Learning and Following the Lord’s Authoritative Ways, Third Monday of Advent, December 13, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week of Advent
Memorial of St. Lucy, Virgin and Martyr
December 13, 2021
Num 24:2-7.15-17, Ps 25, Mt 21:23-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• We can’t help but notice a huge contrast today between the first reading and the Gospel. In the Book of Numbers, we see this mysterious figure called Balaam, who was a pagan diviner whom the Moabite King Balac bribed to pronounce a curse over Israel. When Balaam tried to curse Israel on four separate occasions, however, he couldn’t. Instead he pronounced a blessing — and the greatest blessing of all, foretelling the coming of Jesus 1,300 year later: “I see him, though not now; I behold him, though not near: a star shall advance from Jacob and a [shepherd’s] staff shall rise from Israel.” Even though Balaam certainly didn’t start in the right place, he couldn’t help but acknowledge and announce the truth and the light that God revealed to him.
• In the Gospel we see something totally different. The chief priests and elders of the people, who had started with God’s revelation, who had prayed since their youth the words of today’s Psalm, “Teach me your ways, O Lord!,” ended up rejecting God’s ways, spurning Jesus’ fulfillment of all the Old Testament Messianic prophecies as well as the prophetic announcement of John the Baptist. They were objectively no longer interested in the truth or hungry to learn and follow God’s paths, because they thought they already had all the answers they needed. They thought that they were firmly on the path. They were interested only in authority, and, frankly, not God’s authority but their own. They asked Jesus, “By whose authority are you doing these things?,” because they knew Jesus didn’t have their authority, and almost certainly, they thought, hadn’t received a mission from anyone else who could give it in categories they would acknowledge. The fact that God had given him authority — or even more, that he was God and was speaking on his own authority — hadn’t even crossed their mind because it was a category they did not want to acknowledge even existed. Jesus knew this and for that reason asked a question not to trip them up but to bring them conversion, seeking to have them acknowledge God’s authority. That’s why he asked, “Where was John’s baptism from? Was it of heavenly or of human origin?” We can see just how central John the Baptist’s mission is to Jesus that that would be the retort he would use to question the judgment of those who were questioning his authority. Since John had obviously not received their authority, the question was designed to open them up to the fact that God, as the Source of all authority, could have sent John. But they didn’t respond with a desire for the truth of things, just with a political calculation: “If we say, ‘Of heavenly origin,’ he will say to us, ‘Then why did you not believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ we fear the crowd, for they all regard John as a prophet.’ So they said to Jesus in reply, ‘We do not know.’” Even though they supposedly “didn’t know” and didn’t really care enough to know, they were not agnostic in their approach to Jesus, but in thorough and homicidal opposition. They did not treat John as a prophet. They didn’t heed John’s message. They didn’t make straight the paths. And they didn’t heed John’s indication of Jesus as the Lamb of God who had come into the world to fulfill all the prophecies of the sacrificial lambs in the temple.
• We see in the Psalm the attitude each of us should have toward God’s word announced to us with God’s authority through St. John the Baptist or by the primary Author of Sacred Scripture himself: “Guide me in your truth and teach me!” There’s supposed to be not only an openness but an active, hungry docility. God always wants to respond to that prayer, but we need to be open to how he responds. The scribes and the Pharisees prayed Psalm 25 often, asking the Lord to teach them his ways, but when he sought to teach them through St. John the Baptist or come to teach them in person, they rejected his teaching, his truth, his ways. Today’s readings help us to examine our own attitude toward God’s prophecy. Are we responsive or resistant to the message God sends us? Have we acted on John the Baptist’s summons to us to make straight the paths of the Lord by conversion, a good confession and a new life or have we just given lip service to the need for conversion God has announced to us through him? Have we opened ourselves up to the “star” of Jacob and the “shepherd” of Israel who came in order to revolutionize our lives and make us live like him in the midst of the world? Have we conformed ourselves to the fact that he wants to send us out not only with his blessing but, to some degree, as his blessing?
• Someone who lived attuned to God’s ways that she assiduously sought to learn and impart is St. Lucy. From her youngest days, she loved the Lord to the extent that she wanted to align herself totally to his movements in her life. She offered her virginity to God young in life, but her mother Eutychia had already made plans to marry her off to a rich pagan. After her spurned suitor objected to her distributing her dowry and grasped that desire for virginity likely meant that she was a Christian, he turned her over to Diocletian’s persecutorial administration and she was condemned to death in Syracuse, Sicily. Unlike Balaam, she saw the Lord in the present and up close. She followed the luminescent star of the guidance of Scripture and personally sought to unite herself to the Good Shepherd with his rod and staff, recognizing, as the Psalms instructs, that he was God her Savior. She believed that John’s baptism was of divine origin and that Christian baptism even more so, making her a temple of God’s presence and giving her an assurance of life after death provided she remained faithful. Her name Lucy — which derives from the word Lux, Lucis for light — is not just because she is the patron saint of those with eye maladies, especially those at risk of blindness, but also because her whole life was radiant with the light of Christ turning her into light for the world. She sought the Lord, followed his light, and glowed with it, even in and after death.
• As we learn from Balaam’s prophetic utterance despite his bad beginning, and the chief priests’ and elders’ refusal to accept John the Baptist’s and Jesus’ words and actions despite their good beginning having been nourished by God’s word and the worship of him in the temple, it doesn’t matter so much where we start but how we end up. This goes for us this Advent and it also goes for everyone else. We prepare to celebrate Christ’s birth in a beasts’ trough in a stranger’s animal cave rather than a crib in a palace. That would have seemed in the eyes of the world and even in many religious Jews’ eyes as if the child were cursed from the start, but we know that from those humble grounds, God turned that worldly affliction into a blessing. In the most powerful way of all, when Jesus was pinned to a tree underneath a sign mockingly proclaiming him that king of the Jews, God did something even greater. The Jews and Romans both used to say, “Cursed be anyone who dies on a tree,” and many of the same chief priests and elders were cursing Jesus as they saw him dying on Good Friday. But God made that earthly malediction the greatest blessing in human history — in fact the blessing with which we began our prayer of the Mass and the blessing with which we will finish our Mass, namely the Sign of the Cross. God always draws good out of evil, he always seeks to turn curses into caresses, blights into blessings. We ask him to convert in us whatever is resistant to receiving his prophetic words and sharing them and to transform us, like St. Lucy, into the disciples, prophets and divine blessing the world so much needs this Advent and beyond!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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