Receiving and Responding to God’s Self-Revelation, 15th Wednesday (I), July 14, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 15th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha
July 14, 2021
Ex 3:1-6.9-12, Ps 103, Mt 11:25-27

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today, after several days of focusing on the Christian mission of announcing the kingdom and the welcome or rejection the sowers will receive, our readings turn to God’s revelation of himself and the conditions are for us to receive and respond well to that self-revelation so that we may come to grow in the personal knowledge and love of God.
• In the first reading, God reveals himself to Moses in two ways. The first was in the burning bush. Moses was fascinated by the sight of a bush on fire but not being consumed by the flames, saying to himself, “I must go over to look at this remarkable sight, and see why the bush is not burned.” God reveals himself as an inexhaustible flame, someone whose love is infinite and never-ending, someone whose fire continues undimmed without consuming and absorbing into itself the bush or reality it pervades. The second way God reveals himself is as “the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” He is a personal God. Unlike the pagan deities who were gods of things — fire, war, the sun, eros, etc. — God reveals himself as the God of people. He seeks to enter into relationship with us. God wants us to know him not as an object of study but as an intimate friend, and when we come to know him in this way, we know him as a Father who loves us with an unquenchable burning love. Tomorrow we will see a third way God reveals himself, as “I am who am,” as the source of all being and life, as one ever present.
• In the Gospel, Jesus speaks clearly about how it is the will of God the Father to reveal himself to us, and puts two conditions or our receptivity to the Father’s self-revelation. First, God the Father reveals himself to us in his Son; and, second, in order to receive that revelation in Jesus, we need as spiritual children to enter into Jesus’ divine filiation. Jesus tells us, “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” The way we come to know God the Father and the depth of his ardent love is through Jesus’ revealing him to us. Jesus is the icon of the Father and also speaks not only of the Father but also what he hears the Father saying. His whole mission on earth was to establish this loving bond of the Father with us, teaching us by his example and explicit instructions to pray, “Our Father.” And the way we enter into that relationship with the Father is not just through spiritual childhood in general but by entering into Jesus’ spiritual childhood. Jesus joyfully exclaims in prayer, “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will!” We can’t get to know the Father as Father unless we see ourselves not just as children, but his children, and we do that in Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit. The wise and the clever of this world try to pretend as “grown-ups,” who say, “Thanks, but I’ve got it from here.” They seek to be self-sufficient rather than dependent on the Father. They behave like the sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the first of whom treats the Father as if he is as good as dead to him and no longer needed, and the second treats him more as a slave master than as a dad. To receive the revelation of the Father we need to be open like children, we need to be receptive and trusting, we need to learn from Jesus, who is not only the revelation of the Father but also the revelation of how to relate to the Father as a beloved Son in whom the Father is well pleased. This self-revelation completes what God had revealed to Moses: his love continues to burn, he wants to enter into a personal intimate bond as Father and child, and he wants us far more consciously to draw our very life from his whole being.
• This awareness of God’s self-revelation in Christ is an important part of the Gospel of life. St. John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae, “The deepest and most original meaning of this meditation on what revelation tells us about human life was taken up by the Apostle John in the opening words of his First Letter: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life-the life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us-that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us’ (1:1-3). In Jesus, the ‘Word of life,’ God’s eternal life is thus proclaimed and given. Thanks to this proclamation and gift, our physical and spiritual life, also in its earthly phase, acquires its full value and meaning” and accepts, purifies, exalts and fulfilled “everything that human experience and reason tell us about the value of human life” (30).
• Someone who is a model of spiritual childhood and child-like receptivity, someone who came to know and love Jesus and in him God the Father, is the saint the Church remembers today. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, a fellow New Yorker, was a Native American born in Auriesville, who was canonized in 2012 by Pope Benedict. She was born of a Mohawk father, the chief of the Turtle Tribe, and a Algoquin mother who had converted to Christianity and brought as spoils to Auriesville. At the age of 4, she was orphaned when smallpox decimated her village, claiming the life of her parents and brother and leaving her partially blind. (She was nicknamed Tekakwitha because afterward, because of her blindness, she was routinely “bumping into things.”) She was raised by her uncle, who succeeded her father as chief of the Turtle tribe, and two aunts, all of whom were fiercely resistant to Christianity. They sought to prevent her contact with the “black robes” (the Jesuit missionaries) — St. Isaac Jogues and St. Rene Goupil had been martyred in her village just a decade before her birth — and to marry her off at a young age, but she had already been moved by a desire to give herself totally to Jesus as a Christian and as a spouse. To become a Christian was an act of faith-filled courage, because Christians were basically second class, since most of the Christians present were captured slaves. To remain a virgin was an act of ever greater and firmer faith because it meant she would have no one to care for her except God and that her family would turn on her since it was through marriage that men (who would do the hunting and the fishing) would enter the long-house of the bride and support her and her family. In fact, when she made a vow of perpetual virginity in 1679 with the consent of her Jesuit spiritual director, she became the first Native American to do so that we know of. Her conversion and her eventual profession as a virgin meant she would suffer rejection, but she nevertheless boldly sought instruction and baptism and was baptized at the age of 20 on Easter 1676. She suffered as a result from the non-Christians of her village because she kept the Sabbath and the Jesuits feared that the escalation, so they arranged for her to escape to Kahnawake, just south of Montreal, where she received her First Holy Communion on Christmas 1677. She dedicated herself to Jesus in a life of prayer and mortification, adoring him as she knelt in the snow outside the Church before it would be opened early each morning and stayed there until the last Mass was celebrated at night, sleeping on a bed of thorns in reparation for the sins of her tribe and for their conversion, caring for the sick and elderly. In worldly eyes, she was an insignificant, but God had graciously revealed himself to the merest of children. She died at the age of 24, just four years after her baptism, saying “Jesos Konoronkwa” (“Jesus, I love you”) as she passed into his eternal embrace. Pope Benedict said about her at her canonization in 2012, “Leading a simple life, Kateri remained faithful to her love for Jesus, to prayer and to daily Mass. Her greatest wish was to know and to do what pleased God. She lived a life radiant with faith and purity. Kateri impresses us by the action of grace in her life in spite of the absence of external help and by the courage of her vocation. … May her example help us to live where we are, loving Jesus without denying who we are.” St. John Paul II, at her beatification in 1980, during the tricentenary of her death, said, “All of us are inspired by the example of this young woman of faith who died three centuries ago this year. We are all edified by her complete trust in the providence of God, and we are encouraged by her joyful fidelity to the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Church has declared to the world that Kateri Tekakwitha is blessed, that she lived a life on earth of exemplary holiness and that she is now a member in heaven of the Communion of Saints who continually intercede with the merciful Father on our behalf. Her beatification should remind us that we are all called to a life of holiness, for in Baptism God has chosen each one of us ‘to be holy and spotless and to live through love in his presence.’ Holiness of life – union with Christ through prayer and works of charity – is not something reserved to a select few among the members of the Church. It is the vocation of everyone.”
• God’s self-revelation and our receptivity and response to it come to their daily culmination, as it did for Saint Kateri, at the altar. Pope Benedict is fond of quoting Origen who said about Jesus in the Eucharist, “Whoever draws near to me draws near the fire.” We draw near to the one who came to light the earth on fire, the one who burns with Passion but doesn’t consume us, the one who hopes that we’ll be the bush through which he’ll burn in the world without destroying our identity but perfecting it. This is the place in which we allow Jesus to become our God, the source, summit, root, center and simply most important reality and relationship in our life. This is the place in which God the Father reveals his Son and that Son, the icon, shows the depth of the Father’s love. This is the means by which we get younger — going up to the altar of God who gives joy to your youth — as we recall the joy of our first Communion each time we receive the same Lord Jesus. And this is the means by which we like Saint Kateri, are prepared to meet the Lord with love at the end of our life. May we recognize not only that this is holy ground but that God wants to make us his holy, burning abode!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download