Living as Members of Jesus’ Family, 16th Tuesday (II), July 24, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Charnel Maklouf
July 24, 2018
Mic 7:14-15.18-20, Ps 85, Mt 12:46-50

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Jesus came from heaven to earth ultimately to restore God’s family by reforming us in the image of God and bringing us into communion with him and with each other. In today’s Gospel, we see that Jesus, made aware that his mother and his relatives (the Hebrew and Aramaic words for brother was used for all relatives) were outside, used it as a teaching moment to stress who his family members are. It’s an opportunity for us to focus on our divine filiation, our calling and mission as sons in Jesus the Son. We can focus on four points.
• The first is that we show that we are sons and daughters of God the Father, members of Jesus’ family, by “doing the will of [our] heavenly Father.” We become more like the Son precisely in making the Father’s will our own and obeying his words with love. This is the way he sculpts us to become chips off the old divine block. It also helps to make us, at the same time we become Jesus’ brothers, the “mother of the Word,” as St. Ambrose taught: conceiving within us the Word that grows until, so pregnant with it, we have to give birth in deeds of love, we have to bring it to the light.
• That process of divine filiation begins by receiving Jesus through faith into lives, which teaches us how to receive his words and act on them. St. John tells us in his prologue, “He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him. But to those who did accept him he gave power to become children of God” (Jn 1:12). That power to become children is the power of the Holy Spirit that helps us to cry out “Abba, Father!” and to relate to God as Father. We receive this power in baptism, but it’s a gift received in faith.
• The third means by which God helps us to recognize and live our divine filiation is by mercy. The Parable of the Prodigal Son is all about God the Father continuously begets us in his mercy, restoring us to his image. The prodigal son treated his father as dead and wanted immediately the inheritance that would come when he perished; the elder brother in the parable didn’t relate to his father as a dad either, but more as a slave, commenting that “Not once did I disobey your orders,” and failing to recognize his returned brother as a brother through the same Father, saying, “When this son of yours returns.” The reconciliation of the prodigal is precisely one of a restored sonship, where the Father in love finds his son, raises him from the dead, wraps him in his finest clothing, gives him the sandals of freedom, puts on his finger a signet ring, and kills the fatted calf for a celebration. In today’s first reading, Micah praises God for his mercy: “Who is there like you, the God who removes guilt and pardons sin for the remnant of his inheritance; Who does not persist in anger forever, but delights rather in clemency, And will again have compassion on us, treading underfoot our guilt? You will cast into the depths of the sea all our sins.” That’s what leads us to cry out in the Psalm, “Show us, O Lord, your mercy, and grant us your salvation.”
• And when we’re filled with God’s mercy and have peace interiorly and in our relationships, then we are equipped to become peacemakers  through our words and witness, through our apostolate and all our actions. Jesus would say in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the Peacemakers for they will be called children of God.” When we’re living out our divine filiation, filled with God’s mercy and heeding God’s word, we become images of Christ the Prince of Peace seeking to bring to the world the definitive peace treaty between God and man through the forgiveness of sins and helping people to live free of the sin that divides and wrecks peace. That becomes our Mission: at peace in our relationship with God, we help others find the same peace for which they’re longing in the One who has first found us.
• Today, the Church celebrates St. Charbel Maklouf, a great Maronite monk and priest who was a true son of God, brother of Jesus, filled with the mercy of God who sought to help others find the peace that only God can give. As a young boy, he was drawn to the example of his maternal uncles who were monks. Shepherding his family’s small flock as a boy, he would take them to a grotto where he had installed an icon of the  the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Mercy and Queen of Peace, and would spend the day in prayer. He learned from her how to receive and respond to the Word of God. His family wanted him to marry and to continue his hard work on the farm, but when he was 23, he left home without telling them because of the opposition to begin his training as a monk and then as a priest and finally as a hermit. He sought constantly to turn with the Lord in prayer. He was deeply devoted to the Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, and it’s significant that he basically died during Mass, having a stroke while celebrating the divine liturgy from which he never recovered. God waited to call him home for eight days and summoned him on Christmas Eve. After his death, his remains glowed, people came to him to ask for miracles that were granted, when his body was examined it was found incorrupt, and now he is a great witness to the continuous power of God’s continual work of forming his family.
• We don’t know whether this will be our last Mass, but what we do know is that the Lord Jesus here restores us in our familial relationship, as we hear his words as words to be done, as we renew our confident loving prayer to the Father, and as we enter into communion with him, enter into greater filiation with the Father and fraternal communion with each other. Through the intercession of St. Charnel, may we receive God’s continued help to live as children of the Father here on earth so that together with St. Charnel and all the saints, we may experience the love of the Father forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: