Living with God in the World and Remaining Conscious of His Presence, 29th Tuesday (II), October 23, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 23, 2018
Eph 2:12-22, Ps 85, Lk 12:35-38

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were made in the homily: 

• St. Paul describes in the first reading the situation of the gentiles in Ephesus before Christianity. “You were at that time without Christ, alienated from the community of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world.” They were hopeless without Christ because they were living without God in the world. Once one begins to live with God, one begins to have hope in every circumstance. Pope Benedict wrote about this in his beautiful encyclical on Christian Hope, Spe Salvi. “Paul reminds the Ephesians that before their encounter with Christ they were ‘without hope and without God in the world’ (Eph 2:12). Of course he knew they had had gods, he knew they had had a religion, but their gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths. Notwithstanding their gods, they were ‘without God’ and consequently found themselves in a dark world, facing a dark future. … Here too we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness. Only when the future is certain as a positive reality does it become possible to live the present as well. … The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life. … the Ephesians, before their encounter with Christ, were without hope because they were ‘without God in the world.’ To come to know God—the true God—means to receive hope.” That’s the hope that came to all the nations. St. Paul describes it, “Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the Blood of Christ.”
• That communion with Christ leads to a communion with his body the Church, which St. Paul also describes. He says of Jews and Gentiles, Christ “made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, … that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two … and might reconcile both with God, in one Body, through the Cross.” That dividing wall of enmity is a reference to the tall wall of separation in the Temple between the Courtyard of the Gentiles and the Courtyard of the Jews. A gentile couldn’t enter the inner courtyard and there was a sign that if one were caught he would be executed. There was strict separation between the two. Christ tore down that wall “that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both [Jew and Gentile] with God, in one Body, through the cross, by it putting that enmity to death.” That leads to the beautiful reality that in Christ, as St. Paul says, “So then you are no longer strangers and sojourners, but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God,  built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is held together and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord; in him you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” That’s the reality of the Church. We are united with each other but also with the the saints, built upon Christ, as a holy temple, the dwelling place of God.
• The challenge for us is to remember and live this reality. In the Gospel, Jesus praises those who keep an awareness of his presence. He calls us to be “like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding, ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival. … And should he come in the second or third watch and find them prepared in this way, blessed are those servants.” This is the attitude we call “presence of God,” an awareness that Jesus is with us in the world, an alertness of the various ways he comes to us. This is contrasted with the attitude Jesus describes we will hear tomorrow, of the one who forgets God, who thinks “My master is delayed in coming” and “begins to beat the menservants and the maidservants, to eat and drink and get drunk.” These are people who live without God in the world. I want to highlight in a particular way what Jesus says about the promise he has in story for those who are aware of his presence in the “second or third watch” of the night. The second watch was 9-12 pm and the third 12-3 am. Jesus says those who are aware of his presence then — when they’re tired, when they’re sleeping, when most people in most ages are prone to partying — will be particularly blessed. How wonderful it is when we would use that time to pray, when we would consecrate even our sleep to God. I’m presently reading a book, In Sinu Iesu, in which all the evidence seems that Jesus is indeed speaking to an anonymous Benedictine priest. Yesterday I read Jesus’ words about prayer during this second and third watch: “There are particular graces reserved for souls who keep watch before My Eucharistic Face during the night. Those who pray by night imitate My own night watches of prayer to My Father. How often would I keep vigil in the presence of My Father, conversing with Him in the silence of the night and taking up into My prayer the secret areas of a sleeping world, and even the groans of creation. You will discover that there is  clarity and a peace in nocturnal prayer that I do not give to souls at other times. Those who have discovered this return to me by night and seek to remain close to my Eucharistic Heart. The light of my Eucharistic Face illumines them, and the night, though it be dark, shines for them inwardly. Leon to adore Me by night. I especially desire that priests should come to me at night. They will lose nothing their repose, for I will be their refreshment and their rest.”
• Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who was full of hope because he was with God in the world, a man who, after his conversion, was always vigilant for the Lord, and who worked indefatigably to keep God’s family together, uniting Jew and Christian, working to end the great Schism at the Council of Ferrara- Florence in 1437-9, settling many civil disputes between city states, striving to be a peacemaker as apostolic nuncio to Austria, and trying to keep the Church and Christendom together against the invading Muslim threat at the Battle of Belgrade. St. John of Capistrano (1386-1456) was a brilliant young man who became mayor of his town at 26. He was used to being in charge. But he had a major conversion, recognized his vanity, and discerned that the Lord was calling him to be a Franciscan despite his marriage and personal weaknesses. The day he presented himself to the Franciscans, he mounted a donkey, sat backward toward the tail, put a paper on his back listing all his sins, and then let the donkey be led to the Franciscan monastery as the people of the town, especially the kids, pelted him with filth and epithets. Once accepted, the Franciscan who was put in charge of him knew how difficult it would be to get him to obey the Holy Spirit after he was used to being in charge, so he was brutal with him, but eventually with the help of prayer, the Holy Spirit and lots of mortification, God strengthened him to become an instrument of so much good within the Franciscan order, in Italy and even in various countries where he was sent to reconcile. He became an extraordinary preacher bringing vast multitudes to conversion and inspiring them to seek what really matters, to build their lives on Christ the capstone, whom he told them was with them always. He was a great preacher of the Holy Name, following his teacher St. Bernardine of Siena, and to invoke the name of Jesus is to invoke Jesus’ very person.
• Jesus wants to help us keep a lively awareness of his presence. He meets us in prayer. He comes to abide in us in Holy Communion and help to create us more and more into his Body and make us fellow citizens with the saints. Jesus promised that if we remember him and live with him in the world, if he finds us vigilant, “he will gird himself, have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.” That’s what Jesus did at the Last Supper, taking on the form of a slave and washing his apostles’ feet and feeding them with his very own body and blood. That’s what he does for us here at this Eucharistic banquet. That’s what he promises to do forever in heaven if we, like St. John of Capistrano, live together with Him in the world and live in a communion of genuine sacrificial love with all the holy ones, building our entire life on Christ the capstone.

The readings for today’s Mass were: