Seeking, Staying with, and Belonging to the Lord, January 4, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Mass for January 4 (Saturday before the Epiphany)
Memorial of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
January 4, 2020
1 Jn 3:7-10, Ps 98, Jn 1:35-42

To listen to a recording of the homily, please click below: 

The following was the written text that guided the homily: 

• Today as we celebrate the feast, and 199th anniversary of the birth into eternal life, of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the Gospel God’s providence gives us focuses on four vocations: John the Baptist’s, to point out the Lamb of God, St. Andrew’s, St. John the Evangelist’s (who almost certainly was the one who accompanied Andrew), and St. Peter’s. Their vocations, your and my vocations, and every Christian vocation must be marked by something for which we asked God at the beginning of Mass today. In the Collect, we begged God the Father, reflecting on “Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton’s burning zeal to find you,” to grant “by her intercession and example that we may always seek you with diligent love and find you in daily service with sincere faith.” Vocations are always first and foremost God’s grace, but they’re received best when we are seeking God with burning zeal and diligent love and finding him in daily, sincere, faithful service of him and in him of others.
• That zeal for God is on full display in today’s Gospel. As soon as the fishermen Andrew and John began their short-lived careers as bad private investigators tailing Jesus, the Suspect turned around and asked them a question that on the surface seems ordinary and perfunctory, but is actually quite extraordinary and profound. “What are you looking for?” What do you seek and desire? What do you want? Their answer might at first seem like a lame rejoinder from those caught off guard — Rabbi, where, ah, ah, ah, are you staying? — but it is something that is likewise quite far-reaching. First, it’s the vocative “Rabbi.” This Hebrew term meaning “My great one,” pointed to someone they considered a teacher, someone who had much to teach them. To use the term at all showed a ready willingness to be a disciple, the Greek word for student. Then the question: “Where are you staying?” They were not interested in a passing conversation on a path, a quick change of business cards or an autograph. They wanted to stay with Jesus for a while, to get to know him, to enter into his space and life. They had a hunger for him. Jesus understood what their lips and hearts were saying and so didn’t respond by giving an address or a verbal description of where the Son of Man who had no place to lay his lead would be spending the night. He invited them into a relationship. “Come and you will see.” And they came, and they saw, and they were conquered. They stayed with him that day until the sabbath was over — about 26 hours — and Andrew could run to find his brother. Over the course of their conversation they were able to discover that this Lamb pointed out by John was indeed the long-awaited Messiah. The whole encounter changed their lives forever, with St. John recording for posterity the exact time when they met Jesus for the first time. “It was about four in the afternoon,” because that was the time, when dusk was beginning its descent, that the Sun rose in their life forever.
• The saints have found it exceedingly curious, however, that even though the exact time was noted, almost no other details were given. There was no description of where Jesus was staying and how far their journey was. There was no mention of what they talked about, no reference to the questions they asked Jesus and the responses he gave, or the questions Jesus asked and the answers Jesus’ first two disciples and two future apostles gave. All of these details are passed over in silence. Why? I think the fundamental reason is because St. John wanted to focus on the essential of that encounter rather than the incidentals. The essential was precisely this: they went to be with Jesus, to abide with him, to remain with him, to stay where he is, to live with him. That, likewise, is the essence of discipleship, the core of the Christian life, the essence of any vocation. It begins with “being with Jesus.” In St. Mark’s Gospel, Jesus described the calling of the first seminarians. After a night in prayer, he summoned those he wanted, and he appointed them “so that they might be with him and he might send them forth” (Mk 3:14). He called them first to be with him, to abide with him, to enter with him into his own world. He grafted them onto him the Vine so that, remaining him, they might bear great fruit. Likewise the fundamental call Jesus has made to each of us is to abide with him, to leave our own comfort zones and make an exodus to where he is. Many Christians prefer to “visit” the Lord rather than to come and see where Jesus is staying, because they fear he might be staying with the homeless people who, like him, have no place to lay his head, or with prostitutes and drug addicts under the bridge, with the handicapped, crippled, blind and lame, with the unwanted refuse of society, sharing their life, their meals, their friendship, sacrificing himself to lift them up. They want to be with him on their terms, part-time, rather than on Jesus’ terms, full-time. Today Jesus asks us, just like he asked John and Andrew, “What you seeking?,” wanting to invite us into a lifetime adventure to come and see where he abides, knowing that Jesus has no fixed earthly abode, but at every moment is “moving,” calling us to follow him and move with him, as he goes to find and save his lost sheep wherever they are to be found and bring them back to the fold.
• To abide with Jesus is the essence and secret of the Christian life. Today in the first reading, St. John, who sought to dwell with the Lord from 4 pm on that fateful day throughout the whole rest of his life into eternity, tells us, in the verse right before the beginning of today’s first reading that helps us to understand it, “You know that he appeared to take away our sins and there is no sin in him. Anyone who abides in him does not know sin. Anyone who sins has not seen him and does not know him.” Then he tells us today, “Little children, let no one deceive you. Whoever sins belongs to the devil. … No one who is begotten by God commits sins, because God’s seed remains in him; he cannot sin because he is begotten by God. In this way, the children of God and the children of the Devil are made plain.” These are very challenging words — and potentially discouraging ones if we misunderstand them. St. John tells us that if we abide in God, we don’t sin — in fact, we can’t — and that whoever sins belongs to the devil. It would seem, therefore, that insofar as none of us is the Immaculate Virgin, insofar as each of us sins, then none of us actually abides in the Lord, because none of us really lives up to what seems to be a practically impossible standard. But this is to misread what St. John is saying. Eve though St. John welcomed Mary into his own on Calvary, he wasn’t the sinless Virgin either. We remember that earlier in this first epistle, he tells us “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” and “If we say that we have not sinned, we make [God] a liar,” before telling us, “If anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:8,10; 2:1). So he knows we’re going to sin even though we’re Jesus’ disciples.
• So what can he possibly mean that, on the one hand, whoever abides in God doesn’t and can’t sin, but that if we say we’re not sinners, we make God a liar? It’s the truth that we only partially abide in the Lord. Part of us is with the Lord, and part of us is not. We belong to him by baptism with its indelible seal, but we don’t fully belong to him morally. We should of course intend to belong to him morally, but the spirit is willing and the flesh is weak. St. John Chrysostom once said about the seeming contradiction of Jesus’ statements, “Whoever is not with me is against me and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Mt 12:30) and “Whoever is not against us is for us” (Mk 9:40) that there are parts of us that are with the Lord and parts of us that are not with him.  The key to spiritual growth, the key to the Christian life, is to stoke up our desire to be with the Lord in all parts of our life so that we will be children of God full-time not partially. It’s a choice to abide with the Lord in chaste love, rather than in hedonistic concupiscence of the flesh. It’s a choice to abide with the Lord in poverty, rather than in the materialistic lust of the eyes. It’s a choice to abide with the Lord in obedience until death of the Cross rather than to abide in the independent, autonomous pride of life.
• Today we celebrate a saint — the first native-born American saint, the founder of the first parochial school, the founder of the first American religious order — who did seek to abide with the Lord. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton always sought the Lord, even as a young girl, through prayer and charity. She sought him in prosperity and poverty. She sought him enough to leave her Episcopalian roots — even though her grandfather was a famous Episcopalian priest — in order to be with him in the Eucharist, even though it meant great hardship for her. Her favorite prayer was Psalm 23, proclaiming that with the Lord as her shepherd, she always had it all, even if she were in the valley of darkness, because she knew even then that the Lord was with her with his rod and staff. She spent her life seeking the Lord in order to find and abide with him. She spent her relative short life — she died at 46 — trying to pass on that holy zeal to find where the Lord was staying to her five children, to her fellow Sisters of Charity, to the children entrusted to her community’s care in the school system that she and her order founded. She wanted them to be able to learn how to come to abide with the Lord. She once wrote in a letter to her spiritual daughters, “I will tell you what is my own great help. I once read or heard that an interior life means but the continuation of our Savior’s life in us; that the great object of all his mysteries is to merit for us the grace of his interior life and communicate it to us, it being the end of his mission to lead us into the sweet land of promise, a life of constant union with his will.” Her great help was to allow the Savior’s life to live in her, this great mutual abiding, a union that is meant to last forever.
• And we know, as she did and taught her fellow sisters, natural children and spiritual children, that that union is consummated each day here at this altar. The proper prayer over the offerings that we’ll pray in a few minutes asks the Lord, “in celebration of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton [to] grant by the power at work in this sacrifice that we may be more deeply inserted into the mystery of your Son.” Through the power of the Eucharist, we who seek to see where the Lord is staying discover that he comes to stay with us, so as to help us abide in him and his life forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1
1 JN 3:7-10

Children, let no one deceive you.
The person who acts in righteousness is righteous,
just as he is righteous.
Whoever sins belongs to the Devil,
because the Devil has sinned from the beginning.
Indeed, the Son of God was revealed to destroy the works of the Devil.
No one who is begotten by God commits sin,
because God’s seed remains in him;
he cannot sin because he is begotten by God.
In this way,
the children of God and the children of the Devil are made plain;
no one who fails to act in righteousness belongs to God,
nor anyone who does not love his brother.

Responsorial Psalm
PS 98:1, 7-8, 9

R. (3cd) All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
Sing to the LORD a new song,
for he has done wondrous deeds;
His right hand has won victory for him,
his holy arm.
R. All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
Let the sea and what fills it resound,
the world and those who dwell in it;
Let the rivers clap their hands,
the mountains shout with them for joy before the LORD.
R. All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.
The LORD comes;
he comes to rule the earth;
He will rule the world with justice
and the peoples with equity.
R. All the ends of the earth have seen the saving power of God.

Gospel
JN 1:35-42

John was standing with two of his disciples,
and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God.”
The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus.
Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them,
“What are you looking for?”
They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher),
“where are you staying?”
He said to them, “Come, and you will see.”
So they went and saw where he was staying,
and they stayed with him that day.
It was about four in the afternoon.
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter,
was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus.
He first found his own brother Simon and told him,
“We have found the Messiah,” which is translated Christ.
Then he brought him to Jesus.
Jesus looked at him and said,
“You are Simon the son of John;
you will be called Cephas,” which is translated Peter.