Living According to the Lord’s Will to the End, Seventh Wednesday (II), February 23, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr
February 23. 2022
James 4:13-17, Ps 49, Mk 9:38-40

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, as we give thanks for the last seven years when I’ve had the privilege to celebrate Mass for you three, four and five times a week, the Word of God and today’s feast unsurprisingly provide us categories with which to align our heads and hearts.
• We begin with the first reading, which helps us to focus on the will of God. During my early years as a parish priest, at Espirito Santo Parish in Fall River, I always loved how many of the parishioners, whenever I’d say to them in Portuguese “See you tomorrow,” would  reply, “Se Deus quiser” (“If God should will”). I used to joke with them that I didn’t know that they knew the Letter of St. James so well, something that caught most off-guard, because most didn’t know the Scriptural foundation of their good Christian habit. Today St. James discusses those who are always making plans for the future, saying things like, “Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town, spend a year there doing business, and make a profit.” He tells them, “You have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow. … Instead you should say, ‘If the Lord wills it, we shall live to do this or that.’”
• “If the Lord wills it.” It’s a beautiful expression that first reminds us that every day is a gift and, indeed, that it’s the Lord’s will that holds us in existence. It’s a mentality, a spirituality, that helps us to entrust ourselves to his loving will in the present and leave the future to his Providence. Many Scripture scholars say that St. James’ letter is a step-by-step application of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. On this point about living in the present and not presuming upon tomorrow, Jesus — after describing that we shouldn’t worry about what we are to eat, drink, wear or live because our Providential Father knows we need all of these things and cares for us — stressed, “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself” (Mt 6:29). He added, with regard to our needs, a few verses later, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything else will be given to you besides” (Mt 6:33).  Based on the Lord’s own wisdom, St. James goes beyond how we should regard what we’ll be doing tomorrow, but is telling us that everything in our life, every day in the present, we should entrust to the Lord’s will, to his love, to his providence. We should seek his kingdom, we should strive to align our whole existence to God’s will, to make our life a commentary on the words, “Thy will be done!” That’s why the Responsorial Psalm today — which always is meant to respond to or relate to the first reading in some way — focuses on spiritual poverty (“Blessed are the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs”) because spiritual poverty grasps that our whole life is dependent on God’s loving care, including the number of our days, and those who are spiritually poor are rich in their trust in God’s will. I thank you, Sisters, for over the last several years giving me a beautiful witness of loving trust and of faithfully doing of the Lord’s will. You did it when you came here to St. Andrew’s from St. John the Martyr. You are preparing interiorly to do it again from St. Andrew’s to where God is asking you to go. Just like Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans, so you’re being asked to move, trusting in the Lord, and the Lord will bless your aligning yourself to him and his will as he promises that all things work out for the good (Rom 8:28).
• Today in the Gospel, Jesus makes clear God’s will in a very important dimension of Christian life. St. John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name, and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.” Think about that for a moment: They were trying to prevent someone from casting out demons because the person was not one of their number, as if Jesus’ will would rather be to allow a possessed person to remain in the clutches of the evil one! What they were also missing was that Jesus’ name was not some magical talisman by which demons could be expunged apart from God’s will. The only way the invocation of Jesus’ name would work would be if God were responding to the prayer of the exorcist. It was evident that this man casting out demons in the name of Jesus was doing so with the active cooperation of our exorcising God. In his reply, Jesus sought to align St. John’s thinking to God’s thinking, his will, to God’s. Jesus said, “Do not prevent him. There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time speak ill of me. For whoever is not against us is for us.” Jesus was saying that this man, even though he wasn’t known to be with them, nevertheless was for them. He was on their side. It’s God’s will not to prevent anyone from working for the kingdom. When, however, we hear this expression, “Whoever is not against us is for us,” it’s important for us to link it to something else Jesus said that on the surface might seem contradictory. When he was explaining to those who accused him of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons,” Jesus, after reminding them that divided kingdoms can’t stand, said, “Whoever is not with me is against me; whoever doesn’t gather with me, scatters” (Mt 12:30). When we harmonize the two seemingly contradictory passages, we learn two important truths. First, it is possible from someone to be gathering “with Jesus” while not necessarily being visibly “with us.” That’s why we should never presume that someone who is not with us is necessarily not with Jesus. This is a key point in terms of ecumenical work for the kingdom and the common good. But secondly and more profoundly, a harmonization helps us to see that there are parts of us that are with the Lord and parts of us that are not with Him. Parts of us gather with him and parts of us scatter. It’s God’s will that we seek to bring all parts of us into alignment with God. And that’s God’s work of continual sanctification, something that God wills to grow in us in response to his grace and in communion with others.
• A great witness to this type of growth in doing God’s will until the every end is St. Polycarp, the heroic bishop of Smyrna in southwestern Turkey who was martyred on this day in 155. He learned the Gospel as a young boy from St. John the Apostle. With Pope St. Clement and St. Ignatius of Antioch (a saint whom he knew and from whom he received a celebrated letter), he is one of the three great post-Apostolic fathers, the great heroes of the second generation of Christians. We know how the faith spread so much in the early Church: it was the witness of martyrdom — that sane people treated Jesus as someone worth living for and dying for — and the witness of Christian charity, that Christians would sell all they had, lay the proceeds at the feet of the apostles and bishops to care for everyone as family members where needed. Polycarp presided over that charity and mutual mercy. And at the end of life he also spread the faith, out of love for God and others, through his martyrdom. When the bloodthirsty mobs and soldiers came to arrest him, he said, doubtless based on the words Jesus taught in the Our Father and said in the Garden of Gethsemane, and echoing the sentiment of St. James in today’s first reading, “The will of the Lord be done.” He asked for some time to pray as the guards were provided supper and he prayed for two hours. He went to his inner room and, standing, entrusted to God his own flock in Smyrna and the Church universal. As he was being brought to the place where he would be tried and killed, some of his captors tried to persuade him out of it by pronouncing Caesar as Lord or by offering incense to the statues of the pagan gods, but he replied, firmly, “I am resolved not to do what you counsel me.” Later, in the stadium, he was given a chance to save his life simply by cursing Jesus Christ. He rejoined, “For four score and six years I have served him and he has done me no wrong, why would I betray him now?” The presiding magistrate sentenced him to be burned at the stake. Ss they were tying and were about to nail his feet to the wood, he said, “Leave me as I am. The one who gives me strength to endure the fire will also give me strength to stay quite still on the pyre, even without the precaution of your nails.” After he had prayed anew, with praise to God for having brought him to this hour, he asked for the grace to partake of the chalice of Christ as a pleasing sacrifice, and enter into eternal life in the immortality of the Holy Spirit, finishing his words with a doxology and amen. They lit the fire, and the Christian eyewitnesses noted in their account of his martyrdom, “When a great flame burst out, those of us privileged to see it witnessed a strange and wonderful thing. Indeed, we have been spared in order to tell the story to others. Like a ship’s sail swelling in the wind, the flame became as it were a dome encircling the martyr’s body. Surrounded by the fire, his body was like bread that is baked, or gold and silver white-hot in a furnace, not like flesh that has been burnt. So sweet a fragrance came to us that it was like that of burning incense or some other costly and sweet-smelling gum.” Polycarp entered into the sacrifice of Christ that he had the privilege of celebrating each day. He hallowed the name of God by his fidelity to the end, doing the will of the Lord, seeking his kingdom above all, hungering for what God gave, forgiving those who hurt him, and entrusting himself to the Lord during trial, confident that God would indeed free him from the evil one. We prayed for the same gifts as Polycarp as we opened today’s Mass, begging God to “grant, through [Polycarp’s] intercession, that, sharing with him in the chalice of Christ, we may rise through the Holy Spirit to eternal life.” This is the means by which we, too, may remain faithful to serving the Lord and never betraying him no matter how long we live and no matter what vicissitudes we face. As I celebrate today two score and twelve years since my birth, I am conscious that each year, in fact each day, on earth is one day closer to meeting Christ definitively in heaven. I ask for the grace of perseverance in serving the Lord who has done me nothing but good, and for the grace, like St. Polycarp, never to betray the Lord but do his will until the end.
• “If the Lord wills it.” I rejoice that part of God’s will for me has been to serve you over the course of these last seven years. Since the first time I came early in the morning to Visitation Convent on March 5, 2015, I have been privileged to celebrate Mass with you 1,114 times. [I have also had the chance to celebrate Mass 358 times at Sacred Heart and 38 times at other Sisters of Life convents. When I celebrate my last scheduled Mass at Sacred Heart this Friday, I will have altogether celebrated Mass for the Sisters of Life 1,510 times since my arrival in New York City, a great joy and gift.] I have grown so much as a disciple and a priest here thanks to the way God has blessed me through you. Thank you for your love for Jesus in the Mass, which has made it so easy for me to pray the Mass with un-rushed love and fitting devotion. Thank you for the way some of you pivoted to the Word of God as it was proclaimed as you sat like Mary of Bethany hungering, it seemed to me, for every word the Lord wanted to give you, even on the days when you were really tired. Thank you for the reverent, loving, faithful way you received Jesus in Holy Communion. Thank you for the ardor and beauty you poured into singing the Mass parts and, on feasts and solemnities, to antiphons and hymns. Thank you for your heroic witness to life each day, as we prayed together for those in need asking for mountains to be moved, and we rejoice at how often God did. Thank you for the trust you showed in Divine Mercy and in me as his unworthy instrument, as you came to confession, and gave me the extraordinary privilege of seeing as only a confessor can your extraordinary desire to do God’s will and unite all parts of your life to him — and to witness, too, the really beautiful work of mercy he has begun in you and is bringing to completion. Thank you, in short, for the love you gave me in the Lord’s name. Please forgive me for all the times I didn’t serve you as well as I wanted, as God wanted, and as you deserve — for the ways in which it was obvious how I’m not yet fully with the Lord. Despite my sins and weaknesses, I really tried to give you my best I could, coming faithfully, rain, snow or shine, healthy or sick, even during the pandemic. I tried to show, through that commitment, a little bit of God the Father’s loyal hesed and providential care; as a friend of the Bridegroom, a little of the Bridegroom’s persevering care for his beloved brides; and as a Barnabas, give you encouragement of how much the Church values you and your beautiful and important vocation. I love you and will miss you. But I will continue to bring you intentionally with me each day to the altar, as I seek to give a return for all that the Lord in his goodness has given me through you. I ask you please to continue to pray for me, that I may be able to give one day a testimony like St. Polycarp, however long the Lord permits me to serve in his vineyards.
• “If the Lord wills it.” The Mass is the great opportunity we have for bringing our entire life into conformity with God. It is God’s will that we do this in his memory and make our life Eucharistic. It is here that we, like St. Polycarp, are baked into the bread that is transformed into Christ’s body and are made one body, one spirit in Christ and with each other. This is where we live each day the mystery of the Visitation, as the Lord comes to us, to bless and consecrate us, to make us leap with joy, and to transform us, like our Lady, to make our life a fiat to God’s will — and like our Lady, to bring the Jesus we receive and bear within out to the world he seeks to transform into a culture of life and a civilization of love, one precious person at a time.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

• The first was a new Stabat Mater written by Sr. Maria Emmanuel, SV, and sung for the first time together with Sr. Gianna Maria, SV, accompanied on the violin by Sr. Rose Patrick O’Connor, SV. It’s an extraordinary piece of music that I believe will be sung in 500 years. 
• The second was a song by Sr. Eden Marie, SV, about God the Father that she said was inspired during her postulancy when she used to come to see me for spiritual direction. She sung it together with Sr. Gianna Maria, SV. 
• The final, another original composition entitled No Bye Ever, was sung by all of the Sisters, accompanied on the violin by Sr. Rose Patrick O’Connor, SV. 

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