Made Stronger By The Stronger Man, Thursday of the Third Week of Lent, March 7, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the Third Week of Lent
Memorial of SS. Perpetua and Felicity, Martyrs
750th Anniversary of the Death of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church
March 7, 2024
Jer 7:23-28, Ps 95, Lk 11:14-23

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Yesterday we pondered how great a gift of God’s mercy it is that God has spoken to us in his word and his commandments. Moses exclaimed, “For what great nation is there that has gods so close to it as the Lord, our God, is to us whenever we call upon him? Or what great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law that I am setting before you today?” He added that the Israelites should rejoice in that gift of mercy and pass it on to their children and grandchildren as a means by which to grow closer to the God who through his word and commandments has drawn near to us. Jesus himself in the Gospel said he came to fulfill that law and that the greatest in his Kingdom would be those who put that word into practice and taught others to do the same. The fulfillment of the law leads to the fulfillment of human persons.
• What did the vast majority of the Israelites do in response to that gift of mercy God had given them? The Lord himself summarizes it through the Prophet Jeremiah at the beginning of today’s first reading: “This is what I commanded my people: Listen to my voice; then I will be your God and you shall be my people. Walk in all the ways that I command you, so that you may prosper. But they obeyed not, nor did they pay heed.” Then he uses four body parts to describe graphically their response. “They turned their backs, not their faces, to me.” This was a sign of betrayal and abandonment. “They have stiffened their necks and done worse than their fathers.” They wouldn’t heed the Lord when he sent the prophets toward them; they would resolutely keep doing what they wanted to do like horses running with blinders. “They walked in the hardness of their evil hearts.” Their hearts, which were meant to be sponges for God’s words, had become sclerotic, impenetrable even to God.
• We see an illustration of this type of resistance in the Gospel reading. Jesus had just exorcised a boy, one in a long line of deliverances from the devil, but those Scribes and Pharisees who had already hardened their hearts, stiffened their necks and turned their backs toward Jesus refused to accept that any of the incontestable exorcisms happened by the finger of God. They accused Jesus of working exorcisms by the power of the prince of devils. Their hardened hearts had led to a hardening of the brain. Jesus exposes their foolishness in two ways. First, since they admitted that some of their own number were exorcising, if he cast out by the devil, then they were suggesting that their own number might be exorcising by Beelzebul, too, something of course they would never believe or admit. Second, since the devil is trying to win, not forfeit, the possession our hearts, backs, necks and faces, it would make no sense for him to be defeating himself through exorcism. Their response to Jesus’ liberation of the boy from the devil, however, shows what God was describing about the Israelites and their treatment of the prophets sent in God’s name. They didn’t want to turn back to God. No matter how often they had prayed today’s Responsorial Psalm, “If today you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your hearts,” that’s precisely what they did when they heard the voice of God through Jeremiah, and it’s precisely what the Scribes and Pharisees did when they heard Jesus’ voice.
• Now we turn to us. If we want to prevent what happened to them from happening to us, we need to hearken to the voice of the Lord. Rather than turning our backs toward Him, we need to turn our faces in prayer and in adoration. Rather than hardening our hearts, we need to soften them, by responding to his merciful help to love more and more all that he teaches us, listening to his words as words to be done, and then helping others to receive and live by this same gift of mercy. Rather than stiffening our necks, he wants us to turn our necks with him when he turns to the Father, when he turns to the poor that he wants us to help, when he turns to the others here, when he turns toward our family members that we need to forgive, when he turns toward Sacred Scripture in order to instruct us in his ways. The word “convert” comes from the Latin con-vertere, which means to turn with the Lord, and that’s precisely what God wants to help us to do.
• The devil will use anything he can to try to get a foothold in us so that he can begin to divide us from the Lord and others. If he can get us to have a hardened heart to the voice of the Lord in Sacred Scripture each day early in the morning, giving us that hardened soil that convinces us we’ve heard it before and that it really doesn’t have the power to change our life forever, that’s where he’ll start, because he knows that partially hardened hearts leads to hardening of the spiritual arteries, to stiff necks, and to backs turned toward the Lord. If he can harden our hearts by tempting us not to forgive someone else, that’s where he’ll start. Any way that he can seek to divide us, within ourselves, among ourselves, or in our relationship with God through sin or tepidity, he will, seeking to metastasize that spiritual cancer later.
• What’s the Good News? Jesus stresses that he is the stronger man who has come to bind the devil and divide his spoils. Jesus’ power to unite is infinitely greater than the devil’s ability to divide. We need to take advantage, however, of all of the means he gives to turn our faces, our hearts, our necks, our bodies and souls to him. The Third and Fourth Weeks of Lent are all centered on the annual catechumenate, preparing not only unbaptized Elect for the saving waters of Baptism but renewing in each of us our baptismal promises and identity. Today’s readings are a powerful reminder to us of what happens in baptism and how we’re supposed to correspond. Early in the baptismal rite, the priest exorcises our hearts, taking the oil of catechumens and anointing our breast over our heart, casting out the devil and preparing us for the infusion of the Holy Spirit. Through his minister, Jesus does for us what he did for those possessed by demons, to soften and prepare our hearts for his presence and prepare us for communion with God and others. The priest prays in the baptismal rite, “Almighty and ever-living God, you sent your only Son in to the world to cast out the power of Satan, spirit of evil, to rescue man from the kingdom of darkness, and bring him into the kingdom of light. We pray for this child: set him free from original sin, make him a temple of your glory, and send your Holy Spirit to dwell with him. We ask this through Christ our Lord.” Later we ratified that exorcism, either vicariously through our parents and godparents for us or with our own voice if we were baptized after we had reached the age of reason, proclaiming that we reject Satan, all his evil works and all his empty promises. Then we professed our faith in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body and eternal life. We announced that the devil is real but that Jesus is the stronger man who liberates us. We proclaimed that we had turned our faces, hearts, necks and our whole existence in faith toward God. We renew that prayer for deliverance every time we pray the Our Father, begging the Lord to “deliver us from the Evil One.” This is one way we live out the Lenten command heard on Ash Wednesday to turn away from sin and believe the Gospel.
• Jesus finishes today’s Gospel by saying, “He who is not with me is against me and he who does not gather with me scatters.” This points to the truth that we cannot be neutral in our life with respect to Jesus and what he’s asking. We’re either actively turning toward him, or we’re turning our back on him and helping others to turn their back on him. Pope Francis said during his first homily as Pope, that we’re either praying to the Lord or praying to the devil. It’s not enough not to do evil. It’s not enough not formally to turn our back on God or give him a gesture of defiance. If we’re not actively turning toward him, if we’re not receiving his word with good soil, then objectively we’re turning against him and scattering. Jesus in another passage in the Gospel said something that on the surface seems contradictory, but isn’t. He said to his apostles, “Those who are not against us are with us.” The two passages have been harmonized by various saints to mean that part of us is with the Lord and part of us is not; part of us is gathering, part of us is scattering. And the whole purpose of Lent is to bring us into total conformity so that we may not be a house divided, but a house totally in communion with God. God wants to help us turn the entirety of our hearts, minds, souls, strength, faces and necks to him and then go out with him gathering others to do the same.
• Today the Church gives us the example of three people who turned their hearts, backs, faces and necks toward the Lord. The first are the martyrs the Church celebrates today, SS. Perpetua and Felicity. The account of their martyrdom is one of the great hagiological treasures of the early Church, because Perpetua wrote of their sufferings in detail the day before their death, and eyewitness accounts of their martyrdom immediately spread around the early Church. These accounts were so highly regarded by the early Christians that St. Augustine needed to remind them that they should not be treated during Mass with the same reverence as the readings from Sacred Scriptures. Perpetua was a 21-year-old newlywed and mother of a small child and Felicity was a young married slave pregnant with her first child. They were arrested as catechumens and baptized in prison awaiting execution. They both knew that to profess Christianity was a “crime” punishable by death, but they were undeterred. Perpetua’s father, an old man and a pagan, tried all means imaginable to get his daughter to save her life by saying a prayer and making a small sacrifice to the pagan gods. He first begged her to have mercy on his white hair. As deeply as Perpetua loved her father, Perpetua replied, “I cannot call myself by any other name than what I am — a Christian.” She observed Jesus’ teaching that we must pick up our Cross and follow him, we must become like the grain of wheat and fall to the ground and die, we must “lose” our life in order to save it, we must acknowledge Christ before others and he will acknowledge us before the Heavenly Father. Her father in desperation tried violently to shake her physically, but he wasn’t able to shake her of her fidelity. Finally he brought her much-loved baby boy, saying, “Look upon your son who cannot live after you are gone,” and throwing himself at her feet begged her with tears not to bring such dishonor on their whole family. Perpetua wrote of how much she grieved for her father and family, but entrusted herself to God, whom she knew loved her family even more than she did and would take care of them should she die for love of him. When she was led before the procurator of the province, Hilarian, he tried all the same tactics of the threats of torture, of the pain of her father, of the ruin that would come to her son. But none worked. Upon his query, “Are you a Christian?,” she answered resolutely, “Yes, I am.”  She was sentenced to be killed by wild boars, cows, leopards, bears and gladiators in a spectacle for bloodthirsty soldiers, with her face, neck, back, heart and all her body, mind, soul and strength directed to the Lord. Alongside her on the altar of the arena was Felicity. Because she was pregnant when captured, she feared that she might not be able to give the supreme witness of her love for Christ, because in general Romans did not execute women who were pregnant lest they execute a child for the “crime” of the mother. She asked some clandestine Christians, however, to pray for an early childbirth and her prayers were answered. She gave birth to a girl whom two of her fellow Christians adopted. As she was being led into the ampitheater, she was singing triumphal psalms and rejoicing that she had so quickly passed “from the midwife to the gladiator, to wash after the pangs of childbirth in a second baptism.” She was to be baptized in the same baptism of blood for which Jesus once longed and said, “There is a baptism with which I must be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!” (Lk 12:50). She was renewing her baptismal commitments as she was heading to the fulfillment of baptism. She was, to quote St. Paul in his letter to the Romans, being baptized into Christ’s death so as to share in his resurrection. The procurator set a savage cow upon Felicity and Perpetua. The cow violently threw Perpetua down on her back, tearing her tunic and disheveling her hair. Perpetua got up and quickly pinned her hair, since letting one’s hair down in the ancient world was a universal sign of mourning. In the meantime, the cow had gone after Felicity and had brutally tossed her on the ground. Perpetua ran over to her and helped her up as the cow ran away. They stood awaiting another attack, but none came. They turned to the crowd and shouted to the Christians among them, as great teachers of the wondrous gift of faith, “Stand fast in the faith and love one another, and do not let our sufferings be a stumbling block to you.” They gave each other the kiss of peace, and since the cow wouldn’t kill them, the gladiators were dispatched to pierce them with a sword and send them to God, where they now behold him forever.
• The third saint we mark today is the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, who died 750 years ago today. In the old liturgical calendar, his feast was always today, but since 1970, we’ve celebrated him on January 28, which was the feast of the translation of his relics. St. Thomas was one who always had his mind, face, heart, and who being focused on the Lord and who, through his theological work and particularly the fruit of his prayerful contemplation, has helped the Christian faithful do the same. Today we ask his intercession that we might likewise so focus, especially with regard to the Holy Eucharist.
• Today, Jesus wants to help cast out from us whatever is in the grip of the evil one. He wants to cure our hearts, faces, and necks so that they, and our entire body and soul may turn toward the Lord, rejoice in his word and his gifts, and through, with and in Him, gather all people to share the Communion Jesus came into the world to give us. He is the Stronger Man who wants to fill us, just like he did Perpetua, Felicity and Thomas, with his strength in our weakness. As we prepare now to receive him, let us ask him for the grace, like the saints we mark today, to love God with all our hearts, faces, necks, minds, soul and strength! Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download