Living the Truth and Doing Works in God, Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, May 1, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Joseph the Worker
May 1, 2019
Acts 5:17-26, Ps 34, Jn 3:16-21

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Today in the readings we see illustrated for us in words and deeds the great Christian paradoxes between love and rejection, salvation and judgment, light and darkness. We see the full meaning of Jesus’ resurrection but at the same time we witness how some people prefer to continue to live as spiritual cadavers rather than experience the risen life Jesus has come to give us. This is the essential drama of human life.
• St. John begins today by giving us the most beautiful — and probably famous — synthesis of the Gospel. “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God loves us so much that he himself died so that we would live forever. He didn’t want to lose anyone of us. The incarnation, life, preaching, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus were all one big rescue mission. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,” St. John continues, “but that the world might be saved through him.” But despite Jesus’ not coming into the world to condemn it, there is still a condemnation, there’s still a judgment. It’s the condemnation and judgment that happens when we refuse to accept Jesus’ rescue. St. John describes it in these terms: “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.” We see here that everything begins with faith but faith must become operative, it must become faith working through love (Gal 5:6). The work of the evil one is often the reverse: he starts with getting us to do deeds contrary to our faith and then to have the shame over such Christian misbehavior start to lead our whole life into darkness. We do one deed of darkness and prefer to keep it hidden. That leads us more and more into a life of darkness such that we begin to hate the light.
• St. John adds, however, “Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” The aim of the Christian life, the aim of faith, is to live in communion with Christ who is the truth, to believe in him is to believe in what he says and try with all our might to put what he says into practice. And when we live the truth, we want to live in the light not so that we can show off — Jesus warns us against that every Ash Wednesday when he tells us to pray, fast and give alms in secret — but so that the Father may be glorified, so that our deeds may be seen as done in God, so that God may get the credit, so that our life may give him witness and glory. God so loved us as to make that possible.
• Today we have two illustrations of this paradox between darkness and light, the lie and the truth, condemnation and salvation. The first is illustrated in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles. The Sanhedrin, the chief priests, Sadducees, many of the Scribes and Pharisees and Sanhedrin in large part preferred the darkness and rejected Christ’s rescue work. They rejected it before they conspired to have him executed. Even after word of his resurrection started to spread and his simple followers started to work incredible miracles in his name as they testified that he was alive, they continued to prefer the darkness. They warned Peter and John not to say anything ever again about Jesus, but the two apostles courageously kept speaking out, saying that it was impossible to keep their mouths shut about what they had seen and heard and that their primary obedience was to God, who sent them out as his witnesses. At the beginning of today’s reading, they were arrested for a second time for preaching openly, preaching in the light of Solomon’s Portico in the temple, about Jesus and his call to conversion and salvation. After they were imprisoned, however, an angel rescued them, opening the doors of the prison just like he opened Jesus’ sealed tomb, telling them, “Go and take your place in the temple area, and tell the people everything about this life. They were arrested again but surreptitiously, in darkness we could say, because they feared the people. St. Luke tells us that these leaders were “filled with jealousy.” They resorted once again to threats. “We gave you strict orders did we not, to stop teaching in that name. Yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and want to bring this man’s blood upon us.” These were the same people who had clamored in Pontius Pilate’s praetorium, when Pilate washed his hands of the blood of Jesus whom he called an “innocent man,” “his blood be upon us and on our children.” Yet St. Peter wasn’t trying to condemn them for shedding Jesus’ blood but to have them saved by that blood. He was trying to convert them through repentance and forgiveness. He said, “The God of our ancestors raised Jesus, though you had him killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as leader and savior to grant Israel repentance and forgiveness of sins.” But they didn’t want to repent and have their sins forgiven. They didn’t want to acknowledge that they had sinned at all. And so after Peter had said, “We are witnesses of these things, as is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him,” St. Luke tells us, “They became infuriated and wanted to put them to death.” It wasn’t enough for one man to die for the people, as Caiaphas had said about Jesus. Now they wanted to kill his disciples, too. They hated the light of Christ’s resurrection radiating through his disciples and they wanted to turn off that light. They who had condemned Jesus to death were themselves condemning themselves for not believing in him. They who pronounced verdicts supposedly on behalf of God were in fact pronouncing a verdict against themselves. This is a dynamic that all of us have to grasp, because many times Christians act like the apostles and live in the light and bring Jesus’ salvation to others, and at other times, we prefer to live by our “own light” which is fact a darkness and behave like members of the Sanhedrin, pronouncing judgment on others and their actions without recognizing that we’re just condemning ourselves to living apart from Jesus and his light partially or fully.
• The second illustration we have today is St. Joseph, someone who lived in the light and whose works are clearly seen to have been done in God. Today is the memorial of St. Joseph the Worker, which was instituted 64 years ago in 1955 by Pope Pius XII both to give a spiritual context to “Labor Day” in many European countries as well as a spiritual response to the “May Day” celebrations in communist countries where the meaning of human work and the relationship between human worker and the State were distorted. Pope Pius XII wanted the whole Church on this day to go on pilgrimage to a carpenter’s shop in Nazareth to find in the hardworking St. Joseph and his diligent foster Son the key that unlocks the meaning of the dignity, beauty and redemptive importance of human labor as part of Christ’s mission of love, so that we might not perish but have eternal life.
• Today is a day on which the silent spouse of the Virgin teaches us about the Good News of work in God’s divine plan, how to live in the light and work in God. So many today are confused about how important work is. Some, for example, behave as if work is just a necessary evil that we have to endure until we earn enough money or get to the magic age when life can become an unending vacation on the golf course or lounging at the pool. Others fail to see in the crisis of unemployment, especially among the young, that we’re dealing with something far greater than a pressing economic problem, but rather a profoundly dehumanizing one that can gradually deprive millions of a sense of moral worth through a sense of being useless. And sometimes we can see a combination of both of these confusions when people who can work just choose not to do so, opting rather to take advantage of the generosity of family members or other workers in society so that they can seemingly remain on vacation 365 days a year. Insofar as most people will spend at least 25 percent of their week, from the time they’re five through when they’re 65 or older, doing some form of work, it’s important that we enter the vocational school of St. Joseph and learn from him how to turn our work into a pleasing offering to God.
• In the beginning of time, God gave us the vocation to work, which was meant to bring his gift of creation to perfection. He commanded us to do three different forms of labor: to “increase and multiply,” cooperating with his creative power to bring new human beings into existence; to “fill the earth and subdue it,” by bringing forth the earth’s inner potential, producing fruits and vegetables from the soil, glass and computer chips from sand, medicines from plants and more; and to “have dominion” over all living creatures and treating them as gifts of God. God gave us this vocation to work because through work we would become more and more like him, who himself worked in creation and, as Jesus would later say, “works still” (Jn 5:17). We are made in God’s image and likeness and God works! Work is meant not only to produce something but to perfect someone, by bringing out the various hidden talents and potentials God has implanted in us — physical, intellectual, and spiritual — which are far greater than the hidden potentials God has inscribed in the earth. We see this human cultivation, for example, in the study that forms our brain, in the physical labor that forms our muscles, in the caring for children and others that forms our heart. The interior effect of work is even more important than its external outcome. St. Gregory of Nyssa would even say that through our work we become our own parents, through forming our character through work well or shoddily done. After Original Sin and the Fall, as Genesis teaches clearly and we know from personal experience, our work became arduous. There would be pangs in childbirth, working the fields would become toilsome and sweaty, and animals would often rebel. But we retained the vocation to work, because work remained a fundamental good and gift and would now become a means of our redemption. Through labor we would be helped to overcome our selfishness by working for others, for the family we’re supporting, for the persons receiving the fruits of our efforts, even out of gratitude for our employers or employees, clients and vendors, without whom, in many cases, our work would not be possible. So great was Jesus’ appreciation for human work in the divine plan that he could not stop using it as an analogy for the kingdom he had come into this world to establish. In his preaching, Jesus favorably mentions shepherds, farmers, doctors, sowers, householders, servants, stewards, merchants, laborers, soldiers, cooks, tax collectors and scholars. He compares the work of evangelization to the manual work of harvesters and fishermen. He called us not to be “bodies” in his vineyard taking up space but “laborers,” those who roll up their sleeves and work hard.
• As St. Josemaria Escriva, the great apostle of the laity and of the importance of ordinary work in God’s plans taught us last century, honest work well done is an opportunity for a triple sanctification: the sanctification of the work itself by offering it to God like the sacrifice of Abel or we can say the labors of St. Joseph; the sanctification of the worker doing the work honestly and diligently; and the sanctification of others through contact with one’s coworkers, clients, customers and vendors. Work well done is an act of love for all those who will benefit from the fruits of one’s labor, just like everything we use — from watches, to cell phones, to automobiles, to clothing — is the fruit of someone else’s good work. The marketplace is meant not to be simply an exchange of goods and services but ultimately an exchange of virtuous action and rewarded appreciation that at its best can become an exchange of mutual loving concern. But we’re called to work with integrity, to work honestly in the light, to do our works in God, cooperating with what he is doing in us as we work.
• Most of Jesus’ followers are called to live out their discipleship and apostolate, their vocation and their mission, just as St. Joseph did, in the family and in the workplace. Jesus calls them to become saints and bring others to sanctity through this “increasing and multiplying” and “subduing” and “dominion.” One’s desk, or sewing machine, or keyboard, or kitchen, or classroom, or operating room, or workbench or boat, is meant to become an altar that sanctifies not only what is given to God in work, but the giver as well. It is there that the vast majority of men and women are called to be sanctified and sanctify others through showing the original dignity and meaning of human work.
• We prayed at the beginning of Mass today that God the Creator of all things, “who laid down for the human race the law of work” will grant us that through “the example of St. Joseph and under his patronage, we may complete the works [he sets] us to do and attain the rewards [he promises].” That’s what this feast is all about. Work is not principally about earning a paycheck, but about serving and loving others. This is something we understand as priests and religious who work, to some degree, for God and for the eternal pension plan, more easily than many in the world do. No matter what work we do — whether it’s superior of a community or an institute or a porter or a cook or a jack of all trades and a universal utility person, filling in wherever we are needed — we are helping Jesus through that work to save the human race. When work takes on this divine meaning, the perfection of the human person continues, the work-place is evangelized, and God’s kingdom is advanced. In every age a diligent construction worker from Nazareth, together with his foster father, waves to each of us with calloused hands and says, “Come, follow me!”
• And Jesus does that in a particularly special way for us here at Mass. It’s here that we encounter Jesus as the Light of the World and ask him to make us children of the Light. It’s here that we receive the love of God the Father, who so loved the world — so loves us — that he gives us his own Son here that we might not perish but enter into communion with Jesus now and forever. It’s here that we combine Jesus’ saving work with our own work done in the light and in God. As the Second Vatican Council teaches us, the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of any life that is truly Christian. It’s supposed to be the starting point and the goal, therefore, of our work. We receive strength here to sanctify our work and the goal of our efforts ought to be to place our work on the paten to be offered to the Father with the work of Jesus’ whole life of redemption, including all he did for us in Nazareth. Just as Jesus worked the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish from the raw material of five buns and two sardines given him, and just like Jesus worked the miracle of Cana not by creating wine out of nothing but changing the 180 gallons of water brought by the servants from the town well, so Jesus wants to incorporate us and our work in the miracle of the Mass. We don’t celebrate Mass with the raw material of grain and grapes, but rather bread and wine, which are not just the gifts of God but the “work of human hands.” From the beginning Jesus wanted to incorporate our work into his supreme sacrifice. It’s here at Mass that we learn how to pray our work so that the entire world becomes God’s work shop. Let us ask St. Joseph to intercede for us today before his foster Son so that from here we can go out to do our work well all the days of our life and thereby grow in holiness, help others grow in holiness, and do something beautiful for God and others. St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us!

The readings for today’s Mass were: