Persevering in the Way of Virtue and Mercy, Friday of the First Week of Lent, February 23, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the First Week of Lent
Memorial of St. Polycarp, Martyr
February 23, 2024
Ez 18:21-18, Ps 130, Mt 5:20-26

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that our righteousness, our justice, must surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, in order to enter into eternal life, in order not to go to Hell. The “justice” of the Pharisees was quite rigorous in terms of prayer, weekly fasting, tithing. But there were two things it lacked. First, it was external, focusing on acts rather than the heart; second, it lacked mercy. The Pharisees were the “separated ones,” those who in order to cut themselves off from sin sought to cut themselves totally off from sinners, as if they weren’t sinners themselves. That’s why they complained when Jesus was eating with Matthew and the other tax collectors, because they had no communion at all with sinners, whom they thought would just be straw for the fires of hell. Likewise, to convert them, Jesus preached the three parables of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin and Lost Son in Lk 15, because the scribes and Pharisees were like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, preferring their brothers to remain dead in sin rather than rejoicing in their resurrection through reconciliation with God. Our righteousness must surpass theirs because theirs wasn’t truly “right” with God or with others: they served him with their lips and even externally with some of their deeds, but their hearts were far from him, because they didn’t realize their need for God’s mercy and God’s desire to transform them by that mercy to be merciful like he is merciful. The whole practice of Lent is meant to help us become like God: in fasting, we learn to hunger for what he hungers; in almsgiving, we share in his providential care, passing on to others who need it more than we do what God has first given to us; and in prayer, allowing his thoughts to become our thoughts and his ways our ways. Today in the readings we enter into these truths.
• God responds to a complaint he knows has welled up in the hearts of the people of Israel in Ezekiel’s day and one that arises in every age. It certainly arose for the Scribes and Pharisees whose righteousness ours needs to surpass. “The Lord’s way is not fair!,” we can complain. Ezekiel had described clearly what the Lord’s way is. On the one hand, “If the wicked man turns away from all the sins he committed, if he keeps all my statutes and does what is right and just, he shall surely live, he shall not die. None of the crimes he committed shall be remembered against him; he shall live because of the virtue he has practiced.” On the other hand, “If the virtuous man turns from the path of virtue to do evil, the same kind of abominable things that the wicked man does, can he do this and still live? None of his virtuous deeds shall be remembered, because he has broken faith and committed sin; because of this, he shall die.”
• The first way we and others complain that the Lord’s way is not just is that it is a way of mercy for sinners. Someone who has lived a sinful live for decades all of a sudden converts and God says he shall live. God won’t remember the crimes he has committed. True justice, we can object, is to hold people accountable forever. Like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, we can get into the state that we don’t rejoice when our lost brother is found and our dead brother comes to life again. Our self-identity is caught up, somehow, in a sense of spiritual superiority, and when he’s restored to the relationship with the Father he should have had all along, we resent it rather than rejoice. But that shows how much we need to be converted! Jesus encountered it over and again in the resistance of the scribes and Pharisees to his work reconciling, embracing and eating with sinners. God tells us today through Ezekiel, “Do I indeed derive any pleasure for the death of the wicked? Do I not rather rejoice when he turns away from evil that he may live?” God’s way is a way of mercy. He doesn’t forget the needs of justice. In fact, he himself takes on our flesh to pay the price we deserved. But his mercy surpasses what our deeds deserve. And that should give us hope.
• The second way the people of Ezekiel’s time and ours complain that God’s way is unfair is that it is a way of justice for those who refuse to convert, including those who had lived a very good life for a while but then turned away from God and persevered in that alienation. There’s a sense of added shock and scandal when a virtuous man diverts his heart from God to malevolence and maleficence. Most often these are not sins of the flesh but of calculation and corruption because through the virtuous life in most cases one knew better. We want to say that if God were fair, he would balance out the life: 70 years of virtue and only several months of vice. But it’s here that God holds us accountable and makes us responsible for our decisions made in freedom. For a person in this circumstance, as long as he still lives, it’s possible for him to turn back to the Lord and live, to leave his wicked deeds behind. His path, too, can be a way of mercy, but only if he recognizes what he’s done and repents. Previous good deeds don’t excuse or outweigh the turning of one’s heart from the Lord and the persevering in that sin at the end. It’s our way, God tells us, that is unjust if we don’t want to hold someone accountable for their choices, if we refuse to recognize that we are always in need of God’s mercy, that we’re always in the first category of those needing to convert.
• Conversion, as I like to emphasize, involves three moments. The first is averting (turning away) from things that are not of God. The second is adverting (turning toward) God and the things of God. And the third is converting, turning with the Lord, which is a continual process. As life is dynamic, there’s always an opportunity for us to turn away from whatever keeps us from God, turn toward him in mercy, and turn with him in life. But there’s likewise a chance that we can turn away from him, turn toward sin, and begin to walk in the way of sinners. Jesus describes the journey we’re on in the Gospel as a walk to court to meet the judge. He calls us to be like him and to seek mercy rather than justice. “Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court. Otherwise your opponent will hand you over to the judge, and the judge will hand you over to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Amen, I say to you, you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.” If we seek justice from our adversary rather than reconciliation, we may very well end up receiving justice, being found guilty, and suffering the consequences. He says we anticipate that journey every time we come to pray and he calls us to live that reconciliation for us to pray well. “If you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” We can’t offer the gift of ourselves to God in a pleasing way if we seek to do so with unreconciled hearts and lives. It’s not enough that our external deeds are in conformity with God’s law, but he wants our hearts to be as well — not only not killing our brother but not being angry or insulting him or harboring any of the thoughts in which we treat our brother as dead within us. Jesus is calling us to convert from these thoughts rather than to persevere in them. If we convert, we will find mercy; if we persevere in them, we will find justice, and the words of the Psalm remind us that if the Lord is strictly just, we’re in trouble: “If you, O Lord, mark iniquities, who can stand?”
• Today we celebrate a saint whose righteousness surpassed that of the scribe and Pharisees, and who persevered in the way of Christian love, virtue and heroism until death. St. Polycarp was the heroic bishop of Smyrna in southwestern Turkey who was martyred on this day in 166. He learned the Gospel as a young boy from St. John the Apostle himself. With Pope St. Clement and St. Ignatius of Antioch (a saint whom he knew, from whom he received a celebrated letter and whose chains he kissed as Ignatius was on the way to martyrdom in Rome), he is one of the three great Apostolic fathers, the great leaders of second generation of Christians. We know how the faith spread so much in the first generations: it was the witness of martyrdom — that sane people treated Jesus as someone worth living for and dying for — and the witness of Christian charity, that Christians would sell all they had, lay the proceeds at the feet of the apostles and bishops to care for everyone as family members where needed. Polycarp presided over that charity and mutual mercy. And at the end of life he also spread the faith, out of love for God and others, through his martyrdom. When the bloodthirsty mobs and soldiers came to arrest him, he said, doubtless based on the words Jesus taught in the Our Father and said in the Garden of Gethsemane, “The will of the Lord be done.” He asked for some time to pray as the guards were provided supper, and he prayed for two hours. He entrusted to God his own flock in Smyrna and the Church universal. As he was being brought to the place where he would be tried and killed, some of his captors tried to persuade him out of it by pronouncing Caesar Lord or by offering incense to the statues of the pagan gods, but he replied, “I am resolved not to do what you counsel me.” Later, in the stadium, he was given a chance to save his life simply by cursing Jesus Christ. He replied, “For 86 years I have served him and he has done me no wrong, why would I betray him now?” He had chosen Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life and he was going to persevere in that choice until the end. He knew that if he as a virtuous man turned away from virtue to do evil, he would be treated justly as an evildoer. Out of love for God, however, he persevered faithfully and heroically. They sentenced him to be burned at the stake and as they were tying his feet to the stake and were about to nail his feet, but he said, “Leave me as I am. The one who gives me strength to endure the fire will also give me strength to stay quite still on the pyre, even without the precaution of your nails.” After he had prayed anew, with praise to God for having brought him to this hour, he asked for the grace to partake of the chalice of Christ as a pleasing sacrifice, and enter into eternal life in the immortality of the Holy Spirit, finishing his words with a doxology and amen. They lit the fire, and the Christian eyewitnesses noted in their account of his martyrdom that there was a Eucharistic culmination. They recalled, “When a great flame burst out, those of us privileged to see it witnessed a strange and wonderful thing. Indeed, we have been spared in order to tell the story to others. Like a ship’s sail swelling in the wind, the flame became as it were a dome encircling the martyr’s body. Surrounded by the fire, his body was like bread that is baked, or gold and silver white-hot in a furnace, not like flesh that has been burnt. So sweet a fragrance came to us that it was like that of burning incense or some other costly and sweet-smelling gum.” He entered into the sacrifice of Christ that he had the privilege of celebrating each morning. At the beginning of Mass, we prayed for the same gifts Polycarp displayed at the supreme hour as we opened today’s Mass, begging God to “grant, through [Polycarp’s] intercession, that, sharing with him in the chalice of Christ, we may rise through the Holy Spirit to eternal life.” This sharing in Christ’s passion, cooperating with the Holy Spirit, is the way that we will persevere until the end.
• Today as we come forward to present ourselves to the altar, we ask the Lord’s grace through St. Polycarp’s intercession, so that we and our whole culture may turn from any ways that are evil, both in our actions and in our thoughts, and seek reconciliation with all those whom we have hurt and with all who have hurt us, so that together with them we may rejoice in the celebration in the House of Father, where the Father prepares for us not a fattened calf but a Lamb looking as if he has been slain. The Lord wants us to live, and we live by his mercy as we prepare to receive that holy offering that Jesus gave for the remission of sins, reconciling all of us to the Father.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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