Learning to Love the Lord Much, 24th Thursday (I), September 16, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of SS. Cyprian and Cornelius, Martyrs
19th Anniversary of Cardinal François Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan
September 16, 2021
1 Tim 4:12-16, Ps 111, Lk 7:36-50

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel we encounter one of most beautiful scenes in the life of Jesus, but it is also one of the most important for us to grasp if we wish to love Jesus and to spread love of him. Jesus enters the home of a leading Pharisee, Simon, who doesn’t welcome Jesus with the three typical gestures with which guests were always greeted, with an embrace on the shoulder, the washing of the guest’s feet with cold water, and a pinch of incense or smell of roses on the head. Simon, it seems, not only took typical hospitality for granted but took Jesus for granted.
• The sinful woman in the Gospel, however, did not take him for granted. As Jesus lay reclining with the others at the table, she anointed his feet with oil, then washed them with her tears — think about how copious she must have been weeping or how many years worth of tears into an ancient Jewish tear jar! — and then dried them with her long hair. Simon’s reaction was that Jesus couldn’t have been a prophet if he didn’t realize this woman was a sinner, but Jesus in fact recognized they both were and drew an important and obvious lesson we shouldn’t miss as he prepared to forgive her sins and send her away in peace: The one who has been forgiven more, loves more. “But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” For us to love Jesus much, we need to be forgiven much. On this day on which the Jews marks Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, we Christians grasp that Jesus became the atonement for our sins and every day with him is meant to be one of expiation and merciful love.
• Pope Francis stresses the point about those being forgiven more loving more in a book length interview before he became Pope. “For me, feeling oneself a sinner is one of the most beautiful things that can happen, if it leads to its ultimate consequences” the future Pope Francis said in El Jesuita. “When a person becomes conscious that he is a sinner and is saved by Jesus,” Cardinal Bergoglio said, “he proclaims this truth to himself and discovers the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field. He discovers the greatest thing in life: that there is someone who loves him profoundly, who gave his life for him.” Many Catholics have sadly not had this fundamental Christian experience. “There are people who believe the right things, who have received catechesis and accepted the Christian faith in some way, but who do not have the experience of having been saved, … who therefore lack the experience of who they are,” he lamented. “I believe that only we great sinners have this grace.”
• That’s why it’s essential for us to grow in the love of Jesus that we have this experience of our desperate need for Christ’s mercy and come, like the woman in the Gospel, to weep at Jesus’ feet, conscious that, as we prayed in the Psalm, “his mercy endures forever” and that he has done everything he did to forgive us our sins. If we remain aloof, like Simon the Pharisee, we’ll never really understand who Jesus is or who we are.
• To say that those love the Lord much are those who have been forgiven much doesn’t mean that those who have had the “biggest sins” forgiven but those who have the greatest gratitude for the Lord’s mercy. Some of the great saints, like for example St. Philip Neri, have always said, “But for the grace of God go I.” They realized that they were capable of every type of sin but the grace, the mercy, of God prevented them. Saint Therese, whose spiritual director doubted whether she had ever committed a mortal sin, said that she was looked upon so mercifully by the Lord who, knowing her greater weakness, gave her the grace of mercy ahead of time to prevent her fall. None of us will love the Lord as much as the Blessed Mother who didn’t need to be forgiven, but she had a great sense of how the Lord’s mercy extends from generation to generation, to Abraham and his children forever. Her sinlessness was preveniently a gift of God’s mercy from the moment she was conceived. She was able to love the Lord much because she experienced that mercy in filling her with grace, because she recognized that but by being filled and helped by grace she could succumb to the temptations she experienced in faith. She loved much because she had this great gratitude for God’s mercy.
• This truth brings us to appreciate better today’s first reading. St. Paul was one who had experienced the abundance of God’s mercy. As we’ve heard earlier in his first letter to St. Timothy, he knew he was a blasphemer, persecutor and violently angry man. He was the foremost of sinners yet he recognized that by his having been forgiven he could become a fitting ambassador to appeal to everyone else to be reconciled to God because if he could be forgiven, so could they. But St. Timothy was not exactly in the same category. He had been raised in a holy way by his mother Eunice and grandmother Lois (2 Tim 1:5) and lived with their “sincere faith.” He had been made aware from his earliest days of the mercy of the Lord and because of that gratitude never took it for granted and sought to live a holy life. But his youthfulness was a little bit of a handicap. It was, in some ways, harder for him to appeal to others for conversion because some thought he hadn’t yet lived, that he might not understand their temptations. So today St. Paul gives a lot of advice for him to show the power of the Lord’s mercy through other means. St. Paul begins by saying, “Let no one have contempt for your youth” — youth meant anyone under 40 in the Greek — but “set an example for those who believe in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity.” The way we contradict the critics is by virtue, the way we speak and act, our agape, our loyalty, our unsullied life. When we give evidence that our behavior is the fruit of a genuine choice for God rather than just a sense of naive innocence, then it can be even more powerful than a great conversion story. St. Paul continues, “Attend to the reading, exhortation and teaching.” He means here to the Liturgy of the Word at Mass, proclaiming God’s word, encouraging others on account of it and explaining what it means and its power. “Do not neglect the gift you have,” Paul tells Timothy, which is incredible advice in every season, because one of the ways we most often neglect God’s gift is by failing to focus on it, instead focusing on the gifts we don’t have and desire. He tells Timothy to be “diligent in these matters [and] absorbed in them, so that your progress may be evident to everyone.” We have a duty not to hide the gift of God under a bushel basket; when people criticize us for being too young, we can at least point to the growth God has given us, not to draw attention to ourselves but to God. It’s a sign of the type of growth God wants to do in them. And St. Paul finishes by speaking about his discipleship and apostolate, both of which are meant to be a proclamation of God’s merciful love: “Attend to yourself and to your teaching; persevere in both tasks, for by doing so you will save both yourself and those who listen to you.”
• Today the Church marks three people who loved the Lord very much because of having received the Lord’s mercy, who set an example for fellow believers in their speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, who attended to the reading of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching, and who did not neglect the gift they had but were diligent in using their gifts for others. Saint Cyprian and Cornelius both gave their lives for Christ during the ferocious anti-Christian persecution of the emperor Valerian in 258. Seven years prior, there was the persecution of Decius and various Christians had either sacrificed to idols or bought certificates saying that they had. Many Christians resented those who had betrayed the faith and there was a question about whether they could be forgiven for their apostasy. Pope Cornelius and Cyprian of Carthage were apostles of Jesus’ mercy, shown on the Cross, praying for all who didn’t know what they were doing, forgiving the Good Thief, forgiving Peter and the other ten apostles for abandoning him under trial. They made a path for the reconciliation of the lapsi, conscious that the more one is forgiven, the more one can love and appreciate the Lord Jesus. Similarly today marks the 19th anniversary of the death, and we humbly pray, birth into eternal life of the Venerable Cardinal François Xavier Nguyen van Thuan — whom I knew, who called me a friend and whose feast I hope to be able to celebrate soon if a miracle is accepted for his beatification. He was imprisoned for 13 years, nine in solitary confinement, but while he was there, being mistreated in many ways, he never stopped praying not just for his flock but for his persecutors and loving his enemies. The only people he came into contact with for a while were his guards. He prayed for them, worked for their conversion, tried to teach them foreign languages, and returned good for evil brutality. Eventually, won over by his meekness, humanity, goodness and faith, they started to give in. Then they were exchanged. He did the same for the next guards. Then they were changed, too. Eventually the communists grasped that he would convert all the guards sent to him and they just kept converted ones with him so that he would convert no more. After his liberation he would travel to speak to the Vietnamese in diaspora, appealing to them on the basis of his sufferings, not to be eaten alive by resentment and hatred for the communists who had killed so many of their family members and destroyed their country. He had written from his prison cell, “Wherever love exists, God is there; wherever hatred exists, hell is there.” He wanted them, having received God’s mercy, to love, rather than to be in the hands of the evil one through hatred. It was so moving to hear him make this appeal in person. He was someone who loved the Lord much.
• Today on his feast day we come here to meet the same Jesus who entered Simon the Pharisee’s house. We come to hear the reading, exhortation and teaching, We ask for Jesus’ help so that we may never neglect the gift we have, and the greatest gift of all is the gift of Jesus himself in the sacraments. This is the gift that Cardinal Van Thuan used to celebrate it solitary confinement, with a few bread crumbs and a drop of wine on his hands, from memory, as he did this in Jesus’ memory for the forgiveness of sins. Indeed, the works of the Lord are great, and, having received his mercy, we have, like Cardinal Van Thuan, become one of those works!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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