Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
21st Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
October 14, 2018
Eph 6:10-17, Mt 18:23-35
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
The Blameless on the Way
In the prayers at the foot of the altar with which we began Mass today, we prayed words that summarize today’s readings: “Ostende nobis, Domine, misericordiam tuam. … Et salutare tuum da nobis.” “Show us, O Lord, your mercy, and grant us your salvation.” Just after that, in the Introit, we, together with the whole Church, sang the words of Psalm 118, “Beati immaculati in via: qui ambulant in lege Domini.” “Blessed are those who are blameless on the way, who walk in the law of the Lord.”
These are so fitting today as we rejoice at the canonization of seven new saints by Pope Francis in St. Peter’s Square: Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador who was shot dead during the celebration of the Mass; Francesco Spinelli and Vincenzo Romano, diocesan priests who distinguished themselves by the way they loved and sanctified Christ’s people through prayer and charity; Maria Caterina Kasper and Nazaria Ignatius of St. Teresa of Jesus, founders of religious institutes of women; Nunzio Sulprizio, a 19 year old layman who found sanctity through many years of suffering, care for his fellow sufferers, and love for Jesus in the Eucharist and the Blessed Virgin Mary; and the most well-known of them all, Pope St. Paul VI, the 262ndPeter who shepherded the Church from 1963-1978. They were those who responded to the Lord’s gift of mercy and salvation, whose souls having been repeatedly cleansed by the Lord in the Sacraments of Baptism and Penance, persevering walked in God’s ways even and especially when it was hard, when guns were pointed at them, when physical sufferings mounted, when various obstacles were thrown in their paths, when they were criticized and persecuted by all those who were challenged by their holiness of their lives. Today we turn to these seven new sancti and ask them to pray for us that we may become the saints in our time just like they became living reminders of Jesus Christ in their own.
St. Gregory the Great once said, “viva lectio vita bonorum,” “the life of the saints is a living lectio [divina],” a living commentary on the word of God. Pope Benedict XVI said, “The most profound interpretation of Scripture comes precisely from those who let themselves be shaped by the word of God.” There would be many ways to illustrate today’s readings from their lives, but I would like to do so primarily from the words and life of Saint Paul VI, because I think that they may be the most relevant for all of us today.
Church’s Greatest Needs
On November 15, 1972, he gave a general audience in which he asked, “What are the Church’s greatest needs at the present time?” He immediately replied by saying, “Don’t be surprised at my answer and don’t write it off as simplistic or even superstitious: one of the Church’s greatest needs is to be defended against the evil we call the Devil.” Three-and-a-half months earlier, on June 29th, he had said during a homily for the ninth anniversary of his installation in which he had been surveying the situation of the Church, that he had a sense that “from some crack the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.” He described how much sin, doubt, uncertainty, division, lack of trust, false prophets, relativist philosophies, revolutionary spirits, darkness, there was and asked, “How has this come about?” He replied, by “the intervention of an adverse power. Its name is the devil.” In his November catechesis, he described the machinations of this “dark disturbing being” who “is still at work with his treacherous cunning,” sorrowing error and misfortune, undermining our moral equilibrium with his sophistry, malignly and cleverly seducing us through our senses, imagination, libido, and social contacts, but that many people are oblivious to his presence, trying to pretend as if the devil doesn’t exist and isn’t “one of the greatest and most lasting problems… even after the victorious response given to it by Jesus Christ.”
He asked, “What defense, what remedy, should we use against the Devil’s action?,” and replied, “Everything that defends us from sin strengthens us by that very fact against the invisible enemy.” He specifically referred to grace, praying to God the Father to “deliver us from evil,” striving for innocence and holiness, ascetical practices like prayer and fasting, and charity, seeking to “overcome evil with good.” He referred to St. Paul’s words from today’s first reading and encouraged us to imitate St. Paul in putting on the armor of God so that “we may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil, for our wrestling,” the Apostle emphasizes,” is not against flesh and blood, but against the Principalities and Powers, against the world rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness on high.” “The Christian must be militant,” Paul VI said. “He must be vigilant and strong.”
What he said about the smoke of Satan 45 years ago is still very much true about the situation of the Church today and to some extent will be true about the Church in every age. The devil is constantly trying to destroy God’s work and to ruin each of our eternal destiny, seeking to get us not to look for God’s mercy and salvation, not to walk blamelessly in the ways of the Lord. But just as in the early 1970s so again today, many are not only oblivious to that infernal smoke but getting high on it like some spiritual marijuana that lowers their defenses to all types of other sins. That’s why St. Paul’s words today are so important for us to understand and to live.
Armor of God
St. Paul in his exhortation to the Christians in Ephesus tells us, “Draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power… so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the Devil, … so that you may be able to resist on that evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground.” As he was writing or dictating this letter under house arrest in Rome, doubtless with plenty of time to ponder the armor of the Roman soldier who was assigned to guard him, he counseled us to be just as arrayed with God as a Roman soldier is with bronze and steel. He mentioned six parts of our battle vesture:
- “Stand fast with your loins girded in truth.”A belt tied a tunic, held a sword, and allowed freedom of movement. Living in the truth against the father of lies is the first thing St. Paul emphasizes, so that we may move freely, rather than enslaved to lies or to impulses. That fact that the belt enveloped the area of one’s groin is highly significant as well because the area in which so many are most vulnerable to the lies of the devil is with regard to human sexuality. Since we’ve been made in the image and likeness of God who is love, the devil most wants to corrupt our capacity to love, since then he will most easily distort the likeness of God in us. That’s why he’s attacked marriage from the beginning with Adam and Eve, seeking to pervert love into lust, and change us from self-givers in the image of the Divine Giver to takers and consumers of others, to degrade us from protectors of others to predators. That’s why we need to stand fast with our loins girded in the truth about God, about us, and about the self-sacrificial love that Jesus exemplified and called to us to imitate.
- “Clothed with righteousness as a breastplate.”Over our heart and vital peritoneal organs St. Paul says we’re to place righteousness, holiness, being just before God and others. The devil will try to attack our heart and make it hardened. He may accuse us falsely through others of having a merciless, wicked or pharisaical heart because, like Jesus, we don’t and won’t bless others doing evil. But the most important defense is integrity of life, of true righteousness, of waiting immaculate in the way of the law of the Lord. St. Paul wants being right with God to be our true treasure, because where our treasure is our heart will be, and if our treasure is in divine justice, then our heart will be secure.
- “Your feet shod in readiness for the Gospel of peace.” Sandals were the great sign of freedom in the ancient world. Slaves couldn’t wear sandals because it would make escaping easier. But for Paul this footwear wasn’t just a sign of a “freedom from,” of being able to flee the devil, but of a “freedom for,” showing that we were capable and desirous to evangelize, to go from town to town, from person to person, bringing peace to homes and people to the Prince of Peace. A genuine sign of a Christian is that the person recognizes we’re on pilgrimage, on the move, in the retinue of the One who constantly is calling us to “Come, follow me” and to “Go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” If laziness or idleness is the devil’s workshop, then one of the most important defenses against the devil is to keep moving, to put our shoes on and get ready for work, for service, for journeying and growth.
- “Hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the Evil One.” St. Paul uses in Greek a word for shield here (thyreos) that doesn’t refer to the small round shield that we can normally imagine, but a large oblong full-body shield used by a heavily armed warrior, that one could, in essence, rest behind when the archers of the enemy were bombarding you with arrows dipped in pitch, set ablaze and flying through the air. The full-body protection we need, St. Paul says, is our faith, our complete entrustment to God and to everything God has revealed to us. From the beginning, as we see with Adam and Eve, the devil is trying to tempt us with the fiery dart of distrust of God, that we really won’t die if we disobey him, that no sin is really mortal, and that God really doesn’t want us to live forever, that he doesn’t want us to become like him, but that he fears our becoming like him. As we see in Jesus’ response to the devil in the desert, faith, true trust in God and all he has revealed, is the means to withstand this diabolical bombardment.
- “Take the helmet of salvation.”The devil is always trying to get us to forget what Christ has done to save us. He’s trying to get us to think that our salvation is cheap or automatic, and that basically everyone will come to salvation no matter what road they’re on. The great defense against this, St. Paul says, is to envelope our head, so to speak, with the salvation won for us by Christ, to think about what Christ has done, to think constantly about our salvation and the salvation of others, and to move forward in the path of sanctification that will make that salvation secure. We’re called to “put on the mind of Christ,” to fill our thoughts with his, to long for eternal life with him, so that the devil by his cunning won’t be able to get us to forsake it.
- Take “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”A sword is both a defense as well as a weapon of attack. The Word of God, given to us by the Holy Spirit through the inspired authors, helps us in both. It was Jesus’ defense against the devil in the desert and it will be ours, when we know it enough so that the Holy Spirit can remind us of it when we’re tempted. It’s also our offense against the sins of the world, helping us to build in ourselves and in others the virtues that can strengthen us toward victory in the battle overall.
One of the most important weapons in our arsenal, St. Paul says afterward, is prayer, but not just any prayer but prayer that is constant (“pray at every opportunity”), pneumatological (“in the Spirit”), vigilant and enduring (“be watchful with all perseverance and supplication”), unselfish and intercessory (“for all the holy ones and also for me”) and audacious (“with boldness” and the “courage to speak”). This type of prayer is what helps us precisely to gird our loins with truth, to seek the Lord’s justice from the heart, to put on our sandals with haste, to guard our faith, to remember and seek salvation and to treasure and enflesh the Word of God.
Receiving and Sharing God’s Mercy
Before we conclude, however, I want to focus on one last means to defeat the devil, which I think is the most important of all. It’s what Jesus himself points to in today’s Gospel: receiving God’s mercy and sharing it. Two years ago, the last time I celebrated Mass for the 21stSunday after Pentecost with you, I preached for 20 minutes on this Parable, which is one of my favorites. There I described how in the Parable the 10,000 talents God forgives us is the equivalent in today’s money, for someone making $12.50 an hour or $100 a day, of $6 billion, and how the debt others owe us, by the same standard, is $10,000. If God forgives us so much — and he does, he forgives us ultimately of choosing sin over salvation, Barabbas over Christ, our will over his will — then he wants us to receive the gift of his mercy in such a way that we love others as he has loved us, to be merciful as our Father is merciful. If we are not willing to forgive others, then we are not able to receive his mercy. That’s why Jesus emphasizes after teaching us the Our Father, “For unless you forgive others their sins, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you yours,” and after the Parable today, “So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.” The Father won’t forgive us not because he’s punishing us; the Father won’t forgive us because we can’t receive his mercy unless we have a heart open to mercy.
What does this have to do with the devil? Everything. Because the devil wants to do everything he can to prevent us from receiving God’s mercy, because unless we receive it, we will be Satan’s forever. He wants to prevent our recognizing that we have incurred an unpayable debt to God through our sins and come to confession. Or, if he can’t stop us from seeing that we’re sinners, we wants to convince us that our sins are unforgivable even to God, so that we won’t come. Or to convince us that they’re just peccadilloes, tiny little sins, so that we don’t need confession. Or to fill us with shame such that we won’t come to ask for the forgiveness God never tires of giving. Anything he can do to prevent our making a good confession. And even if we do make a good confession, he wants us to make the mistake of the forgiven debtor in the Gospel, by getting us not to forgive others like God has forgiven us because he knows that unless we forgive others, we will go to Hell, because then our sins can’t be forgiven. So one of the most important ways to put on the armor of God to defeat the devil is to bathe ourselves in God’s mercy and share that mercy just as generously as God has forgiven us.
Right before Jesus gave today’s parable, St. Peter had asked Jesus, “If my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as 7 times?” This would be an astronomical standard, giving someone an eighth chance, before writing someone off as incorrigible. Jesus replies, “No, Seventy Sevens.” Whether that means 70×7 (490) or 70+7 (77) times really doesn’t matter, because seven is a number already with a sense of infinity. It means to forgive without limit. We must never refuse forgiveness to anyone who has wronged us — even and especially those who have really wounded us deeply. We must forgive fathers and mothers who have hurt us when we were younger, husbands and wives who have betrayed us, friends who have deceived us, priests or nuns who have scandalized us, assailants who have attacked us, and terrorists who have mercilessly killed those closest to us. If we have suffered those evils, the devil wants to multiply the harm and make it eternal. God, on the other hand, wants to heal us through his mercy and make us spiritual billionaires so that we, rich in mercy, like him, might forgive others.
Drawing Strength from the Lord at Mass
The place where we get strengthened to do so is here at Mass. It’s at Mass that we “draw [our] strength from the Lord and from his mighty power.” This is where the Lord shows us his mercy and grants us his salvation. This is where we’re strengthened with the armor of God to “stand firm against the tactics of the Devil” on the “evil day.” This is where we put on Christ and his merciful love, where we wrap ourselves with the truth about him, ourselves and our need for him; where we’re clothed in his holiness around our heart, where we put on the shoes of the Gospel of peace. This is where we begin by confessing that we’re in need of God’s help and protection because we’re sinners who have lost in battles against the devil by our own grievous fault but are nevertheless strengthened by his divine mercy against the flaming arrows of temptation so that we might win the war. This is where we wrap our head with the helmet of salvation so that our minds are thinking about eternity, and where we assimilate the word of God as a weapon to use against the devil. This is where Saints Oscar, Francesco, Vicenzo, Maria Caterina, Nazaria, Nunzio, Paul VI, and the saints have received their nourishment and the effusion of the Holy Spirit. This is where we proclaim that we’re not worthy to receive Jesus but we ask him to say the word and forgive our debts so that he may enter under our roof. And with Jesus inside us, with mercy incarnate abiding in us, how can we not forgive others like he forgives us?
Let’s ask St. Michael to help us in this battle… St. Michael the Archangel…
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Ephesians
Finally, brothers and sisters, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground. So stand fast with your loins girded in truth, clothed with righteousness as a breastplate, and your feet shod in readiness for the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield, to quench all [the] flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
The continuation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew
Jesus said to his disciples, “The kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king who decided to settle accounts with his servants. When he began the accounting, a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount. Since he had no way of paying it back, his master ordered him to be sold, along with his wife, his children, and all his property, in payment of the debt. At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.’ Moved with compassion the master of that servant let him go and forgave him the loan. When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants who owed him a much smaller amount. He seized him and started to choke him, demanding, ‘Pay back what you owe.’ Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him, ‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’ But he refused. Instead, he had him put in prison until he paid back the debt. Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened, they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master and reported the whole affair. His master summoned him and said to him, “You wicked servant! I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to. Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant, as I had pity on you?’ Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers until he should pay back the whole debt. So will my heavenly Father do to you, unless each of you forgives his brother from his heart.”
