Passing onto others the Fruit of our Being “Templed with” God, 19th Monday (II), August 8, 2016

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Nineteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Dominic
August 8, 2016
Ezek 1:2-5.24-28, Ps 148, Mt 17:22-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today’s feast of St. Dominic is a particularly special one because it is occurring during the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Order of Preachers. The motto of the Dominicans is contemplata aliis tradere, to pass on to others the fruits of one’s contemplation, and today, as we ponder what Jesus teaches us in the readings and it the way St. Dominic enfleshed the Gospel, we should do so in such a way that what we contemplate can so transform us that we will zealously pass it on to others and so transform the world.
• Today in the Gospel, Peter is approached by those collecting the annual Temple tax that all Jewish males over 20 were expected to pay each year not only to support the liturgical needs of the temple but to remind them that God ransomed them (literally redeemed them or “bought them back” from slavery). When they asked Peter if Jesus paid the Temple Tax, Peter was too much of a slave to human respect and replied that he did and sent the collectors away. When Peter returned to the house, Jesus, aware of the conversation, asked him whether it was foreigners or subjects, citizens or members of the royal family that paid taxes. Peter replied, in accordance with his knowledge of the customs of the times, that members of the royal family or citizens of an occupying power were free of the taxes. Peter got the initial point that Jesus knew he was exempt from the Temple Tax. Jesus had mentioned to his mother and foster father when they rediscovered him in the Temple after three days that he was in his “Father’s house” and for that reason would be exempt, because he was a Son of the King. But he was exempt for a more important reason: He identified himself as the Temple that would be destroyed and in three days rebuilt. The temple was a sign that was pointing to Him and it would be absurd for the Signified to pay taxes to the sign. By the same logic, because we have been made sons in the Son and have been made Temples of God’s presence, we are free of the requirement, too.
• But Jesus then pointed to a higher understanding of freedom than a freedom from responsibility. The purpose of our freedom is so that we can choose to love God and others. And so Jesus said that lest they scandalize anyone out of their duties to God, they should pay the temple tax and Jesus instructed Peter of how to do so, through catching a fish that Jesus someone either knew or arranged was carrying a coin worth twice the tax, to pay for Christ and Peter both. Jesus was teaching Peter and all of us that we should focus more on our freedom for than our freedom from. Jesus was free from sin, yet he took on all our sins. He was free from the consequences of sin, death, but he freely underwent death so that we might live, allowing himself as he foretold at the beginning of today’s Gospel to be betrayed into the hands of men who would kill him. He didn’t stand on his dignity and his privileges, but with his dignity privileged others. We’re supposed to use our freedom in the same way. To be a son in the Son, to be templed with him (contemplative), means to be someone who passed onto others the gift we have received in God.
• The second illustration of freedom happens in today’s first reading from the beginning of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel. We’ll be pondering Ezekiel’s prophecy for the next two weeks. Ezekiel was writing in 592 BC from Babylon. He had been born in the same home town as Jeremiah and a member of the priestly class, but after the Jewish leadership decided to oppose Nebuchadnezzar contrary to Jeremiah’s messages from God, Nebuchadnezzar brought many of the upper classes, including Ezekiel’s family, into captivity in Babylon. When he turned 30, the time when Ezekiel would have begun his service in the Temple in Jerusalem, he went down by the river Chebar and was given by the Lord seven different visions he was called to share with the people. The first visions pointed to the imminent destruction of Jerusalem five years later. But eventually the visions turned to ones of hope, as we’ll see over the course of the next two weeks. One of the main points of what God was revealed to Ezekiel and through him to the people was that even though they were in captivity, they were still free to pray. Even though it was impossible for them to worship God in the temple, they could worship him in Babylon. That’s not only a very important lesson in freedom that we all need to grasp, but a lesson about being templed with God: There are certainly privileged places to pray, but when we’re unable to be there, we can still pray with freedom, a lesson that St. Paul and so many martyrs have taught us all the way down to the martyrs of modern times like St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe whose feast we’ll mark on Saturday, praying in the midst of the concentration camps.
• These are lessons we see in the life of St. Dominic. St. Dominic received his priestly vocation young in life and became a canon of his cathedral in Osma. He was asked to accompany his bishop on a diplomatic mission and while staying with innkeepers in southern France came face-to-face with the Albigensian heresy, which was one of the dualistic heresies that thought all matter was evil, and therefore that the body was evil, the sacraments that use matter were evil superstitions, sexual relations that involve the body evil, and suicide that escapes the body was good. These people wanted to serve God — and many of them were extremely ascetic — but they were serving an idol, a God who hadn’t pronounced the material world good and pronounced the human person, body and soul, very good. St. Dominic stayed up all night to convert the innkeepers. And he recognized within a deep desire to convert his faith into deeps to help others, who were enslaved by falsity, to come to faith as well. He first founded in 1206 a monastery of nuns to give those women who were formerly Albigensians the means to pray for the success of his missionary efforts. Then, in 1216, he founded an order of Friars Preachers to help in the propagation of the truth. Later there would be third orders associated with the Dominicans as well. And they undertook successfully the reevangelization of southern France from the Albigensians and the Cathars, reminding them that their body is meant to be a temple for God’s glorification and that just as the eternal Son of God “tabernacled himself” among us, so God’s presence, God’s greatness, God’s goodness and holiness could live within. That fruit of St. Dominic’s contemplation was shared and it continues to be shared until this day by so many Dominican nuns, friars, sisters and tertiaries.
• Today in the celebration of the Eucharist all of these lessons combine. Jesus had had Peter catch a fish with a stater in its mouth to pay the Tax for them both. Jesus could have easily had him catch a fish with two coins rather than one twice the value, but was emphasizing the union between Christ and Peter. Christ seeks that same union with us. And today he will put himself under the appearance of a host about the size of a stater within our mouths in order to bring about that communion and make us truly his Temple. It’s here at Mass that we see something far greater than what Ezekiel witnessed by the river Chebar, because we encounter the fulfillment of those prophecies and have a vision of the glory of the Lord in all his majestic humility in the Holy Eucharist. Today as we come forward to receive Jesus, we ask Him for a double portion of St. Dominic’s love for him so that, like him, we may always be united with him in con-templation (becoming one temple in prayer), we might always rejoice in the dignity of our divine filiation, so that we may come with him and many others to whom we have passed on the fruits of what God has revealed to us in prayer to the eternal temple of God’s glory in heaven where we will see something far greater than Ezekiel’s visions!

The readings for today’s Mass were: