Leading People To Or Away From God, Fifth Saturday, II, February 12, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the UN, New York
Saturday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
February 12, 2022
1 Kings 12:26-32.13:33-34, Ps 106, Mk 8:1-10

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today as we make a pilgrimage to the most beautiful Churches in New York City, the readings offer us a great warning as well as a profound consolation.
• Let’s tackle the warning first, which is how our religious impulse can be diverted and how sometimes people, rather than leading people to God lead them away from God. On Thursday, the Church pondered how Solomon, who had built the temple for the worship of God, who had been given by God when he was 18 a wise and understanding heart unlike anyone had ever possessed, who had written so many proverbs and hymns to God, had basically lost his faith, married 700 women and 300 concubines and had begun to build temples to their pagan gods, leading people astray. It got worse. Yesterday we saw how Jeroboam, whom Solomon had placed in charge of his labor force, was met by the prophet Ajihah, who tore his new cloak into 12 pieces and told Jeroboam that ten of those pieces, representing the ten tribes of Israel, would be given to him when Solomon’s kingdom would be divided after Solomon’s death as a result of his fostering of idolatry. He had been chosen by the Lord to rule the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel precisely because of Solomon’s idolatry. And yet what do we see him do today? Despite the Lord’s promise, Jeroboam thought to himself, “The kingdom will return to David’s house” if they return to worshipping at the Temple of Jerusalem. They would return not to God, he thought in his politically corrupted musings, but to Rehoboam, David’s grandson and Solomon’s son through an Ammonite wife. And because of his ego and his paranoid sense of self-preservation, Jeroboam led his people into idolatry just like God had condemned Solomon for doing. He said, “If now this people go up to offer sacrifices in the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem, the hearts of this people will return to their master, Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me.” So he decided to change their deity, their temple, their rites, and their priests. Instead of the one true God who had chosen him, he made golden calves. Instead of the Temple where God’s presence dwelt, he built two shrines, one in Dan at the northernmost part of the kingdom along the Jordan River above the Sea of Galilee, and one in Bethel, at the southernmost part of the kingdom a short distance north of Jerusalem. Instead of the feasts God set up, he established his own. And instead of the levites, the priests God had chosen, he allowed anyone who wanted to be a priest to be commissioned. And the people were led away by him from the true God and the temple, the feasts and the priests God himself had established.
• We might think that this is just a terrible thing that happened 920-930 years before Christ, but what Jeroboam did in drawing people away from God happens in every age. There are many rulers who have sought to suppress worship of the true God in order to advance their political objectives. Think of what happened to the Jews during the time of Antioches Epiphanes IV or the Christians during the 13 ferocious anti-Christian persecutions between 64-313 AD. Think about what happened to the Japanese Christians at the beginning of the 1600s or the Christians in communist countries last century and the Chinese and North Korean governments still today. There have been many Jeroboams over the course of history! But we also need to be aware of the more subtle ways that the same idolatry is promoted among us today. Pope Francis has said repeatedly that we are living now in a new age of the worship of the Golden Calf. Likewise many have substituted worship at the true temple for false worship. So many say that they don’t need to come to worship God in the Holy Eucharist with the other members of his family, but instead they can worship him just as well lying in their hammock in the backyard or in their favorite recliner. One of the newest temples built by our culture’s false worship of mammon and celebrity are sports stadiums, where 75,000 can go on Sunday to worship athletes, like they will tomorrow for the Super Bowl. I love sports and there’s nothing wrong with being a fan, but we have to admit candidly that many people have turned sports into a new religion. Similarly, there has been a substitution of the true religious rites with different feasts, again for the most part driven by the worship of the golden calf. At Christmas time, many are led to prioritize trees, tinsel, mistletoes, fat white-bearded men and wrapping paper more over the One wrapped in swaddling clothes and placed in a manger. At Easter, many kids are thinking far more about bunnies, chocolate, plastic eggs and jelly beans than they do the Risen Lord Jesus. It’s not that Christmas Trees and Easter Bunnies are necessarily idolatrous — they’re not — but when they substitute for true worship, they’re harmful, and many people have been led astray. And we shouldn’t be surprised that there’s also an attempt to change the priesthood God has established. Jeroboam allowed anyone who wanted to become a priest to become one, as if the vocations came from within and not from God. Today there are many who are trying to change the priesthood, whether we’re talking about married men who want to be ordained, or women who want to be ordained, or even non-Catholics who want to be ordained. At the same time, though, many in our culture have made a different type of priesthood altogether, turning instead to psychiatrists, or to celebrities, or to self-help gurus as the ones with the capacity to lead us to God rather than those sent to us by God. Today as we think about true or implicit Jeroboams, we should think about the larger point about drawing others away from the Lord. There are many who outwardly are ordinary, good people, but who when a family member begins to prioritize God, to put God first, by praying more, or coming to Bible studies, or getting more involved in charitable work, resist, because they get jealous. There are also those who give ordinary scandal leading others away, those who put work ahead of God and show their kids that money is more important to worship, or those who have time for television but not for prayer, or those who teach that we can pick and choose what commandments we want to follow. These are all those who follow in the line of Jeroboam. We need to ask God’s forgiveness for the times we and others have led people away from him by our actions!
• As we head out on this pilgrimage, we need to examine where we are heading and why, and what our footsteps trace for others to follow. In my time as a guide in Rome, as well as leading many pilgrimages since as a priest, there are pilgrims and then there are tourists. The pilgrims come on a journey of faith. The tourists go to see the sights. Some go for God, others for the god of entertainment or exercise or some other motive. Today on this Saturday, traditional day of our Lady, whom the Christian people have traditionally invoked as “Stella Maris,” “Star of the Sea,” for guiding us on the stormy seas of life to the safe harbor, we focus on her, as the Second Vatican Council did, as the model for the “pilgrimage of faith” until we land safely in the eternal port. We ask her in a special way to bless not just our day, but to help this pilgrimage to advance us on the pilgrimage of Christian life.
• In the Gospel, we see our great consolation. Jesus looked on the crowd of 4,000 that was following him and his heart exploded with pity for them because they were famished having gone great distances and he worked a tremendous miracle for them, multiplying seven loaves and a few fish to strengthen them. He looks on us during our pilgrimage of life with similar mercy and gives us himself as food for the journey. At every Mass Jesus fulfills the prophetic action he did on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. In it we have the great multiplication of the “living bread come down from heaven,” the breaking of the unleavened bread in the Last Supper, and how Jesus miraculously transformed it into himself. This is what the Church has been distributing ever since, a distribution that continues still today here. Likewise there’s meant to be a multiplication of fish. We’re that fish — caught by “fishers of men” before us with the same bait (Jesus) with whom they were caught by other fishers of men, tracing themselves back all the way to the time of the apostles — and Jesus wants to multiply us. He wants us to “increase and multiply” first by our uniting to him all that he’s previously given us, receiving from him these changed blessings, and then sending us out to give people the blessing to lead others to him. On the pilgrimage of life, which follows Jesus along the narrow way, he wants us to invite many others who, strengthened by this food, will follow Mary as the Star of the Sea all the way home to the Blessed Fruit of her womb.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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