Listening to the Lord As He Speaks, 1st Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time, Year II
January 10, 2018
1 Sam 3:1-10.19-20, Ps 40, Mk 1:29-39

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• We continue our first steps in Ordinary Time with the help of St. Mark’s Gospel, with which we dive into the public ministry of Jesus. The central fruit of the Christmas Season is to recognize that God-with-us is still with us, seeking to save us, speak to us, heal us, help us, unite himself to us, help us become more and more like him, and fulfill his mission. As we prayed on Christmas morning, it is to come to share in the divinity of him who has come to share our humanity, to seize this “wondrous exchange.” Today we take a glimpse at an ordinary day in the life of Jesus in which we see just how busy his activity was, full of preaching, healing, praying and a passion to share himself with yet others. The Jesus who behaved that way in Capernaum still has those priorities as he seeks to interact with us like Peter’s in-laws and contemporaries.
• Jesus began by preaching for a long time in the synagogue on the Sabbath, which as any priest will tell you after a Sunday morning, must have been somewhat exhausting all-day work since people would return home normally only at sunset. Then he went to Simon’s house where he healed his mother-in-law. Soon after that, the whole town was at the door asking for miracles, and Jesus, as was his custom, would work with every sick person one-on-one, bringing people into a personal relationship with him so that he could give them an even greater gift, salvation through faith. And after that, well before dawn in the next day, he went out to pray. We’ll return to this in a moment. Finally, when the apostles found him and said that everyone was looking for him, rather than rejoice in his “success,” he mentioned that they needed to be on their way, because he wanted to preach the Gospel in surrounding towns as well. “For this reason I was sent,” he said. Such was his passion to spread the faith that he wasn’t just looking for a few to receive him, but for all.
• What I’d like to focus a little bit more on today, however, was Jesus’ prayer in the middle of the night. Even though he was exhausted, he still went out to pray. That was how much he desired that communion with the Father. There’s something particularly special about prayer at night, prayer, we can say, that triumphs over the body’s desire for sleep, because it really tests and strengthens the will to choose God over one’s appetites. Jesus was regularly praying at night not only because he was mobbed during the day but because that’s a time in which the distractions of each day are less and we can sense the light of God shining in the midst of the nocturnal darkness. This is likewise one of the reasons why many adorers who take the “graveyard shift” speak about how special it is. That’s one of the reasons why you get up so early in the morning to pray in this convent. It’s one of the reasons why monks and nuns for centuries in cloisters have arisen to pray matins at about 3 am. There’s something special about prioritizing God in the middle of night, about getting up before dawn to express our desire for God before the sun that symbolizes God rises. Praying at night is not only praying at a time with fewer distractions but often it’s done when everyone else is sleeping, when no one else can notice. These two lessons — prioritizing the Lord in prayer and praying to him, for for the attention of others — are meant to influence our prayer at all times.
• And this lesson about the lessons of prayer at night are similarly communicating catechetically we could say in today’s first reading. God called young Samuel to prayer not in the middle of the day but while he was sleeping. We know that after Samuel’s birth, Hannah presented him in the temple and left him there to learn how to serve the Lord. And he would sleep in the temple close to the Ark of the Covenant. The text tells us that at the time “a revelation of the Lord was uncommon and vision infrequent,” something that implies that at the time of writing revelations were common and visions of God frequent, a change that is meant to continue into our present as God reveals himself to us and allows us to see his will in prayer each day. God calls out to Samuel in the middle of the night by name, but Eli, who had been corrupted over time and allowed his family to become corrupt, was slow to pick up on what was happening, and didn’t want to be interrupted in the middle of his sleep. Eventually he caught on and gave Samuel good advice, to see to the one calling, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” And that’s precisely what Samuel did. In that prayer, we learn a lot. Often we can think about prayer as our work — the vocal prayers we say, the meditations we choose and do — but prayer is first and fundamentally about opening ourselves up to what the Lord wants to give us in his mercy. It’s more about God’s word than our words, his action than our action. I say to kids, “God has given us two ears and one mouth for a reason,” so that we’ll listen to him far more than try to hog the conversation. The ultimate purpose of prayer is not an exchange of words or ideas but an exchange of persons, and God in grace makes the first move. That’s why we must begin with an attentiveness to his voice, to his presence, to his self-giving. This type of receptive prayer is essential. The text tells us, “At that time Samuel was not familiar with the Lord.” Even though Samuel was raised from his earliest days in the Temple, even though he doubtless had learned to recite the Psalms and the Torah, even though he was a “minister to the Lord” already, he was “not familiar with the Lord,” he didn’t know God as a Father, he didn’t see himself as a member of God’s family, he didn’t have a personal relationship with him. That type of personal relationship happens through prayer, the one-on-one dialogue we have with God. God wants us all to be familiar with him in this way through the existential dialogue of prayer. And God mercifully will give himself to us in that way, in the middle of the night when we can perceive him more clearly, so that we can also see more clearly how he’s giving himself to us in the middle of the day. God wants to give us the same gift he gave Samuel, to “wake us up” in the middle of our sleepiness to his presence, so that just as “Samuel grew up, and the Lord was with him, not permitting any word of his to be without effect” and he was known “from Dan to Beersheba … [as] an accredited prophet of the Lord,” so we will continue to grow conscious that the Lord is with us and allow the word he implants with us to bear 30-, 60- or 100-fold fruit, making it possible for us to announce the Lord to others by who we are even before we open our mouths.
• I would like to pause a little bit longer on that prayer, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” because I think it is one of the most beautiful and helpful aspirations a Christian can say. I’d encourage you to make it each night before you go to bed, allowing the Lord, if he wishes, to interrupt your sleep or to speak to you in your dreams. I’d encourage you to say it as part of your morning offering, arising out of bed. I’d encourage you to pray it at the beginning of your mental prayer, when you pray the Liturgy of the Hours, when you begin another hour of work. I’d urge you to say it at the beginning of the Liturgy of the Word at Mass and, if you need to, before the first reading, the Psalm, the Gospel and the homily. It’s a sign of great docility. And as you listen for the Lord’s gentle whisper, be listening to him to speak with words to be acted upon. That’s what links us to today’s Psalm, which trains us to say — as the Letter to the Hebrews ascribes to Jesus the fundamental attitude of — “Here I am. I have come to do your will.”
• Today as we come here to Mass, we recognize that it is the same Lord who spoke to Samuel, the same Jesus who teaches, heals and prays, who has called us to this encounter. He teaches us in Sacred Scripture. He heals us from the inside by what St. Ignatius of Antioch called “the medicine of immortality” (the Eucharist) and he prays for us, so that, so healed and strengthened by him, we may use our health, like Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, to serve God and others as we go to other towns and people as well, because it’s to spread that faith in action that we, like Christ, have been sent!

The readings for today’s Mass were: