Missionaries of Mercy and Hope, Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent, March 31, 2025

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome, Italy
Mass of the Missionaries of Mercy from the USA
March 31, 2025
Is 65:17-21, Ps 30, Jn 4:43-54

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

The following text guided the homily: 

What a joy it is for us, as part of the Jubilee of Hope Pilgrimage of the Missionaries of Mercy, to pass through the Holy Door and celebrate Mass here at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, where the remains of the great Doctor of the Gentiles and enshrined under the main altar. St. Paul was the great Missionary of Mercy among the first generation of apostles, who, we heard on Ash Wednesday and again yesterday at Mass, saw himself as an Ambassador of Christ appealing to the first Christians to “be reconciled to God.” He was likewise a great man and missionary of hope, who reminded the first Christians that hope is ultimately living with God in the world and whose words to the first Christians here in Rome were taken as the title of Pope Francis’ Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee: spes non confundit, “Hope does not disappoint” and then he tells us why: “because while we were still sinners Christ died for us,” that “where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more” — the grace of God’s mercy — so that “grace might reign through justification for eternal life.” If those facts are not enough, he tells us that the love of Christ shown on Calvary “has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given us.” That’s why St. Paul never ceased to preach the hope that came from God’s mercy. He had himself experienced it after terrorizing and presiding over the executions of the first Christians. And so he resolved to know, preach and boast in nothing but Christ and Christ Crucified as the power and the wisdom of God. To preach Christ crucified for him was not fundamentally to focus on Christ’s sufferings, but to proclaim the merciful love that made even crucifixion bearable. It’s also why he announced the power of Christ’s resurrection, without which our faith would be vain, as the definitive triumph of God’s mercy, of life over death, of light over darkness, of sanctity over sin. And so we come here today on pilgrimage, asking St. Paul’s intercession that we, too, might live up to our vocation to be “chosen vessels” to help people come to know “God, who is rich in mercy” (Eph 2:4) and help all nations “glorify God for his mercy” (Rom 15:9). We ask him likewise to pray for us to put on the “helmet that is hope for salvation” (1 Thess 5:8), “abound in hope” (Rom 15:12), and “rejoice in hope” (Rom 12:12), as we and the people we serve “await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ” (Tit 2:13), who is “our hope” (1 Tim 1:1).

Today’s readings are fittingly about mercy and hope. They likewise underline the how we are all called to be “pilgrims of hope” during this Jubilee and beyond.

In today’s first reading, we encounter the prelude to yesterday’s Laetare Sunday. The Church on the Fourth Sunday of Lent begins the Liturgy with God’s message, “Laetare, Ierusalem!,” found in the 66th chapter of the Prophet Isaiah. Today we read from what immediately preceded that holy imperative in the 65th chapter, God’s promise to the Jews in Babylonian exile, the hope, indeed the merciful promise, that would make them rejoice: that he was not only going to bring them back from captivity, but that he was going to do something far greater: he was going to make a new heaven and a new earth that would be full of joy. By God’s mercy, received in baptism and confession, God wants to recreate us, renew us, and give us a totally new start. The prayers of today’s Mass are all about this hope of renewal by God’s mercy. We started Mass praying in the Collect, “O God, who renew the world through mysteries beyond all telling.” In the Prayer over the Gifts, we’ll ask the Lord to grant us the grace to “be cleansed from old earthly ways and renewed by growth in heavenly life.” After Communion, we’ll pray that the gift of this Mass will “give us life by making us new, and by sanctifying us, lead us to things eternal.” The whole purpose of the Lenten season from God’s perspective, the purpose of the Jubilee of Hope, the effect of God’s mercy profoundly received, is to make us new. Today we pray to cooperate in that renewal and make us instruments to help all God’s people receive it.

In the Gospel, we once again see mercy and hope on full display, as well as the summons for us to journey with faith and hope in the transformative power of God’s merciful love. A royal official from Capernaum, in other words someone who likely worked for King Herod Antipas, went out to meet Jesus as soon as he heard that Jesus had returned to Cana in Galilee. The distance between Capernaum and Cana is 20 miles and this father, out of love for his son, walked it in search of Jesus. It was quite humbling what the dad did, not only journeying such a distance but desperately placing his trust in a Nazarene carpenter, something that for a royal official likely could have brought him derision and possibly might been a terrible career move. He journeyed out of desperate hope, and Jesus was going to take advantage of the situation not only to heal the man’s son but to bring him and his family to faith. This is a different miracle than Jesus’ healing of the centurion’s servant at a distance (Mt 8:5-13; Lk 7:1-10), which we get each year on the first Monday of Advent and the 24th Monday in Ordinary Time. While both the royal official and the centurion were from Capernaum, the royal official met Jesus in Cana, while the centurion met him in Capernaum. Jesus challenged the royal official’s faith; he praised the centurion’s for being greater than all the faith he had found in Israel. The royal official begged Jesus to come to his home; the centurion said he wasn’t worthy to receive Jesus under his roof. The royal official was likely Jewish; the Centurion was definitely pagan. Not only were the men different, but the lessons Jesus drew were different. In the centurion’s case, it was to reward and underline the beauty and power of his faith. In the royal official’s circumstances, it was to provoke faith in him and others. When the royal official asked him “to come down and heal his son,” to make the long journey with him and touch his son to cure him like he had heard Jesus had done to many others in Capernaum and elsewhere, Jesus responded, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Seeing would be believing for him. Sight preceded. Jesus wanted to teach him how to walk by faith, full of hope, trusting in his love. Jesus would say after the resurrection to doubting Thomas, “You have believed because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen but believed.” Jesus wanted to bring this royal official to real faith, not only in Jesus as a person but in what he said. The royal official, however, wasn’t interested in the larger points about seeing and believing at that point but was full of impatient anxiety for the cure of his son. He pleaded with Jesus, “Sir, come down before my son dies!” That’s when Jesus said to him, “You may go. Your son will live.” It was a supreme test of faith, whether he would believe in Jesus enough to hope in his word. It would have been tempting to think Jesus may have been blowing him off, that he didn’t want to be bothered with the journey. But Jesus must have said it in a way that inspired confidence. St. John tells us, “The man believed what Jesus said to him and left.” And we know that along the at least seven-hour journey back, the royal official was intercepted by his servants who told him that his son had gotten better. The official could have simply rejoiced as if it were a coincidence, but he asked at what time his son was cured, to verify what his faith had told him, and he was told that it happened at the very hour when Jesus had said his son would live. St. John concludes by saying, “He and his whole household came to believe.” He helped his family grow to faith that it was precisely Jesus’ healing word that worked the miracle.

During this Jubilee Year, in fact during the entirety of our Christian life, Jesus wants us to walk by faith, filled with hope, trusting in her merciful love for us and for all those we care about. The pilgrim Church on earth is called always to “pilgrims of hope,” trusting that Jesus wants all of us to live. As St. Paul himself was being led in chains here to Rome, he was nevertheless always a pilgrim of hope because he was consciously making that journey with Christ our hope. That’s the journey we deepen at every Mass, because by Christ’s design, the trek of the pilgrim church on earth is a Eucharistic procession, as Christ Jesus seeks to accompany us from within each day as we seek, together with others, to follow him to the Father’s house where he’s gone to prepare a place for us. Today we come to Mass to meet the same Jesus who met St. Paul outside the gates of Damascus, the same Jesus whom the royal official met in Cana, and Jesus wants to do in us an even greater miracle than he did for this man’s son. We haven’t journeyed for 20 miles on foot — though taking the 23 bus, or the Roman metro to get here has its own challenges! — but nevertheless we have all journeyed on pilgrimage to get here. Jesus wants to give himself to us on the inside so that, as pilgrims of hope, as recipients and ambassadors of his mercy, we can do in our own day in the United States and beyond what the Doctor of the Gentiles did in his own day across the ancient world and here in this city, and lead people on a journey of faith and hope to the new heavens and the new earth, and to the joyful fulfillment of all God’s promises.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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