Jesus’ Helping Us To Grow In Our Communion With Him and Others, Fifth Saturday (II), February 10, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Saturday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Scholastica
Campus Retreat on The Five Stages to Grow in Faith
February 10, 2024
1 Kings 12:26-32.13:33-34, Ps 106, Mk 8:1-10

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, as we enter more deeply into the theme of our retreat on the Five Stages to Growing in Faith, we see in the Gospel how the Lord Jesus seeks to help his disciples to grow in their communion with him. They had already encountered Jesus, experienced a conversion from their previous way of life, and begun to follow him, as he journeyed teaching, preaching, healing and exorcising throughout Galilee and Judea not to mention the pagan territories of Tyre, Sidon and the Decapolis. Today in the Gospel we see how he wishes to advance them in mercy, so that they might experience a true communion with others and a mission to take personal responsibility for their welfare. The crowds who were listening to Jesus for three days had nothing to eat. Jesus told his closest followers, “My heart is moved with pity for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat.” His heart was exploding with mercy for the people and he didn’t want to send them home hungry, lest, famished, they not make it. The disciples objected, “Where can anyone can get enough bread to satisfy them here in this deserted place?” They were right. Many supermarkets today wouldn’t even have enough food to feed 4000 families. In the ancient middle east, there wouldn’t even have been enough bread. But Jesus didn’t want to allow his disciples to exempt them from responsibility. He wanted communion with him and, in him, with others. “How many loves do you have?,” he asked. They had only seven and a few fish. Jesus had the crowd sit down, he took the loaves and fish they had brought him, gave thanks, blessed them, broke them and gave them to the disciples to distribute. Every one ate until he or she was full. There were seven baskets left over, one for every original loaf. Jesus could have worked the miracle so that there would not be a crumb remaining, but he worked it so that the seven who had sacrificed a loaf would each receive a basket back, a reminder of Jesus’ promise to return to us a hundred fold. The lesson learned that day was about true merciful love of neighbor, true communion with their plight, and our mission to help Jesus care for them. We may not have have everything we need, but Jesus asks us, like he asked them, what we have, and wants us to give him back what he has bestowed on us so that he can multiply those gifts to care for a world that still hungers for bread, but hungers for far more than bread: that hungers for him and for the outpouring of his life, light and love. Just as Jesus helped his disciples then to grow in faith, so he seeks to help us. He wants us to look out at the world, beginning with our fellow students on campus and those around Morningside, with his mercy, and to make a commitment to use whatever gifts we have to promote a true encounter with him, so that having met him, they might be converted by and through his mercy, learn from him, enter into communion with him and us and be so transformed that they begin to have their hearts, too, moved with pity for others.
• While Jesus is calling us to such grown in faith, from encounter to mission, from meeting God to trying to bring others to God, there are others who are seeking to distance us from God. We see that in today’s first reading with the infernal figure of Jeroboam. Yesterday at daily Mass the Church had us ponder how Jeroboam, whom Solomon had in charge of his labor force, was met by the prophet Ahijah, who tore his new cloak into 12 pieces and told Jeroboam that ten of those pieces, representing the ten tribes of Israel, would be given to him when Solomon’s kingdom would be divided as a result of Solomon’s fostering of idolatry. Solomon, we remember, had been given at 18 — the age of a college freshman — the most “wise and understanding heart” of all time and had built the Temple of the Lord. But eventually, he gave in to lust, his heart was corrupted, and he started to build temples to the pagan gods of his 700 wives and 300 concubines. Rather than leading people to God, he had begun to lead people away from God, to break the first and the greatest commandment. Jeroboam had been chosen by the Lord to rule the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel precisely because of Solomon’s idolatry. And yet, as we see today, despite the Lord’s trust, promise and help, Jeroboam thought to himself, “The kingdom will return to David’s house” if the people he was ruling returned to worshipping at the Temple of Jerusalem. They would return not to God, he thought in his politically corrupted musings, but to Rehoboam, David’s grandson and Solomon’s son through an Ammonite wife. And because of his ego and his paranoid sense of self-preservation, Jeroboam led his people into idolatry just like God had condemned Solomon for doing. Jeroboam said, “If now this people go up to offer sacrifices in the temple of the LORD in Jerusalem, the hearts of this people will return to their master, Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me.” So he decided to change their deity, their temple, their rites, and their priests. Instead of the one true God who had chosen him, he made golden calves. Instead of the Temple where God’s presence dwelt, he built two shrines, one in Dan at the northernmost part of the kingdom along the Jordan River above the Sea of Galilee, and one in Bethel, at the southernmost part of the kingdom a short distance north of Jerusalem. Instead of the feasts God set up, he established his own. And instead of the levites, the priests God had chosen, he allowed anyone who wanted to be a priest to be commissioned. And the people were led away by him from the true God and the temple, the feasts and the priests God himself had established.
• We might think that this is just a terrible thing that happened 920-930 years before Christ, but what Jeroboam did in drawing people away from God happens in every age. There are many rulers who have sought to suppress worship of the true God in order to advance their political objectives. Think of what happened to the Jews during the time of Antioches Epiphanes IV or the Christians during the 13 ferocious anti-Christian persecutions between 64-313 AD. Think about what happened to the Japanese Christians at the beginning of the 1600s or the Christians in communist countries last century and the Chinese, North Korean, and Cuban governments still today. There have been many Jeroboams over the course of history! But we also need to be aware of the more subtle ways that the same idolatry is promoted among us today. Pope Francis has said repeatedly that we are living now in a new age of the worship of the Golden Calf. “The worship of the ancient golden calf (cf. Ex 32:1-35),” he wrote in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, “has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.” So many in our culture have made money a god. The easiest way to prove that, as I often say, is that if I were giving away a million dollars this morning to everyone who came here to this retreat — or even just having a free raffle for one million dollars to one winner — we all know that this chapel, this entire part of the city, would be filled to overflowing. And yet we’re giving away God and far fewer come. There are more people in malls on Sundays than there are in houses of worship. Many Catholics choose to put in overtime on Sunday for time-and-a-half even if it means missing the worship of God. Likewise many have substituted worship at the true temple for false worship. One of the newest temples built by our culture’s false worship of mammon and celebrity are sports stadiums, where 75,000 can go on Sunday to worship athletes. I love sports and there’s nothing wrong with being a fan, but we have to admit candidly that many people have turned sports into a new religion and worship athletes on Sunday more than God, as we will see tomorrow, when more Catholics will watch the Super Bowl than come to adore God. Similarly, there has been a substitution of the true religious rites with different feasts, again for the most part driven by the worship of the golden calf. At Christmas time, many are led to prioritize trees, tinsel, mistletoes, fat white-bearded men and wrapping paper more over the One wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a manger. At Easter, many kids are thinking far more about bunnies, chocolate, plastic eggs and jelly beans than they do the Risen Lord Jesus. It’s not that Christmas Trees and Easter Bunnies are necessarily idolatrous — they’re not — but when they substitute for true worship, they’re harmful, and many people have been led astray. And we shouldn’t be surprised that there’s also an attempt to change the priesthood God has established. Jeroboam allowed anyone who wanted to become a priest to become one, as if the vocations came from desire and not from God. Today there are many who are trying to change the priesthood, severing it from apostolic succession and the Sacrament of Holy Orders, altering priests’ being ordained in the person of Jesus the Bridegroom or priests’ conformity to Jesus’ chaste celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. At the same time, many in our culture have established a different type of priesthood altogether, turning instead to psychiatrists, or to self-help gurus as the ones with the capacity to lead us to happiness, holiness, and some form of heaven rather than those given by God. Today as we think about true or implicit Jeroboams, we should think about the larger point about whether we draw people toward aor away from the Lord.  There are many who outwardly are ordinary, good people, but who when a family member begins to prioritize God, to put God first, by praying more, or coming to Bible studies, or getting more involved in charitable work, resist, because they get jealous. There are also those who give ordinary scandal leading others away, those who put work ahead of God and show others that money is more important to worship, or those who have time for streaming services but not for prayer, or those who teach that we can pick and choose what commandments we want to follow. These are all those who follow in the line of Jeroboam. Today is an opportunity for us to examine the type of life we are indeed living and whether we are in fact leading people to God, helping people to remain where they are, or even leading them away from God by design or de facto by our actions.
• Today the Church celebrates someone who not just led many women to encounter God, to convert, become Jesus’ disciple, living in communion, and give their lives praying for the mission Christ entrusted to the Church, but someone who also led one of the greatest saints of all time to conversion and the importance of communion. Saint Scholastica, who died on this day in 542, has led centuries of Benedictine sisters — and through them, so many others — to God. But I’d like to focus on how she led her brother, Saint Benedictine — one of the greatest saints of all time, the founder of western monasticism, a patron of Europe — more deeply to God. Her brother St. Benedict would come to visit her only once a year even though she lived close by. He was so focused on his ora et labora, his prayer and work, that he really didn’t love his sister in deeds and allow God to lead each of them more to him through their spiritual friendship. It was never enough for St. Scholastica’s desire for communion. Once when Benedict wanted to cut his annual visit short, Scholastica turned to God for the communion to be continued. It’s one of the most beautiful stories in hagiography. I quote from Saint Gregory the Great’s account: “Scholastica, the sister of Saint Benedict, had been consecrated to God from her earliest years. She was accustomed to visiting with her brother once a year. He would come down to meet her at a place on the monastery property, not far outside the gate. One day she came as usual and her saintly brother went with some of his disciples; they spent the whole day praising God and talking of sacred things. As night fell they had supper together. Their spiritual conversation went on and the hour grew late. The holy nun said to her brother: ‘Please do not leave me tonight; let us go on until morning talking about the delights of the spiritual life.’ ‘Sister,’ he replied, ‘what are you saying? I simply cannot stay outside my cell.’ When she heard her brother refuse her request, the holy woman joined her hands on the table, laid her head on them and began to pray. As she raised her head from the table, there were such brilliant flashes of lightning, such great peals of thunder and such a heavy downpour of rain that neither Benedict nor his brethren could stir across the threshold of the place where they had been seated. Sadly he began to complain: ‘May God forgive you, sister. What have you done?’ ‘Well,’ she answered, ‘I asked you and you would not listen; so I asked my God and he did listen. So now go off, if you can, leave me and return to your monastery.’ Reluctant as he was to stay of his own will, he remained against his will. So it came about that they stayed awake the whole night, engrossed in their conversation about the spiritual life. It is not surprising that she was more effective than he, since as John says, God is love, it was absolutely right that she could do more, as she loved more. Three days later, Benedict was in his cell. Looking up to the sky, he saw his sister’s soul leave her body in the form of a dove, and fly up to the secret places of heaven. Rejoicing in her great glory, he thanked almighty God with hymns and words of praise. He then sent his brethren to bring her body to the monastery and lay it in the tomb he had prepared for himself.” We see in this lesson that Benedict just presumed what God would want, but he was mistaken. As Saint Gregory the Great, one of Benedict’s first generations of spiritual sons noticed, St. Scholastica loved God more and Saint Benedict needed to learn from her how to love God better. She led this great giant more profoundly to God. Like St. Scholastica, God wants each of us to offer our loaves and fish lovingly to the Lord and to show everyone else — including great saints, not to mention ordinary popes, bishops, priests, deacons, male religious and lay faithful — how to advance closer to God through loving God and really loving brothers and sisters.
• Today through St. Scholastica’s intercession, we ask God to give us the grace not just to grow from encounter through conversion to discipleship, but also to grow in loving communion and mission, to be distinguished, like she was, for lovingly leading other souls to God. In a particular way we ask for the gift of being able to lead them here at Mass, where the Son of God continues to look on us with compassion, to feed us, to incorporate us and our gifts into his self-giving, and to send us out to share his blessings with the Lord. At every Mass Jesus asks us what we have, takes it, changes it, multiplies it, and then sends us to share those gifts with others. The Mass is what the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish points to. In it we have the great multiplication of the “living bread come down from heaven,” that Jesus celebrated not close to the sea but in the Upper Room. The breaking of the unleavened bread in the Last Supper, and how Jesus miraculously transformed it into himself, is what the Church has been distributing ever since, a distribution that continues still today here. Likewise there’s meant to be a multiplication of fish. We’re that fish — caught by “fishers of men” before us with the same bait (Jesus) with whom they were caught by other fishers of men, tracing themselves back all the way to the time of the apostles — and Jesus wants to multiply us. He wants us to “increase and multiply” first by our uniting to him all that he’s previously given us, then by receiving from him in return himself, sending us out to give people the blessing of an encounter with him through us so that they may come to him too. As we prepare to enter into Holy Communion, let us ask Jesus to help us to enter into communion with his compassion on the crowds, enter into communion with each other, and live out to the full the apostolic dimension of the Eucharist.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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