Living in and Announcing the Kingdom of God, 32nd Thursday (II), November 10, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Thursday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Alverna Center, Winona, Minnesota
Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester
November 10, 2022
Plhm 7-20, Ps 146, Lk 17:20-25

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today as pundits and citizens continue to ponder the present and future meaning of Tuesday’s election results, the readings that we have today indicate to us in a special way the vocation of Christian leaders and faithful at this time. The Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come. They were doubtless asking this within messianic expectations, that the kingdom of God would erupt by building the type of momentum to fulfill Jewish hopes in evicting the Romans from Israel and reestablishing the Davidic throne. For them, the messianic age was fundamentally a political reality, basically a theocracy. In the question, they were egging Jesus on to see whether he thought he was the Messiah and, if so, what his future program might be. But Jesus, as he is wont to do, transcended the question. He said that the inauguration of the Kingdom wouldn’t be a spectacle to be observed. There wouldn’t be trumpets sounding. There wouldn’t be “Hail to the King!” There wouldn’t be heralds indicating that the kingdom is “here” or “there.” Rather, Jesus says, “Behold, the Kingdom of God is among you.”
• This means two things. First, that the Kingdom had already come because the King was present. The Kingdom is where the King is and Jesus was already present. Secondly the Kingdom had already come because people had already embraced it, entered it and were living in it because they were living with the King. There’s a couplet in the Our Father in which we pray first, “Thy kingdom come!,” and then repeat it in other words, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The Kingdom of God is wherever God’s will is done, whenever one begins to live in relationship with God and his kingdom. Jesus reveals to us various other qualities about his kingdom and the conditions for entering it and living in it. He says that the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are “poor in spirit,” to those who treasure God more than all the wealth of the world. He says that it belongs to those who convert and become like little children, who trust in God and accept it as a gift. He says that the kingdom is like a wedding banquet full of joy and those who live in the kingdom are those who are profoundly and serenely joyful. He says the kingdom grows like a mustard seed or yeast, imperceptible to people on the outside but the growth is real. He says it’s like a buried treasure or a pearl of great price, a net cast into the sea or a field with wheat and weeds. By each of these realities Jesus was indicating qualities of the Kingdom. Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, said very powerfully back in 2000 in a talk to catechists from around the world, “The kingdom of God … is ‘not a thing.’ The Kingdom of God is God. The Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our – in my — life. God is not a faraway ‘ultimate cause,’ God is not the ‘great architect’ of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it; on the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of history.” The kingdom has come to a person when God is truly Lord of that person’s life. The Kingdom of God is living within the reality of the incarnate King of Kings.
• When we enter into that kingdom, everything changes, and all other fiefdoms are relativized. We see that in today’s first reading. St. Paul writes to Philemon whom he had evangelized and brought into the Church in Colossae. He had a slave, Onesimus, who had escaped and had come to Rome where he encountered St. Paul, whom he had doubtless at least seen in Colossae. He served St. Paul for a time, but Onesimus was a fugitive. St. Paul wanted to restore his standing in a way that would help both Onesimus and Philemon. So he sent him back with what became the Letter to Philemon. In that letter, St. Paul described how things change when we’re really living in the kingdom. In the Roman empire, Onesimus was simply a slave, and because he had escaped, Philemon could have him cruelly punished and even executed. But the reality and rules of the kingdom of heaven needed to trump Roman law, Paul would tell Philemon. The apostle wrote, “I am sending him, my heart, back to you, … so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a brother, beloved especially to me but even more so to you, as a man and in the Lord. … Welcome him as you would me.” In the kingdom, we grasp that there is no longer Jew or Greek, no longer free or slave, because we’re all beloved sons and daughters of God and therefore brothers and sisters of each other. St. Paul was confident that Philemon would live by the values of the kingdom. The fact that we have the letter today is clearly a sign that he did. In a similar way, living in the Kingdom must change the way we interact and all our human interactions. In the kingdom, we recognize that the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the stranger, the ill, and the imprisoned need to be treated with the love with which we would treat Christ. We recognize that even notorious sinners are beloved by God who died for them and therefore must have the door of conversion opened to them. We recognize that those whom the world considers nobodies are often given special missions to reduce to humility those who think they’re somebodies. We look at everyone —Black, White, Brown, Yellow, Red, Male, Female, Democrat, Republican, Liberal or Conservative,  — with love. Today’s Gospel is an occasion for us to ask whether we’re really living in that kingdom, whether God is the “most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life.”
• Someone who lived in the kingdom, who was in the world but not of it, during very difficult times in the Church and in the political sphere, is the saint we fête today. He’s one of the greatest saints who has ever lived, Pope St. Leo the Great (d. 461). He is such a huge figure inside the Church. As a deacon of the Church in Rome, he strengthened the baptismal faith of everyone; his famous baptismal verses teaching the meaning of the Sacrament still adorn the octagonal baldachin over the Lateran baptistery; he strengthened the Marian faith of everyone, being the Archdeacon under Pope Sixtus III charged with building St. Mary Major Basilica to enshrine the Church’s teaching that Mary is Mother of God, which had just been infallibly defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431; he strengthened likewise everyone’s faith in Christ, writing his famous Tome against Eutyches, who claimed that Jesus only had a human body and soul but not a human intellectual spirit, which would not make him fully human. His Tome was decisive at the Council of Chalcedon; Leo’s Christmas homilies were also very formative to help people to grasp the meaning of the incarnate, and the meaning of the kingdom. But he was also a huge figure outside the Church. His bravery led him to confront Attila the Hun in 452 and divert Attila from his plans to pillage Rome the same way he and his armies had despoiled so many other cities in northern Italy. He fought against the Goths the following year. He battled against the ecclesiastically and socially dissociative heresies of Arianism, Pelagianism, Manichaeism, Priscillianism, Nestorianism and Eutychism precisely because he was fighting for Church and social unity. And he was able to fight because he knew he wasn’t fighting alone. He knew that the incarnate Lord, the true King, was with him. And he wasn’t afraid of suffering. If Christ’s kingdom was consistent with the Son of Man’s “suffer[ing] greatly and be[ing] rejected by this generation,” then he knew he might have to suffer as well, but the Kingdom would still be at hand.
• What made St. Leo so strong, and what allowed him to strengthen the people of his time and still our time, was his faith in the effects of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. He had a great love for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and was responsible for inserting the words “sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam,” a “holy sacrifice, a spotless victim,” into the Roman canon. He preached, “As we receive the power of the heavenly food, we pass over into the flesh of the One who took on our flesh,” “and “We pass over into what we receive.” This means not only that we are sacramentally incorporated into Christ and united to his courage and redemptive sufferings, but also that we experience an eschatological passage into his heavenly kingdom even here on earth. “For,” he says, “the reception of Christ’s Body and Blood does nothing less than transform us into that which we consume, and henceforth we bear in soul and body Him in whose fellowship we died, were buried, and are risen again.” That’s what gave him the strength always to live by the kingdom even in the face of civil and ecclesiastical threats.
• As we prepare to receive the King now in Holy Communion, we ask through the intercession of St. Leo, for the grace always to live in his kingdom, to let him establish his throne within us, and grasp that the Kingdom is not something meant to be here or there but borne within as the “most present and decisive reality in our life.” And liberated by Christ through his passion, death and resurrection, and united with him in Holy Communion, we ask for a similar grace to that received by Philemon and Onesimus, so that we might live as true brothers and put into practice what St. Leo instructs us to do every Christmas morning in the Office of Readings: “Christian, remember your dignity, and now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom. … Do not drive away so great a guest by evil conduct and become again a slave to the devil, for your liberty was bought by the blood of Christ.” To remember our Christian dignity is to remember that in Christ’s kingdom we are members of the royal family and ambassadors, members of his family, even his body, and sent out to help bring others into this Eucharistic kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download