Living According to the Holy Spirit, 28th Wednesday (II), October 14, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Callistus, Bishop and Martyr
October 14, 2020
Gal 5:18-25, Ps 1, Lk 11:42-46

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today we come to the end of our reading of St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians and he summarizes everything he’s been saying about the contrast between living while thinking one is saved by the law and external deeds versus living to be saved by God through his grace received and responded to with faith. He does so in describing two totally divergent sets of effects. One he calls the “works of the flesh,” because this is what living focused on the “works of law” produces and is entirely the production of the individual; and the other is called the “fruit of the Spirit,” which like fruit is made requires the cooperation between the one who sows a seed (in this case, the Holy Spirit) and the one who receives it (in this case, us). The contrast couldn’t be greater. Often when we think of the “works of the flesh” we think first of those living under the three fold concupiscence of the lust of the eyes (materialism), lust of the flesh (carnal sensuality) and the pride of life (a desire for control and dominion). But St. Paul makes clear in context that living according to the works of the law, rather than in communion with the Legislator, can produce these same works of the flesh. He says that the works of the flesh are “obvious”: “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.” He says that those who do such things “will not inherit the kingdom of God,” not so much because they’ll be punished but because they won’t be interested in God’s kingdom after having made other things their god.
• Jesus pronounces a series of “woes” (indications of a cursed life) in the Gospel to those Scribes and Pharisees who, even though they thought they were living the way God wanted them to live were living ultimately according to the flesh. Unless they convert, he said, they’ll be doomed, because while they pay tithes on the smallest of garden herbs they “pay no attention to judgment and to love for God.” They focus on the most conspicuous seats and the greetings of others, but are spiritually dead, “like unseen graves over which people unknowingly walk.” To use the words of today’s Psalm, they’re ultimately like the “chaff that the wind drives away.” They impose burdens on others hard to carry without lifting a finger to help them, the exact opposite of a Good Samaritan. We see the works of the flesh in the way they attacked Jesus and others he had come to save. We see their idolatry of the law. We witness their immorality, hatred, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of anger, acts of selfishness and envy in the way they conspired to have Jesus framed and executed. We see their dissensions and factions in the discussions of the Sanhedrin, to which many of them belonged. On the outside they seemed to be doing the works of God, Jesus was saying, but on the inside they were just doing works of the flesh, refusing to enter the kingdom, and producing only chaff and interior death.
• St. Paul calls the Galatians and all of us Christians to another path. In the Psalm, it’s described as the way of the “blessed man” who “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on His law day and night,” not as a dry document or as an idol but as a means of growing in love with the Lord who gives us the law to train us to love God and others. Such a person, the Psalm says, is “like a tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” That’s the person who plants himself in the Holy Spirit, “lives” in him, is “guided” by him,  and “follows” him. This cooperation with God’s grace in faith yields the type of fruit in every season that St. Paul describes: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” That fruit doesn’t happen as a coincidence; it flows from union with God. If we’re aware of God the Holy Spirit working within us, how can we not experience greater love for God and for all those God loves? How we can not experience the joy that is the infallible sign of God’s presence within, a joy that lasts even in the midst of suffering and contradiction, because how can anything compare with the happiness that flows from God’s presence? How can greater awareness and conscious following of God the Holy Spirit not increase our peace? How can it not help us with patience, for isn’t waiting for whatever we need to happen so much easier when we know we’re waiting consciously and prayerfully with God? How can the awareness of God within not make us more kind and gentle, seeking the other’s good together with the God who loves them and even correcting them out of love, knowing that the Holy Spirit will help us with the words? How can we not be more generous when the Holy Spirit has been generously poured into us as his temple? How can we not grow to trust God more in faith when he entrusts himself to us? How can it not help us with self-mastery over our lower appetites when the Holy Spirit strengthens — literally confirms — us within?
• Hearing all of this, who among us wouldn’t choose life according to the Spirit? We need to ask, however, whether someone would honestly be able to predicate the various manifestations of the fruit of the Spirit to us. If our family members, friends, fellow priests or religious and even strangers who took the time to observe us were to be asked to describe us, would the first words that came to their lips be that we live with and are models of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control? I know to my great lament that God, and my guardian angel and even my mother couldn’t say all of these things about me, at least yet. To the extent that they can’t, that’s because we’re still living according to the flesh. We may, like the Scribes and Pharisees in the Gospel, be “very religious,” we may say our prayers, tithe and never break the letter of the commandments, but we still are not necessarily living fully in the Spirit and following the guidance he gives us. Today is a day for which the Holy Spirit has been waiting a long time, a day on which we ask him for this grace, give him permission, and then “crucify [our] flesh with its passions and desires” as St. Paul says to allow the Holy Spirit to raise us from the dead.
• The saint that we celebrate today is one who taught the first Christians how to live by the Spirit to the crucifixion of the flesh with its passions and desires. He’s a great saint of conversion from life according to the flesh to life according to the spirit. Earlier in the letter St. Paul talks about two types of slavery. St. Callistus was a slave in life before he became a true slave of Christ. He managed his master’s assets. Eventually, either through mismanagement or theft, he lost them and ran away. He was caught, sentenced to manual labor (a particularly hard form of slavery) and sent to the mines. Through various interventions, the Christians in those mines were liberated. Callistus was eventually entrusted by Pope St. Zephyrinus as the steward of Christian cemeteries (the underground catacombs), was ordained a deacon, and after St. Zephyrinus’ death was elected his successor. And because he had made the journey from sin to grace, from slavery to freedom, from earthly life to life according to the Spirit, he sought to make it possible for other to receive that gift. The mercy he showed toward sinners scandalized many of the priests of Rome and beyond as he made it much easier for those who had been misled by sects and heretics to be welcomed back into the fold, for reducing the length of penances necessary for those who had committed sins like murder, abortion, primitive contraception and apostasy to be readmitted to communion, and for recognizing the marriages among different social classes in Rome against Roman law. There were some — among them Hippolytus in Rome and Tertullian in Carthage — who thought he was mistaken to be so lenient, but it seems that they were much more concerned with giving strong penances to show the severity of sin than in recognizing conversion when it had happened and facilitating the life of grace. Callistus also set up diakonia for the poor throughout the city and eventually gave all that he had, giving his life for God and for his people, doing so with joy, peace, generosity and faithfulness. At the beginning of Mass, we asked God, through his intercession and by his example, to strengthen us so that “rescued from the slavery of corruption, we may merit an incorruptible inheritance.” That’s what it means to heed the call of Christ to conversion from living by our own wits and worldly wisdom to living together with him according to the Spirit.
• The first and greatest way we need to correspond to the Holy Spirit, to let him guide us, live in us so that we may follow him all the way to the Father’s house is here at Mass, where the Holy Spirit comes down to overshadow not just the priest and the altar to transform bread and wine entirely into God the Son in his body, blood, soul and divinity, but seeks to transform us into one body, one spirit of Christ. It’s here where we give him the permission to change us. It’s here where we encounter the source of our love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control and are spurred on to holiness.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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