Living Guided by the Spirit, 28th Wednesday (II), October 17, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Assumption Seminary, San Antonio, TX
Wednesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr
October 17, 2018
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 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 in 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 would 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 law, rather than according to 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 because they’ve 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’re doomed because while they pay tithes on the smallest of garden herbs they “pay no attention to judgment and to log 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 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.” Those fruits don’t happen as a coincidence; they all flow from a 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? The question I really want to ask, though, is whether someone would honestly be able to predicate all of the various manifestations of that fruit of the Spirit to us. If our family members, friends, fellow parishioners 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, 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 wouldn’t be 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. St. Ignatius of Antioch is one of the greatest human beings who has ever lived. While St. Igntius concentrated most of his thought on Christ, he focused on the Holy Spirit as the principle of the Lord’s virginal conception (Eph. 18.2), as the one through whom Christ ‘confirmed . . . in stability the officers of the Church’ (Phil.), as the One who spoke through Ignatius himself (Phil. 7.1). In one of his most famous passages he declares the work of the Holy Spirit in leading us to the Cross: ‘Like the stones of a temple, cut for a building of God the Father, you have been lifted up to the top by the crane of Jesus Christ, which is the Cross, and the rope of the Holy Spirit’ (Eph. 9.1). The Holy Spirit is constantly seeking to lift us up in that way. We see how this was lived out in the passage from this morning’s breviary in his letter to the Christians in Rome. He wrote, “No earthly pleasures, no kingdoms of this world can benefit me in any way. I prefer death in Christ Jesus to power over the farthest limits of the earth. He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.” He was willing to let the Holy Spirit help him to deny himself, pick up his Cross, and follow Christ through death to life. He didn’t fear death in the least, as if life in this world were more important than life in the next. He wrote, “I am writing to all the churches to let it be known that I will gladly die for God if only you do not stand in my way. I plead with you: show me no untimely kindness. Let me be food for the wild beasts, for they are my way to God. I am God’s wheat and shall be ground by their teeth so that I may become Christ’s pure bread. Pray to Christ for me that the animals will be the means of making me a sacrificial victim for God. … The time for my birth is close at hand. Forgive me, my brothers. Do not stand in the way of my birth to real life; do not wish me stillborn. My desire is to belong to God. Do not, then, hand me back to the world. Do not try to tempt me with material things. Let me attain pure light. Only on my arrival there can I be fully a human being. Give me the privilege of imitating the passion of my God. If you have him in your heart, you will understand what I wish.” He was aware of the draw of the prince of this world and the spirits of disobedience seeking to draw him to deny the Gospel, to deny Christ. “The prince of this world is determined to lay hold of me and to undermine my will which is intent on God. Let none of you here help him; instead show yourselves on my side, which is also God’s side. Do not talk about Jesus Christ as long as you love this world. Do not harbour envious thoughts. And supposing I should see you, if then I should beg you to intervene on my behalf, do not believe what I say. Believe instead what I am now writing to you. For though I am alive as I write to you, still my real desire is to die. My love of this life has been crucified, and there is no yearning in me for any earthly thing. Rather within me is the living water which says deep inside me: ‘Come to the Father.’ I no longer take pleasure in perishable food or in the delights of this world. I want only God’s bread, which is the flesh of Jesus Christ, formed of the seed of David, and for drink I crave his blood, which is love that cannot perish. I am no longer willing to live a merely human life. … Pray for me that I may obtain my desire. I have not written to you as a mere man would, but as one who knows the mind of God.” He saw his martyrdom as the time he would become a Christian not just in name but in deed.
• St. Ignatius drew his strength from the Eucharist. He saw his life, as we just noted, as being ground into wheat so that he could become in Christ pure bread, united and transubstantiated in the Eucharistic sacrifice. He called Jesus in the Eucharist God’s great gift and the medicine of immorality, given for the forgiveness of sins, which makes real and eternal life possible. We don’t need lions to grind us into wheat; we have ordinary life. But all of that is meant to be a preparation for this sacrifice. 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 with many mansions (Jn 14) 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: