Longing to See God’s Face with Purity of Heart, 10th Friday (II), June 12, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
June 12, 2020
1 Kings 19:9.11-16, Ps 27, Mt 5:27-32

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today Jesus continues to sketch out for us how to live as his disciples, in communion with him who fulfills the law and seeks to help us fulfill the law by loving God with all we are and have and loving our neighbor as he loves us, by interiorizing the law of the Holy Spirit written on our hearts, so that our holiness might surpass that of the virtuous pagans and the scribes and the Pharisees and attain to the full stature of the holiness of Christ in a human being. Yesterday Jesus did so with regard to the fifth commandment. Today he will do so with regard to the sixth. But to understand what he will teach more deeply, let’s begin with the Psalm.
• In the Responsorial Psalm, we pray, “I long to see your face, O Lord,” and that points to the desire that leads to vision that then transforms a life. We see two types of longing to see God in the readings today. The first is to see the Lord in prayer, which is the journey on which God led the Prophet Elijah in the first reading. Elijah, on Mt. Horeb, didn’t find God in the various manifestations that Moses did when he was at the top of the mountain — in the howling wind, the earthquakes or the fire of a burning bush — but in the whisper of a gentle breeze. God doesn’t always respond according to our expectations in granting the desires he plants within us to see Him. He can sometimes come in the least suspecting ways. But when we long to see his face, we’ll be able to find that face speaking to us even in something small like a gentle breeze.
• In the Gospel, we see that longing and vision on display in Jesus’ words about adultery of the heart. He tells us that someone who has looked on a woman with lust has committed in his heart the sin of adultery. Lust begins with an unholy longing in the heart that passes to what St. John Paul II called a type of porno-vision, when we seek to appropriate, possess, objectify, rather than love, serve and die for the one beheld. Lust changes the entire intentionality of a human person, St. John Paul II said, from a self-giver to a taker, from someone called to lay down his life out of love for others to someone who sacrifices someone else for his own pleasures. The righteousness Jesus wants of us begins with chaste longings and chaste looking, something that views the person as a whole, rather than objectifying and abstracting the person’s values through the prism of meeting one’s desire or needs. Chastity, as John Paul II taught in his Theology of the Body, is linked to purity and to piety: purity allows us to “see God” (Mt 5:6) in others rather than make that person an idol, or idolize our own urges; piety allows us to reverence the God we see. Rather than the adulterous desiring and looking that Jesus says we should brutally root out of our life — with graphic language about plucking out eyes and chopping off hands — Jesus wants us to replace it with holy longing and vision that leads to a genuine love, which often involves forsaking human romantic love according to the other person’s or to one’s own situation in life. Adulterous desires, looks and actions are actually similarly adulterous in terms of our spousal Covenant with God, and God’s righteousness — and the help of the Holy Spirit — call us to a different way of life.
• This longing to see God in prayer, in life, and in others is the essence of the consecrated life. The motto of the consecrated life is “Faciem tuam, Domine, requiram,” “I seek your face, O Lord!” (Ps 27). Consecrated men and women seek God’s face, they seek God, and they rejoice to the extent that they’ve found him and been found by him in all aspects of their life. Their celibate chastity is a particularly important witness in an age that regularly gives into adultery in the heart. They show that the search for God’s face, for God’s love, is not in vain. If consecrated men and women can see God in others, including, as St. Teresa of Calcutta used to say, in the distressing disguise of the poor, then it can help husbands and wives, and future husbands and wives, see Him in each other.
• Today we come to find the Lord not in an earthquake, strong driving wind, or fire, but in the gentle whisper of the Word of God and under the appearance of simple Bread and Wine. God asks us, like he asked Elijah, “Why are you here?,” and we respond that we’ve come longing for him. He’ll send us out not on a journey of nearly 1,000 miles from Mt. Horeb to Damascus, to complete our task as Elijah was sent to anoint kings and his prophetic successor, but out into the streets of Manhattan to complete the task he’s given us today, as we seek to find him in the events and persons we encounter. The Lord indeed responds to our longing by allowing us to behold his humble face in the Eucharist and in the events of the day. May his pure longing and vision become our own!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MT 5:27-32

Jesus said to his disciples:
“You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery.
But I say to you,
everyone who looks at a woman with lust
has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
If your right eye causes you to sin,
tear it out and throw it away.
It is better for you to lose one of your members
than to have your whole body thrown into Gehenna.
And if your right hand causes you to sin,
cut it off and throw it away.
It is better for you to lose one of your members
than to have your whole body go into Gehenna.“It was also said,
Whoever divorces his wife must give her a bill of divorce.
But I say to you,
whoever divorces his wife (unless the marriage is unlawful)
causes her to commit adultery,
and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”

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