Prophets Fully With The Lord, 26th Sunday (B), September 29, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
September 29, 2024
Numbers 11:25-29, Ps 19, James 5:1-6, Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• We encounter in today’s Gospel a big contrast and a huge surprise. The contrast is between those who are working for God and those who are not. As the Lord says, some are “for” Him; some are “against” Him. The surprise is that those who seem to be working for the Lord in fact might not be, and those who seem not to be laboring with and for Him in fact may be. Insofar as all desire to be working for the Lord, all of us want to hear him one day say to us, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” we need to examine what the Lord Jesus says today and apply it to our own life and actions, to see whether we indeed are working for him or against him.
• We start with God’s collaborators. God wants all of us on his team, working for him and his kingdom. In the first reading, Moses says, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets!” The Lord wants all of us to proclaim him, to spread his truth, to invite all others into the circle of his incredible love. He’s said this to us in many ways. His last words before ascending to the Father were “Go out to the whole world and proclaim the Good News!” (Mk 16:15). He called us to be the Light of the World, reflecting the light of his truth and the warmth of his love to each one we meet (Mt 5:14). He said that those who are great in his kingdom “will keep my words and teach others to do the same” (Mt 5:19). Announcing the Gospel, as Jesus told us, is not just saying, “Lord, Lord,” but “doing God’s will” (Mt 7:21) and he wants to help us to seek, find, treasure and do his will to make disciples of all nations.
• What we see in today’s readings is that sometimes those on the Lord’s team aren’t wearing the team uniforms and those who bear the team colors are often not actually helping the team win. In the first reading today, Eldad and Medad were not among the original seventy elders chosen to prophesy in the name of the Lord to the Israelites. But the Lord filled them with his Spirit and they began to proclaim God’s word throughout the camp. The still young and immature Joshua, who would become Moses’ successor, objected with panic, “Moses, stop them!” Imagine: Joshua wanted to have them stop preaching about the Lord! Who was working for the Lord here and who was not? Moses told Joshua there was no reason to be jealous. God, he stated, wants all to be prophets, and regularly works outside of our cozy parameters. Even those we think are not the ones chosen by the Lord to be his ambassadors might in fact be important emissaries and coworkers in the end.
• We learn the same lesson from the Gospel. Soon after the failure of the disciples to cast out a demon from a young boy (while the Lord was being transfigured before Peter, James and John on the mountain) and after the Lord had castigated their generation for its lack of faith, the disciples caught someone who wasn’t among their number casting out demons in Jesus’ name. St. John told Jesus that he and the other disciples had tried to stop him. Who was working for the Lord in this Gospel scene and who was against him? It’s a particularly poignant question on this feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, whom we invoke to cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. The disciples were the ones who were supposed to be the Lord’s collaborators, but like Joshua 13 centuries before, they still hadn’t figured out God’s ways. Jesus had come to set prisoners free, to defeat Satan once and for all, but his still-immature disciples wanted to stop someone from casting out devils because, essentially, they were more concerned with what they thought were their exclusive prerogatives in God’s kingdom than in accomplishing his work. None of us should ever think we have a monopoly on the name, mission, message and power of Jesus. We should never find God’s action in others a threat, but rather something to marvel at and praise him for. We should of course want to help others to come to the fullness of the truth about God revealed to us by Christ in His Church. We should of course want everyone to be fully with us in the Lord’s fold. But we should rejoice that others, at whatever stage of revelation they’ve received, are corresponding to the gentle breeze of the Holy Spirit, trying to oppose the devil and do the Lord’s work. Today the whole Church repeats with Moses, “Would that all God’s people were prophets!”
• In his gentle correction of one of the “sons of thunder,” Jesus gives St. John and all of us an important principle: “Whoever is not against us is for us.” We live in a society hyper-polarized by politics and a Church rent with so many tragic divisions. There’s a temptation, even and perhaps especially among many serious believers, to focus so much on what distinguishes us from others that we lose what unites us. Focusing on such differences, we can pull ourselves, and push others, away. In our interactions, we often begin with what we criticize rather than what we admire. We fault others for what they don’t get right rather than focus with what they do. Despite the redwoods impeding our vision, we see the specks in others’ eyes. We see this tendency in the Gospel with many of the Pharisees, literally the “separated ones.” They were constantly distinguishing themselves from others that they really lost the capacity to unite. Like one of their number in Jesus’ parable about prayer, they proudly and condescendingly gave thanks that they were not like others, who were guilty of various types of notorious sins. Jesus wants us to recognize and prioritize in others those parts that are united with him. He wants us not only not to stop them, but to encourage and assist them. He tells us today that anyone who gives us a cup of water to drink because we belong to him is ultimately cooperating with grace, is corresponding to the work and life of the kingdom, is, in short, somehow with him and therefore with us.
• But it’s important for us not to miss the fact that not all God’s people are in fact prophets. Jesus says quite strongly that there are those who are “against” Him, those who not only do not work for him, but actively oppose him. We see many of these opponents in the Gospels: Satan in the desert; various of the Scribes and Pharisees during Jesus’ public ministry; Herod the Great at Jesus’ birth; Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas at Jesus’ death; even, for a very short time, St. Peter, whom Christ called Satan and told to get behind him when he rejected the possibility that the Lord would suffer. Those, however, were not the ones Jesus specified in this episode as those who were “against” him. He referred, rather, to those who give scandal. Those who are against him are the false prophets, who teach others, especially the young, not about how to know, love and serve the Lord but rather how to sin. Such is Jesus’ love for his children that he passionately warns everyone who harms little ones through scandal to know what punishment they should expect: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and thrown into the sea.” They would be better off drowning in the ocean, he states, than having to answer to him face to face. The word “scandal” in the original language of the Bible meant two things: something that causes another to fall and something that is an obstacle to someone’s doing good. Applied to the matters of faith, scandal is something that either causes another to sin against God or that prevents the access of another to the kingdom of God. We can easily call to mind those whose deeds lead others astray: bishops and priests who haven’t walked the walk, as we’ve seen in the recent scandals of sexual abuse and the failure of those in positions of authority to eradicate them or to tell the truth about them; celebrities from the world of music, movies and sports whose example draws the young into drugs, into using others in relationships, into the worship of status; educators, who teach young people in public schools confusing ideas about what it means to be a boy or a girl or who promote premarital sex, homosexuality, abortion and other practices totally contrary to what God wants; politicians who, rather than trying to unite and serve all, demagogically try to turn some groups against others in order to score political points or solicit votes by appealing to baser interests or fears. St. James today in the second reading describes the scandal of wealthy Christians who were living in luxury and splendor while so many were going without, who were withholding wages from workers, and who were basically living in a selfish way rather than loving their neighbor as Christ had loved them; this is a pattern that repeats itself among some Christians in every age, who rather than being a steward of God’s blessings, rather than using what they’ve received to help others and build up Christ’s kingdom, were using it fundamentally for themselves. We can likewise think about those in convents, monasteries, rectories and other religious houses who become bad leaven, whose fallen habits, like pessimism, worldliness, pride or disobedience lower the standards of those around them and make it easier for them to sin. If it were possible to buy stock in a millstone business, now would be the time to buy. But Jesus leaves us this unforgettable image not principally to threaten but to call to conversion. With similarly striking metaphors of plucking out eyes and chopping off hands and feet, he is urging us to be brutal in cutting out of our life not only what leads us to sin but what leads others to sin.
• It’s not enough for us, however, merely to excise metastatic moral cancers. Jesus wants us to be prophets, those who announce his words and encourage people to imitate and follow him. He wants us, by our words and actions, to inspire others to live off every word that comes from God’s mouth, to treat God’s law — as we pray in today’s psalm — as perfect, trustworthy, wise, refreshing, pure, and just. He wants us to show what’s really important in life, to encourage others to pray, to love the Mass, to be grateful for confession, to learn our faith better, to sacrifice ourselves to care for the poor and needy, to use appropriate language, to be honest, to see the good in others, to forgive and give people second chances, to be faithful to the Lord in everything, to strive to become saints, and to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength.
• The best way to learn to be a true and good prophet, to be “with the Lord” rather than “against” him, is to learn from Jesus himself. At Jesus’ time there was a lot of hypocrisy. He pointed to it when he said that his contemporaries should listen to the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees who sit on Moses’ seat, but not follow their example, because their example was a clear violation of the words of God they spoke. Jesus, on the other hand, was full of integrity. He never merely said, “Do what I say,” but always, “Follow me.” And he had set his goal, his eyes, on always doing the will of the Father who sent him, of leading others on the way of sanctity, which is the way of the Cross, all the way to heaven. In order to be the type of true prophet that God wants us to be, we, too, need not merely to mouth the words of the faith, but to be able to say to others, especially those who might look to us, “Follow me!,” by living not for worldly goals and ambitions but progressing resolutely on the clear path set out by Jesus and the Church he founded. We need to toss from our lives whatever is not fitting for that journey, so that others, in following our footsteps, may come to God. We begin every Mass by calling to mind all those parts of us that are not yet in communion with God, that we need to pluck out or chop off. We ask the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Michael and all the angels and saints to pray for not just for ourselves individually but for all those whom God wants to be with us, that he might have mercy on us, help us to eliminate those actions and habits from our life, and grow to become truly like him. That’s the way we will become God’s instruments to bring others to full communion with him and us.
• “Would that all God’s people were prophets!” The Lord would not be calling us to be his prophets in word and deed unless he were planning to give us all the help we need to live up to that vocation and mission. He gives us that help each day in the Mass. After having heard him in Sacred Scripture, we are commissioned to be his living echoes in the world. Through worthily receiving His body and blood inside us, we become one with him and with others. It creates a spirituality reinforcing the reality that those who are not against us are with us. Through the intercession of St. Michael, let us ask the Lord Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, to heal our wounded eyes, or sinful hands, or scandalous feet, so that every part of us — and the lives of those whom he has entrusted to us — may be “with Him” in this life and in the next, as we seek to give others not just a cup of water and bring them to the cup of salvation.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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