Jesus’ Word to the Weary to Rouse Them, Wednesday of Holy Week, April 17, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of Holy Week
April 17, 2019
Is 50:4-9, Ps 69, Mt 26:14-25

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

The following points were pondered in the homily: 

• On this last day of Lent — tomorrow we enter into a new liturgical season, the shortest of the year, the Blessed Triduum — it’s key for us to grasp what the Lord is calling us to do as we turn away from sin and are faithful to the Gospel. Today in the first reading, the third of four Suffering Servant Songs, we hear Isaiah’s reflections about what he and Jesus after him wants to do in us: “The Lord God has given me  a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them.” With eloquence, Jesus wants to arouse us from our spiritual somnolence. What’s the “word” that will actually do that? It’s what he speaks with his body language: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting,” all things we will be pondering over the next couple of days. The word of what our sins have done to Jesus should arouse us to contrition, to repentance,  to entrusting ourselves to his mercy, and to amendment and the pursuit of holiness. Isaiah says, foretelling Jesus’ mindset, “I have not rebelled, have not turned back. … The Lord God is my help, therefore I am not disgraced; I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame.” He was resolute, setting his face toward Jerusalem (Lk 9:51) like flint, the very hard rock always placed at the tips of spears in the ancient world. Jesus wants us to have that same firm resolve to set our faces toward him with trust and not to rebel or to turn back. He preaches this eloquent “word” to arouse the “weary,” because he knows that more than anything else our sins wear us down. We’re also worn down by trying to struggle against evil on our own without God. He comes to join us in that fight.
• That brings us to the Gospel. Yesterday with the help of St. John’s account of the beginning of the Last Supper, we were able to look at Judas’ betrayal and contrast it with St. Peter’s. Today we look at the betrayal again from the perspective of St. Matthew. St. Matthew records something very important that Jesus said about Judas during this supper: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.” That brings us face-to-face not only with the tragedy of the life of Judas but also the point of your life and mine.
• The lamentable misfortune of the life of Judas, the reason why it was better for him never to have been born, is not simply because the names Judas and Iscariot have become synonymous with the most notorious traitor in the history of the world. It’s because he had never come to grasp the point of human life. Even though he had been up close with the Lord Jesus for three years, he had never really come to know him and his merciful love. He had totally missed the point of Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep, lost coin and lost son. He hadn’t grasped that when he called Peter and the others to forgive 70 times 7 times, God himself would do the same. He hadn’t let penetrate the lessons Jesus had taught in forgiving the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s House, the Paralytic, the Woman Caught in Adultery or Zacchaeus. He hadn’t grasped why Jesus had called Simon bar Jonah, whose first words to Jesus were, “Depart from me because I am a sinful man,” or Matthew, who was a despicable tax collector. Despite three years with Jesus, he still hadn’t gotten the most important thing about Jesus and his Mission: that he was mercy incarnate and had come desiring mercy not sacrifice. The real tragedy of the life of Judas is that at the end of his life when he looked at what he had done, he saw no way past the shame. Consequently, he ended his life rather came to receive forgiveness from the one who was preparing to die to take away his sins. It is similarly better for anyone who doesn’t come to know the love and mercy of the Lord never to be born because, frankly, their sins — and the unexpiated guilt of their sins — will kill them in this life and forever, even though Jesus totally has the antidote to the poison of sin that kills us and wants to give it to us. This is the one of the most essential messages of Holy Week, to learn from Judas’ fatal mistake and entrust ourselves to the mercy of the Lord of life. Jesus wants to rouse us from the weariness that comes from the weight of our sins by taking them away and nailing them to the Cross.
• But to grow in how he seeks to do this, it helps to enter more fully into the betrayal of Judas. Why did he sell out the Lord?
  • Most think it was for the money, that he was a greedy thief and would sell out Jesus for what he could get. “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?,” he asked. They gave him 30 shekels of silver, the price of a slave, or about 90 days wages. Jesus had said that we cannot serve both God and money because we will love one and hate the other. Some think that Judas’ avarice led him to love money and consequently to hate Jesus. But I don’t think that’s the reason because later he threw the money back in the temple area when he recognized he had betrayed an innocent man.
  • Another reason that is proposed is because Judas himself thought he had been betrayed by Jesus. It’s possible that he had thought that hooking himself to Jesus’ train would be the path to satisfy his human ambitions, that he would become the money-man of the new Messianic administration; when he began to grasp that that was not in the cards, that his hopes in Jesus would not be fulfilled, aggrieved he turned on him.
  • Another explanation is that he might have been seeking impatiently for Jesus to inaugurate his kingdom. Much like Mary at the wedding feast of Cana went to Jesus and precipitated his “hour” by asking him to do a miracle for the young couple, so some think Judas may have been provoking Jesus to reveal himself and his kingdom fully when he would be placed in the hands of those whom Judas thought Jesus had come into the world to overthrow.
  • A fourth interpretation is less psychological than spiritual: he had allowed Satan to enter into his heart for some reason beyond our knowledge and then Satan tempted him to turn on Jesus and then turn on himself.
  • What I think is most plausible comes from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. He said that Judas’ betrayal began with Judas’ rejection of Jesus in the Eucharist. His betrayal was traceable ultimately to a lack of faith in the Lord such that he refused to believe what Jesus said about the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. Sheen wrote in his spiritual autobiography, A Treasure in Clay: “The beginning of the fall of Judas and the end of Judas both revolved around the Eucharist. The first mention that Our Lord knew who it was who would betray him is at the end of the sixth chapter of John, which is the announcement of the Eucharist. The fall of Judas came the night Our Lord gave the Eucharist, the night of the Last Supper. The Eucharist is so essential to our oneness with Christ that as soon as Our Lord announced it in the Gospel, it began to be the test of the fidelity of His followers. First, He lost the masses, for it was too hard a saying and they no longer followed Him. Secondly, He lost some of His disciples: ‘They walked with Him no more.’ Third, it split His apostolic band, for Judas is here announced as the betrayer.” We see this lack of faith in how everyone else in the Gospel was saying, “Surely not I, Lord,” whereas Judas asked, “Surely not I, Rabbi.” For Judas, Jesus was a teacher owed respect, not a Lord owed faith. And that lack of faith was seen most of all in his approach to the Eucharist.
• What began Judas’ downfall is meant to begin our rise. His refusal to accept Jesus’ words should be repaired by our total commitment not just to believe the truth of the Lord’s real presence, but how he reigns, how he saves, how he sanctifies through the Eucharist. The words Jesus preaches to the weary are, “This is my Body, which will be given up for you,” “This is the chalice of my blood,” and “Do this in memory of me!” This is what gives us the strength to set our faces with his like flint toward Calvary and not turn back.

The readings for today’s Mass were: