Lenten Humility, Exaltation and Greatness, Second Tuesday of Lent, March 7, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Campus Ministry, Notre Dame, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Second Week of Lent
Memorial of SS. Perpetua and Felicity, Martyrs
March 7, 2023
Is 1:10.16-20, Ps 50, Mt 23:1-12

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Ash Wednesday each year, Jesus gives us the program for Lent and life when he announces “Repent and Believe,” or “Turn away from sin and believe in the Gospel.” There are two moments that he describes: the first stage of conversion is averting from everything unfit from God — from a bad life, from sin, from evil. The second stage is adverting, turning toward God, and then converting, turning with God, through putting our faith into practice. In today’s opening prayer we asked for this, as we asked the Lord in his “unceasing mercy” and “constant help” to keep us “from all harm”—  and no harm is greater than separating ourselves from God’s love and fraternal love through sin — and be “directed to all that brings salvation,” which is what real practical faith in the Gospel brings us. In today’s readings we also see both moments portrayed very clearly.
• At the beginning of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, God through his emissary calls the Jews “Sodom” and “Gomorrah” to highlight the severity of their sins, because those are the most notoriously iniquitous cities of all time. Throughout Isaiah we see what those sins were. God speaks of their “misdeeds,” their “doing evil,” their “scarlet” and “crimson red” sins. “Wash yourselves clean!,” Isaiah cries out. In the Responsorial Psalm, God points out the hypocrisy of his people, saying, “Why do you recite my statutes and profess my covenant with your mouth” as “you hate discipline and cast my words behind you?” In the Gospel, Jesus begins a searing 35-verse call to repentance not only for the Scribes and Pharisees but for all of us who, like them — and in contrast to the sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah who previously gloried in their debaucheries — can be tempted to appear white on the outside while our souls remain scarlet on the inside. That hypocrisy, that acting, was the principal vice of the Scribes and the Pharisees and often can remain the downfall for those who behave in a religious way but whose hearts are far from the Lord. Jesus says of them that they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy religious burdens on others without lifting a finger to help them, whereas the truth, although often challenging, is meant always to set us free. The reason why they didn’t lift a finger in charity and seek to help people who were struggling to align their lives to God’s will was because they were doing everything not for God or others but to be seen: they widened the phylacteries that would contain verses of sacred scripture in their locks of hair, lengthened the tassels that were to remind them of revelation, and preferred to be acknowledged by everyone for their religious devotion in banquets, synagogues and marketplaces. They were the types who, Jesus told us on Ash Wednesday, pray, fast and give alms not out of love for God and others but to be rewarded by others’ praise and esteem, the exact opposite of the type of motivation God wants: their motivation was not true love of God but rather self-love under the mask of devotion. They sat on Moses’ seat but didn’t share Moses’ own humility before God (Ex 4:10,13). Their knowledge of the law, rather than moving them to conform their lives ever more to God’s revelation, became in essence an obstacle, because it made them proud not humble; they manipulated their knowledge of the law to seek to grow in others’ eyes. They sought the titles of “rabbi” — which literally means “great one,” but is normally translated “teacher” — and “father” and “master,” but in seeking these titles they were striving to take the place not only of Moses but of God: God is our Father; Jesus is our one Master; the Holy Spirit is our teacher and guide. Jesus once said about Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazin that if those of sinful Sidon and licentious Tyre had heard and seen what these three cities had heard Jesus say and watch do, that Sidon and Tyre would long ago have converted. And our call to conversion — 2,000 years after Jesus backed up all of his preaching with the resurrection — needs to be greater still.
• That leads us to the second stage of conversion. It’s not merely fighting against and eliminating sin. It’s positively and passionately doing good. It’s loving God and loving others as God loves others, with all we have and are.  Isaiah says we should be ambitious to “make justice your aim!,” and “learn to do good.” He gives us hope that even if our sins be crimson and scarlet they can become white as snow; in other words they can be transformed from evil into good, by giving us the added motivation to make up for lost time, to recognize what a great and merciful God we have and imitate his loving mercy and generosity to those who need our help as much as we need God’s mercy. He wants to change us from the inside out. “Come now,” God tells us through Isaiah, “let us set things right.” He invites us “now” — because “now” is the day of salvation, as we heard from St. Paul on Ash Wednesday — and doesn’t put the burden on us, but takes the responsibility for fulfilling that call with us. He wants to help us to convert. The whole purpose of the Incarnation is so that Jesus could help us set things aright. In the Gospel, Jesus summarizes our cooperation with this holy desire of God by saying, “The greatest among you must be your servant.” Jesus, the greatest ever, humbled himself to take on our nature, became our slave, washed our feet and our hands, head and souls, and called us to follow him along this path of humility and service. For him, and for those who truly follow him, to reign is to serve, not to be served. He wants us to share his ambition that we be truly great not in the eyes of others but in the eyes of his Father and in the Father’s kingdom. He teaches us by his words and by his own life that the way up in greatness is the way down in humility. That’s the second stage of conversion.
• And there’s a particular focus of the language we can’t miss. Jesus wants us to have the holy ambition to become great among each other by our serving each other. The “greatest among you,” he says, which means we become great among each other, by washing each other’s feet, by ministering to each other. There’s a perennial temptation to think that the call to become the servant of the rest means to think about people on the outside, about neighbors who are strangers we meet waylaid on roadsides, but it always begins with greatness in the home and family, greatness among roommates, greatness among fellow students or co-workers or literal neighbors. Jesus has given us each other to help make us great if we respond by really loving and serving each other.
• Today we have two great saints who show us how to be great, who teach us how to remain free of the most insidious harm and follow Christ on the path of salvation. The account of SS. Perpetua’s and Felicity’s martyrdom is one of the great hagiological treasures of the early Church, because Perpetua wrote of their sufferings in detail the day before their death, and eyewitness accounts of their martyrdom were immediately spread around the early Church. These accounts were so highly regarded by the early Christians that St. Augustine needed to remind them that they should not be treated during Mass with the same reverence as the readings from Sacred Scriptures. Perpetua was a 21-year-old newlywed and mother of a small child and Felicity was a young married slave pregnant with her first child. They were arrested as catechumens and baptized in prison awaiting execution. They both knew that to profess Christianity was a “crime” punishable by death, but they were undeterred. Perpetua’s father, an old man and a pagan, tried all means imaginable to get his daughter to save her life by saying a prayer and making a small sacrifice to the pagan gods. He first begged her to have mercy on his white hair. As deeply as Perpetua loved her father, Perpetua replied, “I cannot call myself by any other name than what I am — a Christian.” She knew the faith was a treasure and she wasn’t going to be ashamed of it. She observed Jesus’ teaching that we must pick up our Cross and follow him, we must become like the grain of wheat and fall to the ground and die, we must “lose” our life in order to save it, we must acknowledge Christ before others and he will acknowledge us before the Heavenly Father. Her father in desperation tried violently to shake her, but he wasn’t able to shake her of her fidelity. Finally he brought her much-loved baby boy, saying, “Look upon your son who cannot live after you are gone,” and throwing himself at her feet begged her with tears not to bring such dishonor on their whole family. Perpetua wrote of how much she grieved for her father and family, but entrusted herself to God, whom she knew loved her family even more than she did and would take care of them should she die for love of him. When she was led before the procurator of the province, Hilarian, he tried all the same tactics of the threats of torture, of the pain of her father, of the ruin that would come to her son. But none worked. Upon his query, “Are you a Christian?,” she answered resolutely, “Yes, I am.”  She was sentenced to be killed by wild boars, cows, leopards, bears and gladiators in a spectacle for bloodthirsty soldiers. Alongside her on the altar of the arena was Felicity. Because she was pregnant when captured, she feared that she might not be able to give the supreme witness of her love for Christ, because in general Romans did not execute women who were pregnant lest they execute a child for the “crime” of the mother. She asked some clandestine Christians, however, to pray for an early childbirth and her prayers were answered. She gave birth to a girl whom two of her fellow Christians adopted. As she was being led into the ampitheater, she was singing triumphal psalms and rejoicing that she had so quickly passed “from the midwife to the gladiator, to wash after the pangs of childbirth in a second baptism.” She was to be baptized in the same baptism of blood for which Jesus once longed and said, “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!” (Lk 12:50). She was renewing her baptismal commitments as she was heading to the fulfillment of baptism. She was, to quote St. Paul in his letter to the Romans, being baptized into Christ’s death so as to share in his resurrection. The procurator set a savage cow upon Felicity and Perpetua. The cow violently threw Perpetua down on her back, tearing her tunic and disheveling her hair. Perpetua got up and quickly pinned her hair, since letting one’s hair down in the ancient world was a universal sign of mourning. In the meantime, the cow had gone after Felicity and had brutally tossed her on the ground. Perpetua ran over to her and helped her up the cow ran away. They stood awaiting another attack, but none came. They turned to the crowd and shouted to the Christians among them, as great teachers of the wondrous gift of faith, “Stand fast in the faith and love one another, and do not let our sufferings be a stumbling block to you.” They gave each other the kiss of peace, and since the cow wouldn’t kill them, the gladiators were dispatched to pierce them with a sword and send them to God. Their faith came to perfection, as did their hope and love. The saving power of God was shown to the upright and through them to the crowds. They who humbly suffered out of love for Christ have now been exalted forever.
• To help us follow in their footsteps, Christ now gives us himself, showing us the saving power of God. He humbles himself fully to exalt us in humility, so that together with the great one, Son of the Father and teacher on the inside, we might learn to do good, aim at justice, hear the plea of the orphan, defend the widow and serve all with fidelity and perseverance as Christ did, until, God willing, we are able to experience like SS. Perpetua and Fidelity, the exaltation that comes from those who live by faith.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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