Seeking and Living by God’s Wisdom, 4th Saturday (II), February 8, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Saturday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Josephine Bakhita
Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Seat of Wisdom
February 8, 2020
1 Kings 3:4-13, Ps 119, Mk 6:30-34

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel we see what Jesus’ compassion — God’s love — causes him to do for the crowds. His merciful love had first led him to take the apostles with him in a boat to a deserted place far away from the crowds so that they could rest with him, because they had been so busy preaching the Gospel and helping Jesus heal that they didn’t even have time to eat not to mention rest. The same Jesus likewise out of love regularly calls us apart to be with him so that he can give us rest by yoking himself anew to us. It’s what he does in prayer, in adoration, on days of recollection and retreat. But he won’t force us to accept that invitation. We, like the apostles, need to get into the boat with him and go away from our ordinary places in order to be with him.
• What I want to spend most of our time on, however, is what Jesus did with regard to the crowds when he disembarked, which shows another crucial aspect of his compassion. Even though St. Mark today doesn’t tell us anything about geography, elsewhere he does, and the route that the apostles would have taken across the top of the Sea of Galilee would have been about 4 miles. To walk along the upper lip of the Sea of Galilee from where they embarked to where they disembarked would have taken about 10 miles. But that’s precisely what a vast crowd did, so hungry were they for what Jesus was giving. Even though Jesus and the apostles would have likely still been tired when they were approaching the shore, even though they were trying to escape from the multitudes for a shirt time, St. Mark tells us that Jesus’ bowels exploded (the literal Greek phrase) with compassion for the crowds. He was sick to his stomach with compassion for them. And what did Jesus do out of compassion? Since, St. Mark tells us, they were “like sheep without a shepherd,” because they were lost and needed guidance and protection, “he began to teach them many things.” Teaching is one of the principal ways Jesus shows his compassion on the multitudes. It’s one of the principal ways God loves us.
• What should be our response to this love of the Lord? To receive it. To desire his teaching. To recognize we need it. That’s the response we see in the first reading today and in the Psalm that responds to it. King Solomon was just 18 years old when he assumed the throne of his father David and he recognized that he was way too young to govern God’s people. Imagine going to any high school and taking the President of the Senior Class or even the Valedictorian and making him or her President of the United States. Would you feel confident that that person would be up to the task? Would you feel more or less confident of the person thought he or she was up to the task? Solomon had no such illusions. It would have been customary to make a sacrifice at the beginning of a reign, to ask for God’s help and to show everyone that you knew you needed God’s help. Solomon went to Gibeon to make such a sacrifice, but he didn’t just sacrifice one animal; he sacrificed 1,000, to indicate quite clearly to God and to everyone how much he knew he needed God’s assistance. And God was very pleased by his faith and humility. He appeared to him in a dream and told him, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” He could have asked for anything at all. If we were given that command by the Lord, what would we ask for? Solomon, as God tells us later, didn’t ask for money, health, women, even peace from the enemies of Israel. He asked for what he knew he needed in order to be able to serve God and others. He asked for the Lord’s teaching. “O Lord, my God,” he said, “you have made me, your servant, king to succeed my father David; but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act.…  Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong. For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?” He asked not only for prudence and an attentive conscience (knowing with the Lord) but for the grace to love what the Lord teaches and asks. That’s why he didn’t ask for an attentive mind, but for an understanding heart, so that he might judge God’s people with love for God and love for them and that he might not only distinguish right from wrong in conscience but help lead his people to do the right and avoid the wrong. We see how pleased God was by this request. He not only granted it but much else besides.
• God desires that each of us seek that same wisdom, prudence, and well-functioning conscience and that we love his teaching and guidance. That’s what we prayed for in the responsorial psalm today. We begged God, “How can a young man [like Solomon] remain faultless? … By keeping your words. With all my heart I seek you. Let me not stray for your commands. Within my heart I treasure your promise, that I may not sin against you. Teach me your statutes. With my lips I declare all the ordinances of your mouth. In the way of your decrees I rejoice as much as in all riches.” We’re called to pray those words not just with our lips but with our hearts. God wants us to value his wisdom more than all riches, because it is a far more valuable wealth, something Solomon grasped and God wants us to grasp. With compassion he teaches us, but we must desire that divine gift! In response to our pleas for wisdom, God gives us something far greater than what he gave Solomon. God gives us himself, the Holy Spirit, with his gifts of wisdom and prudence. The Holy Spirit is sent to help us to walk in — live! — the way of divine wisdom.
• Today we are celebrating a votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Seat of Wisdom. She was four years younger than Solomon when God sent the Angel Gabriel to her and we see just how wise she had become by seeking the Lord’s wisdom and pondering his ways. Not only was she wise enough, trusting in God, to say fiat to his proposal, but, a few days later, we see just how wise she was when her heart burst forth with understanding in her Magnificat, synthesizing the words of the great heroines of the Old Testament and applying it to what God was asking of her. At the beginning of Mass today the liturgy reminded us that God the Father “prepared a royal throne for [his] Wisdom in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” Later in the Preface we’ll pray, “Wisdom built himself a house in the chaste womb of the Virgin Mary” and in the final prayer we’ll ask that through the Eucharist God will “pour into our hearts the light of wisdom that so wonderfully filled the heart of the Virgin Mother, so that we may know you in truth and love you with fidelity.” She is our model of persevering wisdom, and she wants to help each of us become a “seat of wisdom” where God’s wisdom comes to set us his throne to rule!
• One person who did this is the saint whom the Church celebrates today. St. Josephine Bakhita was born in the Darfur region of Sudan about 1869 (there were no records and no one knew for sure). When he was only 7, she was kidnapped by Arab Muslim bandits, forced to convert to Islam, and then sold into slavery on five different occasions. As was the custom with Sudanese slaveowners at the time, she was repeatedly beaten as a little girl even if she was prompt in doing what was asked. On one occasion, one or her masters showed up with flour, salt and razor blades to brand her. With the flour, the owner sketched on her breasts, belly and arms 114 intricate designs and then with the razor blades cut into her skin according to those patterns. While she was bleeding and in enormous pain, the master then poured salt into the wounds so that they would never heal and she would always be branded. To those wounds were added another 30 indelible scars over the course of her enslavement. Eventually she was sold to the Italian consul in Khartoum. This was the first time she wasn’t beaten when she was told to do things. When the political situation destabilized, the consul needed to leave the country and he took Bakhita — a name that means “fortunate,” given to her by one of her owners, because she couldn’t remember the name her parents had given her, so great was the trauma of her capture and her beatings — with him. He gave her to the service of friends having arrived back in Italy, where she helped to raise a baby as a nanny. When this family was preparing to return to the Sudan after the political situation had improved, they entrusted Bakhita and the little girl to the care of the Canossian Sisters in town. It was there that Bakhita was really exposed to Christianity for the first time. Her reaction to seeing a bloody Italian crucifix was unforgettable. She recognized that the one whom Christians adored as Lord and Master understood her pain, because he had been lacerated in his scourging just as severely as she had been repeatedly whipped and then sliced up with razor blades. When the family returned from the Sudan to take Bakhita and their daughter with them to Africa, Bakhita refused. A lawsuit followed that under Italian law and a law freeing Sudanese slaves, the tribunal declared her to be free. Insofar as she was now over 18, she could stay. She was baptized with the name Josephine Margaret and confirmed, made her first Communion from the hands of the future St. Pius X, and was eventually accepted as a Canossian Sister, where she served for the next 44 years as a cook, sacristan and portress. She was always so grateful for the teaching of her new true Parón or “Master” — not a slave master but a Magister, or teacher, teaching her the wisdom of how to live, love and die so as to live forever —  and she always sought not only to live according to that wisdom by to pass it on to others. Even though she had never received much education, the school girls used to line up at the door of the school just for her to pat them on the head, because she was able to teach them the wisdom of life, love and trust.
• Pope Benedict wrote about her as as an example of hope-filled persevering faith in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi, and that faith was a fruit of wisdom and wisdom a fruit of faith. “The example of a saint of our time can to some degree help us understand what it means to have a real encounter with this God for the first time. I am thinking of the African Josephine Bakhita, canonized by Pope John Paul II. She was born around 1869… in Darfur in Sudan. …She was kidnapped by slave-traders, beaten till she bled, and sold five times in the slave-markets of Sudan. Eventually she found herself working as a slave for the mother and the wife of a general, and there she was flogged every day till she bled; as a result of this she bore 144 scars throughout her life. Finally, in 1882, she was bought by an Italian merchant for the Italian consul Callisto Legnani, who returned to Italy as the Mahdists advanced. Here, after the terrifying ‘masters’ who had owned her up to that point, Bakhita came to know a totally different kind of ‘master’—in Venetian dialect, which she was now learning, she used the name ‘paron’ for the living God, the God of Jesus Christ. Up to that time she had known only masters who despised and maltreated her, or at best considered her a useful slave. Now, however, she heard that there is a ‘paron’ above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person. She came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her—that he actually loved her. She too was loved, and by none other than the supreme ‘Paron,’ before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her ‘at the Father’s right hand.’ Now she had ‘hope’ —no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: ‘I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me—I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.’ Through the knowledge of this hope she was ‘redeemed,’ no longer a slave, but a free child of God. … Hence, when she was about to be taken back to Sudan, Bakhita refused; she did not wish to be separated again from her ‘Paron.’ On 9 January 1890, she was baptized and confirmed and received her first Holy Communion from the hands of the Patriarch of Venice. On 8 December 1896, in Verona, she took her vows in the Congregation of the Canossian Sisters and from that time onwards, besides her work in the sacristy and in the porter’s lodge at the convent, she made several journeys round Italy in order to promote the missions: the liberation that she had received through her encounter with the God of Jesus Christ, she felt she had to extend, it had to be handed on to others, to the greatest possible number of people. The hope born in her which had ‘redeemed’ her she could not keep to herself; this hope had to reach many, to reach everybody.” She wanted to help others to learn to live by faith too.
• Today the Lord looks upon us with compassion like he did the crowds at the Sea of Galilee, like he did upon St. Josephine Bakhita, like he did upon young King Solomon, and he has lavishly given us his words of wisdom, hoping that we will hunger and thirst for his wisdom, for his voice whispering to us through the organ of sensitivity we call conscience, for his holy word by which he teaches us in Sacred Scripture. And he’s going to give us himself so that we can enter into communion on the inside with God’s Word and Wisdom incarnate. St. John Vianney used to say that if we had been given by God the same gift Solomon was, to ask for anything whatsoever we wanted, we would never have dreamed of asking for the incarnation, for Jesus’ death and resurrection, and for the way he gives his risen body to us to feed us until the end of time. But what we would never have dreamed to ask, God has in fact done. We enter into Holy Communion with the incarnate Wisdom of God. And that wisdom seeks to make us, like he did Mary, his royal throne!

These were the readings for today’s Mass: