Joining Jesus, the Stronger Man, in Gathering For His Kingdom, 27th Friday (I), October 13, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass of Our Lady of Fatima
October 13, 2023
Joel 1:13-15.2:1-2, Ps 9, Lk 11:15-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Sunday I celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of my diaconal ordination. In 1998, October 8 was Thursday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I. The next day I had the privilege to proclaim the Gospel for the first time at Mass and to preach, at a Mass celebrated by Fr. Paul Bailey, my childhood pastor, at the Chapel of Our Lady of Fatima in the Dorothean Sisters’ Casa Fatima across from the North American College in Rome. I remember that special chapel in a particular way today on the 106th anniversary of our Lady of Fatima’s last appearance to the three shepherd children in Fatima and of the famous miracle of sun. But  The readings I had to preach on are the same we encounter today, and for that reason I’ve always had a special affection for them as well as a particular gratitude to God, because they’re not particularly easy to preach on! That means, right from the beginning, I had a chance to put into practice what I was instructed to do at my diaconal ordination, to “believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you teach,” and had to do so explicitly with far greater dependence on God and far greater cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Whenever I have had the chance to preach, therefore, on Jesus and Beelzebul, and on the Lord’s message to us through the Prophet Joel, they always remind me of the summons God gives to turn to him for the light of faith every time I preach.
• Let’s get into the scene. Over the last two days we have been listening to Jesus teach us about prayer and how to relate to God as Father. He instructed us to ask the Father with confidence not to let us fall when tempted and to prevent us from the evil one. He then taught us about the importance of persevering in prayer with the Parable of the Neighbor asking for Three Loaves at Midnight so that we may learn how to persevere in the Christian life until the end. Today’s readings focus on that necessary perseverance in life because of the way that devil persistently tries to tempt us to divide ourselves from the love of God and the love of neighbor.
• We see in the Gospel the opposition Jesus faced by those who refused to believe in him or his works. By this point, Jesus had already worked all of the miracles foretold by Isaiah (61) that would mark the advent of the Messiah: he had proclaimed the Gospel to the poor, healed the sick, made the blind see, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the lame walk. He had liberated the captives from the snatches of the devil by countless exorcisms. He had fed multitudes. He had walked on water. He had done so much. The people who didn’t believe in him couldn’t deny the facts, but they could try to give them another interpretation: Jesus, they argued, wasn’t working them by God’s power but by the devil’s, an attempt to justify their lack of faith in him and their opposition. Jesus, in his words to them, spoke about the work of the devil and the main thrust of his own saving work. The work of the devil is to divide and the main focus of Jesus’ work is to save us and sanctify us by bringing us into communion with God and in Him with others. Christ during the Last Supper prayed for a unity among us resembling the Trinity. He made that union possible that through his incarnation, his life, his passion, death and resurrection. We prayed in the Gospel verse about how, when he would be lifted up on the Cross, he would draw all men to himself — and out of the clutches of the evil one. We remember from St. Mark’s Gospel the two essential aspects involved in life with Jesus: he calls us to be with him and to send us out. The devil wants to divide us from Jesus and prevent our going out as effective, ardent apostles. And he normally seeks to achieve both objectives by division, dividing us from genuine love of neighbor and thereby separating us from God. This is exactly the opposite of what Christ seeks: to gather us to him and to send us out in communion with him to gather others. Jesus gives everyone a choice. He said that Satan won’t do exorcisms because he would then be defeating himself. It’s only God who could do so. God comes in Christ as the “stronger man” to conquer the power of Satan and take his “spoils,” knowing that his “spoils” would be souls Jesus would take out of his hand. Jesus warned his critics at the end of the Gospel to see that God had freed them through the Old Covenant from the domination of the evil one, but that a worse fate could await them if they ceased to live by faith. The devil could return with seven demons and the new state would be worse than the one even before they had been given the Covenant. The whole thrust of Jesus’ words were to help us to respond to Jesus’ desire to gather us into his family and to send us out to gather with him.
• We see in the first reading how that worse fate took place among the Jews after the exile. Joel is the eighth of eight post-exilic prophets we have been examining over the last three weeks. The exiles had returned with great hope and joy from Babylon to Jerusalem, and, as we’ve seen, pondered anew with detail the word of God, committed to keep it, and rebuilt the temple. But eventually they started to fall back into their old habits and the Prophet Joel needed to wake them up. That’s what Joel did, with words we hear every Ash Wednesday, reminding them that the house of God was “deprived of offering and libation.” After they had gotten things back into order, they were now descending anew, and was warning that their future fate could in fact be worse. That’s why, for God, the Prophet Joel was seeking to gather together the  elders and all those who were dwelling in the land into the house of the Lord for prayer.
• As we celebrate this votive Mass of Our Lady of Fatima, we remember how Mary appeared in Fatima to warn against the work of the devil in bringing us to hell, to war, and to attacks on the Pope and the Church. The solution was prayer and sacrifice for the conversion of sinners and for peace in the world, and the way peace would be brought was through consecration to her immaculate heart. It’s an initially strange remedy, but to entrust ourselves to Mary’s heart means to focus on having a heart that says yes to God in everything, that treasures God and the things of God, that receives God’s love and lets that overflow to God and others. Peace comes through our mutually orienting ourselves to God. It’s an ever important reminder at a time in which human hatreds and rivalries, including among those who claim to be religious believers, are setting the world on fire. Today on this day, we turn to Our Lady, and ask for her maternal prayers for conversion and peace. We do so in an age in which, among Catholics, many deprive themselves of “offering and libation,” of Jesus’ body and blood. And so we’re called, like Jonah, blow the trumpet and sound the alarm, to announce that the day of the Lord has come, that the Kingdom of God is at hand, and Jesus wants us and others to come to be with him in the light of that kingdom. At Mass, Jesus, the Stronger Man, seeks to unite us together with Him and others. He gives us the help we need to defeat the devil’s attempted sabotage of our life. He assists us to believe what we read, teach what we believe, and practice what we teach. He reminds us that we are the disciples of him who has defeated the devil and conquered even sin and death and wants to help us to commit anew to his rebuilding project in us and to the work of gathering with him into a united kingdom that will stand strong into eternity.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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