Learning the Lord’s Ways, Third Monday of Advent, December 14, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week of Advent
Memorial of St. John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church
December 14, 2020
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. For them, they were no longer interested in the truth. They were not hungry to learn and follow God’s paths. 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 likely, 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?” It 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 to know, they were not agnostic in their approach to Jesus. 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 and announced to us by the Author 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 and a good confession or have we just given lip service to the need for conversion God has announced to us through him on the Second Sunday of Advent, yesterday on the Third Sunday of Advent and other times throughout this Season? 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, sent out by him not only with his blessing but, to some degree, as his blessing?
• Someone who lived with his whole life attuned to God’s ways that he assiduously sought to learn and impart is St. John of the Cross, whom the Church celebrates today. John’s father died when he was two and he, his mom and two brothers grew up in poverty. Eventually he began working in a hospital while taking simple classes and the hospital administrator paid for his education. He eventually became a Carmelite, but the worldliness and in some places sinfulness of the Carmelites led him to think that he might be called to be a Carthusian. That’s when he met with St. Teresa of Avila, the foundress of the Discalced Carmelites, who asked him to work with her to reform the whole order. He did. And he suffered for it. Many of the Carmelites did not want to be reformed — most wanted to follow their own ways — and they weren’t open to the fact that this reform was coming from God. On one occasion, the unreformed Carmelites essentially imprisoned him for months in a dirty, dank cell with just a sliver of light coming in. On a second occasion, they brutalized him as he prepared for death. But the religious name he had taken in the reformed Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, was well chosen: and it was through bearing that Cross that he discovered God’s power and wisdom, writing some of his greatest spiritual works — his four great poems on the interior life that led to his four great commentaries — during those sufferings. He persevered in faithful, hopeful, loving prayer despite terrible persecutions. None of them could shake him, for even in the midst of his sufferings, he never ceased to have trust in God. And the poems and commentaries he gave pointed out to the dynamism in faith. Learning the ways of the Lord, he wrote about ascending Mount Carmel together with the Lord, heading out into the Dark Night with the Living Flame of Love singing the Canticle of Love. He didn’t stop following the Lord even when those supposedly acting in his name were persecuting him. He wrote once, in a short series of aphorisms called The Degrees of Perfection, “Remember that everything that happens to you, whether prosperous or adverse, comes from God, so that you become neither puffed up in prosperity nor discouraged in adversity.” He saw that even his adverse tribulations came from God and maintained his courage to the end, where he died maltreated and abandoned by seemingly everyone but God. And in the process, John became Jesus the Master’s greatest teaching assistant in the school of prayer. Some of his pithy aphorisms in his Degrees of Perfection I’ve never forgotten from the time I first encountered them half a lifetime ago and they show us how to open ourselves to the downpour of God’s grace in every circumstance and how not to be scandalized in Jesus even when things around us aren’t going according to what we think ought to be the Messiah’s plan: “Remember always that you came here for no other reason that to be a saint; thus let nothing reign in your soul that does not lead you to sanctity.” “Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.” “Do not commit a sin for all there is in the world, or any deliberate venial sin, or any known perfection.” Those were the ways the Lord taught him, in prayer and in life, and he faithfully lived them and taught them to us.
• 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. Everything propitious and adverse comes from God. We ask him to convert in us whatever is resistant to receiving his prophetic words and sharing them and to transform us 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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