Running Away or Rushing Toward?, Our Lady of the Rosary, October 7, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary
October 7, 2019
Jon 1:1-2:1-2.11, Jon 2:3-5.8, Lk 10:25-37

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the readings we see two great dynamisms, two fundamental polarities in Christian and human life. The first we see in Jonah in the first reading. When God reveals his will to him, he seeks to flee from the presence of the Lord. He boards a boat heading to Tarshish, which was basically in western Spain, as far west as Jonah would have known of the geography of the time. But such fleeing from the Lord is never a private action. It always impacts those around us, as Jonah’s sinful polarity soon began to involve the life of the fellow mariners.
• We see that same polarity in the first two figures in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel. The priest and the levite were fleeing from the love of God and love of neighbor, were fleeing from the type of charity to which God was calling them at the moment. Only the Samaritan, from the people whom Jews thought were perpetually in flight from God by worshipping God on Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem, heard God’s call and responded. If Jesus gave the parable today, it would be as if a man had been mugged, abused, and dropped in a sewer waiting to die and the Pope and Missionaries of Charity, hearing the groaning, crossed the road so that they wouldn’t get involved, but then a drug dealer and pimp, or a member of Al Qaeda, or a child molester, or someone else many of the people in the world think a despicable loser drew near to care for him, nurse him back to health and sacrifice money for future care.
• What leads to the transition from fleeing from the Lord to that of drawing near? The answer is found in the responsory to the first reading, which is in fact part of the second chapter of Jonah that was excised from the first reading so that we could make Jonah’s prayer our own. Prayer, real contact with God, transforms us from those who flee the Lord to those who serve and love and the Lord, especially in others. God himself transforms us to set us on his path.
• Today in the Gospel, Jesus describes that path for us. A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe what he thinks the answer is from his study of the law. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus gave elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized that the struggle for this scribe would be to practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere inquisitiveness, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line. The scribe wanted to be justified in not loving certain of his neighbors. That’s why Jesus told him the Parable of the Good Samaritan to show him that the neighbor is one who draws near out of love for those around him, before adding, “Go and do the same.”
• Jesus changed the way that he looked at loving his neighbor from “objectively” seeking to define who was and was not his neighbor that he should treat with love, to “subjectively” becoming a neighbor to everyone, to be willing to love and treat with mercy whomever one meets. St. John Paul II wrote in Love and Responsibility that a human being is someone to whom the only worthy response is love. He surrounds us with neighbors who are hurting precisely to “unleash love” in us, as St. John Paul II wrote in Salvifici Doloris. He permits people to be in need so that we can learn what it means to become a neighbor and actually act as a neighbor: a person who sees everyone as someone to whom one should show love and mercy, someone who recognizes everyone is in his neighborhood. This is what Jesus did to us, drawing close to us when we were dying, left in a ditch, mugged by the evil one, left for dead. He bound our wounds, carried us on his shoulders, poured his precious blood into us, brought us to the inn of the Church and promised to repay everyone who is kind to us at his second coming. And he as a Good Samaritan continues to come to us with all our wounds every morning. He wants us to follow him in loving like this.
• Many times we’re tempted to run away from this vocation just like Jonah did his. We have lots of good excuses, lots of things we need to do that we prioritize over charity. There are lots of “ships to Tarshish.” But Jesus wants us to grasp that the most important thing we need to do, the greatest way we can serve him, is by loving God with all we’ve got and loving our neighbor, the concrete neighbor in need whom we encounter each day. Loving that neighbor in deeds is what he wants. We need to care, as God does, whether the people of Nineveh will perish. Pope Francis has been stressing this point since he assumed the papacy. He has lamented a “globalized indifference” that hardens our hearts to those who are suffering so that, even if we feel some compassion toward them, we don’t do anything. We say, “Poor fella” and pass by the other side. The Kingdom of God that Jesus Christ came to establish is a Kingdom of Good Samaritans, in which we recognize we’re our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and readily — not just out of duty but out of genuine, sincere neighborly love — tend to the wounds those around us have. The more we ponder Jesus’ own wounds in his sacred humanity, the more straightforward this becomes. When we ponder with faith and real love Jesus’ suffering, when we see his scourge marks, when we look at the nail marks and his bleeding head and bloody eyes, we become Veronicas and Simons of Cyrene. Then we’re able to see Christ in the distressing disguise of those who likewise are beaten down by the world, who are hungry, thirsty, naked, a stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need (Mt 25:31-46). And we draw near to care for the One who drew near to care for us.
• Our Lady is one who shows us this love of the Good Samaritan. It is obvious in the scene of the Visitation. As soon as she received word from the Angel that her elderly cousin Elizabeth was pregnant for the first time in her old age, Mary went with haste to care for her. We similarly see it in Cana, where she interceded with Jesus for the young couple and their families before anyone else realized that they had what would be a catastrophic embarrassment on their hands. She also drew near on Calvary when her Son was beaten and left for dead on the Cross. Mary is always drawing near as a Good Samaritan. She is always going in haste. Today we celebrate how on October 7, 1571, she drew near the Christian sailors who were fighting against the Muslim Turks in the Battle of Lepanto off the coast of Greece and guided them to victory against great odds, as Pope St. Pius V and the Christian people were praying to her in Rome. But we see how she drew near the people of this continent through St. Juan Diego in 1531, drew near to us to help us confide in her desire to help us to St. Catherine Labouré in 1827, drew near to us with tears in LaSalette, France, in 1846, drew near to us with a message of healing, prayer and conversion in Lourdes in 1858, drew near to us with a message of penance, prayer and consecration in Fatima in 1917. There are also so many other occasions when each of us can say that she drew near to help us with our problems. She does so at all different times, but she draws near in a special way through the Rosary, in which we “chain” ourselves to her through the Rosary beads, as she seeks to respond to the petitions for which we offer the Rosary and goes way beyond it, seeking to help us obtain what the mysteries contain. Through the school of contemplation within her heart that is the Holy Rosary, Mary seeks to form us all to be more and more like her Son, the Good Samaritan. She wants to help us to do whatever her Son, the blessed fruit of her womb, tells us and whatever that Son himself does. Saint John Paul II, in his exhortation “The Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary,” powerfully described the “fruits of charity,” the transformation that happens to us when we enter into the school of Mary in the Rosary. “When prayed well in a truly meditative way, the Rosary leads to an encounter with Christ in his mysteries and so cannot fail to draw attention to the face of Christ in others, especially in the most afflicted. How could one possibly contemplate the mystery of the Child of Bethlehem, in the joyful mysteries, without experiencing the desire to welcome, defend and promote life, and to shoulder the burdens of suffering children all over the world? How could one possibly follow in the footsteps of Christ the Revealer, in the mysteries of light, without resolving to bear witness to his Beatitudes in daily life? And how could one contemplate Christ carrying the Cross and Christ Crucified, without feeling the need to act as a Simon of Cyrene for our brothers and sisters weighed down by grief or crushed by despair? Finally, how could one possibly gaze upon the glory of the Risen Christ or of Mary Queen of Heaven, without yearning to make this world more beautiful, more just, more closely conformed to God’s plan?”
• The greatest means by which the Jesus the Good Samaritan cares for us and changes us to care loving for our neighbor is here at Mass, as he nourishes us in the inn of the Church with his body, blood, soul and divinity that we offer to the Eternal Father for our sins and those of the whole world. In Jesus we become neighbor to everyone and he strengthens us to become the hands, feet, and heart of the Mystical Body to turn away from Tarshish and go out in search of those wandering from Jerusalem to Jericho whom Jesus wants us to lift out of the ditch and help get back on the road that leads to the Celestial Jerusalem. This is the means both by which we love God and love our neighbor with all we are and have. This is the path to eternal life. This is the path Our Lady indicates to us and is praying that we take.

The readings for today’s Mass were: