Saved in Hope, 30th Tuesday (I), October 29, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
October 29, 2019
Rom 8:18-25, Ps 126, Lk 13:18-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• The Kingdom of God is both now and not yet. Jesus says it’s already among us (because the king is with us) but something that we must also pray will come (because we, others and creation have not yet fully entered into it). Like a mustard seed, the kingdom is meant to grow. The kingdom is here, but it’s basically in embryonic form and is meant to grow to full stature. Like leaven, it has a power within to lift up every other reality. Once we understand this dynamic of the Kingdom we can more easily grasp what St. Paul is saying in the first reading. Yesterday, if we didn’t have the proper readings for the feast of SS. Simon and Judge, we would have heard him tell us that we have already “received a spirit of adoption,” but today he informs us “we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption.” He describes the whole process as “groaning in labor pains,” and labor is an appropriate image. There’s a child waiting to be born; the child is the same before and after, but there is a massive change between the womb and the light. Likewise the mother remains a mother to the child, but there is a massive growth in that relationship after birth. All of this goes back to his question at the end of the seventh chapter, which we heard last Friday about who will save him from his mortal body in which he does not do the good he desires and doesn’t avoid the evil he seeks to evade. The answer is that God the Holy Spirit will do this and this is what the “redemption of the body” means: we groan within as we await the full flourishing of the spirit of adoption and full freedom of the children of God.
• This is why St. Paul says that “in hope we were saved,” which means we are saved as we hope — what Pope Benedict would call in Spe Salvi “living with Christ in the world” — and are saved through hope, meaning by faith in the fulfillment of Christ’s promises. Pope Benedict in Spe Salvi had said, basing himself on the Letter to the Hebrews, that faith/hope is the substance of things hoped for and the guarantee of things not seen: there’s already something present that is meant to grow. And because of that substance, that presence as a mustard seed of what will flourish later, the early Christians were willing to suffer the plundering of their property because they had a better possession: namely the treasure of the faith that they already had, even if unfulfilled. The suffering we endure is like those labor pains.
• We also see in today’s passage the connection between all of creation and this mystery of redemption being worked out in the human person. Creation is a wonderful gift pronounced good, but after sin entered the world, it too experienced “futility.” We see this in the pattern of suffering and death of the plant and animal kingdoms, natural disasters and so many other areas. Creation, too, is groaning in labor pains even until now, St. Paul says, and needs to be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of God’s children. These are thoughts very relevant as we’ve just finished the Extraordinary Synod on the Amazon region. Sometimes when people look at the Amazon, and at the natural world in general, they fail to see that, like the person, marvels of creation must pass to even more wondrous reality of redemption. To understand the Amazon, we must grasp that it is connected to Christ and his saving work, just as its peoples must be connected to that same mystery of redemption. The whole region is now experiencing “labor pains,” but those pains have a purpose. The failure explicitly to connect them to the saving work of God, however, will leave them perpetually in labor, and like a woman who eventually cannot give birth for one medical reason or another, will lead to the death of the child. That’s what has to happen in the understanding of the Amazon and the created world in general. It must be connected to the kingdom.
• In the Psalm today, we pray, “The Lord has done marvels for us,” while recognizing that greater marvels await. And the greatest downpayment of all is Christ in the Eucharist. To live with him, to be conscious of his Eucharistic presence, is to live with hope in the world, which is the path of salvation. Let’s take this truth and this “substance” and let it grow in us so that we might be like mustard seeds or leaven in making Christ’s kingdom come in the world.

The readings for today’s Mass were: