Responding Aright to the Greater than Jonah and Solomon, 28th Monday (I), October 16, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Margaret Mary
October 16, 2023
Rom 1:1-7, Ps 98, Lk 11:29-32

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• One of the real dangers in the spiritual life, especially those who are always around the sacred, is to begin to take the sacred for granted because of routine. Today’s Gospel is one of the best to help snap us out of it. Jesus reminds us that he’s a greater sign of conversion than Jonah and a greater source of wisdom than Solomon. That leads us to ask ourselves that if the pagan Ninevites totally converted at Jonah’s preaching and the Queen of Sheba was willing to travel 1660 miles each way just to hear Solomon’s wisdom, are we converting each time we come into God’s presence as profoundly as the Ninevites did and are we hanging on Christ’s words of wisdom the way the Queen of Sheba did?
• St. Paul is someone who was converted entirely when he encountered Christ, spent 14 years in the desert of Arabia seeking to learn Christ’s wisdom in prayer and then spent the rest of his life trying to bring people to conversion and to enrich the Church with Christ’s wisdom. In today’s first reading we begin four weeks meditating on his greatest theological treatise, written not so much in response to questions or problems in a community he had founded (like in so many other letters) but to a community he had never visited, proposing what were in his mind answers to the biggest questions they probably would have, about how to be right with God, about the status of the Jews, and about authentic Christian spirituality. Today he describes himself to the Romans and what he was hoping to do. He says that he is a “slave of Christ Jesus,” serving him as Lord, was “called to be an apostle,” and was consecrated or “set apart for the Gospel.” His mission was to bring about the “obedience of faith” in those “called to belong to Jesus Christ” and “called to be holy.” When we truly believe, that faith impacts our life. When we believe in Christ, we convert from our own ways and seek to live as he lives, structuring our whole life not on earthly wisdom but his wisdom. When we grasp Christ, and treat him as Lord, we, too, become living, loving, “slaves” of Christ Jesus (instead of sin) because that is paradoxically the path to true freedom, since the truth of his wisdom sets us free.
• Today the Church celebrates the feast of someone who can help us to convert like the Ninevites and seek to align ourselves with God’s incarnate wisdom far more than the Queen of Sheba. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, like so many of the saints, is a wonderful illustration of the obedience of faith. To follow her vocation was hard. After the death of her father when she was a young girl, she and her mother were abused by in-laws. She suffered because of an ulcer on her leg for five years. She suffered from opposition to her vocation. She suffered from various Visitation nuns inside the convent. But she was obedient in faith to Jesus and clung to him on the Cross and Jesus chose her to be his instrument — beginning 350 years ago this December — to reveal to us the love of his Sacred Heart. Like Jesus was doing in today’s Gospel, he through her sought to wake us up to the greatness of the gift we have. He told St. Margaret Mary that he had exhausted himself out of love for us, but from “most” he received only indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn toward his presence in what he called the “sacrament of love,” the Eucharist. He said he was particularly pained that those consecrated to him treated him in this way. What he wants from us instead of indifference is to make him in the Eucharist the biggest difference in our lives; instead of irreverence, piety; instead of coldness, passionate love; instead of sacrilege, holiness; and instead of scorn, praise. This is what St. Margaret Mary gave him and this would be the response of obedient faith. In his apparitions to St. Margaret Mary, Jesus did something very beautiful in a mystical way. He took out her heart, bathed it in the fire of his own to purify it and ignite it, and then placed it back into her. This is what Jesus wishes to do in every one of us, taking away our stony hearts and replacing them with hearts of flesh, hearts after his own, converted hearts full of his wisdom. He does that, first, when he sprinkles clean water upon us and gives us the heart transplant of baptism, prophesied by Jeremiah and Ezekiel. Then he renews it every Mass, as alluded to in the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano when the flesh of the 1200 year old miracle was shown to be human heart wall. Every Eucharist, every celebration of the sacrament of his love, we receive Jesus’ own heart as he seeks to transform us into the visible sign making efficacious his love in the world. That’s what’s need to approach him with the preference, piety, passion, praise and purity he deserves!
• At every Mass, we meet the One greater than Solomon and Jonah. We hear him speak, constantly calling us to a new way of life, living as he lives. It’s here that he helps us to live up to our calling to be holy and sends us forth, like he did after his encounter with St. Paul, with the “grace of apostleship.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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