Professing Christ and Following Him along the Way of the Cross, 24th Sunday (B), September 16, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Annunciation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Suffern, NY
Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 16, 2018
Is 50:5-9, Ps 116, James 2:14-18, Mk 8:27-35

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today St. James focuses on the works that flow from faith.
• In the Gospel, Jesus says that the works that flow from faith in him as the Messiah is acceptance of the way he will serve as Messiah and the way we must follow him through self-denial, picking up our Cross and dying to ourselves so that he may live. Without losing our lives in this way, we will not save them.
• Someone who lived this way was Cardinal François Nguyen Van Thuan, whose cause for canonization is progressing and who died 16 years ago today. I had the privilege to know him.
  • On the day of his arrest, August 15, 1975, all he had was his cassock and rosary beads. Amid the shock, he heard Jesus asking the question, “Simon, who do you say that I am?” Many of those imprisoned with him wanted to know the reason for his hope, why he had left everything, why he was willing to suffer in following Jesus. They had heard Jesus was just an invention of the ruling class. The explanation he used to give was because of the defects of Jesus:
    • Jesus has a terrible memory, forgetting our sins
    • Jesus doesn’t know math, equating the value of one sheep to that of 99.
    • Jesus doesn’t know logic, disturbing friends to find one silver piece and then celebrate when one has found it in a party that would cost more than the silver piece.
    • Jesus is a failed publicity manager. He promises trials and persecutions, no food or lodging, not even the dens of foxes or the next of bird. He promises a life of poverty, mourning, meekness, revilement, persecution.
    • Jesus didn’t understand finances or economics. Giving a whole day’s wage for those who worked only an hour.
    • But these defects, he said, were all flowing from his love, which doesn’t calculate, but forgives and is generous without measure. This was the way he introduced the incredible love of God.
  • While he was there in solitary confinement, really carrying the Cross of suffering, he was able to get his hands on some wood and painstakingly make a small cross. Even though all religious symbols were forbidden, he was able to hide the wooden Cross in a bar of soap. A little later he was able to get his hands on a piece of wire and he began to bend and twist the wire into a series of the rings of chain. What he was doing was making a new pectoral cross, the Cross bishops wear over their chest. And when he was telling me this story, he handed me the cross for me to hold and to see. The wooden cross he had made was now placed within a steel frame and the chains of the cross were the ones he had made with his own imprisoned hands. That Cross was a sign that he had united his entire imprisonment, as hard as it was, to Jesus on the Cross and when he would eventually be freed and allowed to profess his faith freely to others, he did so conspicuously by this Cross that he would wear on the outside of his garments, as bishops do, not just when they celebrate Mass but over their cassock and priestly clothes in ordinary life. Like Cardinal Van Thuan, we are all called to convert all the experiences of our life into our own Cross and chain, and wear it sincerely not as an instrument of death, but as the true tree of life.
  • He eventually grasped something when he was going out of his mind in solitary confinement, in a dark cell, being tempted often to self-pity. He realized that even though he couldn’t be out in Saigon leading his people, he had to do what he could, that he could still offer his five loaves and two fish each day. He got some old calendars and would write small little sayings, one or a few each day, hand them to a little boy named Quang who would pass by his cell and whose parents would copy them into a book. Eventually this became his “Road of Hope,” which sustained so many in Vietnam and has nourished so many afterward.
    • In a chapter dedicated to “Sacrifice,” which he says is the “proof of love,” he points to how crosses voluntarily accepted are means by which to transform us into Christ, to help us die to ourselves so that Christ might love, to lose our life so as to save it through offering it to God and for others. He wrote, “If you were being tortured, you could adopt one of two attitudes: ‘This person is destroying me,’ or ‘By this person I am becoming a sacrifice.’”
    • In another, “While everyone else would say, ‘This person is a cause of misfortune,’ you could say, ‘This person is the instrument by which I am being transformed.’”
    • And a final one, “Without sacrifice there will be no holiness. You have to deny yourself and take up your cross before you can follow the Lord. Self-denial is the prerequisite of holiness.”
  • Cardinal Van Thuan and the Mass celebrated with a few drops of his “stomach medicine” (wine) and bread crumbs on his hand, from memory, in solitary confinement. This was his daily participation in Calvary, the means by which he would die to himself so that Christ could live. This is where our self-offering flows from and leads to as well. This is the greatest work flowing from faith, what Christ commands us to do in his memory. This is the source of our ability to bear fruit in acts of love.

The readings for today’s Mass were: