Not to Be Afraid to Acknowledge Christ Before Others, 14th Saturday (II), July 14, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the 14th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, Virgin
July 14, 2018
Is 6:1-8, Ps 93, Mt 10:24-33

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• Today we see the vocation story of Isaiah, as we prepare to spend a week pondering the message God sent him to announce. In his vocational vision, he saw the Lord surrounded by the seraphim crying out “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts! All the earth is filled with his glory!” He was filled with fear and thought he was doomed, because he was a person of “unclean lips,” someone incapable of speaking of God like the Seraphim or like the prophets. But God sent the Seraphim to purify his lips with burning charcoal, to remove his wickedness and purge his sin. Once that was done, when God asked for a “volunteer” to send, Isaiah stepped forward: “Here I am. Send me!”
• In the Gospel, Jesus is similarly addressing the fears of his apostles as he is preparing them for their mission of proclaiming the Kingdom. In the passage we had yesterday, Jesus described how his followers and apostles were being sent out as sheep among wolves, how they would be betrayed to courts, scourged in places of worship, dragged before governors and kings, handed over by family members to death, hated by all, and persecuted. That was enough to make most people a little intimidated! Today Jesus addresses it straight on, saying that as they would do to him, they would do to his disciples, but as this happens, they would become like their teacher. “Therefore,” he stressed, “do not be afraid of them.” He summons them to speak in the light and proclaim on the housetops because all others can do to them is to “kill the body,” but they can’t touch the soul. And in his resurrection, he would show that death is just corporeally temporary! Rather than be intimidated by the body-killers, he said that they should fear only the “one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna,” namely God. But then lest they be frightened of God the Father, he reminds them that he cares for them more than sparrows and counts every follicle on their head. Jesus sums up this section by saying that he will acknowledge before the Father everyone who acknowledges him, and that acknowledgement is essentially eternal life!
• Someone who acted with Christian courage and acknowledged Jesus before others is the saint the Church remembers today. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a fellow New Yorker, was a native American born in Auriesville, who was canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict. She was a Mohawk orphaned at a young age when smallpox decimated her village claiming the life of her parents and brother. She was raised by her uncle, the chief of the Turtle tribe, and two aunts, all of whom were fiercely resistant to Christianity. They sought to prevent her contact with the “black robes” (the Jesuit missionaries) — St. Isaac Jogues had died in their village just a decade before Kateri’s birth — and to marry her off at a young age, but she had already been moved by a desire to give herself totally to God as a Christian. She overcame their rejection, and boldly sought instruction and baptism against the will of her uncle. Even though familial and tribal loyalties are incredibly strong among the native Americans, after her baptism at the age of 19, she fled to Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. There she dedicated herself to Jesus in a life of prayer and mortification, adoring him as she knelt in the snow outside the Church before it would be opened early each morning and stayed there until the last Mass was celebrated at night, sleeping on a bed of thorns in reparation for the sins of her tribe and for their conversion, caring for the sick and elderly. In worldly eyes, she was an insignificant, simple Indian with the residue of small pox on her face. But she loved Jesus, acknowledged him, and became more and more like her teacher in a short time because of what she suffered, dying at the age of 24, just five years after her conversion, with her last words “Jesos Konoronkwa” (“Jesus, I love you”) as she passed into his eternal embrace. We ask her intercession so that we might do the same and pass from where we sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” on earth to where we hope to sing it with all the seraphim forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: