Jesus’ United Kingdom, 3rd Monday (II), January 27, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Angela Merici
January 27, 2020
2 Sam 5:1-7.10, Ps 89, Mk 3:22-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Saturday, the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, we finished the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, focused on making real Jesus’ prayer on Holy Thursday that we all may be one, as the Father and He are one. Today’s readings focus us on unity and division.
• In the passage from Second Samuel, we see the leaders of the tribes of Israel come to David in Hebron, where he was King of Judah, asking him to shepherd the children of Israel, too. (Judah is the southern part of the Holy Land, Israel the northern, and each was inhabited by different tribes among the descendants of Jacob). David, who was a uniter rather than a divider, agreed and ruled over both kingdoms for the next 33 years. It’s an image of what’s supposed to happen with the “son of David,” Christ, who came to gather the tribes of Israel against the forces that divide and scatter. The Kingdom of God Jesus came to inaugurate is a United Kingdom, where people are in communion with God and each other.
• We see in the Gospel, however, that the devil seeks to destroy that unity and tries to get others, consciously or unconsciously, to cooperate with him in that fragmentation and destruction. The scribes who had come from Jerusalem on foot to Galilee, witnessing Jesus’ exorcisms, couldn’t deny that the exorcisms were occurring, that possessed people were being liberated, that the demons themselves were hailing Jesus as the “Holy One of God.” They couldn’t deny the facts. But they could try to change the interpretation. And because they had already prejudged Jesus not to be the type of Messiah they were looking for, because he didn’t follow their own man-made prescriptions with regard to the Sabbath, to fasting and to other parts of the fence they drew around the Mosaic law, they concluded that since he couldn’t be of God, then he had to be of the devil. That’s why the said that Jesus himself was “possessed by Beelzebul” and exorcised not by God’s power but by the power of the “prince of demons.”
• It was absurd and Jesus pointed out the absurdity in some brief parables that not only answer the objections but communicate something really important about the unity that’s meant to reign in his kingdom. “How can Satan drive out Satan?,” he asked. “If a kingdom is divided against itself,” he continued, “that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself,  that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided,  he cannot stand;  that is the end of him. But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property  unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.” In other words, the only way he could plunder Satan’s house (his temporary abode in a possessed man) and drive him out of that house is if he had bound up Satan first. If a possessed man — as they were claiming Jesus to be — were battling against the prince of demons and casting demons out from those whom the demons had occupied, then Satan’s kingdom would be defeated. Underneath Jesus’ reply is a crucially important principle of unity, something that President Abraham Lincoln himself would famously cite to try to keep the United States united.
• But then Jesus describes a moral principle with regard to the unitive power of the truth versus the destructive power of lies. “Amen, I say to you,” he said, beginning with the words of a solemn oath: “all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.” What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why can’t it be forgiven? Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in general, is calling something evil good or good evil. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth and one blasphemes against him whenever one deliberately or with vincible ignorance calls a lie the truth or a truth the lie. Jesus reminded them of this sin because they were saying “He has an unclean spirit,” that he was possessed, as he was doing God’s work. The same type of sin happens today, for example, with those who want to treat sexual immorality as if it’s sacramental rather than sinful, who want to call those who defend the institution of marriage as God made it “hateful” and “bigoted,” who want to defend unborn girls in the womb from execution “anti-woman” and “anti-freedom,” those who want to call those who are chaste “perverts” and “sexually repressed,” those who care for undocumented immigrants “traitors,” etc. Why is such a sin against the Holy Spirit, against the truth, unforgivable? The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss” (CCC 1864). The reason why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable is not because God doesn’t want to forgive but because the sinner won’t open up to receive mercy, either because he doesn’t believe he needs it, or because she doesn’t believe God will forgive, or because he doesn’t want to come to receive it in the way God has intended. When someone is convinced that evil is good and a lie is true, the person will not think he or she is in need of forgiveness. When someone is calling Jesus evil and possessed, that person is generally not going to come to ask Jesus for mercy. When someone has convinced himself that destruction of human life is a beautiful act of freedom that should be celebrated, that gossiping is a charitable information service for inquiring minds that want to know, that producing smut is an exemplary public service promoting the right of free speech, they’re generally not going to repent. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not necessarily a curse against the third Person of the Trinity but can be a hard-hearted refusal to be opened by him to the truth of things and to come to receive the forgiveness that “God the Father of mercies through the death and resurrection of his Son has sent the Holy Spirit among us” to accomplish.
• Against the divisive work of the father of lies who seeks to get us to live and spread lies, we need formation in the truth. Today we celebrate the feast of St. Angela Merici (1470-1540), the foundress of the Company of St. Ursula, which was the first teaching order of women in the history of the Church. Angela was orphaned at 15 and when her younger sister died a few years later without the sacraments, she began to look around to see how many girls, both orphans and those growing up in poor families, who were receiving no education and Christian formation. The only instruction for girls at the time happened in rich families by tutors or happened in convents. The vast majority of young women received no educational formation at all, not to mention no formal instruction in the faith. St. Angela opened up her family home into a primitive school to try to teach the girls of her city, others joined her, and it eventually became a model that was approved by the Church and blessed by God with many vocations. Over the course of the four and a half centuries since, the Ursulines have formed millions of Catholic kids and spawned many other orders of teaching sisters. In the Collect (opening prayer) of the Mass, we asked God that following St. Angela’s example, “we may hold fast to your teaching and express it in what we do.” To hold fast to the teaching of God, to let it be expressed in all we think, say and do, is the path to a United Kingdom against the one who seeks to divide by deceit.
• The great means by which God seeks to unite us in the truth is here at Mass. It’s here that we entrust ourselves to the Holy Spirit who teaches us through the Scripture he has inspired and forms us in the school of the truth to continue the work of teaching all nations. Then he changes bread and wine into Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity, and through Holy Communion, seeks to make us one body, one spirit in Christ.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

All the tribes of Israel came to David in Hebron and said:
“Here we are, your bone and your flesh.
In days past, when Saul was our king,
it was you who led the children of Israel out and brought them back.
And the LORD said to you,

‘You shall shepherd my people Israel
and shall be commander of Israel.’”
When all the elders of Israel came to David in Hebron,
King David made an agreement with them there before the LORD,
and they anointed him king of Israel.
David was thirty years old when he became king,
and he reigned for forty years:
seven years and six months in Hebron over Judah,
and thirty-three years in Jerusalem
over all Israel and Judah.

Then the king and his men set out for Jerusalem
against the Jebusites who inhabited the region.
David was told, “You cannot enter here:
the blind and the lame will drive you away!”
which was their way of saying, “David cannot enter here.”
But David did take the stronghold of Zion, which is the City of David.
David grew steadily more powerful,
for the LORD of hosts was with him.

Responsorial Psalm
PS 89:20, 21-22, 25-26

R. (25a) My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.
Once you spoke in a vision,
and to your faithful ones you said:
“On a champion I have placed a crown;
over the people I have set a youth.”
R. My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.
“I have found David, my servant;
with my holy oil I have anointed him,
That my hand may be always with him,
and that my arm may make him strong.”
R. My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.
“My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him,
and through my name shall his horn be exalted.
I will set his hand upon the sea,
his right hand upon the rivers.”
R. My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.

Gospel
MK 3:22-30

The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said of Jesus,
“He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and
“By the prince of demons he drives out demons.”

Summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables,
“How can Satan drive out Satan?
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house is divided against itself,
that house will not be able to stand.
And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided,
he cannot stand;
that is the end of him.
But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property
unless he first ties up the strong man.
Then he can plunder his house.
Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies
that people utter will be forgiven them.
But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit
will never have forgiveness,
but is guilty of an everlasting sin.”
For they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”