Running in the Right Direction, 27th Monday (I), October 4, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Francis of Assisi
October 4, 2021
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 and his contemporaries would have known of world 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 running away 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 through pride and willfulness by worshipping God on Mount Gerizim instead of 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 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. When we call out to the Lord, he hears our voice, answers, and rescues us from dead ones. 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. The scribe 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 and who 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.  When he was asking “Who is my neighbor?,” he was querying not so much whom to love but whom not to love. 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 anyone around him in need, 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 he as Pope 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. As he suggested in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti published a year ago today, 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.
• The lessons we learn from the word of God today about fleeing to Tarshish or crossing the road to care for those in need, about the impact of encountering the Lord in prayer, pondering his wounds, and seeking to care for the wounds of humanity, are all illustrated in the life of the saint whom the Church celebrates today, the great St. Francis of Assisi. He is someone who for the first 25 years rejected for the most part what the Lord was asking,  running away from his Christian vocation. In his autobiographical 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, as he helped him turn back from Tarshish and begin to help him rebuild his Church through helping to make us other Christs, other Good Samaritans. When Pope Benedict went to Assisi in 1207, he pondered the four stages of Francis’ conversion. Insofar as Christ “came to call sinners” like Jonah and Francis, we can see this calling to metanoia and holiness as a summary of Francis’ whole life and a light on our own.
• The first stage of his renewed calling happened through charity and compassion, through crossing the road, and 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 some alms. 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 vocational stage of conversion and holiness 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, with the proceeds began to reconstruct the dilapidated house of God. 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 calling. Each of us is called in a similar way to participate in that constant renovation project that is the Church.
• The third stage of his calling 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 rebuilt 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 seeking to love God with all his mind, heart, soul and strength through radically uniting 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. We, too, are called to respond to our identity as beloved sons and daughters of God and live in accordance with that dignity.
• And the fourth and final stage of his vocation 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. 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 culminated 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 turn away from Tarshish and turn with love toward God and neighbor, is the chief lesson of Francis’ life. 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,’ 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,’  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!” That’s a prayer to help us respond fully to our Christian calling!
• 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 and lack of love for God and neighbor. 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’.
• 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 by which Jesus does something even greater for us than he did for Francis in the cave of LaVerna, since 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. This is the path to eternal life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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