Responding to the Grace of the Call to Conversion, 26th Friday (II), October 4, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi
October 4, 2024
Job 38:1.12-21;40:3-5, Ps 139, Lk 10:13-16

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• “Guide me, Lord, along the everlasting way.”  Today the Lord responds to that prayer for guidance we repeated several times in the Responsorial Psalm. He does so, first, by calling us back to the way through the gift of conversion, which is what we encounter in the Gospel, in the Lord’s conversation with Job in the first reading, and in the feast of the great saint we celebrate today, Francis of Assisi. He does so continuously and definitively now for us as Jesus calls us to follow him who is the Way, beckoning us to receive his work, words and will, and responding to him with reverence, faith and perseverance. And then he seeks to transform us so that we can be his heralds trying to help others get onto that narrow way that leads to everlasting life.
• In the Gospel, Jesus reproves Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum for their failure to respond profoundly to all that he did among them, saying that if what he did in those cities had been done in the debauched pagan cities of Tyre and Sidon — and, according to a similar passage in St. Matthew,  in Sodom and Gomorrah — the inhabitants would all have repented. He didn’t find, however, profound conversion in the three cities of Galilee and threatened that they would go to Hell rather than be exalted. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, which is either a more detailed account of the same words or the description of a similar scene, Jesus said that the Queen of Sheba had come 1600 miles to hear Solomon’s wisdom, and the Ninevites had repented immediately at the preaching of Jonah, but there was a greater than Solomon and Jonah among them, and yet they hadn’t received the wisdom and repented. They didn’t recognize who was among them.
• This is something God taught Job in today’s first reading. After Job finally succumbed to his grief and to his physical suffering and began to question God’s wisdom and goodness, God spoke to him reminding him that he was the commander of the morning, who holds the ends of the earth, who has entered the depths of the sea and knows the breadth of the earth. God almost seems to joke with Job asking how old he is compared to God himself. Job, having heard God speak, responded with humility, putting his hand over his mouth and listening to what God had said verbally and through his works, rather than seeking to lecture God. He converted profoundly and returned to the type of holiness that God had ascribed to him at the beginning when the devil wanted to test him.
• Job’s conversion and the conversion to which the Lord summons those in Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum, and New York City,  brings us to the Alleluia verse and the end of today’s Gospel. “If today you hear [God’s] voice,” we sang, “harden not your hearts” (Ps 95). Jesus described the spiritual hardening of the arteries at the end of today’s Gospel in terms of what happens to him and what will likewise happen to us. Either God’s word will be received or rejected.  “Whoever listens to you listens to me,” Jesus says. “Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” Jesus is calling all of us to ponder whether we really listen to him or reject him, especially as he speaks to us through his emissaries, the apostles, their successors and others, and as he speaks to us through the evangelists and apostles who have been the Holy Spirit’s instruments to give us God’s word. Do we harden our hearts to God’s indications or do we respond with a clean heart?
• The theme of conversion is very important today on the memorial of St. Francis of Assisi, one of the greatest converts in the history of the Church. For the first 25 years of his life, he responded with a hardened heart to what the Lord was asking. In his Testament at the end of his life, he said he regarded the first 25 years of his life as a time when he was “in sin,” living a care-free life in which he was head of the fraternity, or as his friends called him, the “king of feasts.” But the Lord never stopped calling him, and he called him through four great stages. When Pope Benedict went to Assisi in 1207, he pondered the four stages of Francis’ conversion. The way he responded to those graces can inspire us today toward a conversion just as profound so that we can follow Francis following Christ all the way along the everlasting way.
• The first stage of his conversion happened through charity and compassion. It took place when he was riding his horse outside the city and met a leper who came out from a leper colony to ask him for an alm. Francis dropped him something and sped away, not being able to stand the sight and smell of the leper and also phobic about catching the disease. But a short distance away he was pierced to the heart by his lack of genuine love. He turned around, sped to the leper, dismounted, and then embraced him and kissed the hands he wouldn’t touch earlier when dropping coins. It was a conversion to charity. “After 25 years of a mediocre life full of dreams, spent in the pursuit of worldly pleasures and success,” Pope Benedict described, Francis “opened himself to grace, came to his senses and gradually recognized Christ as the ideal of his life.” Each of us is called to open our senses in a similar way to find Christ in disguise.
• The second stage of conversion happened in the Church of St. Damian on the slope of Assisi. As Francis was praying in front of the Crucifix in the run down Church, Jesus spoke to him from the Cross and summoned him, “Francis, rebuild my Church which you can see is falling into ruin.” Francis, at first, took the Lord literally and, selling some of his father’s precious fabrics, began to reconstruct the dilapidated house of God with the proceeds. But the Lord had a far bigger building project in mind. Later Pope Innocent III had a dream in which he saw Francis, whom he would meet for the first time the following day, holding up the Cathedral of St. John Lateran, the Pope’s principal Church, a sign that the renovation project God had in mind was the Church as a whole, which is not built of marble, wood, bricks and glass, but men, women, boys and girls, living stones built on Christ the cornerstone. That’s the building project Francis would undertake for God, one living stone at a time, beginning with his Franciscan brothers, and then the Poor Clares, and then the lay Franciscans, and through them in the Church as a whole. St. Clare would run away from home at 18 to “live according to the manner of the holy Gospel,” and that type of evangelical living is precisely what the Lord was asking for, what Francis would eventually inspire. That was the second stage of his conversion and calling. Each of us is called in a similar way to participate in that constant renovation project which is the Church.
• The third stage of his conversion happened in the courtyard of the bishop’s residence after Francis’ father had denounced him to the bishop for stealing his fabrics to sell them to rebuild the Church. What Pietro Bernardone was really hoping for was far more than the restitution of his sold property, but the restitution of his son whom he thought was losing his mind as he sought to unite himself to Christ in radical poverty, chastity and obedience. When Pietro told Bishop Guido what his son had done, Francis readily confessed, promised to return the money, but then grasped that the clothes he was wearing were also the fruit of his father’s generosity. So he stripped naked in the bishop’s courtyard, gave the clothes back to his Father, and then said he was finally able to live fully dependent on the generosity of his Father in heaven to whom he prayed, “Padre nostro, che sei nei coeli,” “Our Father, who art in heaven.” That was the third stage, to take Jesus’ words seriously, that just as the Father takes care of the lilies of the field and the birds of the sky, so he will always care for our food, drink, clothing and housing. He was to live totally by God’s providence and mercy. That’s a call to every Christian.
• And the fourth and final stage of his metanoia happened when the Lord appeared to him once more from a Crucifix, a Crucifix in LaVerna, two years before he died, and from his wounds pierced Francis’ hands, feet and side with his Sacred stigmata, so that Francis could bear in his own flesh Christ’s wounds. We marked the 800th anniversary of this event on September 17, just over two weeks ago. This was the culmination, so to speak, of his journey of conversion and holiness, which was, as Pope Benedict said in 2007, a “daily effort to put on Christ.” This itinerary was crowned with the appearance of the stigmata, which enabled him to experience fully what St. Paul wrote to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Before he had received the visible wounds of Christ in his body, Pope Benedict stressed, Francis had received the wounds of Christ on his heart. He had been touched by the way his own sins had offended the Lord and had been moved with the same love for God and others that pierced Christ’s heart. This was his total conversion to Christ, “to the point that he sought to be ‘transformed’ into him, becoming his total image.” The Lord calls us, too, to become other Christ’s.
• Responding to the call to conversion and holiness, to do what those who had witnessed Jesus’ miracles and heard his preaching around the Sea of Galilee didn’t do, is the chief lesson of Francis’ life. It was the call to love Christ above all. As Pope Benedict said in the Basilica of St. Francis in 2007, “Today, everything here speaks of conversion. … Speaking of conversion means going to the heart of the Christian message, and at the same time to the roots of human existence. … Since the time when the faces of lepers, loved through love of God, made him understand in a certain way the mystery of kenosis (cf. Phil 2: 7) – the humbling of God in the flesh of the Son of Man -, from the time when the voice of the Crucifix in San Damiano put in his heart the program for his life, ‘Go, Francis, repair my house’ (2 Cel I, 6, 10), his journey was none other than the daily effort to put on Christ. … What was the life of the converted Francis if not a great act of love? This is revealed by his passionate prayers, rich in contemplation and praise, his tender embrace of the Divine Child at Greccio, his contemplation of the Passion at La Verna, his living ‘according to the form of the Holy Gospel’ (2 Test. 14), his choice of poverty and his quest for Christ in the faces of the poor. This was his conversion to Christ, to the point that he sought to be ‘transformed’ into him, becoming his total image; and this explains his typical way of life by virtue of which he appears to us to be so modern. … May Francis of Assisi obtain the grace of an authentic and full conversion to the love of Christ!”
• Each of us is called to “relive the interior journey of Francis.” Each of us is called to hear the Lord’s voice to repair his Church, parts of whose living stones in every generation “falling into ruins” through sin. Each of us is called to let Christ fully come alive in us through being “crucified with Christ,” which means denying ourselves, picking up whatever hardships or crosses we are given, and following Christ (see Mt 16:24). Each of us is called, in short, to offer our lives in love for God and for others. “In a word,” Pope Benedict summarized, “Francis was truly in love with Jesus.” That love for Jesus shone throughout his converted life and still shines 800 years later. It is a love that was so strong as to rebuild the Church. It is a love that is still powerful enough to rebuild the Church in our time, if we are able to experience that love through a conversion as profound as Francis’. To strengthen us in this continued assimilation of the life of Christ, Jesus is going to do something even greater for us than he did for Francis in the cave of LaVerna. We’re not just going to receive in our flesh his sacred stigmata, but we’re going to receive within his whole body, blood, soul and divinity, something that will help us from the inside to live a converted life, to live according to the manner of the Holy Gospel, so that others, in seeing our response to Christ’s perpetual call to repent and believe, might seek to imitate us like we imitate Francis and journey together, guided by the Lord, along the everlasting way!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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