gave us the parable of the importune woman bothering the unjust judge in order to convey to us the necessity of “praying always without losing heart.” Today we encounter the living illustration of what he was teaching in the blind man by the side of the road whom St. Mark in his version of the same scene identifies as Bartimaeus.
• Like rabbis were accustomed to do on the triennial pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. Bartimaeus was sitting by the roadside begging. He was in Jericho, literally the lowest place on earth. He heard the commotion of the crowd and asked what was happening. Upon being told that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, he immediately began to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” He didn’t cry out for alms, which would have been small. He didn’t cry out at that point for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy. He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles to the north in Galilee and was responding with faith: the fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. But his crying out for Jesus was annoying those who were trying to hear Jesus’ teaching. So the first people in the group rebuked him and told him to shut his trap. That only led him, however, to cry out all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me!” The word St. Luke uses here means basically an animal cry, something coming deep from his woundedness.
• Jesus stopped and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than whatever he was teaching at that moment. Likely, if St. Luke’s account was chronological, Jesus had been talking about the virtues of prayer, like persistence in the prayer of the importune widow and humility in the parable of the publican and the pharisee praying in the Temple. Jesus was about to show how God responds to persistent and humble prayers! Jesus asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?,” and Bartimaeus said, “Lord, please let me see!” The word used — anablepo — means in Greek to “see again.” Hence he was asking Jesus to restore the sight that he had lost. It would have been very easy for Jesus to come to meet Bartimaeus exactly where he was begging. But Jesus loved him too much and understood the human heart too well to do that. Instead he drew near, but then he had Bartimaeus get up to come to him, to exercise Bartimaeus’ freedom, to stoke his desire, to give him greater participation in the miracle Jesus himself was about to accomplish. It takes courage to get up and leave our comfort zone to respond to the Lord. Bartimaeus had that courage and did. St. Mark tells us, “He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.” The cloak was his outer garment that kept him warm at night. It was in a sense his security blanket. It was quite valuable to him and part of his life. But he was intentionally embracing a new life and establishing a new security. He left it behind, which is not just a fact but an important symbol of how he was thinking more about clinging to Jesus and the new life for which he was hoping than clinging to the past. The second element is he “sprang up.” Even though he was blind, he got up immediately. He always raced to respond to his being called by the Lord. Unlike the excuse makers in other sections of the Gospel who said that they would follow Jesus after they had buried their father (who might die three decades later), inspected their oxen, enjoyed their honeymoon, etc., Bartimaeus responded with alacrity. To some degree, Bartimaeus was already seeing by faith but he wanted to see Jesus with physical eyes so that he would be able to do exactly what he did once he was cured, to “follow him, giving glory to God.” Jesus replied, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.” The Lord not only gave him his wish to see, but heard his initial cry to have mercy on him, and Jesus’ generosity far outdid Bartimaeus’ imagination to ask. Faith in response to God leads to salvation, and even though Bartimaeus didn’t dare ask for that, God gave it. Bartimaeus used his sight and his freedom to follow Jesus. He left the depth of Jericho behind and followed Jesus up to Jerusalem. St. Luke’s comment, “He immediately received his sight and followed him, giving glory to God, and when they saw this, all the people gave praise to God” (Lk 18:43), suggests he spent the rest of his life glorifying God in such a way that others joined him in that divine praise.
• This cry of Bartimaeus is one of the most beautiful and frequent Christian aspirations: Domine, ut videam!, “Lord, I want to see.” Many times we too give into blindness, we can no longer see our dignity, or see past the temptations of the evil one, or see God in the midst of daily life. That’s what happened to the Jews in the first reading today. Many of them lost a sense of their dignity and sought to accommodate themselves to the way of life of the Ptolemeian Greeks from Egypt, covering up the signs of their consecration, giving in to their bellies like the pagans, not recognizing that their circumcision and their dietary laws were means to make sure that they would always order their natural sexual and physical appetites to God. Some remained faithful, as we’ll be seeing in readings later this week, even to the point of their death. For those who didn’t, the Son of David would come to try to do for them what he did for Bartimaeus.
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who shows us what persistent and humble prayer, and a life that sees by faith, looks like. St. Rose Philippine Duchesne was born to a wealthy family in France; her father was a banker and businessman and her mother part of a family that eventually produced a French president. After having been educated by the Visitation nuns, she wanted to join them, but her father wanted her to enter into a fitting marriage. So she needed to run away. The French Revolution closed her convent and after trying to reestablish it, she joined St. Madeleine Sophie Barat in the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and eventually accepted a mission to come to the United States to teach Americans how to pray and see the world by faith. At the age of 49, with five other sisters, she embarked on a grueling 20-week journey across the Atlantic and up the Mississippi River. Rose was sick the entire voyage and twice was near death, but she soldiered on until they arrived in St. Louis. The bishop established them in St. Charles and gave them a one-room log cabin, which they used to found a school for poor children, the first free school west of the Mississippi. Thus began 34 years of missionary toil in brutal conditions. The sisters needed to leave their cloaks behind, so to speak, and battle cold, hunger, sickness and deprivation, not to mention opposition to their French teaching methods, ingratitude and even calumny. “Poverty and Christian heroism are here,” she wrote succinctly back to the motherhouse, “and trials are the riches in this land.” About the calumny, she joked, “They say everything about us, except that we poison the children.” All of these crosses, however, served merely to prove and magnify her Christian virtue, and to spur her to share with children and fellow sisters the sweetness of a life in conformity with God’s word. Vocations from among her students started to come in large numbers and she was able to establish new houses, schools and orphanages in Florissant, Grand Côteau, New Orleans, St. Louis and St. Michael. As hard as she was working among the settlers in the frontier, she longed to bring the Gospel to the Indians, so that they could learn to see by faith as well. She got her wish when she was 72. By this point, she had become ill enough that she had asked to step down as superior. When a request came in from the famous Jesuit missionary Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet to help establish a school for the Patawatomi in Sugar Creek, Kansas, she volunteered to go. Her fellow sisters wanted to prevent her from the difficult work in her frail condition, but not only did she insist on going but so did Fr. De Smet. “She must come,” the black-robed apostle demanded. “She may not be able to do much work, but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us. Her very presence will draw down all manner of heavenly favors on the work.” That’s precisely what she did and what happened. It had been hard enough for her to learn English upon coming to America at about the age of 50. It was near impossible for her to learn the Indian dialect, but she did the best she could to teach the young Indian girls about Jesus. What she couldn’t convey in words, she conveyed in action. She spent most of her days and nights on her knees in prayer before Jesus in the Eucharist, which taught the Indians more about the real presence of Christ than hundreds of catechism classes. Once, young squaws placed small pieces of paper on the back of her habit to see if she’d move during the night and go to bed. They came back in the morning and the pieces of paper were exactly where they had placed them. So moved were they by her example that they gave her a precise nickname: Quah-hak-ka-num-ad, “the woman who always prays.” Her prayers led to many conversions and great fruitfulness. The Lord in prayer was asking what she wanted and she said souls. Last Sunday I was in St. Louis and I visited the Cathedral Basilica, which I believe is the country’s most beautiful Church. I was very pleased to see in the Garden area outside the Cathedral a new grotto with a statue of St. Rose Philippine sitting, listening, with two benches for people to sit and talk with her. There’s a sign encouraging such conversation. What she is saying in response might be as unintelligible as what she would try to say to the Patawatomi but doubtless she would be praying that each of us, in our own way, might become “Quah-hak-ka-num-ad,” people who pray insistently that we may have faith and understanding so that we might follow Jesus always and glorify him as he deserves.
• Today we began Mass by echoing Bartimaeus’ cry to have mercy on us — and Jesus has had mercy in calling us to himself over and again. Today the same Jesus who has passed by our lives and invited us to follow him passes by St. Andrew’s, summoning us by name, and asking, “What do you want me to do for you!” With gratitude for all his gifts, we ask him for the grace to see Him in the Eucharist, to see him in those we serve, to see him in all those crying out, and finally with, we pray, Bartimaeus, with St. Rose Philippine and all the saints who always pray around his throne, one day to behold him face-to-face!

The readings for today’s Mass were: