Seeing with the Love We Had at First, 33rd Monday (II), November 16, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Faithful Departed
November 16, 2020
Rev 1:1-4.2:1-5, Ps 1, Lk 18:35-43

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

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

• On Saturday Jesus gave us the parable of the importune woman bothering the unjust judge in order to convey to us the necessity of “praying always without losing heart.” Immediately thereafter is the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican — which the Church doesn’t give us to ponder today because we meditate upon it at other times during the year — which shows us of the importance of humbly begging the Lord for mercy. Today we encounter the living illustration of what Jesus was teaching about persevering, faithful, humble prayer for mercy in the blind man by the side of the road whom St. Mark in his version of the same scene identifies as Bartimaeus.
• As rabbis were accustomed to do on the three-times-per-year pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. Bartimaeus was sitting by the roadside begging. He heard the commotion of the crowd and asked what was happening. Upon hearing that “Jesus of Nazareth was passing by,” he immediately began to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles in Galilee to the north and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. But his cries for Jesus were annoying those who were trying to hear Jesus’ teaching. So the first people in the group rebuked him and told him to shut his trap. But that only led him to cry out all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me!” The word St. Luke uses means basically an animal cry, something coming deep from his woundedness.
• Jesus stopped and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than whatever else he was teaching at that moment. Likely, it was also a “coincidental” opportunity for him put flesh on his parables by showing how God responds to persistent, faithful, humble prayer for compassion. Jesus asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?,” and Bartimaeus said, “Lord, please let me see!” To some degree, Bartimaeus was already seeing by faith but he wanted to see Jesus with physical eyes so that he would be able to do exactly what he did once cured, to “follow him, giving glory to God.” He saw something with inner eyes, but was asking to see more. Jesus replied, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.”
• This cry of Bartimaeus is one of the most beautiful and frequent Christian aspirations: Domine, ut videam!, “Lord, I want to see.” It’s a beautiful response to Jesus’ perennial question to us in prayer, “What do you want me to do for you?” If Jesus were to ask many of us that question, many might waste his attention on lesser things, asking for him to return us to the shape we were in at 21, or to resolve a particular issue, or other relatively small stuff. Every day, however, we should ask the Lord for the gift to see, for the grace to see what we don’t see, to see things as they really are, the way he sees them. We should beseech the grace to see him and to see ourselves aright. We should ask for the grace to recognize him in the Holy Eucharist, in Confession, in prayer, in others, in the various events of the day, and especially in the beatific vision. He won’t allow us to see everything, because then we wouldn’t have the grace to live by faith, believing in things unseen, but he does want us to see things more and more in his light and more and more deeply. Today we ask him with Bartimaeus to give us the grace of real vision.
• In the first reading today, from the beginning of the Book of Revelation which will guide us until the end of this liturgical year a week from Saturday, the Lord seeks to “un-veil” or “reveal” the way things really are behind the scenes so that we can see them. St. John tells us that in this book he was “reporting what he saw” as Jesus allowed him to glimpse various of the things of heaven and various of the ways which which Jesus was looking on the Christians of that time and every time. The book of Revelation is a response of God to the Church’s constant cry, “Lord, we want to see.” In today’s passage and tomorrow’s, we get what the Lord was seeing in the seven Churches of the diaspora for whom St. John was writing the book. Today we get the first of the seven Churches, Ephesus, the one that was in the best condition. Tomorrow, we’ll get the last two Churches, Sardis and Laodicea, the two that were in the worst condition. I would encourage you to read Jesus’ words to the other four Churches in the middle — Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira and Philadelphia — on your own. As we see what Jesus sees in these Churches, it would also be very good for us to ask what Jesus would see in this Archdiocese and in each of us, whether he would be praising us or reproving us for what he says to these ancient Churches during a time of persecution.
• Jesus says that he sees in the Church of Ephesus much deserving of praise. “I know your works, your labor and your endurance,” he says. They were bearing fruit for the Gospel, they were striving to live the faith, and they were enduring faithfully the trials of many persecutions. He said, “You cannot tolerate the wicked.” We’re called to love even our enemies and pray for our persecutors, but we’re not asked to “tolerate the wicked” but to reject their wickedness and pray for their conversion, something that would do all of us good to remember during this time in which people proclaim “tolerance” and mean by it that we look the other way on their sinfulness, something that Jesus himself never did and we as his followers can’t do either. One wickedness they couldn’t tolerate concerned false prophets. Jesus said, “You have tested those who call themselves Apostles but are not, and discovered that they are impostors.” They knew the faith well enough that they were able to recognize and reject those who were preaching another Gospel than the one that they had received. Today that, too, is a very important skill, to be able to discriminate between those who are really announcing God’s word and those preachers who are saying what people want to hear for their own aggrandizement. Jesus finishes the praise by saying, “You have endurance and have suffered for my name and have not grown weary.” This was a Church of martyrs, full of those who were seeking to keep their eyes on Christ even in the midst of tears. But Jesus had one fraternal correction. “I hold this against you: you have lost the love you had at first.” Yes, they were enduring. Yes, they were discerning. Yes, they were working. But they were no longer doing it with the passion, with the love, with which they had begun. Their sufferings had hardened them. Now they were living by fidelity, by loyalty, by duty, but not by love to the same degree. “Realize how far you have fallen,” Jesus said. St. Paul had told the Corinthians that if they were to hand over their body to the torturers as martyrs but didn’t do so out of love, they would gain nothing. Jesus was essentially saying that despite all their works and good deeds, they had fallen very far because they were no longer living by that first love, that love at the beginning, that prior love, which had characterized and ought always to characterize the Christian faith. They were lacking that love for God and that love for others that had distinguished them. “Repent and do the works you did at first,” Jesus said, calling them to works of piety and works of charity. Jesus was saying that it’s not enough for us to be faithful. He wants faith working through love for God and neighbor. To lose that is to lose much! Jesus was calling them to conversion, to recover that first love. He was helping them to see who they really are so that they, like Bartimaeus, might cry out “Son of David, have mercy!,” and begin to see him more in the midst of their afflictions and to see him more in the needy and begin to love him with that passionate love they had at the start.
• Jesus’ curing of the Ephesians’ sight is also a salve for the eyes of our own heart. It’s a chance for us to examine whether we still have the love we had at first, the love for God when we first became aware of his presence, the love we had for him at our first holy Communion, the love we had for him when we first became conscious of his call and sought to respond with all we are and have, the love we had for him as we prepared to enter the seminary or postulancy, the love we had for him on our retreats, professions or ordinations, the love we had for him in the moments in which our perception of divine love was most intense. God wants to renew us in that love, to bring us not back to the level of love we had at first, but to bring us beyond it, while making sure it remains “virginal,” pristine, through having had it intensified by the power of his mercy. He wants that love to inundate all our actions, our “works, labor, endurance,” our discernment, our suffering. He wants our love never to grow weary and even if we have fallen, to help us get up to where we were and keep climbing with him.
• The two saints the Church celebrates today help us to live the mysteries and lessons we encounter in the readings. Saint Gertrude the Great was brought to the Monastery at a very early age, either for her education or because she was orphaned. She was an extraordinary student, who learned everything that the classical formation of the day could provide, throwing herself into profane subjects and to literature, music, song and art. She was surrounded by holy nuns, but wasn’t profiting. Even though she wasn’t living a life of sin, she really wasn’t loving the Lord, she really wasn’t seeing what he was wanting of her. After 20 years of study and of sharing in their liturgical prayer, God helped her to see that she had been giving herself over much of the time to vanities. In 1280, when she was in her mid-20s, the Lord opened her eyes to recognize that she was basically living in a worldly way. Her conversion involved a different type of study, passing from profane humanistic studies to the study of theology and of divine wisdom; a different type of obedience, from negligence to intense mystical prayer coupled to a zeal for the salvation of all; and a different spirituality, from spiritual worldliness to the spirituality of the kingdom. She wrote in her Spiritual Exercises something that pointed to how, post-conversion, she wanted to use the gifts God had given her: “I have so little profited from your graces that I cannot resolve to believe that they were lavished upon me solely for my own use, since no one can thwart your eternal wisdom. Therefore, O Giver of every good thing who has freely lavished upon me gifts so undeserved, in order that, in reading this, the heart of at least one of your friends may be moved at the thought that zeal for souls has induced you to leave such a priceless gem for so long in the abominable mud of my heart.” She loved, making up for lost time, and helping others be cured of whatever prevented them from beholding the love of God.
• St. Margaret Queen of Scotland is a witness of perseverance in the passionate love of God in the midst of a very busy life. The daughter of a Hungarian Princess and Anglo-Saxon Prince, she and her family fled from William the Conquerer and were shipwrecked off the coast of Scotland, where Scottish King Malcolm befriended them and was captivated by Margaret, whom he married in 1070. She helped him become virtuous and was allowed by him, essentially, to become interior minister of the kingdom. She improved arts and education, reformed the country and the clergy religiously through synods she promoted and founded many Churches and monasteries. She had eight kids and supervised their religious instruction. Her love for Jesus in the Eucharist helped her to grow in love and care for those for whom he died, and on her way home from Mass would often wash the feet of six poor persons and give them alms. She never refused beggars or sat down to eat without first feeding orphans and poor adults. We see in her how someone as a mom of eight with a “full-time job” as “secretary of the interior” not to mention all of the duties of State in hosting was able not only to retain the love she had at first but to grow in it.
• Today at this Mass, we ask the Lord with Bartimaeus, through the intercession of Saints Gertrude and Margaret, for the grace to see so that, looking at things with the eyes of faith, we may recognize and revere Him with that love we had at first. Christ is passing by today just like he did in Jericho. He is passing by in the Sacred Host and then in our sacred neighbor. May we prepare to receive him with pristine love, the love we would if we would receive him only this time, the love we hope to receive Him with our last time, the love we hope to give him forever!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel LK 18:35-43

As Jesus approached Jericho
a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging,
and hearing a crowd going by, he inquired what was happening.
They told him,
“Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.”
He shouted, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!”
The people walking in front rebuked him,
telling him to be silent,
but he kept calling out all the more,
“Son of David, have pity on me!”
Then Jesus stopped and ordered that he be brought to him;
and when he came near, Jesus asked him,
“What do you want me to do for you?”
He replied, “Lord, please let me see.”
Jesus told him, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.”
He immediately received his sight
and followed him, giving glory to God.
When they saw this, all the people gave praise to God.

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