Persevering Prayer, Faith and Charity in Missionary Work, 32nd Saturday (II), November 16, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Stella Maris Church, San Juan, Puerto Rico
2024 National Conference of The Pontifical Mission Societies
Saturday of the 32nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
November 16, 2024
3 Jn 5-8, Ps 112, Lk 18:1-8

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus asks us what I think is perhaps the most haunting question in Sacred Scripture: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” It’s not a rhetorical question. He was asking it because the answer wasn’t obvious. He had a serious concern as to whether when he comes for each of us or for all of us, whichever comes first, he would find us truly faithful. The whole work of The Pontifical Mission Societies is meant to help us give a personal and collective “yes” to that petition. We exist to help Catholics in America show their faith by making a commitment, at various levels, to passing it on. We exist also to support the efforts of Catholics across the world to help raise up new peoples and generations of strong faith so that they, too, may become compelling answers to Jesus’ query. We exist so that, if the Son of Man were to come soon or if he were to come in many generations, there would be a resounding response of faith, hope, love and joy to his arrival.
• The readings today, in a particular way, focus on three different ways Jesus hopes to find us faithful. Each of these relate to our work in mission promotion and support.
• The first way is persevering prayer. Jesus gives us a parable about the “necessity” — not just the invitation! — for us to “pray always without becoming weary.” Prayer is faith in action. Jesus describes a widow, someone who was socially helpless without a husband or a son, who was pleading her case before a corrupt judge, seeking a just decision against an adversary. It would appear that the judge may have been bought off by that adversary. The judge, who apparently feared neither what God or others thought of him, was unwilling to do right by her. But the woman didn’t stop. Eventually he felt obliged to relent, saying, “Because this widow keeps bothering me, I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.” Jesus draws the moral of the story, declaring, “Pay attention to what the dishonest judge says,” before adding, “Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them? I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily.” Jesus here wasn’t comparing God to a corrupt magistrate but contrasting him. If even an unjust judge would eventually give in, how much more will a Father who loves his children respond to them when they “pray always without losing heart?”
• Prayer is at the heart of all our missionary work. It’s the reason why St. Therese is co-patron of the missions, as she never ceased to pray for her two adopted missionary priest brothers laboring in Africa as well as for all missionaries to bring the love of Christ to the ends of the earth. We see it in Jesus’ own example. The future Pope Benedict commented in a homily for catechists during the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 about how Jesus preached by day and prayed by night (see Lk 6:12-13). He said, “Jesus had to acquire the disciples from God [the Father]. The same is always true. We ourselves cannot gather men. We must acquire them by God for God. All methods are empty without the foundation of prayer. The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer.” Jesus had us pray to the Harvest Master not just for laborers but for the harvest itself. It can be tempting for us, who work full-time to stimulate and support the missionary work of the Church, to spend our time on speeches, development works and visits, magazines and newsletters, thank you letters, missionary trips, missionary co-ops, and so many other important aspects of our work. But the most important thing of all is to immerse ourselves in prayer, like Jesus did, like Therese did, like Francis Xavier and so many other missionaries have done. We need to persevere in prayer without losing heart, just like the importune woman.
• The second way Jesus wants us to be found faithful is precisely through persevering in the life of faith. Pope Francis, in a 2013 homily, asked the very important question as to why Jesus would want us to persevere in prayer, asking over and over again, if God indeed already knows what we need. He answered, “God invites us to pray insistently not because he is unaware of our needs or because he is not listening to us. On the contrary, he is always listening and he knows everything about us lovingly.” The reason he wants us to persevere in prayer is to train us how to persevere in life. “The battle against evil,” he states, “is a long and hard one; it requires patience and endurance, like Moses, who had to keep his arms outstretched for the people to prevail (cf Ex 17:8-13). … There is a battle to be waged each day, but God is our ally. Faith in him is our strength and prayer is the expression of this faith. Therefore, …he asks: ‘When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ (Lk 18:8). If faith is snuffed out, prayer is snuffed out, and we walk in the dark. We become lost on the path of life. Therefore, let us learn from the widow of the Gospel to pray always without growing weary. … Indeed persevering prayer is the expression of faith in a God who calls us to fight with him every day and at every moment in order to conquer evil with good.” So Jesus wants us to pray with the persevering insistence of the widow so that we might grow in faith and persevere in the battle of faith our entire life long. Just think about how Saint Monica grew in holiness through her 32 years of persevering prayer for her husband Patricius, her mother-in-law and her son Saint Augustine. Perseverance in prayer trains us for perseverance in life.
• The work of the missions requires this type of perseverance. How can we not recall the work of the North American Martyrs bringing the Gospel to North America. St. Jean de Brébeuf worked for three straight years, between 1626-29, in the midst of the harshest conditions of Canadian winters, without making even one convert. When England took over Canada in 1629, all the French missionaries needed to leave, but when France regained Canada in 1632, St. Jean was on one of the first boats back, to continue the work. St. Isaac Jogues had his thumbs and fingers bitten off, he was forced to run the gauntlet and suffer all types of other tortures, he had to witness his friend St. Rene Goupil murdered, and spend two whole years in captivity before escaping with the help of the Dutch, arriving in France as a hero of faith. It would have been easy for him to remain in France as a spiritual director forming new Jesuit missionaries, but he was the only priest in the world fluent in Mohawk, and so, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, he was back not just among the missions, but specifically among the Mohawks in Ossernenon, where he would eventually give his life for God. They are examples of the perseverance of faith in life that persevering prayer makes possible.
• The third expression of persevering faith Jesus hopes to find is with regard to charity. Today we encounter for the only time in the Church’s two-year liturgical daily Mass readings a portion from St. John’s very short third letter. In it, St. John is praising the recipients of the letter for the way their faith has overflowed in acts of love. St. Paul said that what God wants in us is an operative charity, “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6) and that’s precisely what St. John was praising. He wrote, “Beloved, you are faithful in all you do for the brothers and sisters, especially for strangers. They have testified to your love before the Church.” Their faithfulness was shown in their charity especially to strangers. St. John called them to persevere in helping the others persevere in faith in the midst of a context in which the pagans were mocking them and trying to get them to abandon the Christian faith: “Please help them in a way worthy of God to continue their journey. For they have set out for the sake of the Name and are accepting nothing from the pagans. Therefore, we ought to support such persons, so that we may be co-workers in the truth.” All of us are supposed to be “coworkers in the truth,” working together to inspire each other by our own seeking the truth, our living the truth and our teaching the truth so that when the Lord appears, we may all be found persevering in faith.
• Persevering charity is obviously a sine qua non for missionary work. As St. Paul would write, it’s the love of Christ that urges us on (2 Cor 5:14). Charity, he adds, “bears all things, … endures all things. Charity never fails” (1 Cor 13:11). Love for God and love for others is what motivates missionaries to leave the comforts of home and travel to distant lands to share the Gospel. Persevering love for God and others flowing from our faith is what will ultimately sustain us in our work, despite the multiple challenges that inevitably arise. It’s what will keep us fresh. Charity is the flask of oil that will keep the flame of faith alive in our lamps, so that when the Lord comes he may find us like the wise bridesmaids, ready to run out to meet him!
• The greatest example of persevering prayer, and the greatest means to help us to learn how to be faithful in life, the most powerful expression of God’s love for us and others and our day-to-day love for him, is the Mass. In Eucharistic Prayer III, we say to the Lord that we offer this prayer “from the rising of the sun to its setting.” This is the prayer of the Church that never ceases. It is through the Mass that we are strengthened to pray like the importune widow.  It’s through the Mass that we are strengthened from within to “do this” in memory of Christ and make his unflagging self-giving charity the standard of our life. Today we beg the Lord for the grace to help us to persevere in prayer, charity and life in such a way that when he comes he will find us — and all those we have helped come to live in Christ in our missionary endeavors — faithful and say, “Well done, good and faithful servants. Enter into the joy of your Lord!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: