Responding, like St. Philip Neri, to God’s Call to Greatness, 8th Wednesday (II), May 26, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Wednesday of the Eighth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Philip Neri
May 26, 2021
Sir 36:1.4-5.10-17, Ps 79, Mk 10:32-45

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

The following text guided today’s homily:

• Today in the first reading, Ben Sira, inspired by the Holy Spirit, prays for God to “reward those who have hoped in you,” by letting “your prophets be proved true.” That would be seen, we can see in his prayer, by “put[ting] all nations in dread of you,” “gather[ing] all the tribes of Jacob that they may inherit the land as of old.” He begs God to “lead us in the way of justice,” understanding justice as restoring Israel’s proper place, so that “it will be known to the very ends of the earth that you are the eternal God.” It was a prayer for the Messiah and for what a typical faithful Jew would think the Messiah would do. This prayer of Book of Sirach would be heard by God, but in a way far different than he was anticipating. God would show the light of his mercies, he would gather all the tribes of Judah, he would show mercy to Israel, Jerusalem, Zion in a way different from their expectations. He would reward those who have hoped in him and let his prophets be proven true not just about the coming of the Messiah but about how that Messiah would suffer. He would lead them in the way of true justice and send his first Jewish believers out with the Gospel to the very ends of the earth to help them realize that the eternal God is with them always until the end of time.
• That contrast between the Jews’ human, political hopes for the Messiah, and God’s plans for a Messiah-Redeemer, are on full display in the Gospel, which in some aspects is one of the most disappointing and humanly revolting scenes in Scripture. Jesus describes for the third time what is going to happen to him in Jerusalem. He had been walking alone, ahead of the others, and the others were amazed and afraid of this fact, almost certainly because Jesus was in a pensive mood that they hadn’t seen very often. He took the Twelve aside and said to them what was obviously on his mind as he was walking on the path up to Jerusalem: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles who will mock him, spit upon him, scourge him, and put him to death but after three days he will rise.” And what was the response of the disciples? Was it to commiserate with him? Was it to console him? Quite far from it. Instead, James and John came to Jesus and said, “We want you to do for us whatever we ask of you!.” After Jesus asked, “What do you wish me to do for you?,” they replied, “Grant that in your glory we may sit one at your right and the other at your left.” Jesus had told them that he was going to die and they were asking for favors, in the expectation of a political messianic kingdom. Before we get into the meat of the scene and what it means for us, let’s just pause to consider the ugliness of what was happening. Imagine, for example, that your father or your brother or your best friend or a parishioner or even a stranger on a plane came to you and told you that the doctor had just given him two weeks to live and, instead of consoling him, instead of even caring about him, you immediately shifted your attention and asked him to help you get a promotion at work or to give you his house or pepper him about getting a larger share of his will. That’s what was happening in this scene. That’s what Jesus’ friends were doing to him in today’s Gospel.
• And it wasn’t the first or only time. On the other two occasions when Jesus announced in detail the betrayal, torture and ignominious public execution he was about to endure, the apostles never responded appropriately. The first time Jesus foretold his crucifixion was in Caesarea Philippi, right after Peter proclaimed him the Messiah and Son of God and Jesus proclaimed Simon bar-Jonah to be the rock on whom he would build his Church. But when Jesus announced what type of Messiah he would be and how he wasn’t going to inaugurate his kingdom dressed in purple, seated on a marble throne, with a crown made out of gold and diadems but naked, nailed to his wooden throne and crowned with thorns, Peter, rather than consoling him, rebuked him and swore that no such thing would ever happen to him. The second time Jesus announced what would happen was after Jesus, Peter, James and John had come from the Mount of Transfiguration and Jesus had exorcised a demon-possessed boy that the other disciples couldn’t help. Jesus told them a second time, “The Son of Man is to be handed over to men and they will kill him, and three days after his death he will rise,” but instead of responding to what their friend had said, they allowed him to walk on ahead of them while they, in the back, quarreled about who was worthiest to head up the top cabinet secretariats in the Messianic administration they believed Jesus was about to inaugurate. When Jesus asked, “What were you arguing about on the way?,” they, embarrassed, remained mute. Today, after James and John asked asked Jesus to give them a blank check and do whatever they asked, the other disciples got indignant, not fundamentally because of the Boanerges brothers’ importunity, not because they found such behavior contrary to genuine love of Jesus, but because they likewise coveted the two seats the Sons of Zebedee were requesting and were upset because they were gutsy enough to ask for what the others didn’t have the chutzpah to request but all secretly desired. The last and perhaps worst example of this type of unholy behavior occurred during the Last Supper. After Jesus indicated to them, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me,” the apostles again got into a dispute over which of them was the greatest. Rather than thinking about who would be the betrayer, they were thinking about who would be the greatest, not recognizing at the time that all of them would end up betraying him.
• These were all examples of what St. James describes in his letter as “selfish ambition.” They were seeking their own interests, not those of the Lord. They were using him, not truly loving him.
• What happened with them is a perennial warning to the Church, to the disciples of the Lord in every age. We might believe that we would never treat a friend like that, but the reality is that no matter how often we hear about Jesus’ sufferings, crucifixion and death, no matter how frequently we stare at the Crucifix, rather than seek to console the Lord out of love, we, like the apostles, are likewise prone just to divert our attention to what we really love, our own plans, worldly hopes and hungers. While he’s died for others’ salvation, some of us continue to fight for seats at tables or greetings in marketplaces rather than for towels to wash others’ feet.
• Jesus’ response was not to castigate James and John or the other apostles by the corrective, “Don’t be ambitious!” Jesus took advantage of the ugliness of their and the others apostles’ raw earthly ambition to instruct them about the holy ambition he wants them to have. He had, after all, chosen men with the capacity for ambition, who were seeking to be great. What he wanted to do, however, was to change their “selfish ambition” into a holy ambition and chart out for them the path to true greatness. He wanted them to be ambitious for the right things. He wanted them to strive to advance not in a hierarchy of “power,” but in a hierarchy of true Christian loving service, not on the worldly or ecclesiastical ladder of status, but on the ladder of holiness. He wants us to be ambitious, not as sycophantic worldly courtiers but ambitious for souls, to be ambitious to do his will, to be ambitious to spread his name and his love, to be ambitious to die for him so as to live with Him. He wants us to strive not that we be exalted, but that his Father’s name, kingdom, and will, rather than our own, be hallowed, glorified and done. To be number one would not be decided by sharing Christ’s power, but by sharing Christ’s love. Christ’s cabinet would be filled not by those who would kiss his butt, but by those who would put their own butts on the line for Him and for others, by being baptized into Christ’s death through their own suffering and death. He who is the Way has shown them us the path to greatness and the means to become truly number one. Jesus wants us all to be great, not mediocre. Over and over again he stressed that he wants us to “strive,” to “seek,” to “burn,” to “hunger and thirst” for greatness (Mt 5:6; Mt 6:32-33; Lk 12:30; Lk 12:49; Lk 13:24) But the greatness to which he wants us to aspire has nothing to do with some type of terrestrial pecking-order. Real greatness, he describes, is to become most like him, to share in his greatness, in his divine holiness, in his total self-giving love.
• How much we in the Church today need to focus on this theme of ambition because we have a two-fold problem in the Church today with regard to it. On the one hand, there are still far too many “climbers” in the Church, who seek the rewards of spiritual worldliness, striving to exalt themselves through becoming a superior, or getting the rich and cozy pastorate, or having a school, gymnasium or parish hall named after them, or being invested with a pectoral cross and kissable ring, or even getting a dossier at the Congregation for the Causes of Saints so that everyone else will remember their conspicuous sanctity. When you look at the movement of religious women seeking to be priests, I think this is at the heart of much of it, that many look at the hierarchy Christ established as a hierarchy of power and they want a piece of that power. On the other side of the problem — and often as a response — there are many Catholics who consider all ambitions bad, who bury their own and others’ talents, gifts, and truly-inspired desires out of a false sense of humility, who temper their and others’ zeal lest they appear to be ambitious. These equate holiness with mediocrity and are often pastorally inert, not doing anything, not starting anything, not building anything, not knocking on any doors. By their lack of ambition and lack of enthusiasm they perhaps do even more damage to the Church out of omission than the outright worldly ambitious do out of commission. Neither group, however, is truly carrying out the mission of the Church.
• This paradox of the path to greatness — that the humble are exalted and the self-exalted humbled (Lk 14:11), that the first will be last and the last will be first (Mk 10:31), that greatness is shown in washing others’ feet rather than having authority over them —is something the world doesn’t understand. But Jesus has ambition for us. He tells us today about his ambition for us so that we may recalibrate our ambitions based on his. He says today, referring to his baptism in blood, “I have a baptism with which to be baptized and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished!” He wanted us to be so “submerged” in his ambition for souls that we will sacrifice ourselves together with him for their salvation, to offer our life together with his to ransom others from the slavery sin and the death to which it leads. What are the ambitions Jesus wants us to have? In the Gospels, he lists six of them, and we can ask him for the grace for us to be more ambitious for these things than star athletes work hard for championships, than the hardest working student strives to be graduate summa, than the greediest person works to make millions.
  • The first ambition Jesus wants us to have is to be great in faith. He praised the Syro-Phoenician woman and the Roman Centurion for their great faith and longed that all in Israel would emulate it. All the more, he would want us, his followers and his priests, not just to have faith but to have great faith. And we should aspire to it with passion, begging him as he first disciples, “Lord, increase my faith!”
  • Second, Jesus wants to have an ambition to live by his truths and to pass them on to others. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Whoever then relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but he who does them and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” He wants us all to be great in that way. He want us to know and live our faith and to pass on as of the greatest importance what we ourselves have received (see 1 Cor 15:1-5).
  • Third, he wants us to have an ambition to be truly humble. That’s not a contradiction in terms. “If anyone wishes to be first,” he says, “he shall be the last of all.” In the sight of God, to promote oneself is to demote oneself, to ascend with him toward heaven we need to descend. In another part of the Gospel, in response to the disciples’ question, “Who is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven?,” Jesus called a child over and said, “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.” To be child-like doesn’t mean to be childish. St. Paul summons us to “full stature in Jesus Christ,” but our advance in Christian maturity is at the same time progress in childlike simplicity. The truth is that often, as we get older, we cease to relate to God the way we should, as his beloved children. We may not act quite as poorly as the Prodigal Son in the parable, but we often just want to “grow up” and leave “home,” to do things on our own, to be less dependent on Him than we were before and more self-reliant and self-sufficient. Whereas when we were a child and used to talk to the Father every day, now on our own we space out those interactions. We still love the Father, but less than we used to. When he offers to do something for us, we say, “Thanks, Dad, but I’ve got it covered.” To become greater, we need to become humbler and more dependent on God, not less.
  • That passion for humility leads to the fourth point: Jesus wants us to have an ambition to imitate him in total self-sacrificial service. Today Jesus said to the apostles: “You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” He reinforced this point at the Last Supper, when he washed their feet. After doing this, he told them and us: “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord; and you are right, for so I am. If I, then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you. Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.” For Jesus to reign is to serve and he wanted all of his followers to join in that same reigning by serving. St. Paul would describe to the Philippians (Phil 2:3-11) that Christ’s example was the stairway to heaven when he called on them to imitate it: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross.” This safe-abasing loving service was at the root of Christ’s greatness, St. Paul continued: “Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” And Jesus to each of us turns and says, “Follow me!” On another occasion Jesus made a similar point by saying that if we wanted to be the greatest in his kingdom we needed to welcome children in his name. He illustrated this point of service with a little child not because a child was considered “innocent” but because an infant was culturally insignificant and completely dependent. A baby has many needs that parents and adults need to take of, and most often will not even say thanks in return, not to mention return the favor. It’s all giving and very little receiving. You really cannot get into a quid-pro-quo relationship with a little child. The only adequate response to such a person is love. Too often the worldly ambitious treat others well so that they can get something from them later to advance in the eyes of the world. But this can never really be done with a child. Your only reason for treating the child well is love and respect for the child, for the gift of life, and for the person’s being in God’s image. Jesus calls us to treat all people in this way, not using them for our own advantage — as the worldly do and as climbers do — but loving them and serving them, expecting nothing in return other than the love and gratitude of Jesus. Jesus wants us to have the ambition to serve selflessly, just like he serves us.
  • Fifth, he wants us to seek to be great in love. Moved by the Holy Spirit, St. Paul said to the Corinthians that they shouldn’t be ambitious for the ability to speak in or interpret tongues, for the power to work miracles, for various positions in the Church, but that they should “strive eagerly” — be ambitious! — for the “greatest spiritual gifts” — faith, hope and love, of which love was the greatest. St. Paul said in that famous passage it didn’t suffice to have the faith to move mountains. It wasn’t enough to give the body over as a martyr. One needed to do this with love. And someone who loves has a lot to work on. Out of love, he needs to learn how to be patient, kind, not jealous or boastful, insistent at his own way, arrogant or rude, irritable or resentful, rejoicing at the wrong of others.  He needs to believe, hope and endure all things and rejoice in the truth. This is something to which Jesus definitely wants us all to inspire.
  • Lastly, Jesus wants us to be ambitious to be saints. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,” Jesus said, echoing the prophets’ call for us to be holy as the Lord, our God, is holy, so that we might fully become the image and likeness of the God who created us. It’s enlightening to look at the ambitions of many of the saints. St. Paul had the ambition to become all things to all people so as to save as many as he could. St. Ignatius of Loyola had an ambition to do for God what St. Francis did, what St. Dominic did, and do everything not just for God’s glory but for his greater glory. St. Francis Xavier had the ambition to bring whole nations to the Lord. St. Teresa of Avila had the ambition to reform the Carmelites so that it might sing forever of God’s glory. Saint Teresa of Calcutta had the ambition to satiate Jesus’ infinite thirst for souls. Do we have the ambitions of the saints? Do we have the desire to be numbered among them? Do we desire our people to be numbered among them?
• Today the Church celebrates someone who was ambitious for the Lord, for the greatest spiritual gifts, who was consumed with Christ-like zeal for souls and wanted to give his life as a missionary, who was great in love and gave himself totally in spiritual service, and whose whole life bore the fruit of joy that comes from being united with Christ in accomplishing the Father’s will by the gift of the Holy Spirit. When St. Philip Neri arrived in Rome in 1533 as an 18 year-old layman, the eternal city was in multiple levels of devastation. Most of the people were still in trauma from Charles V’s brutal ransacking of the city in 1527. The Renaissance had led to the rediscovery of much of pagan literature and with it, the intellectual and cultured classes had readopted pagan rituals and practices. The Church was in almost total disarray. Several of the Renaissance popes lived more in disgrace than grace. Cardinals were appointed not because of their holiness or sacred leadership but because of their bank accounts and bloodlines. Many pastors, desiring to live leisurely, subcontracted the care of souls to those who were unfit. The challenges that confronted Philip would make the serious issues we face today — the residue of so much bloodshed, two world wars, the sexual revolution, a distorted notion of freedom, the redefinition of marriage, the redefinition of human anthropology, even the clergy sex abuse scandals — seem comparatively small. Yet, by his death in 1595, this vast metropolis had, to a large degree, returned not just to the practice of the faith but to fervent, joy-filled practice of the faith. What did St. Philip do to help turn it around? How did he seek to glorify God?
• He did so by inspiring and calling people to good deeds. Philip would go up to people on the streets, joke and laugh with them, win them over by his jovial goodness and ask, “Brothers, when are we going to start to do good?” He sought to help them, through deeds, give glory to the Father in heaven. He invited his new friends to help him in caring for the sick. They would volunteer each day as orderlies in hospitals, cleaning and changing patients, feeding them, and often preparing them for death. Medical care and sanitation are still problems in Italian public hospitals today; they were little more than germ factories in the 16th century. Philip and his friends, however, brought the Good Samaritan’s love to those whom few in society were willing to care for. They humbly fought not just for the towel but for the bedpans! And that started to transform all those who did it, and they saw the fruit of joy that comes from sincere loving. He also sought to help them come to know God better so that God’s own glory could reign in them. Philip would get all his friends together for brief talks in his apartment on the lives of the saints and martyrs, on Church history, and on various applications of the faith to daily life. He would give many of the talks himself — which created a stir since he was at the time a layman — and invite others whom he thought capable to do the same. Later, these would develop into what he called the little Oratory, where everyone from the poor and illiterate to cardinals and Rome’s rich, famous and cultured would sit side-by-side. He gave them a new culture that would help them turn their lives over to the “cult” or worship of God. You can’t replace something with nothing, and Philip knew that to draw the young away from pagan practices like the Saturnalia, there needed to be fun and attractive adventures of faith. So he started pilgrimages to the seven ancient basilicas in Rome, 40 hour devotions, musical groups and more. He helped them to see that these sanctuaries were their spiritual patrimony, the saints were their brothers and sisters in the faith, and that the spiritual treasures were their family heirlooms. That began to change the way they looked at what so many took for granted. They began to hunger for God’s glory as he did. He formed lay men and women so that they could go out and evangelize others and transform culture and society. They would read together St. Francis Xavier’s letters from India and resolve to make Rome their Indies and win it back for Christ. Philip knew that, without the laity, there was little chance priests and religious alone could turn around Rome. This novel approach of lay involvement would bring him to the attention and, for a time, discipline of the Inquisition. He was centuries ahead of his time. But it’s the same thing for us. If we’re going to turn around our culture, we need to focus on forming the people who are already coming so that they can go, with the Holy Spirit’s power, out as salt, light and leaven to turn around the face of the earth. And he did all of this by the power of the Holy Spirit, whom we are focused on in a particular way in these days after Pentecost. On the vigil of Pentecost in 1544, when he was 28, as he was in the catacombs imploring the Holy Spirit to give him the fruits of the Spirit (Gal 5:22-23), he saw the third person of the Trinity take on the appearance of a ball of fire that entered his mouth, descended to his heart and caused an explosion of heat and love that an autopsy later demonstrated had broken outward two of his ribs and almost doubled the size of his heart. St. Paul once wrote to the Romans, “The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,” and that was literally true for St. Philip. For the rest of his life, the fire burned both spiritually and physically, so that no matter how cold outside he needed to have the windows open. People could hear his heart beating across Churches. He became a living example of each of the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-mastery. His docility to what God the Holy Spirit wanted to do in him and through him not only led to his becoming one of the greatest saints of all time but also to his helping vast multitudes respond to the sanctifying work of the same Holy Spirit. In the Collect beginning this Mass we begged for the same miraculous transformation: “O God, who never cease to bestow the glory of holiness on the faithful servants you raise up for yourself, graciously grant that the Holy Spirit may kindle in us that fire with which he wonderfully filled the heart of St. Philip Neri.” St. Philip attained the glory of holiness because he loved God and was ambitious for the things of God — and wanted to help his contemporaries share those loves, because there’s no great glory given to God than to allow God’s own holiness to radiate in human beings.
• Like with St. Philip, the apostles and the saints throughout the centuries, Christ wants us to be great and today he shows us how. The greatest illustration he gives us of the path to greatness is here in the Mass, our participation in time in the eternal offering of Christ in the Last Supper and on Calvary. When Jesus humbly bent down at the beginning of the Mass to wash his followers’ feet, he was just getting started. Later he would abase himself even further, changing bread and wine into his body and blood so that we, his servants, could consume him and live off of him. This is the chalice he places before us to drink, to which offer he hopes we will respond with as much trust and zeal as John and James. I have always loved those altar cloths in many Churches and Chapels across the globe that have had written on the sides of them St. John’s and James’ response to Jesus’ question, “Can you drink the chalice I am about to drink?” “Possumus!,” they said, Latin for “We Can!” Those words on the altar cloth are a reminder for every priest, as we lift the chalice of salvation, that the Lord calls us to greatness not just by celebrating the Mass but by doing this in memory of Christ and learning from him how to be the servant and slave of all and give our life as a ransom for many. He not only wants us to receive his self-gift of loving service in the Eucharist, but he wants us to make it the path of our life. He simplifies everything he’s taught us today about the path to true greatness in the words he will say again to us in a few minutes: “Do THIS in memory of me!” May the priests who have gone before us, may St. Philip Neri, may Saints James and John and the other apostles all intercede for us to help us to recognize that, too, can!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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