Receiving God through Receiving Others, Fifteenth Monday (I), July 15, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Holy Family Parish, Manhattan
Monday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
July 15, 2019
Ex 1:8-14.22, Ps 124, Mt 10:24-11:1

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today Jesus concludes his instructions to the Twelve about the mission he was entrusting to them and to us. We’ve already covered what they were to say; how they were supposed to accompany those word with deeds of healing, exorcism, and resurrection that would manifest God’s kingdom; how they were to package that message in word and witness by the way they themselves gave evidence to God’s providence through traveling without money sack or extra tunics, to his peace, love and joy by the way they would respond to each other, to his mercy by not holding grudges and taking them with them to the next town. Today, among several final points he makes, he focuses on one that has pervaded all of these instructions and on which we really should stop to ponder. It’s the theme of welcome and rejection.
• As Jesus is preparing to send out the twelve, he gets them ready to identify those who are open to the Gospel by those who welcome them. He tells them to stay in the houses where they are welcomed not just as a courtesy, not just so that it wouldn’t be bad form to be looking for a better deal, but precisely to learn from those who welcome them one of the crucial aspects of the Gospel: the welcome necessary to embrace God and his word. Jesus goes on to say that there is a far deeper dynamic happening in their being welcomed: in welcoming them, they’re welcoming God himself:  “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me. Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward, and whoever receives a righteous man because he is righteous will receive a righteous man’s reward. And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones to drink because he is a disciple – amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.” That’s why one of the most important habits we need to cultivate in ourselves, and form in others, is this habit of welcoming, because in welcoming others, including strangers, not to mention in welcoming those sent out by the Church in Jesus’ name, we’re welcoming the Lord who has sent them as his emissaries.
• But not everyone will receive Christ’s missionaries in this way and Jesus wants us to be prepared for that. He’s already spoken that some strangers won’t welcome us and if they don’t, we are to leave wiping the dust off our feet and moving on. But he describes today a more difficult type of rejection. He says that even when we go to our very family members, they might not welcome us in Christ’s name, because they might reject that we have now made Christ first in our life, loving him above parents, above children, above siblings and friends, and embracing the Cross he gives above a life of comfort. He wanted us to be ready for that. He says something shocking: He whom Isaiah prophesied would be the “Prince of Peace” (Is 9:5), who was heralded by the angels at his birth as the one who would bring “peace on earth to men of good will,” who during the Last Supper would leave us his peace, and who in these very instructions to the Twelve told them to say to a household, “Peace be to his house!,” said at the end of these instructions, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household.” This is not because Jesus came to divide: he came to gather and to save. But he was saying that not everyone would welcome him and if we were clinging to him more than to them, we would experience his rejection. We see this in families often when one member starts to go to Eucharistic Adoration or daily Mass or starts getting involved in charitable work: often the other family members can get jealous of where the person is spending his or her time and, rather than supporting these changes for the better, they can begin to tease and oppose. These rejections from family members, these divisions that come when some (often sinfully) refuse to welcome God, including in their family members, are the toughest of all. How do we prepare for this? By welcoming Christ within, by experiencing the profound peace that comes from the tranquillity of order in the Bethany of our souls from loving him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and loving others as he has loved us and them, being willing to die for them (even when they are treating him and us as enemies). Jesus, as he has been explaining throughout these instructions, will give us all the grace we need to be “worthy of him” by embracing this Cross and following him, offering up the pain of rejection for the conversion of our beloved family members so that they, too, will welcome Jesus, welcome us and the other members of Christ’s body, and come to experience the peace Christ gives and wishes on the world.
• The whole theme of welcoming and the sin of unwelcoming are featured prominently in today’s first reading. Pharaoh’s sins can be summarized all under this theme of the lack of hospitality to God and others. The passage from Exodus begins by saying, “A new king [pharoah], who knew nothing of Jesus, came to power in Egypt.” How is it possible that he knew nothing of Joseph? Joseph had helped to save the Egyptian people. He would have been one of the more famous servants of any pharaoh at any time. But the new pharaoh knew nothing of him, almost assuredly because he was so self-centered that he had lost his memory, lost a sense of roots, lost a welcoming for all that his ancestors had done and accomplished. And that self-centered lack of hospitality would worsen. Even though Joseph was a Jew and so pharaoh should have been extra generous to Joseph’s fellow Jews including some of his descendants, even though the Jews with their extraordinary diligence were building up Pharoah’s kingdom in a trustworthy way, he, paranoid, began to fear their growth. So he first treated them like slaves and then, when that wasn’t enough, started genocidally killing their male babies. His heart was closed and disintegrating through sin. And he was murdered, rather than welcoming, fellow human beings. When Moses would be sent to him, he would not even welcome the Lord who had commissioned him, or the Lord’s request. His heart was indeed hardened because there was no room in it for God or others.
• How are we to welcome the Lord well? Today the Church celebrates a saintly doctor of the Church who can help us! When St. Bonaventure was a young man, he found it hard to welcome the Lord because he was obsessed with his own sins and sinfulness. Even though later spiritual directors wondered whether he had ever committed a mortal sin, all he could see were his moral defects, failures and poor choices for which he was constantly doing penance and mortification. But eventually he was cured of this form of scrupulosity through learning to welcome and trust fully in the Lord’s mercy, and he spent the rest of his life trying to help others similarly to welcome the merciful Lord as well. We have in the Office of Readings this morning a powerful passage from his most famous spiritual work, Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, “The Journey of the Soul into [the very life of] God.” Bonaventure focuses us on the Passover that is meant to happen when we behold Christ on the Cross. If we’re going to welcome God, to desire what God desires, we need to do it through our will. Bonaventure says we need to seek this union “in God’s grace, not in doctrine; in the longing of the will, not in the understanding; in the sighs of prayer, not in research; the Bridegroom not the Teacher; God and not man; darkness not daylight; and look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervor and glowing love.” In the world we often place emphasize what we can do, what we’ve learned, what we’ve understood, our own study, the light rather than the unknowing darkness, but St. Bonaventure lays out for us the path of welcoming the Lord with love. He goes on to say that for us truly to enter into God we must die to the old Adam in us through entering into Jesus’ Paschal Mystery, through taking up our cross and following him: “Let us die, then,” he continues, “and enter into the darkness, silencing our anxieties, our passions and all the fantasies of our imagination. Let us pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father.”
• St. Bonaventure regularly welcomed Jesus and made that journey with him into the heart of the Trinity not just through his prayer but foremost through Mass. He wrote a prayer, his famous Transfige, which the Church continues to pray after Mass to the Lord we have welcome him within.  “Pierce, O most sweet Lord Jesus, my inmost soul with the most joyous and healthful wound of your love and with true, calm and most holy apostolic charity,” the Seraphic doctor wrote, “that my soul may ever languish and melt with entire love and longing for you, may yearn for you and for your courts, may long to be dissolved and to be with you.  Grant that my soul may hunger after you, the Bread of Angels, the refreshment of holy souls, our daily and supersubstantial bread, having all sweetness and savor and every delightful taste.  May my heart ever hunger after and feed upon you, Whom the angels desire to look upon, and may my inmost soul be filled with the sweetness of your savor; may it ever thirst for you, the fountain of life, the fountain of wisdom and knowledge, the fountain of eternal light, the torrent of pleasure, the fulness of the house of God; may it ever compass you, seek you, find you, run to you, come up to you, meditate on you, speak of you, and do all for the praise and glory of your name, with humility and discretion, with love and delight, with ease and affection, with perseverence to the end; and be yours alone ever my hope, my entire confidence, my riches, my delight, my pleasure, my joy, my rest and tranquility, my peace, my sweetness, my food, my refreshment, my refuge, my help, my wisdom, my portion, my possession, my treasure; in Whom may my mind and my heart be ever fixed and firm and rooted immovably.  Amen.”
• Today as we prepare to welcome the Lord Jesus, we ask him to help us embrace his word, to embrace each other, and to embrace him in his Real Presence, so that having received that peace, joy and love we may go out to the world and create a culture of welcome even if in doing so we will experience rejection and even martyrdom. Our help is indeed in the name of the Lord who comes to strengthen us for this mission. May our welcoming of him today here at Mass help us to recognize and welcome him in all we will meet and, like St. Bonaventure, help us to be courageous in giving witness to him until the end!

The readings for today’s Mass were: