Reconsecrated to God as Houses of Prayer, 33rd Friday (I), November 22, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Villa Guadalupe Retreat House, Stamford, CT
Retreat For Women
“Woman, Great Is Your Faith: Models of Faith for Women at a Time of Crisis”
Friday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time
Feast of St. Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr
November 22, 2019
1 Mc 4:36-37.52-59, 1 Chron 29:10-12, Lk 19:45-48

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• There are no coincidences in God. Everything is under his providence. And so before he said “let there be light,” he knew we would be here this weekend on retreat and he made an appointment to be with us. He also arranged for today’s readings, which are a wonderful way for us to begin.
• In today’s first reading, we see the reconsecration of the Temple of Jerusalem on the first anniversary after its desecration by the soldiers and co-conspirers of Antioches Epiphanes IV. There were two parts to their work. Judas and his brothers said, “Let us go up to purify the sanctuary and to rededicate it.” The first was purification. The sacred author tells us, “They found the sanctuary desolate, the altar desecrated, the gates burnt, weeds growing in the courts as in a forest or on some mountain, and the priests’ chambers demolished.” They first needed to wash and ritually cleanse the sanctuary. They removed the statue of a pagan God upon the altar of sacrifices and tore down the defiled altar of sacrifices and stored the stones until a prophet would tell them what to do with it. The repaired the gates, priests’ chambers, the sanctuary and the interior of the temple, restored doors, ornamented the temple with gold crowns and seals, took uncut stones and built a new altar, they made new sacred vessels and brought the lampstand, the altar of incense and the table into the temple, and hung up curtains. The work of purification was thorough and a lot of work. Then they were ready for the rededication on the anniversary of its defilement. With songs, harps, flutes, cymbals, incense, holocausts and sacrifices of deliverance and praise, they celebrated the rededication of the altar and sanctuary for eight days with “great joy … and gladness.” The Jews have continued this eight-day celebration every year down to the present during the octave of Chanukah, which means “inauguration.”
• In the Gospel, Jesus goes to the sanctuary that was reconsecrated by Judas Maccabeus and his brothers and adorned even more gloriously a century later by Herod the Great. But when he arrived, he saw that it was being defiled not by Gentiles but by sins, and he immediately began the two fold process of purification and rededication. It’s an image of Jesus with whom many Christians, especially today, are unfamiliar. The same Jesus whom Isaiah prophesied would “not break a bruised reed nor quench a smoldering wick” (Is 42:3), the same Jesus whom the psalms would call “kind and merciful” (Ps 145:8) the same Jesus who called himself “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29) started to overturn tables, tossing money on the floor, and making a whip of cords to drive the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. And there is no contradiction between the image of Jesus as the kind, merciful friend of sinners and Jesus as consumed with zeal for his Father’s house, because out of love for sinners and his Father, he both really loved sinners and really the hated sin that can kill sinners. What he was doing and its application to us can more easily be seen if we know two Greek words. The first is the word for “temple” or “temple area” that St. John employs in his depiction of this scene. The first is to hieron, which is a neuter form of the word that means “consecrated.” The temple was called “the consecrated place,” the locus totally separated to allow people to come to be with God and filled with him so as to be able to return from there changed by God and capable of changing the world with God. The second word is ekballein, which is the word used to describe how Jesus “drove out” the animals. It’s the same verb used when Jesus did exorcisms and drove out the temple. When we see these two words, we can grasp better what Jesus was doing: exorcising the temple so that it could truly be fit for helping people be consecrated to God.
• The Temple in Jerusalem, built in order to be the dwelling place of God on earth, constructed to be a place of encountering God in prayer, had become something very different. It wasn’t so much the fact that animals were being sold and money exchanged in the temple precincts that bothered Jesus. It was two things associated with this selling of animals and exchanging money: The first was that the moneychangers and animal sellers were tremendously overcharging the people. The temple had become a “den of thieves.” When people came to the temple, they needed to sacrifice an animal to God, the size and value of the animal being determined by their personal means and the type of sacrifice being made. Rather than carry an animal with them for the many miles’ uphill walk to the temple — which was too much of a burden — most would buy one at the temple. But because there was such a demand, especially at the time of the Passover, the merchants had the market to drastically overcharge the people who needed the animals. Others who would try to save money by bringing an animal of their own often had to get the animals inspected by Temple officials who needed to verify that the animals they had brought were unblemished, as the Mosaic law stipulated. These inspectors often were on the take of the animal sellers to find blemishes that weren’t there and disqualify the affected animals. The poor who had saved their money over the course of the whole year for the trip to the temple, therefore, one way or the other, had to pay these enormous prices. While they were there, they also had to pay a temple tax, which needed to be given in one of two types of acceptable Temple currencies. That meant that most everyone had to exchange money and the moneychangers could take an exorbitant commission, which again penalized the poor most of all. Jesus was outraged that people were coming into the temple to rip off the poor. That was the first thing that incensed the Lord.
• The second was worse. The Jewish mentality had become so distorted over the centuries that they began to look at their relationship with God as something contractual or even magical. “As long as I sacrifice this animal to God,” they began to think to themselves, “everything will be all right. God will be happy.” Too many people had started to look at the temple as the place to go “bribe” God with their animal sacrifices. They had started to look at God as someone who needed to be “bought” by such offerings. God had said many times through the prophets, “It is a contrite heart I seek, not animal sacrifices,” but they hadn’t gotten the picture. So Jesus gave them all a lesson they would never forget — and we would never forget. Jesus wanted to return first the temple and then the people to the true worship of God. The Prophet Malachi had described centuries before the purification Jesus would accomplish when he entered the Temple. We hear the passage often in Advent and Handel featured it prominently in his Messiah, but it is particularly appropriate to the cleansing Christ wants to give us: “And suddenly,” Malachi writes, “there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek, and the messenger of the covenant whom you desire. … But who will endure the day of his coming? And who can stand when he appears? For he is like the refiner’s fire, or like the fuller’s lye. He will sit refining and purifying, and he will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or like silver that they may offer due sacrifice to the Lord. Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem will please the Lord, as in days of old, as in years gone by.” Jesus came with fire to refine the people of his day, to bleach them, to make them new so that they could offer fitting sacrifice to the Lord, not the sacrifice of animals, but the oblation of themselves to the Father in union with him.
• After the purification, Jesus spoke about the consecration. He said that his Father’s house was to be a house of prayer. A place of worship. A place of encounter not with greed and other vices but with God and his virtues. And that’s what we see in the latter half of today’s Gospel. Jesus taught in the temple area and “all the people were hanging on his words.” They permitted his words to resonate within them. In the Gospel verse, Jesus said to us, “My sheep her my voice. I know them and they follow me.” Jesus’ sheep are the ones who hang on every word that comes from his mouth. Jesus would pray to the Father during the Last Supper, “I consecrate myself for them so that they may be consecrated in the truth. Your words are truth.” God’s word — hearing it, believing it, living it, teaching it, ultimately like Mary, allowing our lives to happen according to it and enfleshing it — consecrates us, because it unites us with God who speaks.
• Ultimately Jesus’ plan for our purification and reconsecration he announced in St. John’s version of this scene. The chief priests, scribes and leaders of the people who were conspiring within the temple precincts, within God’s house, to murder Jesus, approached him and asked, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus replied, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” St. John comments, “He was speaking about the temple of his body.” The ultimate purification and reconsecration of the temple happened in Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, when he, the true Temple, the ultimate place where God and man meet, incorporated us into his mystical body, so that we, too, could become temples of God and true houses of prayer.
• These readings are so fitting for us at the beginning of a retreat because they focus us on the two-fold process Jesus wants to carry out in us. He wants to purify us of everything that is not fit for him. To eliminate from our lives all of the junk that doesn’t belong, whether we’re dealing with things that are massively broken or dust. He wants to clean it all. He wants to exorcise from us any way the evil one has his grip on us or has left his fingerprints. Like a refiner’s fire or a fuller’s lye, he wants to refine and purify us like gold or silver so that we may offer due sacrifice to the Lord, the loving, trusting gift of ourselves in response to his total self-giving. And he wants to help us to become a true temple of his presence, not an office complex, not a gym in which we obsess about our physical health and figure, certainly not a cesspool of gossip, or resentment, or envy. He wants us to become a house of prayer, where we hang on his words, where we adore him, thank him, ask forgiveness for our sins and the sins of the world, intercede for all those in need, and confidently ask him for whatever we think we need. He wants to help us to become existences made prayer, people whose lives are not compartmentalized, whose hearts are not worried and anxious about 1,000,001 things, but who live in communion with the Lord full-time, listening to his voice, asking for his help, living in loving communion. The Son of God circled his calendar before the foundation of the world to bestow on us this cleansing and consecration, and with it, every spiritual blessing in the heavens. And he is so glad that we have come.
• As we begin this retreat on Models of Faith for Women at a Time of Crisis, today the Church gives us one, who with joy and gladness at a time of ferocious anti-Christian persecution, lived out her consecration, persuaded her husband to join her, and together with him and others, helped others to becoming living sacrifices to God. Cecilia came a noble Christian family and when she was young, living out her intense baptismal consecration to God, fasted, she wore a hair shirt and desired to give herself always as a virgin to God. Her father, however, had plans for a good marriage to a young pagan patrician named Valerian. During their wedding, among the music and rejoicing of the guests, Cecilia stayed apart, singing to God within and praying for help. When she and Valerian retired to the place where he was prepared to consummate their marriage, Cecilia told him a secret, that she has an angel watching over her and that if he touched her in the way of marriage, the angel would make him suffer, but if he respected her and got baptized, he would see him. Valerian with faith and love believed her. He received instruction, got baptized by Pope Urban, and then saw the angel standing by Cecilia’s side. The angel put on both of their heads a crown of roses and lilies, signs (like we’d see much later in the life of St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe) of martyrdom and purity, respectively. Valerian consecrated himself and together they consecrated their marriage to God and made their home a domestic Church, a house of prayer. Valerian eventually helped his brother Tiburtius to convert and the two of them began to care for the bodies of all the martyrs, seeking to bury them, since after all those bodies were sacred, having been the temple of God’s presence. That work of mercy and faith exposed them as Christians and both were brought to martyrdom with the guard, Maximus, who witnessed their supreme testimony, became a Christian on the spot and immediately a fellow martyr. Cecilia buried all three bodies and was herself exposed as a Christian. She was brought to trial before Almachius, who tried unsuccessful to threaten the faith out of her. After failing to suffocate her by fire, they ended up trying to behead her, but the axe wouldn’t penetrate through her entire neck. The blow, however, turned out to be fatal after three days in which we entered more deeply still into the Paschal mystery. She was buried close to the popes in the catacombs that would eventually be named after St. Callistus. Her relics were translated by Pope St. Paschal in the early 800s to the area that was believed to have been her house and where a Church had been built after the age of persecutions. In 1599, the Cardinal in charge of the Church of St. Cecilia (Cardinal Sfondrati), in doing various renovations, decided to re-inter Cecilia with SS. Valerian, Tiburtius and Maximus. As he opened her tomb, he found her incorrupt. He had the great renaissance sculptor Stefano Maderno make a sculpture identical to what was seen in the tomb. That statue is now found before her tomb as well as a copy has been placed in the catacombs where her bodied had rested for over five centuries. Her remains looked as if she were sleeping. You could see the axe marks in her neck. But what has always those who see Maderno’s replica is the way she was prophesying even in death. In her right hand, she had two fingers and her thumb extended. In her left, she had her index finger extended. This was a means by which she was proclaiming her faith in her Triune God, one God in three persons. She was proclaiming that she had been a temple of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity! This was the supreme witness she was giving that not even Roman executioners could cut her off from her consecration to God, because she was united with him even in martyrdom. She constantly kept consecrating herself to God each day with “joy and gladness,” not sacrificing animals but giving herself lovingly to the Lord who gave his life for her.
• So we come to this retreat, which will begin and end with the source and summit of our faith, the Mass, in order to reconsecrate ourselves. It’s here that we hang on Jesus’ words. It’s here where we see to enter into his consecration on the altar, so that as Bride to the Bridegroom and Body to the Head, we might offer as our logike latreia, our fitting and zealous worship, to the Father! It’s supposed to leave us different than when we arrived. Whenever I think of this theme of our reconsecration at Mass, my mind and return to St. Anthony of Padua Parish in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where I was pastor for seven years. In my opinion, it’s the most beautiful Catholic Church in all of New England. The architecture of the Church was designed by Joseph Venne, who built St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal. The original interior decorator was the Italian genius Giovanni Castognoli. The painter of the vault and the designer and executor of the stained glass windows was another Italian master, Guido Nincheri. The combination between painting, stained glass, sculpture and architecture is something that the first time I entered the Church as a seminarian overwhelmed me to such a degree that I couldn’t help falling to my knees. After having served as a guide to so many of the Basilicas in Rome, I was thrilled to have the privilege to lead many tours of the Church where I was pastor. One of the central artistic elements inside St. Anthony’s was a series of rondi, or round paintings, found throughout the Church. Over the pews in the nave, there were various rondi from the life of St. Anthony. Once we entered the sanctuary, the theme of the rondi was Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, as Guido Nincheri placed various prophetic and illustrative images of the source and summit of Christian life: grain and grapes, the pelican, the ark of the covenant, the Old Testament sacrifices, Melchisedek’s offering bread and wine, and Jesus’ taking bread and wine during the Last Supper. Over the exits in the transept there were two other images with which I would always finish the hour-long tour. One was of a monstrance filled with the Eucharist, a clear sign that as Catholics leave Mass, we are supposed to recall that, having received Holy Communion, we should be living monstrances taking Christ out on a Corpus Christi procession across the neighborhood as we make our way home. The other one was a menorah. When I would ask people why they thought there would be a menorah over the exit in counterpoint to the rondo of the Monstrance, no one would ever get the right answer. Some would say that it was a sign that Jesus was Jewish. Others would say, strangely, that it was an image of Christmas, because Chanukah, for which the Menorah is the central symbol, often overlaps by coincidence with the Advent or Christmas season. But when prodded, most Catholics didn’t really know what Jews celebrate on Chanukah so it was hard for them to identify the symbolic application to Catholics leaving Mass. The Menorah with its eight candles is a reminder of the eight days that Judas Maccabeus and his companions celebrated with joy and gladness the rededication of the Temple. The rondo of the Menorah was placed over an exit to help Catholics recall that every time we leave Mass we are supposed to leave rededicated to God, reconsecrated to his love and service, recommitted to the Covenant he has formed with us on the day of their baptism. And so today we come here to Villa Maria to make that reconsecration to that, at this time of crisis, we may be the women of faith, the priest of faith, our times need, as we prepare within to welcome Jesus not with his hands clutching a whip but raised in blessing.

The readings for today’s Mass were: