Living and Proclaiming the Faith in Communion, 27th Friday (II), October 11, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Pope St. John XXIII
October 11, 2024
Gal 3:7-14, Ps 111, Lk 11:15-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today’s Gospel was the first Gospel I ever had the privilege to proclaim and today’s readings were the first ones about which I ever preached, 26 years ago (October 9 that year), the day after I was ordained a deacon. I’ve always thought that God was very good to me in giving me these readings because they’re not particularly easy to preach on, and so from the first time I ever had the chance to act on what I was instructed at my diaconal ordination, to “Believe what you read [and] teach what you believe,” I had to do so explicitly with far greater dependence on God, far greater cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Whenever I have had the chance to proclaim and preach, therefore, on the readings of the 27th Friday of Ordinary Time, Year II, it always reminds me of the summons God gives to turn to him for light! With that help, I’d like to focus on two huge lessons from today’s readings and then tie them to the saint the Church remembers today, Pope St. John XXIII.
• The first lesson is about faith. In today’s reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the apostle talks to us about faith, saying that those who have faith are children of Abraham. St. Paul was writing this to the Christians he had evangelized on his first and second journeys, but whose faith had then been reprogrammed by Judaizing Christians coming from Jerusalem, those who thought that in order to be a good Christian, you first had to be a perfect Jew. They didn’t realize that the Mosaic Law was a gift to prepare God’s people for the advent of the Messiah, who would bring the law to perfection. St. Paul will call the Mosaic Law, as we’ll see tomorrow, a pedagogue or tutor, someone who at his time would travel with a student to class before the master or professor, and then, after class, go over all of the lessons. St. Paul was stressing throughout this letter as well as his letter to the Romans that we are saved by God through faith: salvation is God’s work that we receive through the gift of faith. The Judaizers, like the Pharisees of which he once was one, thought we were saved by our actions of fidelity to God’s law. We Christians know that we’re judged by our actions, but not saved by them. The big takeaway, however, is not just why the Judaizing Christians were wrong. The great takeaway is how we’re supposed to live. We’re supposed to live by faith, just like Abraham. We’re constantly being asked by God to make journeys of faith like Abraham did at 75, leaving Ur of the Chaldeans, his security, his life as he knew it until then and journey to a place God would show him. God didn’t tell him the destination, but Abraham trusted in him enough to go. God promised that he would become the father of many nations and showed him the stars of the sky as a confirmation of how many descendants he’d have, but the text of Genesis is clear that he was asked to look into the heavens when the sky was blue, not dark, because dusk came afterward. Abraham knew the stars were there, but couldn’t see them, which is a good image of what faith means, a certainty without seeing with worldly eyes. He didn’t know that he would have to wait 25 years for the fulfillment of that promise, but he continued to believe. He didn’t realize that he would be asked to sacrifice the fulfillment of that promise, Isaac, 13 years after his birth, but he did so with incredible faith, knowing, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, that God would raise him from the dead if he should be sacrificed. The Lord is calling each of us to a faith like this, to leave our comfort zones, to follow him, to count the stars even when we can’t see them, to trust even when he asks us to sacrifice what’s dearest. As St. Paul writes at the end of this passage, “The one who is righteous by faith will live.”
• The second great lesson from today’s readings is about communion in the Church. In the Gospel, we see the opposition Jesus faced by those who refused to believe in him or his works. By this point, Jesus had already worked all of the miracles foretold by Isaiah (61) that would mark the advent of the Messiah: he had proclaimed the Gospel to the poor, healed the sick, made the blind see, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the lame walk. He had liberated the captives from the clutches of the devil by countless exorcisms. He had fed multitudes. He had walked on water. He had done so much. The people who didn’t believe in him couldn’t credibly deny the facts, but they could try to give them another interpretation: they claimed Jesus wasn’t working them by God’s power but by the devil’s, an attempt to justify their lack of faith in him and their opposition. Jesus, in his words to them, spoke about the work of the devil and the main thrust of his own saving work. The work of the devil is to divide and the main focus of Jesus’ work is to save us and sanctify us by bringing us into communion with God and in Him with others. Christ during the Last Supper prayed for a unity among us resembling the Trinity. He did that through his incarnation, life, passion, death and resurrection. We prayed in the Gospel verse about that when Jesus would be lifted up on the Cross, he would draw all men to himself — and out of the clutches of the evil one. We remember from St. Mark’s Gospel the two essential aspects involved in life with Jesus: he calls us to be with him and to send us out (3:14). The devil wants to divide us from Jesus and prevent our going out as effective, ardent apostles. And he normally seeks to achieve both objectives by division, dividing us from genuine love of neighbor and thereby separating us from God. This is exactly the opposite of what Christ seeks: to gather us to him and to send us out to gather others. And then he gives everyone a choice to gather with him or to scatter. He said that Satan wouldn’t do exorcisms because he would then be defeating himself. It’s only God who does them. God comes in Christ as the “stronger man” to conquer the power of Satan and take his “spoils,” knowing that his “spoils” would be souls Jesus would take out of the devil’s hand. Jesus warned his critics at the end of the Gospel to see that God had freed them through the Old Covenant from the domination of the evil one, but that a worse fate could await them if they cease to live by faith. The devil could return with seven demons and the new state would be worse than the one even before they had been given the Covenant. The whole thrust of Jesus’ words were to help us to respond to Jesus’ desire to gather us into his family and to send us out to gather with him.
• These two focuses in the readings, on growth in faith, and gathering Christ’s family together, are both important ways by which we can gratefully celebrate this feast of Pope St. John XXIII. He died on June 3, 1963, but we celebrate his feast day today, October 11, the day he, responding to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, convened the Second Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council was an attempt to launch a new Pentecost, to open the windows of the Church for the Holy Spirit to come in with his tongues of fire to propose the Gospel in a compelling way to the people of today so as to bring people together. Throughout his ministry, he sought to unite us to Christ in a Church and world that was growing increasingly polarized as a result of two world wars, various genocides and the cold war, as a result of a growing separation between north and south, between rich and poor, developed and developing. He sought to try to gather people together in communion with the “Stronger Man” and the full strength of the Good Shepherd’s love. We can focus on a few ways he did so.
• The first was by maintaining a strong communion with the Lord through a life of personal holiness. He knew he couldn’t gather others for Christ unless he were intimately united with him. From the time he was a 14-year-old in a high school seminary, he saw that in order to bear fruit in his life, he needed to live by a “Rule of life,” a set of spiritual practices that would help him grow in conformity to Christ, and he kept them his entire life. After his death, his former secretary said that John’s “Rules of Life” were truly rules for life. “He copied them out by hand, in minute writing, kept them always by him and constantly observed them, even when he was pope,” Cardinal Loris Capovilla said. They were the blueprint for John’s growth in sanctity in correspondence to God’s grace, his means of growing stronger through communion with the Stronger Man.
• The second way he gathered was through tenderness. He was called “Il Papa Buono,” the Good Pope, in his lifetime because of the way he tenderly loved others with a father’s heart and encouragement. The night before the opening of the Second Vatican Council, he told parents in his memorable “moonlight speech” to the throngs who had assembled in St. Peter’s Square to go home, hug their kids and say, “This is a hug from the Pope.” People never forgot it, because it showed the affection of God through his vicar and icon. He showed God the Father’s love for his family.
• Third, he focused on the need for mercy, which heals the wounds that divides and seeks to establish true reconciliation. The purpose for convening the Council, he said on this day in 1962, was “that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more
 efficaciously,” noting that “the substance of the ancient doctrine of the deposit of faith is one thing, and the way in which it is presented is another.” He thought our age needed a special presentation of the faith with regard to the errors of the day.  The faith was the same but we needed to present it in a more compelling way in response to modern questions if people were going to be saved by faith. He stated that most Councils were called to oppose errors, saying, “Frequently she has condemned them with the greatest severity. Nowadays however, the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather than that of severity. … The Catholic Church, raising the torch of religious truth by means of this Ecumenical Council, desires to show herself to be the loving mother of all, benign, patient, full of mercy and goodness.” That is the means in the modern world, he thought, that the Church could be best a sign of unity and an instrument of God’s peace. That would be the best way to communicate the faith. Today is an opportunity to focus on our role in the transmission of the truth of the faith overflowing in communal love.
• The great work of gathering us to Christ, of uniting us in communion, happens here at Mass where Jesus, the Stronger Man, seeks to make us one body, one spirit with Him and others. It’s here that we receive the help we need to defeat the devil’s attempted sabotage of our lives. It’s here that we remember each day with joy that we are the disciples of the one who has defeated the devil and conquered even death and sin. It’s here that our faith is strengthened by the Word of God, received faithfully in the communion of the Church, and where we commit ourselves anew to holiness and to the work of gathering with Christ into a “United Kingdom” that will stand strong into eternity.

The readings for today’s Mass were: