Pondering the Lord and His Mercy in the City of the Living God, Fourth Thursday in Ordinary Time (I), February 4, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
February 4, 2021
Heb 12:18-19.21-24, Ps 48, Mk 6:7-13

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus gives instructions to the Twelve as he was preparing to send them out to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom. Normally, when we go on a trip, especially if we’re not accustomed to traveling, we prepare a list of the things we need to pack in our suitcase so that we don’t forget anything. Jesus likewise prepares a list for the apostles, but it’s precisely a list of things not to take. He tells them to take nothing except a walking stick (something that would give them greater stamina for the mission), no food, no sack of clothes and toiletries, no money. Why? He knew they needed to preach the Gospel not principally by their words but by their witness, by who they were. If they were going to be preaching that God cares for us more than he cares for the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, then they needed to manifest that trust in his divine Providence. If they were going to be preaching his kingdom — St. Matthew’s version of the same sending out reminds us that Jesus instructed them, “As you go, make this proclamation, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” — they needed to be living in that kingdom themselves.
• When Jesus himself preached the kingdom, as we see at the beginning of his public ministry, he proclaimed: “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The kingdom of God is ultimately God and to enter the kingdom we need to turn away from what keeps us from the kingdom and believe in the fact that God is truly with us. That’s why St. Mark tells us today that the twelve “went off and preaching repentance,” at the same time attacking the devil and his lies and works head on, “driving out many demons.” In today’s Responsorial Psalm, we speak about God’s temple, his dwelling place, the heart of his kingdom, as a place of conversion and mercy. “O God, we ponder your mercy within your temple!” It’s through God’s mercy that we come to dwell in his kingdom!
• But as Jesus himself often prayed, the Kingdom of God is both now and not yet, it’s a present reality because the King is with us, but it’s also not fully revealed and we haven’t entered into it yet definitively. That’s why Jesus gives us various parables about the Kingdom of Heaven, including under the image of a spousal banquet for which we need to be prepared. He did so to stoke our hunger for it so that like the wise virgins we may be ready for it. He wanted to get us properly dressed for it, cleansed for it by his blood in the Sacrament of Baptism and keeping that garment unstained so that we may arrive properly dressed.
• To proclaim the Gospel adequately, we need to proclaim its eschatological significance. Pope Benedict in his beautiful encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi, said that we don’t preach enough about the “great hope” we Christians have for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom. For that reason, we fill our lives with so many lesser hopes and goals, themselves often fine, but always relative. Pope Benedict wrote, “Anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life (cf. Eph 2:12). Man’s great, true hope that holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God—God who has loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end,’ until all ‘is accomplished’ (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30). Whoever is moved by love begins to perceive what ‘life’ really is. He begins to perceive the meaning of the word of hope that we encountered in the Baptismal Rite: from faith I await ‘eternal life’—the true life that, whole and unthreatened, in all its fullness, is simply life. Jesus, who said that he had come so that we might have life and have it in its fullness, in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10), has also explained to us what ‘life’ means: ‘this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent’ (Jn 17:3). Life in its true sense is not something we have exclusively in or from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we ‘live.’ … We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. … His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in a world which by its very nature is imperfect. His love is at the same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life that is ‘truly’ life.”
• Today’s first reading is all about that great hope. It was meant to sustain the first Christians during a time of suffering after the persecution of Nero and before the full terror of the persecution of Domitian. It was an image of what they had to look forward to, what they were directing themselves toward, what they were anticipating in the Kingdom experienced in the Christian life, especially the Mass.
• “You have not come to something,” the sacred author says says, “that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them.” All of these things — the blazing fire, the darkness, the gloom, the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet — were what the Israelites observed when they saw Moses come down from Mt. Sinai (cf. Exod 19:12-19; Exod 20:18; Deut 4:11; Deut 5:23-27). God spoke to them in these unforgettable signs through their senses, so that they would know that He and He alone is the Lord of all creation and that they would have to leave their idol-worship completely behind.
• In the establishment of the New Covenant, however, the Kingdom Christ came to establish, God did not act with thunderous signs that would overwhelm our senses. God did not act with celestial fireworks because otherwise our faith and trust in God would not grow. Instead he gave us realities that we could sense only through the eyes of faith. These eyes allow us to perceive the invisible realities that are here, which go far beyond metereology. Listen to what the author to the Letter to the Hebrews says about what is here today to greet us. After saying “you have not come to … a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest… [etc.],” he states, “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than the blood of Abel.” We will encounter these seven realities in heaven. The sacred author wants us to grasp that we anticipate them all here at Mass (and more!):
  • “Mt. Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” — These are images from Sacred Scripture about heaven.
  • “Innumerable angels in festal gathering” — If God for a moment were to open our eyes so that we could detect the invisible — as he has to some mystics in Church history — we would be overwhelmed to see the entire heavenly host around us, that great cloud of witnesses we heard about earlier this week at daily Mass.
  • “The assembly of the first born enrolled in heaven” — “Assembly” is the translation of ekklesia, the Greek word for Church. By our baptism, we have received the full inheritance of God’s first born son, and are “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ” (Rom 8:17). Through truly living out the full meaning of our baptism, Christians’ “names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20; Phil 4:3).
  • “God the judge of all” — God the Father is with us in the Kingdom and and he is our judge — so we should never sentimentalize his presence or pretend that we’re better than we are — but we should on the other hand not be terrified, because out of love he provided Jesus as our lawyer before Him who has written his brief on our behalf in his own blood (1John 2:1).
  • “The spirits of the righteous made perfect” — These refer to the saints, who have been made perfect by God in heaven. All of them are with us as well  praying right alongside of us.
  • “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant” — The Lord Jesus accompanies us, bringing us into the new and eternal covenant through his Passion, Death and Resurrection, which we enter into in the Mass.
  • “The sprinkled blood [of Christ] that speaks more eloquently than the blood of Abel” — Whereas Abel’s blood cried out for vengeance from the ground after his brother Cain killed him (Gen 4:10), Christ’s blood, after we, his brothers killed him, speaks not of vengeance but of forgiveness: “This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, which will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.”
• This is the reality of the definitive covenant that we’re approaching at the celestial banquet and every time we come to Mass! Jesus out of love humbled himself so much in the Eucharist to give us the means to enter into this reality now and forever. This requires conversion from worldly world views to what we can observe through faith.
• The same Jesus who sent out the apostles in the Gospel comes to be with us here today. He comes so that we might enter into his kingdom and be strengthened to go forth to announce his kingdom, filling people with hope that God-with-us is still with us and the great hope that if we repent and believe, if we draw close to him in the Sacraments, then we will experience the fulfillment of the great hope of his kingdom that will know no end!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MK 6:7-13

Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two
and gave them authority over unclean spirits.
He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick
–no food, no sack, no money in their belts.
They were, however, to wear sandals but not a second tunic.
He said to them,
“Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there.
Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you,
leave there and shake the dust off your feet
in testimony against them.”
So they went off and preached repentance.
The Twelve drove out many demons,
and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

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