Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Extraordinary Form
January 26, 2020
Rom 12:16-21, Mt 8:1-13
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
Today in the Gospel, we see both the power of the word of God and faith in that power. A leper approaches Jesus with the faith that if the Lord wished, he could cleanse him from the disease that was eating away his flesh and ostracizing him from his family, from society, from the temple. Jesus said, “I do will it. Be made clean.” A little later, upon entering Capernaum, a Roman centurion approached asking him to heal his paralyzed, agonizing servant. When Jesus indicated he would go immediately, the Centurion stopped him and said, “Only say the word and my servant will be healed.” Jesus said that word, “You may go. As you have believed, it it be done for you,” and the servant was healed at that very hour.
“Only say the word.” The word of Jesus has the power to cure lepers and paralytics. It has the power to cast out demons, to calm raging seas and howling winds, to get fishermen immediately to leave their fish and boats and tax collectors to abandon their money. It has the power to amaze and astonish listeners in synagogues, in temple precincts, on mountains and seashores. It has the power to forgive sins, to change bread and wine into his body and blood, to raise the dead to raise little girls, or only sons of widows, or people who have been in the tomb for four days. It has the power to create the light and the heavens and the earth.
Do we faith in this word — both with a capital W (who he is) and small w (what he says) — like the leper or the Centurion? Do we hunger for this word, since, as Jesus says, man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God? Do we seek to build our life on this word? Jesus says that the one who listens to his words and acts on them is like the wise man who built his house on rock (Mt 7:24-27). He wants us to be those who “hear the word of God and do it” (Lk 11:28), like his mother, who responded to God through the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation, “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). When he challenges us with “hard” teachings, like he did the first disciples when he said that to have life they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, he wants us to respond with faith like Peter, saying, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68). He wants us to recognize, like we pray in the Psalms, “Your word is a lamp for my feed and a light for me path” (Ps 119:105) and respond, “Lord, teach me your way, that I may walk in your truth” (Ps 86:11). Ultimately he wants us to live in such a way that we say, “Lord, only say the word… and I will believe it, love it, follow it, celebrate it, share it, enflesh it.”
I mention all of this because it brings us to the heart of a new annual feast that the Catholic Church celebrates today for the first time: the Sunday of the Word of God. Pope Francis established today’s feast last September 30 to accentuate the importance that Sacred Scripture is meant to have in the faith, prayer and lives of believers. He announced it intentionally on September 30, which is the feast of St. Jerome, the famous translator of the Bible from the Greek and Hebrew into Latin, then the common language of the people. This year the Church marks the 1600thanniversary of the death of St. Jerome, who is famous for emphasizing, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”: unless we are familiar what Jesus said and did in the Gospel, how he fulfilled all the prophecies of the Old Testament, and how the apostles proclaimed him, we really do not know him.
Saint Jerome learned that lesson the hard way. As a brilliant young student traveling to study from the great masters of his day, he got deathly ill with a sickness that took the life of his companions. He had been up until this point a lukewarm Christian, far more passionate about Greco-Roman literature than the faith. During his sickness he had a dream in which he was appearing before the judgment seat of Christ. When he professed he was a Christian, Jesus replied, rather, that he was a Ciceronian, because he knew far more about that Roman orator and his writings than he did about Christ and his teachings. It struck Jerome to the core. He grasped that he didn’t know Christ because he didn’t know the Scriptures. After he awoke and recovered, he resolved to pour his mind, heart and time into the study and diffusion of the Word of God. Pope Francis is hoping that St. Jerome’s example of converted zeal for the gift of Sacred Scripture will be contagious.
In his decree establishing the feast,Pope Francis said he hopes that today’s feast will help believers “grow in religious and intimate familiarity with the sacred Scriptures,” “appreciate the inexhaustible riches contained in that constant dialogue between the Lord and his people,” “experience anew how the risen Lord opens up for us the treasury of his word and enables us to proclaim its unfathomable riches before the world,” and “marked by this decisive relationship with the living word…, grow in love and faithful witness.” He hopes that today will be a day we celebrate the word of God, we make a commitment to study it and we dedicate ourselves to sharing it.
Pope Francis entitled the decree, Aperuit Illis, taken from the words in the Emmaus scene describing how Jesus appeared unrecognized to the dejected disciples leaving Jerusalem and “opened to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures” (Lk 24:27). Starting with Moses and the prophets, he explained to them not that it was a contradiction of the prophecies in Scripture that the Messiah suffered and died, but a confirmation of them. They said later that there “hearts were burning while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us” (Lk 24:32). The same Jesus who appeared to them and opened to them the deeper meaning of the word of God wants to give us the same gift. He wants to make our hearts burn. But he wants our cooperation.
Recent surveys have underlined that the vast majority of Catholics — including Catholics who faithfully never miss Mass, regularly come to confession, live a moral life, and pray — have a very weak relationship with the Word of God. During the 2008 Vatican Synod on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, an international survey was conducted that showed that even though 93 percent of Catholic adults own a Bible at home —the average household has three copies — only one in 30 read the Bible each day and only one in 14 read it at all during a given week. 44 percent of Catholics say they rarely or never read the Bible. 80 percent confess that the only time they come into contact with the Word of God is when they hear in proclaimed at Mass. So while the average American spends six to eight hours a day watching television or streaming on devices, 29 in 30 do not take even one minute to read the Word of God.
A 2010 Survey on Religious Knowledge by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life revealed that atheists and agnostics — not to mention Protestants, Jews and Mormons — had a much greater grasp of the books of the Old and New Testaments and key Bible figures than Catholics do. Only 42 percent of Catholics could name Genesis as the first book of the Bible. Just 33 percent could name the four Gospels. In multiple choice questions, in which the right answer was in front them as one of four options, only 54 percent could identify Bethlehem as Jesus’ birthplace, 55 percent Abraham as the father who nearly sacrificed his son Isaac, and 25 percent Job as the figure associated with enormous suffering. The Biblical questions posed on the Pew Survey did not concern trivial matters that those who might have a strong grasp of the content of the Bible could easily miss. They were designed so that those familiar with the central content should readily have gotten them. Failure to be able to identify the Book of Genesis implies an ignorance of the revealed truths about the creation of the world and of the human person. The inability to name the Gospel writers seems to indicate a general lack of familiarity with what they wrote of Jesus. Anyone who has ever read the book of Job could never forget the story or the name of the central figure. The inability to identify the most dramatic moment in the life of Abraham points implies a general ignorance of the common father of faith of Christians, Jews and Muslims. And the incapacity of more than a third of Catholics to recognize Moses from a line-up suggests that they have never spent much time thinking about the central event of the Old Testament or seen one of many movies that depict it. From the point of view of faith formation, these failures are the equivalent of Americans’ failing to know the first letter of the alphabet, the names of the four seasons of the year, and the location of the nation’s capital — not to mention being unable to distinguish George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King from a multiple-choice lineup.The results were a clear illustration of a general Biblical illiteracy among Catholics that must be remedied. That’s why Pope Benedict called a Synod on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church in 2008, after which he wrote a beautiful exhortation Verbum Domini. That’s why Pope Francis has established today’s feast.
I want to make a few points based on Pope Francis’ hopes for this day. The first is about celebrating the Word of God as the great treasure it is. During the 2008 Synod on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church,Bishop Anton Justs of Jelgava, Latvia, gave an unforgettable intervention. He described a priest, Fr. Viktors, who was arrested by the Soviets for possessing the Bible and commanded him to step on it. Instead, he knelt and kissed it, for which he was condemned to ten years of hard labor in Siberia. When he returned a decade later as an emaciated witness to Scripture’s inestimable value, he celebrated Mass with his people. After proclaiming the Gospel, he kissed once more the Word of God, and he and the people cried profusely with gratitude to God. Fr. Viktors wasn’t alone in his testimony. “In Latvia, during the Soviet era,” Bishop Justs continued, “no religious books, no Holy Scriptures, no catechisms were allowed to be printed. The reasoning was: if there is no printed Word of God, there will be no religion. So our Latvian people did what the first century Christians did: they learnt the passages of the Holy Scriptures by heart.”And specifically with regard to celebration, he recounted, “Still today in Latvia there is an oral tradition alive. We stand on the shoulders of our martyrs to proclaim the Word of God. Our grandchildren remember their grandfathers and grandmothers, who died for their faith; they want to be, in their turn, heroes of faith. In Latvia we proclaim the living Word of God! We go in the processions and on the pilgrimages, we sing songs and we pray and say: ‘This is the Word of God, for which our grandparents died.’”A people learning Sacred Scripture by heart, taking the Bible on Pilgrimages, proudly proclaiming the Word of God, and seeking to be heroes in witness to it — this is what the Catholic Church is meant to be. This is the type of faith and celebration Pope Francis, by establishing this feast, is trying to catalyze.
The second point is about studying with zeal Sacred Scripture. About a decade ago, I happened to meet a priest from Cleveland at Green Airport in Providence. I invited him to lunch. When the cashier asked if there would be one check or two, I said one and gave my credit card. Fr. Bob immediately interjected, “Sirach says we should go Dutch!” I stared at him quizzically, but retorted, “Jesus calls us to love one another as he loves us and the Last Supper wasn’t Dutch. I’m paying!” When we got to the table, immediately after grace, I asked whether he had invented the quotation from Sirach. “Not at all!,” he enthusiastically replied, as he pulled a worn Bible from his backpack and amazingly opened it to the exact page in the Book of Sirach where it says not to be ashamed to “share the expenses of a business or journey” (Sir 42:3). Blown away, and frankly filled with holy envy by his command of Scripture, I asked how he had come to know the Word of God so well. He told me he had made a promise the day of his diaconal ordination to read the entire Bible once a year and that he had been faithful to that promise. “After 24 years,” he said with a smile, “You get know what Sirach says about restaurant bills!” I asked him how long it takes to read the whole Bible in a year. He replied that it takes cumulatively only 75 hours, or 12-15 minutes a day. Since that encounter, I’ve tried to emulate Fr. Bob’s commitment to reading the Bible each year and have encouraged many others to join us. 12-15 minutes a day can change your life. There are so many books and smart phone applications that make reading the Bible in a year easier, intelligently varying the passages to help one understand it better than if one just read from cover to cover. There are so many superb resources to understanding the Bible given to us by Scott Hahn, John Bergsma, Michael Barber, Brant Pitrie, Tim Gray, Jeff Cavins and others through the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, through Ascension Press, through the Augustine Institute and other great free resources.
But we need to make the effort. I remember one young woman preparing for marriage who attended something I did in the Catksills for young adults in 2003. As we were hiking, she asked what should be on her Catholic bucket list. The first thing I told her was “read the Bible at least once.” She called me three weeks later, saying she had read the whole thing, and had started a second time, convinced that the best gift she could give her future husband was the gift of God. In June I was in Chicago giving a retreat day for the Catholic Medical Association to medical students. There I mentioned that as Catholics they should know the Bible just as well as doctors know anatomy. I was really moved that 15 of them afterward created a WhatsApp group to read the Bible in a year and share their reflections each day with each other. They’re now almost two-thirds done. Even last week, I preached a retreat on the Word of God to consecrated women in Rhode Island and challenged them, during this Year celebrating the 1600th anniversary of the death of St. Jerome this year, to read the Bible. They’ve all made the commitment and this morning I received a message from one of them thanking me because it’s having a huge impact on the life of their community. This morning at Mass in St. Peter’s, Pope Francis said, “Brothers and Sisters, let us make room inside ourselves for the word of God! Each day, let us read a verse or two of the Bible. Let us begin with the Gospel: let us keep it open on our table, carry it in our pocket or bag, read it on our cell phones, and allow it to inspire us daily. We will discover that God is close to us, that he dispels our darkness and, with great love, leads our lives into deep waters.”
The final point, which I’ll make briefly, is that Christ calls us to go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. We can only give what we have. To share the word of God with others so that their hearts might burn begins with our knowing it. Our holiness, to a large degree, depends upon it. When St. John Paul II wrote his pastoral plan for the third Christian millennium, he focused on six pillars in the training of Christians for holiness. The first four will be of no surprise to you: God’s grace, prayer, Mass and confession. The fifth was “listening to the Word of God” and the sixth was “sharing the Word of God.” We see in the lives of so many saints the impact that the Word of God had in them, and through them, in others. God wants his Word to have the same impact in us.
“Lord, only say the Word!” If ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ, intimate familiarity with the Word of God will help us to know not only the inspired words but the Word-made-flesh so much better. Today’s inaugural Sunday of the Word of God is a grace-filled occasion time to make a resolution to celebrate, zealously learn, and eagerly spread this gift. If we do, then what happened on the Road to Emmaus can happen on the very paths we walk. And like in Emmaus, as Jesus led them from the Verbum Domini to the Verbum Caro Factum Est, it will help us to recognize him so much more easily in the Breaking of the Bread in which, even though we’re unworthy to have him under our roof, he only says the Word and makes us ready!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romans
Have the same regard for one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly; do not be wise in your own estimation.Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all.If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.Beloved, do not look for revenge but leave room for the wrath; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”Rather, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.”Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.
The continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew
When Jesus came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him.And then a leper approached, did him homage, and said, “Lord, if you wish, you can make me clean.”He stretched out his hand, touched him, and said, “I will do it. Be made clean.” His leprosy was cleansed immediately. Then Jesus said to him, “See that you tell no one, but go show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses prescribed;that will be proof for them.” When he entered Capernaum,a centurion approached him and appealed to him,saying, “Lord, my servant is lying at home paralyzed, suffering dreadfully.”He said to him, “I will come and cure him.”The centurion said in reply,Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word and my servant will be healed.For I too am a person subject to authority, with soldiers subject to me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come here,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Amen, I say to you, in no one in Israelhave I found such faith.I say to you,many will come from the east and the west, and will recline with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob at the banquet in the kingdom of heaven,but the children of the kingdom will be driven out into the outer darkness, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth.”And Jesus said to the centurion, “You may go; as you have believed, let it be done for you.” And at that very hour [his] servant was healed.
