Persevering in the Faith, Firmly Ground, Stable, and Unshifting, 22nd Saturday (I), September 7, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary
September 7, 2019
Col 1:21-23, Ps 54, Lk 6:1-5

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click here:

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s first reading, we see how St. Paul continues to respond to the Gnostic heretics in Colossae, who thought that matter was evil and therefore that Jesus either couldn’t have been God (because his body would have been evil) or couldn’t have really taken on our flesh, given us himself in the Sacraments, made the Church his Body, etc. They taught that to get to heaven they needed the secret gnosis or knowledge that they possessed but that somehow Jesus didn’t ask the apostles to share with everyone. St. Paul summarized the essence of the Christian message that God through Jesus reconciled us in the fleshly Body of Christ through his death — he was real! — and did this with a purpose, to present us holy, immaculate and irreproachable before God. Salvation was coming from God, not from our intelligence. It was available to both slaves and slaveowners. But what was required was responding to this work of God, “persever[ing] in the faith, firmly grounded, stable, and not shifting from the hope of the Gospel,” persevering in faith working through love. There are two basic ways we can shift from the hope of the Gospel. The first is in a laxist direction, where people try to water down the Gospel. The second is in a rigorist direction, where people add to the Gospel or absolutize minor elements over the major.
• The latter is what was happening in the scene of Jesus and the Pharisees today. The problem with the Pharisees is that even though they knew the Scriptures, they were regularly missing the forest for the trees. They were spying on Jesus trying to catch him. Yesterday they complained that the disciples were not fasting. Today they were complaining that they were violating the Sabbath. While they obsessed about what they thought were violations of the third commandment, all the while they plotting to break the fifth. God through Moses in the Book of Deuteronomy said that when people were walking through fields and were hungry, it was not sinful to pluck heads of grain or an ear of corn because he had provided that for them. It wasn’t stealing. The context of today’s Gospel was that it was a Sabbath Day and the Pharisees thought that there were multiple violations of the Sabbath involved in the work of plucking, threshing, winnowing and preparing to eat what was plucked. So little did they love their neighbor or understand all God had written about mercy and love that they thought God wanted his sons and daughters to starve rather than to eat of the food he had provided. Jesus came into the world to show a different way, to show us how to “read the Scriptures” and live them. The Sabbath is actually about God and about God’s love for us, seeking to press the reset button in our relationship with him. That’s why Jesus could say, in both his divinity and humanity, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” The disciples were focused on their relationship with him, not on picking heads of grain.
• Someone who shows us how to live “holy, without blemish and irreproachable” is the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom we celebrate today on Saturday and the feast of whose birthday the Church will mark privately tomorrow on Sunday. She had been preserved free from all stain of original sin preveniently from the first moment of her existence through the death of Christ in his fleshy body — that he had taken from her — on the cross 47 years later, receiving that eternal gift in time. But she persevered in the faith we see at the Annunciation in Nazareth through the second annunciation of Simeon that her own heart would be pierced with a sword, through the third annunciation by her Son from the Cross to behold John and all of humanity as her spiritual children. She was firmly ground, stable and unshifting in her believing in the Gospel, even when she saw on Calvary what exteriorly would have been a contradiction to Gabriel’s words that Jesus would be great, called Son of the Most High, and whose kingdom would not end. We ask her to pray for us today, as we prepare to receive the “fleshly Body of Christ” her Son in Holy Communion, that we may make him not only the Lord of the Sabbath, but of every day, and persevere in responding to the reconciliation he has gained for us, becoming holy, immaculate and irreproachable by the transformation he seeks to accomplish by coming to reign within.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Reading 1
COL 1:21-23