Knowing Nothing But Christ Crucified, 22nd Monday (II), August 31, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
August 31, 2020
1 Cor 2:1-5, Ps 119, Lk 4:16-30

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday the Church pondered Jesus’ correction to Peter to think as God thinks, not as human beings do, and St. Paul’s echo not to conform ourselves to this age, but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds so that we may discern what is God’s will, what is good, pleasing and perfect. Jesus also said that the renewal of our minds must take root in our whole life, as he said that if we wish to follow him, we must deny ourselves, take up our Cross and follow him, losing our life to save it. This is what St. Paul himself encouraged the Christians in Rome to do when he told them “to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.” The way we most transform our minds to conform them to Christ’s rather than to this age, the way we most think as God things and follow Jesus is through the living sacrifice of a crucified life of love. That’s what we see St. Paul describe for us in the way he approached Corinth and what we see Jesus preach about and foretell in his visit to his hometown synagogue.
• St. Paul tells the Corinthians that he hadn’t come to them with “persuasive words of wisdom,” the worldly wisdom of the Greeks and the age, so that their “faith might not rest on human wisdom.” Instead he was coming in “weakness and fear and much trembling” as a “demonstration of spirit and … the power of God.” He was fearful because he was preaching Christ crucified, which was “folly” to the hedonistic Corinthians, because for those who loved pleasure and sought to minimize pain, what would be less appealing than following someone on a path of self-denial and a way of the Cross? But Paul was doing so anyway, and preaching Christ crucified — as we heard on Saturday, the “power and the wisdom of God” — not just by his lips but by his life, having suffered together with Christ to such an extent that he was able to say to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” His conformity to Christ was the demonstration of spirit and power. He was inviting the Corinthians, like him, to “know nothing … except Jesus Christ and him crucified,”  which means not just to “know about” Christ crucified, but to “know” him in something analogous to the Biblical sense of union, to become one with Christ on the Cross. Though his own self-denial and crucified life, St. Paul was to prove far more effective in bringing people to conversion than the lofty words of wisdom he had preached before to the Greek intellectuals in the Athenian areopagus immediately before arriving in the Corinthian isthmus.
• St. Paul wanted us to experience that same wisdom, but it’s a wisdom  learned not so much in books or homilies but through existential union with the crucified Master. In the Responsorial Psalm, we prayed first “How I love your law, O Lord! It is my meditation all the day,” but then we added, “Your command has made me wiser than my enemies. I have more understanding than all my teachers, … I have more discernment than the elders because I observe your precepts.” We become wise by living the Word of God, by observing God’s commands and precepts, by incarnating his call to a union so intense that it lasts even in worldly pain and suffering.
• This is also one of the essential lessons of today’s Gospel of Jesus’ preaching in the Synagogue of Nazareth, which begins our prayerful reliving of St. Luke’s Gospel at daily Mass that will last for the next three months. After Jesus had read the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, Jesus said, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” The Word of God is not meant just to be heard but to be incarnated. Jesus, the Word of God in the flesh, was the fulfillment of all Scriptural prophecies: He was the one anointed by the Spirit who was announcing and delivering the Good News to the poor, freedom to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the oppressed, and a year of Jubilee. But that enfleshment was too much for many of his listeners. Many are fine when someone talks about theological subjects, but when someone goes further and tries to live by the Word of God, it’s a challenge to everyone else to live by that reality. Many resist, because they don’t want their lives to change. Those in Nazareth recognized that Jesus was speaking with “gracious words” but they couldn’t harmonize that with the fact that he was the supposed son of Joseph the carpenter. Their amazement soon passed to doubt and then to homicidal anger as they sought to kill him. His enfleshment of the word of God was a scandal to them, they didn’t think that one of their own could be the Messiah, they didn’t want to get shaken out of their own habits to examine whether it was true and if so to follow him, and therefore they sought to reject the message by killing the messenger. The homicidal rage of the mob to remove from their midst one whose words and very being made them uncomfortable was a prophecy of what would happen in Jerusalem three years later.  Jesus got a foretaste of the Passion in his home town.
• Today Jesus wants his word to be fulfilled in us as we hear it. He wants us to receive that seed on good soil, be transformed by it, and bear great fruit. He wants to give us true metanoia — the renewal and transformation of our minds — so that we may think as he thinks. He wants to help us know nothing but him Crucified and love him, as we come to know him personally at the depth at which he desires through denying ourselves, picking up our Cross and following him from the inside out. He wants us, as we enter into his Passion in the Mass, to offer our lives as a living sacrifice together with him, holy and pleasing to the Father, our logike latreia, the only worship that makes sense. He wants to fill us with all of the power and wisdom that comes from such a communion. And he wants to make us his Nazareth, his home, where he wishes continuously to amaze us by his word and fulfill it in and thorough us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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