Listening to Moses, The Prophets and the Risen One, 26th Sunday (C), September 25, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
September 25, 2022
Amos 6:1,4-7, Ps 146, 1 Tim 6:11-16, Lk 16:19-31

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• Today Jesus gives us one of his most moving and unforgettable parables of a poor man dying at a rich man’s gate and the rich man’s subsequent torment in hell. None of us can remain unmoved when we hear the story of Lazarus, covered with sores, being licked and consoled by dogs, longing to eat just the crumbs from the rich man’s table. No one can remain unstirred by the desperation of the rich man after he dies, tormented by thirst and worried about his brothers. What moves us all the more is not simply the state each of them is in, but the fact that each was avoidable.
• In the Parable, the rich man goes to Hell not because he was rich, not because he had earned his money in an immoral way, not because he had been asked by Lazarus for help and refused, not because he had sent dogs to lick Lazarus’ wounds or had done anything at all evil to him. He went to Hell because when there was a poor man at his gate he simply did nothing. He was condemned not because of anything he had done, but precisely because of what he hadn’t done: he was so caught up in himself that he didn’t make any effort at all to help out a man who was struggling and dying in his midst. He simply ignored him.
• In St. Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25:31-46), Jesus made clear that when he judges us, he will separate us into two groups on the basis of how we have treated the poor and needy among us. To those on his right who will be saved, he will say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of the world, for I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill or imprisoned and you cared for me.” But to those on his left, he will declare with great sadness, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, because I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, naked and you gave me no clothes, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, ill and in prison and you didn’t care for me.” The condemned will poignantly ask, “Lord when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger or a prisoner and not minister to your needs?” Jesus will then reply, “As often as you failed to do this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you failed to do it to me.” The rich man went to Hell because in neglecting the dying poor man at his doorstep, he was neglecting God himself. In failing to love his neighbor, he was failing to love God and in fact failing to love himself properly, too.
• So many Catholics are accustomed to thinking about how God wants us to change simply in terms of the bad behavior we know he wants us to excise from our life. We think about sin just in terms of commissions, the bad thoughts we have, the malicious or mendacious words we say, the wayward deeds we commit. But, as we note at the beginning of each Mass, these are not all the sins we commit. We confess to Almighty God and to each other that we have sinned not just in our thoughts, words, and deeds, but “what I have failed to do.” Few of us spend much time, however, examining ourselves on these failures. We omit the omissions, the acts of love we should have done but didn’t do. The lesson Jesus teaches us in the Gospel is that it’s not enough for us not to do evil, but we also have to do good, to sacrifice ourselves for those who are needy, to look past ourselves, identify their needs, and do what God makes possible to remedy them.
• We’re now living in an age in which — because of technological advances in television, cameras, the internet and social media — we see can see all the tragedies happening across the country and the world almost all at once. We see news report of floods in Pakistan, a hurricane in Puerto Rico, another massacre against Christians in Nigeria or Madagascar, Uyghers imprisoned in detention camps in China, Ukrainian refugees in Poland, South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, Venezuelan refugees being moved as political pawns from one part of the United States to the next, and many are tempted to flip the channel and wash their hands. We know that 829 million people in the world, one in nine, are chronically malnourished and 155 million children go to bed each night ravenously hungry, but many say there’s little they can do. We recognize that, even after Dobbs, each year more than 600 thousand babies, made in God’s image and likeness, will have their lives ended through abortion in the United States alone, but most turn a deaf ear to their silent screams. The magnitude of the needy and their needs can sometimes make us just turn inward, mind our own business, and divest ourselves of responsibility.
• Pope Francis has called this the “globalization of indifference” and he’s trying to wake the world up to the way we can live like the rich man in this Sunday’s Gospel. When he went in 2013 to the small Italian island of Lampedusa where over a 25-year period more than 20,000 people died making a perilous 16-hour journey on a rough stretch of the Mediterranean packed on pirate smuggling vessels, he poignantly asked, “Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters of ours?” And he answered, “Nobody! That is our answer. … Today no one in our world feels responsible… for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: ‘poor guy!,’ and then go on our way. … We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; [we say] it’s none of my business!” Where does this indifference come from? How can so many in the world, including so many Christians, get to the point where we chronically fail to be Good Samaritans, where our hearts are no longer touched by the misfortune of others, where we fail even to weep over others’ misfortune when we notice it?
• Pope Francis blames “the culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, which makes us insensitive to the cries of other people.” Such comfort makes us addicted to our own desires over others’ needs. Consumerism makes our hearts stony, corrupted, anaesthetized and deadened by the love of money and material things. Like the rich man in the Gospel who dresses like a king and acts like a god, some can stuff ourselves with so much food and pleasure that we longer empathize, so blinded by our ego that we fail even to notice the Lazaruses whom God places at our doorstep not only to help them but convert and change us.
• Jesus cares for every Lazarus and wants us to share his love. He wants to help us by today’s Gospel to overcome our apathy toward others, our indifference, our neglect, our lack of responsibility and love. The reason why the Missionaries of Charity were founded was to transform the world to notice poorest Lazarus in his distressing disguise and to give him or her wholehearted, free service. Jesus thirsts infinitely for these Lazaruses and he wants to love and care for them through us, his Mystical Body. He raised up through St. Teresa of Calcutta the Society of the Missionaries of Charity, as your Constitutions say, not only to “labor for the salvation and sanctification of the poorest of the poor all over the world, … loving [Jesus] wholeheartedly and freely in the poorest of the poor with whom He identifies,” but also to make “reparation for the sins of hatred, coldness, lack of concern and love for him in the world today.” The whole Church is meant to live this two-fold mission, because, as Pope Benedict wrote in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, charity is as essential to the mission of the Church as the proclamation of the Gospel and the celebration of the sacraments. Mother Teresa once commented on how Jesus said, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren, you did it to me” and “This is my commandment that you love one another.” She said, “Suppress this commandment and the whole grand work of the Church of Christ falls in ruins. For Jesus came on earth to give charity the rightful place in the hearts of men. ‘By this,’ He said, ‘men shall know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ … ‘My little children,’ St. John says, ‘let us love not in word but in deed.’ To love means to give, and we are expected to have total surrender. Let this spirit come through in our relations with our poor people, for we are missionaries, the carriers of God’s own love.”
• She expressed concern that the cancer of indifference that can affect many hearts in the world can similarly attack the hearts of Missionaries of Charity. She examined her conscience and encouraged her daughters to examine theirs by asking, “Are you one of those who just ignore the poor? Do you go to them without preparing? Are you one of those who judge the poor? … Though we do not take money, we are not living in the open. We have a house, clothes to wear, four meals and all the comforts necessary. When I get up I don’t even think, ‘What am I going to eat today?’” She said that “Charity for the poor must be a burning flame in our Society” and wanred that “just as when a fire ceases to burn, it gives us no more usefulness and heat, so the Society, the day it loses its grip on charity toward the poor, will lose its usefulness and there will be no life.”
• And so she encouraged everyone to focus on the words of the fourth vow, to give wholehearted, free, service to the poorest of the poor. To love Christ in each Lazarus with their whole heart, “not just half minds, or as much as you are able to do,” with “hearts burning with zeal and love for souls, single-minded devotion, wholly rooted in … deep union with God in prayer and fraternal love.” And freely, which means “joyfully and with eagerness; fearlessly and openly; freely giving what we have freely received; without accepting any return, without seeking any reward or gratitude.” This “wholehearted and free service to Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor,” she said, gives the Missionaries of Charity “a distinct vocation in the Church today.” And the whole Church needs that vocation to rediscover how to satiate Jesus’ infinite thirst and take responsibility to notice, love, and serve each Lazarus. This is the means by which, as men and women of God, they may, in St. Paul’s words from today’s second reading, they may “pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience and gentleness,” “compete well for the faith,” and “lay hold of eternal life, to which you were called.”
• At the very end of Gospel, Jesus makes clear that charity for Lazarus is essential for us to lay hold of, rather than let go of, eternal life. When the rich man due to his callous disregard to Lazarus in his midst asks Abraham, representing God, to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them that they need to be charitable, to overcome their indifference to the plight of those in need, lest they join him in the place of flames, Abraham replies that his brothers have Moses and the Prophets. They had Amos, for example, who in today’s first reading thundered against the “complacent in Zion [Jerusalem], lying upon beds of ivory, stretched comfortably on their couches,” eating lambs and calves, improvising using, drinking “wine from bowls” and anointing themselves “with the finest oils,” not concerned at all about collapse of the Kingdom in the North, over their sufferings or even on the cause of their fall due to sin. They had Isaiah, who said that the fasting God wishes is to “Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless, clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own. Almost every prophet denounced injustice and the hardness of heart that turned people from loving the needy in their midst. But the rich man says that that the testimony of the prophets won’t be enough, because his brothers, just like he used to, were ignoring God through Moses and the Prophets just like they were ignoring the poor. “But if someone from the dead goes to them,” the rich man begs, “then they will repent.” Abraham replies, however, that if they are deaf to the Law and the Prophets, if they are deaf to God, then they will be unmoved even by the appeals of someone risen from the dead. Well, today, we and the whole Church receive what the five brothers in the Parable did not. Not only do we have Moses and the Prophets to speak to us about charity, but Jesus, risen from the dead, comes to proclaim to us this Parable live. At Mass, we encounter him not under the appearance of a poor man but under the even humbler appearances of bread and wine. As he gives us his Body and Blood, tells us, “Do this in memory of me,” which means not just to celebrate Mass but to go and do what he does, giving our body, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our food, our material resources, and most importantly our love to others in need. God who calls us to be remember him and to love others as Good Samaritans will give us all the help he knows we need to do so, but we need to respond to that grace, as true missionaries of his responsible, tender, compassionate love. This is the path that, when it comes time for our judgment, will enable Jesus to wave each of us to his right for having cared for him in the person of others. This is the path to satiate his infinite thirst. This is the way that we may take our seat with all those eating not just scraps from the Master’s table but sharing in the sumptuous eternal wedding banquet for which the Mass is a foretaste. God bless you!

The readings for this Sunday’s Mass were: 

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