Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, Resumed (24th Sunday After Pentecost), Extraordinary Form
November 4, 2018
Rom 13:8-10, Mt 8:23-27
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
The Last Things
We have begun the month of November, the last month of the Church’s liturgical year, in which we concentrate with greater focus on the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell — and look at our day-to-day journey with the end of our earthly pilgrimage in mind. The month begins with celebrating the Solemnity of All Saints, which reminds us of the fact that God has created each of us for no other purpose than to be holy as he is holy. The day after All Saints we commemorate the faithful departed, praying for all the dead that they may be admitted into the company of saints, and remembering that we, too, are dust and unto dust we shall return. The entire month is a privileged occasion for us to focus more deeply things we should be pondering throughout the year, that our life has meaning, that our life in this world will not last forever and is not all there is, and that real wisdom lies in keeping the end of human life in mind so that not only we do not get distracted or lost along the way, but so that we can order our steps in the direction of the heavenly Jerusalem rather than eternal self-alienation from God.
Today’s readings help us to contemplate two things we must confront as we ponder the last things. The first is our existential fears of suffering, death, judgment and what comes after, fears that the evil one never ceases to foment. The second regards the way we need to live in this life so that we might live forever. Let’s take each of them in turn.
Trusting in Jesus in the midst of our fears
Today’s Gospel about Jesus’ calming of the winds and the seas is much more than a demonstration of the Lord’s power over the forces of nature. He who with a word created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all they contain, with a word could calm them; as we see in the Gospel, he did. Neither is today’s passage from St. Matthew a manifestation of the failure of the apostles to believe in this power of Jesus. They knew that he had the powerto calm the seas, which is why they woke him up in the first place. They had, after all, already seen him cast out demons, cure Simon Peter’s mother-in-law and others who were ill, heal lepers, forgive the sins and paralysis of a crippled man, and straighten a man’s withered hand. They have no no doubts about Jesus’ omnipotence. The point of today’s Gospel is that, even though they knew Jesus had the power to calm the seas and the wind, they began to doubt whether he would do so. This Gospel is a display of their failure to believe in Jesus’ love for them. In St. Mark’s version of the same scene, as they startled Jesus from what must have been a very deep and long-overdue sleep on an uncomfortable and rocky boat, they asked, “Master, do you not care that we are perishing?” Do you not care?! They had begun to doubt whether Jesus gave a hoot whether they drowned in the lake. They had begun to question whether he was indifferent to their plight, as if he didn’t care whether they died.
Jesus’ whole life, of course, is an answer to that question. He did care that we were about to die and that was the reason why the Son of God, the second person of the Blessed Trinity, took our human nature and was born of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He cared enough that he spent himself to the point of exhaustion teaching, healing the sick and comforting the afflicted. He cared enough ultimately to take our place on death row, giving his life so that we might survive. Like Jonah, who was tossed into the sea in order to calm the ferocious storm of the sea, so Jesus tossed himself overboard to quell the tempests that were causing us to die. As he hurled himself into the abyss from the Cross, he calmed the storm of sin so that we might reach the eternal shore. His entire life was a demonstration of the depth of his loving care.
The problem was that the apostles doubted that saving concern. Just like the serpent in the desert had seduced Eve and Adam to doubt in God’s love for them, so here again he was tempting the apostles. In this the twelve were like the twelve tribes of Israel 1300 years before. After they had witnessed God’s hand in the ten plagues of Egypt, after they had seen him part the Red Sea, after they had seen Pharaoh’s horsemen and chariots perish in the sea, after they had witnessed Moses’ strike the rock to provide them water, after they had been fed miraculously with manna and then quails from heaven, after they had seen the thunder and lightening of Moses’ conversations with God on the top of Mt. Sinai, the Israelites continued to doubt in God’s love for them. They obviously knew that God had the power — he had already shown them this power on all these occasions — but they didn’t have faith that he would continue to use that power to help them. “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt,” they complained to Moses, “that you have taken us away to die in the desert?” (Ex 14:11). Whenever anything got difficult, they grumbled. They doubted. They began to whether God’s solicitude had an expiration date. His past actions didn’t factor into their equation.
The same thing was happening with their descendants in the boat. They had witnessed Jesus’ power and his goodness on so many occasions, but they began to wonder whether his love — not his power — had a limit. They began to question whether he was indifferent to their plight. It was, simply put, a lack of faith in who he was, based on a failure to grasp the meaning of all he had done up until then. That’s why Jesus, as soon as he had awakened turned to his followers and said, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?”
The same lack of faith that happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden, to the Jews in the desert and to the apostles on the Sea of Galilee can happen to all of us. Generally, few of us question whether God has the power to work a miracle, but very often we begin to wonder whether he has the will. When we’re assailed by the storms of sorrow, the downpours of doubt, the twisters of uncertainty, the hail of anxiety, and the blizzards of loneliness, we can start to imagine that he is having sweet dreams while we’re experiencing nightmares. We can start to reckon that he’s snoring while we’re screaming for help. And when these doubts begin to grow with regard to our day-to-day situation, how much more can they assail us when it comes to suffering at the end of life, to death and beyond. This cancer of doubting the Lord’s love for us happens when we, like the twelve tribes and the twelve apostles, begin to forget all that the Lord has done for us up until now and what that reveals about who he is and how loved we are by him. As St. Paul wrote to the Romans, “If God didn’t even spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, would he not give us everything else along with him? (Rom 8:32). If God the Father was willing to allow his Son to be brutally killed so that we might live, he is going to respond with love in every circumstance, by giving us what he knows we need. But we need to have faith in him and in the power of his love. The apostles were anxious in the boat because they were paying more attention to the waves and to the winds around them than to the presence of Jesus with in the boat. The same thing happens with us. This scene is a reminder to us of the need to focus more on Christ than on our problems. This is the mark of a life of faith. Jesus turns to us in the midst of whatever hardship we are experiencing, and with regard to our most basic human fears, and says, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?” To believe in him means not just to trust in his power, but to have faith in his goodness and love and that that goodness and love perdures into eternity. So even if we’re terrified about potential storms at the end of our life — whether we will have to suffer the loss of our memory through Alzheimer’s or muscle control as with ALS, or have to endure excruciating physical agony — Jesus wants to strengthen us to have no doubt about his presence. Just like he permitted the apostles to endure this ferocious tempest on the Sea of Galilee to strengthen them in faith, so sometimes he allows us to experience great difficulty, so that we can grow in faith precisely through confronting our fears together with him. That’s the type of faith that November is meant to help us grow in.
Faith working through love
But faith alone is not enough. As St. James reminds us, faith without works is dead (James 2:26). A living faith, St. Paul reminds us, overflows with works of love (Gal 5:6). That’s what today’s epistle from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans helps us to remember, which is key as we seek to live in such a way that as we approach death and judgment we will not be eaten alive by fear. St. John of the Cross wrote, “In the twilight of life, God will not judge us on our earthly possessions and human successes, but on how well we have loved.” To love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and to love our neighbor as Christ has loved us, is the synthesis of holiness, of the way that will lead us to eternal happiness at Jesus’ side. But we have to concentrate, with single-minded focus, on this love. Today St. Paul tells us, “Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.” Not only is this a statement against amassing financial debt — words that are very important today in a culture that doesn’t save but charges beyond their means on credit cards, or borrows way beyond our means as a national government — but it is a reminder for us that we do have a debt to love one another. Loving one another is not a “good suggestion” by Jesus. It’s not even merely a command. It’s a debt to pay, it’s a real duty, something we owe others. This might seem strange at first to think we owe everyone a debt of love, but when we take seriously Jesus’ words that whatever we do for the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to him (Mt 25:31-46), then it’s easier to understand: because we owe a debt to Jesus for everything — for our life, our salvation, our gifts, etc. — we pay that debt in the way we love each other. He didn’t say, “love me as I have loved you,” but “love another.” St. Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, wrote in Love and Responsibility that the other is someone before whom the only worthy response is love.
How do we pay this debt? First, by keeping the commandments. Today St. Paul lists the “second tablet” of the Decalogue, focused on love of neighbor, reminding us that the “one who loves one another has fulfilled the law” and “love is the fulfillment of the law.” Jesus said something similar in St. Matthew’s Gospel when he reminded us that all the law and the prophets, including obviously the Ten Commandments, hinges on the love of God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and the love of our neighbor as we love ourselves. We can’t really love our parents if we’re dishonoring them. We can’t love someone if we’re hating them or ending their life, or using them for our own sexual pleasure, or ripping them off, or lying to them, or envious about their blessings. We begin to pay the debt of love when we reverence our parents despite their shortcomings, when we risk our lives to save others, when we sacrifice the desires of the flesh out of love for others’ souls, when we give them what we have rather than steal from them, when we tell them the truth even if we should have to suffer as a result, when we rejoice at what they have rather than seek it selfishly for ourselves.
But even though keeping the commandments with love is the fulfillment of the law, we are called to go beyond the minimum of the law to the full standard of the love of Christ. Christ calls us to love by his standard, which involves willing the good even of our enemies, unselfish self-sacrifice, patience, kindness, humility, perseverance, sincerity, devotion, fervor, fidelity, and affection, as we see in the list of attributes for love St. Paul gives us in Rom 12 and 1 Corinthians 13. God pours his love into our hearts precisely so that, filled with his love, we can love others not just with our finite love but with his infinite love.
I’d like to bring up three questions to try to make the duty of love we owe to others concrete.
- The first is how often do we tell others that we love them? I’m not just talking about our spouse, or our children, or our parents, although we should regularly be expressing our love for them with words as well as deeds. I’m talking about our neighbors. Jesus said to us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you” (Jn 15:9). We’re living in a world in which many don’t think that they’re lovable and as Christians we are supposed to be the continuance of Christ’s mission of love in the world. That doesn’t mean we say I love you to every stranger that we meet, which would obviously cheapen the word, but if we sincerely love other people, then we should be as comfortable saying so as Jesus was to us and we are to our family members. If we would be uncomfortable saying “I love you” to our friends, our fellow parishioners, our co-workers, and others with whom we normally interact, the reason may be precisely because we don’t really love them with affection from the heart as Christ calls us to. Just as Jesus loves us and says it, so he wants us to love others.
- Second, do we sacrifice for those to whom we owe a debt of love? No one has any greater love, Jesus says, than to lay down his life for his friends. In most cases, we won’t have to make the supreme sacrifice for others, but are we willing, in little things, to die to ourselves to help others? Are we willing to make serious sacrifices of our financial savings and of our time, especially when others are in need? We need regularly to examine ourselves on this point, asking: Do I sacrifice for this person next to me? Do I recognize that that sacrifice is something I “owe,” that it’s a debt I’m paying, that the other is worthy of it? Do I count the cost of loving and wait for a quid pro quo?
- Third, do we love with urgency? Especially in November, we would do well to consider the counsel of The Imitation of Christ: “In every deed and every thought, act as though you were to die this very day. … If you are not prepared today, how will you be prepared tomorrow?” If today were the last day of our life, how would we spend it? Most of us would spend it getting our priorities straight: making a good confession, reminding people we love them, asking for forgiveness from those we’ve wronged, and doing as much charity as we can. Cardinal Justin Rigali in 2011 gave a wonderful meditation on death as he was preparing to retire from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, in which he asked us to ponder everyday two sayings of the Lord, “No one takes my life from me; I freely lay it down” (Jn 10:18) and “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46). When we ponder the first, we don’t go through life as victims, but we freely consent to every sacrifice, including those that initially come from the outside. Each day is an opportunity for us to lay down our lives for others. And when we ponder the second, we are overcoming our fears and entrusting everything to the Father’s mercy.
Taking the risk to love as we owe
I’d like to illustrate these points about loving with urgency in deeds with a story. November 4 is the feast of St. Charles Borromeo, the great reforming Archbishop of Milan in the 1500s, who led the reform of the Church after the sins that precipitated the Protestant Reformation, and whose life has so many lessons to help the Church recover from scandals today. In 1571, the plague hit Milan. People were dying. So many others were starving. He sold almost all he had — both in the Archbishop’s residence as well as his inheritance — to care for the poor. He sought to engage the priests of the Archdiocese of Milan, but so many of them were afraid: afraid of catching the plague and dying. They were stingy with regard to the debt of love that was owed to others. St. Charles spoke to them with words that each of us can apply in general to every situation in life, especially with regard to how many people are languishing with a type of spiritual plague that separates them from God. He said, “How can those upon whom mercy has been given and liberally poured out be so tightly limited with theirs, and measure it out in accord with temporal and external necessities? The same Son of God, who for the sake of the salvation of all men, including his enemies and the impious, was fixed to the cross and died in the greatest shame and the bitterest torment, invites us to go forward into the danger of a quiet and glorious death for devout brethren. He to whom we owe as much repayment as we could not obtain by dying a thousand times without end, does not even request this pathetic life of ours, but only that we put it at risk. …Our Fathers, incited by the spirit of God, did the same in similar circumstances. They taught that this is what should be done. … They extolled a work of this kind because it has the greatest power to motivate our souls to confirm that they are the stuff of martyrs. It is indeed a desirable time now when without the cruelty of the tyrant, without the rack, without fire, without beasts, and in the complete absence of harsh tortures that are usually the most frightful to human weakness, we can obtain the crown of martyrdom.” It’s through sacrificing ourselves for others in the present, even risking our lives to do so, that we grow in the love that makes us martyrs and saints.
The Lord’s strength on the journey of love
The Lord this November wants to fortify us against all fears and help us to love in such a way that in the twilight of our life, as he judges us on love, he will be able say, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Inherit the kingdom, the kingdom of love, prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” And to strengthen us to overcome our fears and to love as he loves us, he now feeds us with himself and tells us, “Do this in memory of me!”
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans
Brothers and Sisters, Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; you shall not kill; you shall not steal; you shall not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this saying, [namely] “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no evil to the neighbor; hence, love is the fulfillment of the law.
The continuation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew
Jesus got into a boat and his disciples followed him. Suddenly a violent storm came up on the sea, so that the boat was being swamped by waves; but he was asleep. They came and woke him, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” He said to them, “Why are you terrified, O you of little faith?” Then he got up, rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was great calm. The men were amazed and said, “What sort of man is this, whom even the winds and the sea obey?
