Knowing, Receiving and Loving the Lord, 26th Monday (I), September 30, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church
September 30, 2019
Zec 8:1-8, Ps 102, Lk 9:46-50

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today’s readings and feast lead us to examine the path to greatness, which is not a path so much of a achievement but of receiving and responding to the gifts God gives us by which he wants to help us to unite ourselves to him and, in him, to others. The path is simple and straightforward, but to walk it requires humility, simplicity, loving trust, gratitude, and joyful perseverance. We can focus on three aspects of the path.
• First, today is the feast of St. Jerome, the patron saint of Biblical studies, famous for his saying, quoted in the Catechism, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” For us to come to know Christ, to love him, to become like him, we must treasure God’s word. We must treat every word that comes from his mouth with the same type of loving reverence as we would every particle of the Sacred Host on the altar. If we haven’t always prioritized Sacred Scripture in this way, we can gain confidence for conversion in the life of St. Jerome, because neither did he. He was a brilliant student from Dalmatia (modern day Croatia/Bosnia) who went to study under a famous pagan orator in Rome. There his childhood faith became lukewarm as he continued to read the Greco-Roman classics. He traveled with close friends to learn from the various masters. Both of the friends died and he himself became very ill. During his sickness he had a dream in which he was at his judgment and when he said to Christ that he was a Christian, Jesus replied that he was, rather, a Ciceronian, because he knew far more about Cicero and his writings than he did about Christ and what he said. It struck Jerome to the core. He recognized that he wasn’t opening his ears and heart to the Lord and that he needed to change. When he recovered, he began to study the Scriptures, learning Hebrew at first as a penance to gain self-mastery in his fight to have a pure heart. Eventually returning to Rome, Pope St. Damasus made him his secretary and asked him to translate the Bible from its original languages into the common language of the people, which he did. After St. Damasus’ death, because by his pungent personality and writing he had alienated many, he went to Bethlehem to pray, translate and write, surrounded by a bunch of women who were in essence proto-religious women. He built a monastery for men and two for women next to the place where Christ was born. In all of his work, St. Jerome recognized an essential point, that to know Christ better we must know Sacred Scripture better. If we’re not paying assiduous attention to what Christ has said in the Gospels, what the Prophets foretold about him and he fulfilled, what the Apostles announced about him, his words and his calling, then we don’t really know him. Today’s feast day is an opportunity for us precisely to focus on the role of Sacred Scripture in our life and whether we recognize that we have God speaking to us from those holy pages. At the beginning of Mass, we turned to God and asked Him that as he “gave the priest St. Jerome a living and tender love for Sacred Scripture,” he would likewise grant that we “be ever more fruitfully nourished by your Word and find in it the fount of life.” We need a living and tender love, not a dead and cold one; we also need to grasp that Jesus has the words of eternal life and to know him through Sacred Scripture is the source of eternity. We’ll pray at the end of Mass, “May these holy gifts we have received, O Lord, as we rejoice in celebrating Saint Jerome, stir up the hearts of your faithful so that, attentive to sacred teachings, they may understand the path they are to follow and, by following it, obtain life everlasting!” Sacred Scripture indicates to us the path we must follow and God wants to help us follow it all the way to eternity! We rejoice that today in the Vatican Pope Francis, at the beginning of the 1600th year marking the death of St. Jerome and birth into eternal life (September 30, 420), he has named a “Sunday of the Word of God,” which will take place on the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time each year and be an occasion to help the entire people of God come to receive and know Christ better through his word.
• Sacred Scripture leads us today to the second means to greatness, which is what we discover in the readings today. Jesus tells us today, “Whoever receives this child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me. For the one who is least among all of you is the one who is the greatest.”Jesus wants us to receive and love children as we would receive him. Infants, as Jesus is referring to them here, are not a symbol of innocence but tangible reminders of inconvenience, of those with the inability even to remember what we’ve done or to thank us. To be great in God’s kingdom, Jesus is saying, we need to receive children and everyone selflessly. Once we get good at receiving children in this way, we can receive everyone better, including those who are exorcising in the Lord’s name who are not a visible part of the apostolic band. If one is seeking to advance himself rather than receive and serve others, that’s when he’ll be insecure at others’ doing Christ’s work. Sisters, you have a special mission in the Church to teach everyone how to receive children lovingly as we receive Christ. In today’s first reading, we see an image of God’s kingdom through the Prophet Zechariah. God reestablishes his “faithful city” in Jerusalem. In it we see “old men and old women,” with walking staffs in their hand, sitting in the squares and we see it  “filled with boys and girls playing it its streets.” Pope Francis says that Christ’s kingdom is one in which we care for those on the extreme of life, the very young and very old, those who do not have yet or any longer “economic productivity,” who are not able to be inserted in someone’s utilitarian machinations, but who are nevertheless true images of Christ in our midst. Once we learn to receive them with reverence and gratitude, we can receive everyone else better. Once we learn to sit with them, and play with them, we are far more open to sitting with and joyfully receiving Christ himself.
• The final way we ponder receiving Christ is in the Holy Eucharist. Knowledge of the Word of God leads us to the Word-made-Flesh, as we gnaw on his body and blood and do this in his memory. The more we recognize and love Jesus under the appearances of bread and wine here, the more easily we recognize him in others, especially children and the elderly.
• The best way we’re trained to receive everyone as Christ wants is here at Mass. Jesus says that if we receive infants in his name, we receive him and in him the Father. Jesus tells us today, “The one who is least among all of you is the one who is the greatest.” Here the Greatest of all becomes so humble that he becomes our food, so that from the inside he may help us receive him in all the ways he speaks to us and comes to us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel LK 9:46-50

An argument arose among the disciples
about which of them was the greatest.
Jesus realized the intention of their hearts and took a child
and placed it by his side and said to them,
“Whoever receives this child in my name receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
For the one who is least among all of you
is the one who is the greatest.”Then John said in reply,
“Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name
and we tried to prevent him
because he does not follow in our company.”
Jesus said to him,
“Do not prevent him, for whoever is not against you is for you.”