Learning from and Cooperating with Jesus Who Does All Things Well, 23rd Sunday (B), September 8, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Red Mass, Invoking the Holy Spirit at the Beginning of the Academic Year
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 8, 2024
Is 35:4-7, Ps 146, James 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• At the beginning of an academic year, it’s routine to celebrate a Mass of the Holy Spirit in which we ask God the Father together with, and in the name of, Jesus, God the Son, to send us God the Holy Spirit, to guide us throughout the entire year. How much we need the Holy Spirit’s gifts of wisdom, knowledge, understanding and prudence in our academic work, so that we do not merely become smarter but enlightened by the light of God. How much we need the gift of courage in so many personal and communal aspects of campus life. How much we need the gifts of reverence and fear of the Lord in an age in which so many marginalize God and there are so many offenses against those made in his image and likeness in speech, social media and behavior. Since we are not normally able to celebrate Pentecost together because it generally falls after the end of the academic year, we start the academic year by asking the Holy Spirit to come down upon us like he did upon Mary and the first Christians in the Upper Room. We ask him to help teach us how to pray, since we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. We ask him to help us to understand Sacred Scripture better, since he inspired each of its Sacred Authors and also helps us to interpret it aright through the Church. We ask him to help us to recognize the particular gifts, charisms and manifestations of the Spirit he’s given each of us for the common good and move us to use them as he intends. We ask him to help us to learn how to live according to the Spirit, which is a summary of the entire Christian moral life, rather than according to the flesh. We ask him to help us to experience the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-mastery — and live them in such a radiant way that others might want to come to know more deeply the Source of each of them. And we ask him to give us a tongue of fire so that, like the first Christians, we may proclaim the Gospel on campus with ardent love for God and others. As we begin this new year, we ask for all of these gifts as well as for the help we need to live by them.
• Today the Holy Spirit, through all his gifts, wants to help us to enter into the passages of Sacred Scripture with which we have been blessed today and to apply them to our life on campus and beyond. To me there are three essential lessons.
• The first is about the awe and reverence we should have for Jesus. In the Gospel, we get a glimpse of the amazement of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. Many of the Jews by this point were beginning to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah from today’s first reading of how their God would come to save them, opening the eyes of the blind, clearing the ears of the deaf, making cripples leap like deer and making mute people sing. They were beginning to hope that he was the anointed of the Lord through whom, as we prayed in the Psalm, God would secure justice for the oppressed, give food to the hungry, set captives free, give sight to the blind, raise up those who were bowed down, love the just, protect strangers, sustain orphans and windows, and thwart the way of the wicked.
• Even non-Jews in the pagan terrorities, as we see in today’s Gospel, were buzzing with what Jesus could do and who he might be. That’s why when Jesus and the apostles journeyed into the terrority of the Decapolis, or ten cities, on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, several people brought their deaf and mute friend to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They had high hopes, and they were not to be let down. Jesus took the man away from the crowds to prevent him from being objectified by everyone as simply a deaf-mute or, soon, as a miracle recipient, but more importantly to establish a personal relationship with him, so that the first voice he would hear would be Jesus’ own as he spoke to him, and so that the man would not to be disproportionately influenced by the pagan crowd. Once apart, the Lord Jesus put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Ephphatha!,” “Be opened!” The man’s capacities to hear and speak were healed. Once he started speaking plainly, amazement seized everyone. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
• It’s important to pause on that phrase. “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be our Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching and teaching, in his miracles, especially in his saving passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really knows what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of the saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues, in short, to do infinite good and do it amazingly well.
• There would have been many people at Jesus’ time, however, who would have disagreed that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer destroying the sabbath and undermining the law of Moses. They would eventually claim that he would be a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Similarly, many of the zealots who had political ideas of who the Messiah would be and who were therefore were looking for someone to evict the Romans likewise thought Jesus was a total loser. Little could they or other groups of critics fathom what Jesus’ followers — a small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies — would do in his name throughout the globe.
• Today, too, many in our culture challenge whether the Lord in fact does everything well. They criticize Jesus’ direct teachings and those of the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it,” and a modern irrelevancy. Some, like certain of the so-called new atheists, even accuse Jesus and his Church as being a force for evil in human history. One Columbia professor last year in a Contemporary Civilizations class actually compared Jesus to the genocidal madmen Hitler and Lenin and didn’t relent when challenged. Those who hold such ideas, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, some of these false ideas and their presuppositions have been invading the minds of believers, too. This is a much greater concern. It leads us to ponder: If Jesus were to ask us directly whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? I think all of us disciples would of course want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But do we actually believe that? With the light of the Holy Spirit, we can turn to a handful of concrete issues to see whether we, like the residents of the Decapolis, truly praise him for doing all things well or only some things well. How would we respond to these questions if Jesus were to ask us directly?
• “Do you believe that I did all things well in creating you, with your strengths and weaknesses, or do you think I should have made you differently, more like someone else? Do you believe that I did all things well in reiterating for you the Ten Commandments, or do you think I should have made some of them optional? Do you believe that I did well in establishing the Sacrament of my Body and Blood as the source of our personal loving communion, even though, as you saw two weeks ago, so many of my first followers walked away scandalized? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing the Sacrament of Confession on Easter Sunday night even though so many don’t come to me in the way I established to forgive your sins? Do you believe that I did well in setting a high standard for discipleship, calling you to imitate me in living the beatitudes, loving others as I have loved you, being merciful to others just as I have been merciful to you seventy-times seven times? Do you believe I was right in saying you couldn’t serve both God and material possessions and calling you to deny yourself, pick up your cross every day of your life and follow me along the path of sacrificial love to Calvary? Do I believe that I was right to establish the standard that whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me? Do you believe that I did well in making marriage the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, in calling you back to God’s plan for marriage in the beginning? Do you believe that I knew what I was doing when I ordained only men to be my apostles and priests? Finally, do you believe that I did all things well in establishing a heaven and a hell, or do you think I would have been more loving if everyone were to get to heaven no matter what he or she does in life?
• Challenging questions like these are important ones to ask, because sometimes we can begin to allow the devil to sow seeds of doubt as to whether Jesus knows what he’s doing and does everything out of love in an age in which many want to call him antiquated, a misogynist, bigot, hater, or even a psychopath. To believe in Christ, however, to have faith, means to trust in Jesus’ words and actions, to believe in what he says and what he did. This isn’t always easy to do, but Jesus never promised that it would be. We can recall from the Gospel a couple of weeks ago how hard it was for the Twelve to believe in Jesus’ words that they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, a full year before Jesus made sense of these words by taking bread and wine at the Last Supper, changing them into his body and blood and giving them to his apostles to eat. When Jesus asked if they wanted to abandon him as a result this teaching, St. Peter, with real faith, said, not that he understood everything, but “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” In other words, Peter was declaring, “Jesus, you have done everything well until now and we trust that in this, too, you’re doing perfectly and precisely what we need.” Jesus calls us to trust in him in the same way.
• So that’s the first lesson the Holy Spirit, I think, wants to help us to grasp. That Jesus has done everything well, that his teachings and actions are manifestations of his divine wisdom and love, and that we are so lucky to be his disciple, even if some will oppose us out of opposition to him.
• The second lesson is about how Jesus wants to heal and help us to continue his good works in the world. Even though none of us will do everything well, like Jesus, the Holy Spirit wants to help us to do a lot of good. We are able to learn this lesson from the miracle. It’s good to ask why, for example, St. Mark would have included this scene in his Gospel. His fellow evangelist, St. John, said that if he were to try to describe all that Jesus had done, all the libraries in the world wouldn’t be big enough to contain the stories (Jn 21:25). Most of Jesus’ miracles were not described at all or described only in summary, such as what was sung in the Alleluia verse today, “Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom and cured every disease among the people” (Mt 4:23) or what St. Luke said on Wednesday at daily Mass: “All who had people sick with various diseases brought them to [Jesus]. He laid his hands on each of them and cured them” (Lk 4:40). So why did St. Mark choose to include this healing of this deaf-mute in the Decapolis over so many other miracles that he opted not to include? The reason, I think, is because he wanted us to grasp several lessons beyond the healing of one pagan man. The scene indicates in some way the mission of the Church. As Jesus did, the Church still goes into the “pagan territories.” At Jesus’ time, the ten cities were Gadara, Geresa, Scythopolis, Hippos, Raphana, Dion, Pella, Canatha, Damascus and what’s now Amman. But today they could easily be New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio, Paris, London, Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi or many others we could name. We could even talk about the ten campuses, like the eight Ivies, MIT and Stamford. The fact is that there are so many places teeming with people who have never heard or are deaf to the word of God and therefore have speech impediments such that they’re hindered from speaking to God or about him. They’ve often been made spiritually deaf by the noise of their secular environments. And as a child’s speech can be helped or hurt by how and how often parents and others speak to the child, so the speech of many today is spiritually incapacitated because they’re never been formed in the grammar and vocabulary of God’s word. Nevertheless, many have a sense that they’re missing something. They want to be healed. They need to go on a journey, to be led apart from the crowds and the peer pressure, where they can begin to listen to God’s voice in prayer and in Sacred Scripture and there learn how to converse with him and speak his words to others.
• This experience has already happened in your life and mine. On the day of our baptism, Jesus, through a bishop, priest or deacon, worked a miracle similar to what he did in the Gospel. He didn’t use spit, but through his sacred minister, he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the minister who baptized us said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the praise and glory of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to and about him. He worked this miracle so that we might listen to him, treasure his word, and be so transformed by it that through us he might transform the world. The fundamental purpose of our ears is to hear God’s word, and the primary purpose of our capacity to speak is to speak to God. We can use them for many other good purposes — including our studies, our work, our friendships — but we should never forget their first purpose. God has opened both our ears and our lips at the beginning of our Christian life, but we have to use these gifts. At the beginning of this academic year, the Holy Spirit wants to help us to resolve to have a relationship with Jesus like the healed deaf mute, to yearn to hear Jesus’ voice in Sacred Scripture and personal prayer, and to speak to him and, with tongues of fire, to speak about him. At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus instructed the healed man and the crowds not to tell anyone of the miracle, lest everyone come to treat Jesus mainly as a free miracle worker and no longer listen to his word, which was calling them to repent and believe. Regardless, St. Mark tells us, “The more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it.” They couldn’t restrain themselves for speaking of what they had witnessed and heard. After his Resurrection, as he does at the end of every Mass, Jesus does not tell us not to tell anyone, but, rather, to go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to do that on campus, using the gift of speech we have to be able to share, with one person or friend at a time, the marvels the Lord continues to do, including and especially by coming to speak to us every Sunday, in fact every day, and to feed us with himself.
• Let’s turn briefly to the third lesson the Holy Spirit wants us to grasp based on the readings. It’s how we’re supposed to hear the word of God through the ears God has opened. Last Sunday, you recall, St. James called us to be not idle listeners, but doers of the word of God. In today’s reading, he gives us a specific application of how to put the word of God into practice, which can be super instructive to the life of students. It’s about recognizing the worth of every person, attested to by the Word of God, and treating every person not according to human criteria but divine. St. James calls out in today’s second reading the way some of the first Christians were playing favorites. People were treating rich and poor differently, giving finely dressed men with gold jewelry front row seats while telling those who were poor and shabbily dressed to sit on the floor or stand in the corner. St. James is brutal in saying that such distinctions are done by “judges with evil designs.” How can we really listen to God’s word about the dignity of every person whom he has pronounced “very good,” how we live Jesus’ command, “Love one another as I have loved you,” how can we put into practice his parables of the Good Samaritan and the Rich Man and Lazarus, as well his reminder, “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me,” and possibly play favorites among people? And yet that’s what St. James was encountering, and sometimes what still happens in churches. In many places, we treat benefactors differently than the homeless people coming to Church on Sunday, when we’re supposed to treat both the way we would seek to treat Christ. We’re not supposed to play favorites between rich and poor, fit and fat, tall and short, beautiful and unattractive, coiffed and bald, celebrity or unknown. This can be particularly acute on campus, as certain students get VIP treatment from their peers and sometimes even from the university and others struggle to get the time of day. Since it’s so easy and natural to give attention to the rich, famous and good-looking, we need as Christians to prioritize caring for those who normally fall to the bottom of human favoritism. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to hear and keep in mind the divine wisdom proclaimed to us at the end of today’s second reading, that God has chosen “those who are poor in the world to be rich and faith and heirs of the kingdom that he promised to those who love him.” In what matters, often the poor — whether economically or the poor in spirit — can be affluent in the only wealth that can pass through the eye of the needle. As Catholics, we are concerned not just about the star athletes, or the top students, or those popular enough to be elected and selected to various elite positions and institutions on campus. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to care for each one, and to have a special concern for those whom our society often overlooks or even looks down upon, both on campus and around it. Jesus sends us out as his mystical body for 100 out of 100 people, but, considering the way sin corrupts human relationships and leads us to judge and instrumentalize others “for evil designs,” he wants to help us to prioritize the deaf mutes, those perhaps in shabby clothes, or otherwise on the peripheries, and to help them to hear and see through us the love God has for them so that they might come to know him and to be able to speak of him to others.
• Jesus has done all things well, and he wants to continue doing good things well through us. His greatest ongoing work is what we do at the altar in his memory. It’s here that he speaks to our opened ears his word and then puts himself into our open mouths so that we might become one with him and go out together with him into the modern Decapolis. It’s here that the Holy Spirit comes to change bread and wine into Jesus and then to change men and women into one body, one Spirit in Christ. As we prepare to encounter Jesus now at Mass, as he takes us apart from the crowd to be with him here in the most intimate way in human life, we ask the Holy Spirit to help us to imitate those in the Decapolis in not being able to restrain ourselves from speaking about all the good he does for us poor, former deaf mutes, as he himself with his Church has welcomed us here however we’re dressed to his assembly and given us each a seat from which he seeks to make us rich in faith, heirs of the kingdom and true laborers in his vineyard here in Morningside.  Jesus continues to do all things well and he has willed that each of us be here at Columbia now. The Holy Spirit is being sent to strengthen us in our mission. Let’s respond with all we’ve got.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?

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