Responding to the Lord’s Call Promptly, Fully and Perseveringly, 26th Wednesday (II), September 28, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Lawrence Ruiz and Companions, Martyrs
September 28, 2022
Job 9:1-12.14-16, Ps 88, Lk 9:57-62

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Yesterday, Jesus “fixed his face toward Jerusalem,” toward Golgotha, toward the fulfillment of his Messianic mission. Everything for the rest of St. Luke’s Gospel needs to be interpreted within that context. And as he was heading there, he met three different people, two of whom volunteered to follow him and one whom Jesus directly called. But to all of them, Jesus described what it would mean to follow him. What he taught them is crucial for young people on a college campus to discern their vocations in life well and for all of Christ’s disciples to follow Christ faithfully and help others to become true disciples.
• In the first vocation story, a man runs up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus had come into the world to make disciples. Because many would refuse to follow him, we would have expected for him to respond with joy. Instead he replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus wanted him to know the cost of discipleship, especially at a time in which messianic expectations had hyped the Jews to think that the Messiah would kick out the Romans and set up a political administration in which there would be plenty of patronage. Jesus wanted him to know that to follow him wherever he went meant to follow someone who was basically homeless, to value him more than one’s own home and one’s own bed, to have not even what foxes and birds take for granted. We, too, need to ponder the radical nature of God’s call. Are we willing to follow Jesus wherever he goes? If he asks us, like God asked Abraham, to leave our own native place at 75 — or our temporary place at 20 — and go to a place he would eventually show us, would we follow him, or would we value our bed, our old habits more than we do the Lord?
• The second scene involves a man to him Jesus said, “Follow me!” But this man replied, “Lord, let me go first to bury my father.” When we hear this, we can presume that the person’s dad had just died and he just wanted to go home for the funeral and then return immediately. The text doesn’t say that, however. What’s much more likely was that the man’s father was very much alive and might live for decades still. What the man was likely communicating was, “Jesus, I’d like to follow you, but my father comes first. As soon as I’ve fulfilled all of my obligations to him, then I’ll be free to come and follow.” Jesus’ reply was strong: “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” As Jesus would say a little later at the raising of Lazarus, he is the Resurrection and the Life and everyone who lives and believes in him will never die, even if he dies (Jn 11:25-26). For us to become alive in the most important sense of all, we need to be in a living relationship to him. If we’re not following him, if we’re not allowing his life to reign within us, we’re dead, even if all our corporeal vital signs are healthy. He was calling this man to come fully alive and seeking to give him a participation in the Resurrection. He was presenting him a choice between life and death, living and dying even while breathing, and encouraging him to let those who are “dead,” who don’t have this relationship, bury their confrères. Most often Jesus doesn’t call us to make a strict break between him and our family members. He calls us, after all, to honor our father and mother. He calls the family to be an image of the Church and the communion of persons who is God. Burying the dead is and will always remain a spiritual work of mercy. But at the same time Jesus is reminding us that he needs to come first, so that our family life will become the life of the living rather than the walking dead. Our vocation is to a new type of familial life that will last forever and Jesus wants us to seize it, as he called this man in the Gospel.
• The third vocation scene is another one that involves the family. After being summoned by Jesus, this person replied, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” This was almost identical to what Elisha had said to Elijah and Elijah gave him permission (1 Kings 19:20). Jesus, who could see what was in the heart of the one with whom he was speaking, grasped what the request symbolized. The person simply was oblivious to the greatness of the invitation he had received to follow Jesus. As we prayed in the Alleluia verse, God wants to help us, like he helped St. Paul, to recognize that everything else is “rubbish” compared to the unsurpassable worth of “knowing Christ Jesus” and being found in him. The young man was giving a condition on following Jesus, was placing human respect, human courtesy, and family above the call to follow Jesus. Very likely Jesus also suspected that this man’s family members might have objected to his leaving them behind to follow Jesus fully. So Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.” He was saying, “Don’t look to what you’re leaving,” but rather, “Look ahead to what you’re gaining, to the work you’re called to do with me.”
• This “gain” is what allowed Job in today’s first reading to respond with the faith to the temptations he was suffering and the tests he was enduring. His real love was for God — not for cattle, sheep and camels, houses or even health — and he framed everything within the context of considering everything else as rubbish compared to his relationship with God. In today’s first reading he gives a powerful witness to God’s work in the world and in him, to God’s wisdom. These are words inspired by God that God himself will almost repeat later in the Chapter when Job begins to ask God to explain the reasons behind what he was permitting. But we can see here that Job trusts in God more than he trusts in himself and keeps his eyes forward on God rather than on what he has lost.
• These lessons about vocation are on display in the lives of the martyrs the Church remembers today, St. Lorenzo Ruiz and his companions, who were living commentaries of the full, persevering response to God’s call. Some of these martyrs — like Dominican priests from Spain — had followed the Lord, leaving not just their home and their family but their country in order to plow for the Lord in the Philippines. Another had left his strong family ties to become a priest in Japan and then a missionary in the Philippines. St. Lorenzo, the first Filipino saint, shows us another lesson. He was married with three kids and a very good calligrapher. He was present at a murder and some accused him of being complicit. He fled because of the charges and the death penalty that came with them. He got on a boat with the Dominican priests, the Japanese priest and a leper, and they landed in Japan. Soon thereafter he was arrested during the ferocious Tokugowa shogunate. The Japanese sadists went through their normal mind games with their prisoners trying to get them to apostatize and it seems that St. Lawrence asked the question whether his life would really be saved if he denied his faith. But he didn’t deny it. When they were about to torture him by hanging him upside down by his heels over a pit with a cut behind his ear so that he would bleed to death over three days, he said, famously, “I am a Catholic and wholeheartedly do accept death for God; Had I a thousand lives, all these to Him shall I offer.” Sustained by grace, he remained a faithful disciple heroically until the end. His story gives all of us hope, that no matter our failings, as long as we’re alive, we still have a chance to give our life one-thousand times over for him who gave his for us. And by our words and example, we still have the chance to invite others to join us in following Christ.
• The same Jesus who spoke to the three in the Gospel, who summoned today’s martyrs, calls us anew today. He reminds of the cost of discipleship but wants to strengthen us by himself on the inside to help us to follow him wherever he goes, to keep our hands on the plow and our eyes ahead, fixed on Jerusalem, fixed on Him on the Cross, so that we may be strengthened to respond in faith like Job should we have to suffer economic, familial and personal hardship, or should we have to die, like the martyrs we celebrate today. Let us ask Him to strengthen us with the spirit that can help us like them be faithful to the end.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download